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Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

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Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#131

Post by karmakaze »

noahtallen wrote: post #75
karmakaze wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may also have been the case with localization and translations. At a certain scale the problem is solved and tooling is put in place. Now on the project I work on, we have a process for creating translation templates that get populated for other languages. But it's everyone's responsibility for using the template mechanisms put in place. The same arguments are valid for performance and security. They shouldn't b…

Sure, developers should be mindful of all of these things. But if one person or team spends a lot of effort creating solid internal tools, and then they all get fired, you’ve lost a very significant amount of internal knowledge. Then who maintains the tools and updates them as the product changes? Or as industry best practices improve, as is often the case with security? If you get to the point of having a performanc…

I wasn't recommending that they all be fired. Ideally some number of them would be redistributed across other teams. What is often inefficient is keeping a large team around that has largely fulfilled their goals.

Also performance is too large an area to make it a single team. It is better to have a database expert guild (or team) that other teams can consult for performance and other engineering quality issues and similarly for other performance sensitive areas. I can't speak for security but I imagine that each area should have experts that cover security for that area.

Perhaps others like working cleaning up poorly written non-performant designs and code but I prefer starting earlier in the process and building it into the engineering culture.

Edit: I think it's actually easier to have a performance/security team at a medium scale of growth. At small scale they would be in the product dev teams or known by name by all teams. At large scale I don't think they can't cover the surface area/volume produced by all the teams. So it should be more effective to develop mechanisms/processes and culture.

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#132

Post by School-Cotton »

Nullabillity wrote: post #88
coffeeblack wrote: post #63

Would be great if everybody could be a little less hysterical. Maybe the team was just sh*t and expensive. They get rid of them, so they can hire better people at a better price. Which make a lot of sense now that many tech companies have big layoffs.

That's not how civilized societies work. You don't just get to fire whoever you want whenever you want.

Twitter is headquartered in California, where you do in fact (mostly) get to do that. Whether you consider California to be a "civilized society" is subjective, I suppose.

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#133

Post by Jensson »

spoils19 wrote: post #129
hulitu wrote: post #4

> Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go A8y "A11y" s4s f1r accesibility. (Apparently "A11y" stands for accesibility). "Twitter is better in the app" is not a sign of "accesibility". Sign in is not a sign of "accesibility".

> Apparently "A11y" stands for accesibility This has been a common term since a few decades ago. No need to be snarky if you don't understand something.

A11y is not very accessible which is funny. It isn't even a long word, they could just spell it out for you to make the writing more accessible.

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#134

Post by emptyparadise »

whoIsYou wrote: post #104
hoten wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given this is just a series of positive testimonials of the skills of a manager's direct reports, all recently fired and looking for new work, your take comes off as extremely uncharitable.

If these people were so incredible and intelligent and hard working and were changing the world for the better. If they truly were the paragons they are made out to be, then why were they the ones fired? Let's be honest, Twitter has underperformed for a long time. It has been openly known as the rest and vest place. This type of flowery nonsense would be difficult to believe about the better half of their engineers,…

dude do you expect the guy to say "my entire team were utter dipshits; never hire them"

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#135

Post by BenjiWiebe »

Jensson wrote: post #133
spoils19 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apparently "A11y" stands for accesibility This has been a common term since a few decades ago. No need to be snarky if you don't understand something.

A11y is not very accessible which is funny. It isn't even a long word, they could just spell it out for you to make the writing more accessible.

Just guessing, but I suppose it's following the lead of i18n?

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#136

Post by fathyb »

kjeetgill wrote: post #51
School-Cotton wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK that’s a misconstrual. Having a “verified” blue checkmark will cost $8 a month, but using Twitter and saying whatever you want on it will still be free.

I have no horse in this race — I'm not on Twitter — but does anyone know if the blue checkmark boosts your posts in the feed/recommendation engine? I'd expect it does implicitly at least because people must interact with those users differently.

It does, verified accounts get prioritized ranking and are listed first in tweet responses.

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#137

Post by thexumaker »

whoIsYou wrote: post #107
Nullabillity wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how civilized societies work. You don't just get to fire whoever you want whenever you want.

If people are being overpaid and underperforming why wouldn't the business owner be within their right to fire them?

yep. Literally with so many people reneging, working multiple jobs, doing what's required of them, a company has no loyalty to their engineers. The opposite is also true, an engineer shouldn't have too much loyalty to their company. Considering these dudes were making over 200k a year I'm sure they'll be fine and land their next job.

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#138

Post by skissane »

sosull wrote: post #35
adam_arthur wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no moral requirements

Immanuel Kant came up with the idea of a categorical imperative. It’s one of the foundation stones in the field of moral philosophy (or ethics). An example would be the moral requirement not to kill other people. The only way to successfully prove that there are no moral requirements is by arguing the point with people who don’t know any better.

There are many philosophers who disagree with Kant's categorical imperative though – even among those who agree that ethics is objective (in some sense). The categorical imperative gives morality a deontological flavour, to which many will object–such as consequentialists. And there are others who don't object to the deontological flavour per se, but who think there are better foundations for such a morality (e.g. natural law theorists).

I agree with your position that ethics is objective, but I don't think Kant's categorical imperative is a very good argument for its objectivity – a person can coherently accept ethics/morality as being objective, yet doubt or deny the categorical imperative. I think "ethics is objective" is one of those things where very many people can agree on a conclusion, yet disagree massively on what is the correct reasoning to reach that conclusion.

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#139

Post by emj »

Jensson wrote: post #133
spoils19 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apparently "A11y" stands for accesibility This has been a common term since a few decades ago. No need to be snarky if you don't understand something.

A11y is not very accessible which is funny. It isn't even a long word, they could just spell it out for you to make the writing more accessible.

To day I learned it's called numeronyms they seems to be very infrequent out side of slang/tech, these are all words I think you should just know around here: I18n A11y l10n Y2K 420 a16z

If you are into making software for something more than just the naive "one market" your first introduction would be internationalization which should be the most widespread. When you make things for government in the EU/US you will most probably have laws demanding accessibility features. The problem isn't the numeronym but that so few people care about accessibility.

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#140

Post by smoothman11 »

kjeetgill wrote: post #46
adam_arthur wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before it was that private companies could do whatever they wanted, now many trying to impose their will on Twitter’s actions all of a sudden. Huh

> Huh Before you let that cynicism build up too much, for the record, not all of us Elon+Twitter skeptics have a problem with the $8 thing. You're just not going to hear from any one who didn't have an issue with it. Related: Is there a quippy term or a fallacy for the (very natural!) habit of treating a random sample of a million voices and expecting a coherent message from them? I feel like it's related but distinc…

Are you looking for logical fallacies used in debates/arguments?

Conflation might work as well but Im not good at debating

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