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

economist.com

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

#211

Post by civopsec »

Symbiote wrote: post #180
civopsec wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wiped the computer they gave me and installed my own OS. If I quit or they fire me there is a three month period where I have to work for them anyway. It would be ideal to have two computers, but I don’t feel like committing to such an expense (it would have to be about equally powerful) in this economy and all that.

The BIOS (or equivalent) will be locked on these corporate laptops. You can't install your own OS.

Makes sense. Good for me.

Would in any case be kind of obvious that the employee thad violated the company policy when their desktop doesn’t look like the Mac or Windows one.

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

#212

Post by shagie »

chadash wrote: post #63
infamouscow wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate media produces nothing of intellectual value. It merely continues to exist because their business model, advertising, allowed them pivot into being drama generating entertainment machines.

Top 10 articles from the front page of nytimes.com right now: * E.U. Settles on Russian Oil Price Cap After Fraught Talks * A phony climate foundation in Germany helped Russia complete Nord Stream 2 after U.S. sanctions threatened to derail it. * U.S. Employers Add 263,000 Jobs, Showing Strong Demand for Workers * Why are middle-aged men missing from the labor market? * Alex Jones Files for Bankruptcy * As Officials…

> Go and read anything at https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/206 and tell me if anyone but "corporate media" would be able to do anything even close to these.

BuzzFeed News Has Won Its First Pulitzer Prize

BuzzFeed News won for its innovative series exposing China’s mass detention of Muslims and was named a finalist for its colossal FinCEN Files investigation into the global banking industry.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/pulitzer-priz...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News#Awards_and_recog...

Though make sure that you differentiate BuzzFeed News from BuzzFeed... the later is the way that makes money that is able to support news site without needing subscriptions and paywalls.

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

#213

Post by dragonwriter »

shagie wrote: post #212
chadash wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top 10 articles from the front page of nytimes.com right now: * E.U. Settles on Russian Oil Price Cap After Fraught Talks * A phony climate foundation in Germany helped Russia complete Nord Stream 2 after U.S. sanctions threatened to derail it. * U.S. Employers Add 263,000 Jobs, Showing Strong Demand for Workers * Why are middle-aged men missing from the labor market? * Alex Jones Files for Bankruptcy * As Officials…

> Go and read anything at https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/206 and tell me if anyone but "corporate media" would be able to do anything even close to these. BuzzFeed News Has Won Its First Pulitzer Prize BuzzFeed News won for its innovative series exposing China’s mass detention of Muslims and was named a finalist for its colossal FinCEN Files investigation into the global banking industry. https://…

BuzzFeed News is corporate media.

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

#214

Post by smoldesu »

mhoad wrote: post #205
smoldesu wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the website is still here. If you want to critique the new leadership, than do it by all means. The actual employees seem to be doing a fine job at reduced-capacity though, and they've even managed to make a few changes I like. The point still stands - Twitter was operating way above it's means. If it actually requires 7500 engineers to keep running, then Twitter doesn't stand a chance anyways. Something tell…

Individually these are fatal mistakes. Collectively it’s clear… It’s over for Twitter under Musk. They might be able to sell it to someone for a fraction of the price they have paid for it but every day that he stays in charge the less they will be able to sell it for.

Unfortunately there is not anyone dumber than Musk to whom he might sell the platform. That being said, even Musk isn't capable of destroying Twitter (at least yet). The site is still here, and all the profiles with their 280-character messages still load.

Trust me, I want Twitter to suffer the worst death of all. It's just not likely that Elon Musk will be the reason why the site falls, at least not from a technical standpoint.

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

#215

Post by Zafira »

smoldesu wrote: post #157
themitigating wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notoriously overstaffed based on what? The fact that you've heard this repeated in different ways over a long period of time?

Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet. If anything, it's gotten better now that I don't need to log-in to scroll through someone's feed. Best change they've made in years, from where I'm standing. But generally, yeah. I've heard a lot of people question Twitter's opex and headcount over the years, from HN to daily standup meetings. Twitter is a big…

> Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.

This logic is just specious. Passing judgment on a large, distributed system based on its continued uptime is a bit like arguing that firing the flight crew of a jumbo jet was a good idea because the autopilot is working. It betrays a lack of understanding of what is really going on.

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

#216

Post by orsenthil »

> 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.

---

Seems straightforward, isn't it? Why would a company tolerate such a tool and a toolmaker?

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

#217

Post by bottlepalm »

mandeepj wrote: post #195
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?

> Twitter had almost the same number of people as SpaceX. Nope! Spacex has 9500 employees > multiple manned missions a year to the ISS Over 100k people worked on Crew Dragon Crew-2 mission from three different locations in making sure it's a success. But, here you are drinking cool-aid

I mean if you count the farmers who grew the beans that the astronauts ate then you could say 'we all' worked on Crew Dragon.

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

#218

Post by mhoad »

smoldesu wrote: post #214
mhoad wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individually these are fatal mistakes. Collectively it’s clear… It’s over for Twitter under Musk. They might be able to sell it to someone for a fraction of the price they have paid for it but every day that he stays in charge the less they will be able to sell it for.

Unfortunately there is not anyone dumber than Musk to whom he might sell the platform. That being said, even Musk isn't capable of destroying Twitter (at least yet). The site is still here, and all the profiles with their 280-character messages still load. Trust me, I want Twitter to suffer the worst death of all. It's just not likely that Elon Musk will be the reason why the site falls, at least not from a technical…

You also seem to have a very narrow definition of what failure looks like as defined by HTTP status codes.

It’s already over… I don’t know how long the death rattle is going to last but it’s past the point of no return in any meaningful sense.

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

#219

Post by horsawlarway »

fzeroracer wrote: post #173
bmj wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, access controls are critically important for many companies in many domains. My employer operates under such operating procedures. It seems reasonable that if your software collects and stores user information, employee access to all systems should be tightly controlled, and "turned off" if an employee is fired, laid off, or quits.

This is a great way to quickly lose critical information from your engineers. The few companies that do follow what you recommend end up scrambling when a key infrastructure engineer leaves, they immediately cut access and realize that he was the only one who knew how to work certain parts of the system. If you're the kind of company that conducts exit inteviews (which are the majority of large tech organizations) th…

You're misunderstanding the difference between a voluntary exit and a firing.

This is not standard procedure for a voluntary exit at most companies. The employee puts in their two weeks, works the time, and exits. The assumption is good faith on both ends, because the employee has chosen to leave.

It absolutely is the standard procedure for GETTING FIRED. The other standard part of getting fired is that the company has already decided they no longer need your skills or expertise (excluding twitter's situation, where they decided poorly - according to the news).

If you're laying off 100 people - the odds that any one of them might do something silly is very low. But that chance * 100 is usually considered an unacceptable risk from a security standpoint. Multiply it by several thousand, and it's absolutely not ok to leave the keys to the kingdom with that many fired employees.

All it takes is one drunk employee holding a grudge and you get a really nasty mess on your hands. Not to mention legal hot water.

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

#220

Post by dibt »

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.

> 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

Do you have any examples? Did they identify as Musk supporters? One or two tweets with a sufficiently high amount of replies and 'likes' should be enough. Otherwise, I'd wonder if you are painting a narrative.

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