Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

#131

Post by fzeroracer » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 7:55 PM UTC

horsawlarway wrote: post #103

fzeroracer wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normal according to who, exactly? Like where is your reference point for 'normal'? I've worked for companies at scale and have never dealt with these sort of problems before because usually there's an understanding that employees when laid off aren't going to do anything bad (unless you're perhaps cutting them out of severance and spiting them, which...). Do you have any reference points or reasons why you believe th…

Across basically every company I've worked for - this is normal. And many of those companies are not 3k+ employee tech companies. Think 10 to 100 engineers. It's actually a requirement for many compliance certifications in the US - previously employed staff are not allowed access to your systems. If you're in an office - you can wait until you grab the employee and put them in a conference room to fire them before cu…

The only scenario where I see this being an even remotely reasonably request is if you think someone is a severe risk for harming your systems should they be laid off. In every large company I've worked for (including ones involving high security systems) the standard was that you'd give people a week notice, maybe two weeks of an impending layoff along with a decent chunk of severance. This way those people being laid off could do a knowledge transfer and ensure that their domain experience wasn't lost and that you maintain a good business relationship with your employees.

To me, the way y'all present it is not the norm. It's working for a company that clearly does not trust its employees and treats them poorly. If you find yourself working for those kind of places frequently then please realize that it is not the norm and you should not try and normalize it.

Re: Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

#132

Post by kelnos » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 7:55 PM UTC

azanar wrote: post #80

It seems many commenters in several threads are making the same point. I'll summarize it here: > Creating an excessively competitive environment by working longer hours because of an ability and desire to do so is bad civic hygiene. I can say I understand the sentiment. I personally very much dislike the bind someone puts me in if they do my job for cheaper. I dislike it _more_ when I see them suffering because of th…

It's the human equivalent of the race to the bottom. A company with deep pockets (or VC funding) might sell a product at or below cost to try to muscle out competitors. The end result is either a monopoly (where the company can then raise prices up to whatever profitable levels they want) or long-term lower prices and weak margins.

In the same way, an individual worker might want to work longer hours in order to be more attractive as a candidate for raises or promotions. But often management sees a small number of employees willing to do this, and then starts to expect all employees to do it. In the absence of unions or other collective action, the other employees are forced to keep up. They've raced their labor price to the bottom.

I agree with the "civic hygiene" angle: it's much healthier for people not to do this, and provide better working conditions for themselves and others. But that requires everyone to do the right thing all the time. There will always be enough people who want to get ahead, and are willing to make themselves miserable to do it. I don't think most are being malicious: they don't realize the societal effects of their actions. But those effects happen regardless.

The difficulty of collective action is really the heart of this. If every employee just up and decided one day that the standard would be a 32-hour work week, and people would only work Monday through Thursday, it would... actually happen. Companies would complain, threaten to fire people, fire some people after all. But if everyone could actually stick together for the greater good, it would work. But people can't do that, not 100%. Some can't for legitimate reasons ("I can't risk getting fired or I won't be able to pay rent / buy food / stay in the country"), and some won't for selfish reasons ("If I break ranks and lick the company's boots, I'll be rewarded").

Re: Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

#133

Post by bottlepalm » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 7:56 PM UTC

mikeyouse wrote: post #119

bottlepalm wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter had almost the same number of people as SpaceX. One of those companies launches a rocket a week, multiple manned missions a year to the ISS, operates a global satellite internet constellation, and is building a ship that can go to Mars. The other company.. does what?

Had $5b in annual revenue and served hundreds of million of tweets daily?

Those 280 characters must generate some immense traffic.

Re: Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

#134

Post by godshatter » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 7:56 PM UTC

spaced-out wrote: post #17

ketralnis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of a weird situation. As told, this person enjoyed what they were doing and hanging out with their friends, and that happened to be on a project that benefited their employer. This sounds like it's not your problem. Except you're troubled by it because you're competing with them. You don't have fun hanging out late at work and living on Mountain Dew and Cheetos but you're competing for the same salaries and…

This is very true, and there's certainly nothing I could do if our industry becomes filled with people who are willing and eager to put in 70 hour weeks for months at a time. All I'd add is look where it got this guy: still fired. And I bet he got less severance than the people who opted for the 3 months from that form Musk sent out weeks ago. I started my career in startups and I saw the same thing quite often. Pass…

This is probably why they got fired:

> One day I created a tool that made it faster to download things from your work email that you might need if you were looking for a job: performance evaluations and that sort of thing. I posted the tool on Slack so that my colleagues could also benefit from it if they needed to. One hour and four minutes later I was fired.

I credit them for wanting to help their peers and it sounds like their intentions were good and I'm not supporting this decision by upper management but it sure seems like an unwise thing to do during an organizational change like this. Especially if you like working 70 hour weeks and helping out peers just for the sake of making someone's life easier.

Re: Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

#135

Post by coffeeblack » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 7:57 PM UTC

cuttysnark wrote: post #34

smoldesu wrote: post #8

The "hacking" hook is simply that their Macbook went into MDM lockdown mode. That's completely normal for companies at-scale, and I can understand why they'd want to lock the devices before laying people off. If the opposite had happened, they'd be writing an article about how Twitter failed to protect their files and angle it as a "they're running out of staff" article. I still don't really understand what there is…

> don't really understand what there is worth talking about here. Elon Musk, previously adored by many for futurist technology advocacy and largely forgiven for quirky-billionaire-behavior is now on the "bad guy list". This is "public opinion", from my perspective. It is now common to hear people saying: "He didn't really build that" "His family had money" "His family had a mine" "He's a fascist" "He's a racist becau…

Yep. And the entire media apparatus changed its behavior at the same moment into the same direction. Weird.

Re: Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

#136

Post by factsarelolz » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 7:57 PM UTC

retskrad wrote: post #42

It's fascinating how Elon Musk supporters on Twitter cheered, almost like a sports team, when the Twitter employees got fired in such inhumane ways by Elon Musk. Don't his supporters realize that Elon would do the same thing to them if they worked at Twitter? The stereotype about conservatives ring true - they don't care about others until it affects them personally.

[dead]

Re: Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

#137

Post by smoldesu » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 7:57 PM UTC

folkrav wrote: post #89

smoldesu wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does seem to be the case, I'm just not sure what's worth reading into here. Billionaires do stupid and terrible things constantly, if any of these passionate sideliners actually cared about that stuff then they'd be out for Larry Ellison's head for buying Lanai, or asking Steve Jobs about his $40 million jet.

The whataboutism never fails to show up. It's entirely possible to attempt to address one issue and having missed, not looked into or plain having been wrong about another one.

This isn't an issue, though, and there's no way to address it. A traded company went through a hostile takeover and the current customers aren't happy - it's a story as old as capitalism itself. If people object to the way it was sold, they should criticize the free market. If people are unhappy with billionaires using their money to tangibly hurt the planet, there are much scarier boogeymen to hunt down than the guy who everyone on Twitter hates.

Re: Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

#138

Post by dpkirchner » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 7:57 PM UTC

mikeyouse wrote: post #119

bottlepalm wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter had almost the same number of people as SpaceX. One of those companies launches a rocket a week, multiple manned missions a year to the ISS, operates a global satellite internet constellation, and is building a ship that can go to Mars. The other company.. does what?

Had $5b in annual revenue and served hundreds of million of tweets daily?

Got itself valued at $44B with that revenue and with substantial annual losses. In a way, Twitter has been hugely successful.

Re: Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

#139

Post by kdmccormick » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 7:58 PM UTC

ketralnis wrote: post #81

kdmccormick wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate that you represent both sides of argument here, but I've found a way to frame it for myself that removes all the dissonance: You work for a large, for-profit company. You have some free time outside of the typical 9-5 M-F work week and you would like to spend some of it working. Great! You could: * contribute to an an open source project or start your own * start a side project/business * volunteer somew…

> Instead, you choose to Uh huh. So? That's what choose means. You only care because you're competing with them, but that's not really their problem. That doesn't resolve any of the dissonance at all. What if their motivation isn't enjoyment but money, so they're choosing to outcompete you. What if they're doing that because they have to feed their very hungry family and their family is hungrier than yours. Does that…

> What if they're doing that because they have to feed their very hungry family and their family is hungrier than yours. Does that change the calculus?

Yes, it does. I should have been more clear in the outset: I am frustrated by people who work more than 40 hours because they enjoy doing it, not because they need to in order to make ends meet.

If you work 60hrs/week in order to pay off student loan debt and feed your kid, my heart goes out to you. If you work 60hrs/week because it's your idea of fun, please log out of work and get a hobby... you're actively making harder for the parent with loan debt to capitalize on the extra 20hrs/week they're putting in.

> You're walking into this with a set of values and just assuming that everybody else has the same ones so you can throw them on the table and say, see?

I mean, kinda, yeah! I value being able to work To reduce it to a contrived version: If you value being able to litter because it lets you get where you are going faster, I think you suck! We have divergent values, and I don't have any qualms saying that you pursuing your values actively works against my values.

Re: Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

#140

Post by bottlepalm » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 7:58 PM UTC

themitigating wrote: post #130

bottlepalm wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter had almost the same number of people as SpaceX. One of those companies launches a rocket a week, multiple manned missions a year to the ISS, operates a global satellite internet constellation, and is building a ship that can go to Mars. The other company.. does what?

I don't see how you can compare two unrelated companies staffing levels. You are simply implying complexity has a direct correlation to the correct workforce amount. Walmart has 2.3 million employees but it's just a store. Why do they need that many when SpaceX has N employees and is launching rockets

I guess probably a third of SpaceX is technicians, and Twitter doesn’t really build anything or operate any store fronts.