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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

#261

Post by ilyt »

godshatter wrote: post #134
spaced-out wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 soun…

I'm here wondering what the "tool" exactly did that simple desktop email client didn't...

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

#262

Post by ilyt »

tomcam wrote: post #30
fnimick wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just that, but every employee who wants to work nights and weekends puts pressures on those who don't to catch up or be cut. It's a race to the bottom that leads to people who do have things they need to do scheduling emails to go out late at night, changing the times on their commits, etc to look like they are as "committed" as the rest of the team. It's harmful and damaging and I'm not at all surprised that peo…

Did Steph Curry or Kobe Bryant harm basketball because they plain worked harder than everyone else? Prince in the recording studio? Did they cause a race to the bottom?

Pay me their salary and I'd be all the happy to work weekends.

Hell, I'd be able to buy a house after a month.

What a fucking stupid comparison...

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

#263

Post by mcspiff »

smoldesu wrote: post #208
idiotsecant wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet. But a bunch of stuff did break. Famously 2FA stopped working, there has been an explosion of spam, and other widely reported issues- which are only the ones we know about - there could very well be some truely abhorrent stuff going under the hood to keep the wheels from falling off. The idea that a week or tw…

2 weeks is certainly nothing, I agree that the proof will be in the pudding. But so far, I remain unconvinced that Twitter is going to "break" in the traditional sense. If stuff goes down, we have protocol for bringing it back up. When 2FA dies, the process for recovering it is the same under Musk as it was under Dorsey. We'll really just have to wait and see what happens. I really want Twitter to destroy itself beyo…

This isn’t entirely true fwiw. That assumes a constant load on the systems. If you start running into a capacity crunch on a given system, your best case is scale horizontally or vertically using established procedures. But if you hit a limit there (vertical scaling limit, architectural limit) and actually need to refactor? Good luck!

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

#264

Post by ilyt »

subroutine wrote: post #95
throw8383833jj wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. Here's my hypothesis as to why people are so glib about throwing away their lives for their employer: People depend on their employer for their entire livelyhood. This day and age, without a pay check, you can't have any basic needs: Shelter, food or water and you'd be out on the street or worse: the average homeless person (it's shocking) lives 30 years less than a housed one. So, it's no surprise t…

Just so I understand, your world view is that normality means disliking your job; anyone who enjoys their job is suffering from stockholm's syndrome. Even if you're making a quarter mil per year, if you stay after-hours with coworker buddies to implement a feature that augments the experience of millions of people, you're a total sucker.

Sure but how many people do that ?

I like my job. I like my hobbies better. I'd still not trade hobbies for job just to give users a feature week early. I'm fine with working extra occasionally but that's what I signed for by picking jobs in ops, not because I think that's good.

Also, OP is OBVIOUSLY talking about people that maybe have few months of savings and have them getting fired heavily affect their lives, not people earning 250k

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

#265

Post by ilyt »

octopolus wrote: post #153
spaced-out wrote: post #3

>My colleague, whom I liked a lot, was never going to get it done in time without help, so we all pitched in. I actually quite enjoyed it. I wasn’t really thinking about whether those changes were good for Twitter; I just really liked being part of that community, working together on a deadline. I even slept on a sofa in the office on Saturday night. It's not cool to paint pressuring employees to work long hours as a…

> It's not cool to paint pressuring employees to work long hours as a good thing, and we need to be more vocal about this Just stop, please. There's nothing wrong with working long hours and people enjoy it, let them live in peace.

That entirely depends on compensation.

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

#266

Post by themadturk »

spaceywilly wrote: post #106
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…

When I was laid off security walked me from a conference room near the exit to my car. I was not even allowed to collect my stuff from my desk, had to have a friend bring it to me after.

This happened to my boss, the IT manager at a law firm, when he was fired. Part of his firing was due to complaints by the IT staff, the rest for other reasons. I deactivated his account while he was at lunch, his staff -- three of us, as I remember -- were told to leave for the day, and he was escorted out when he returned from lunch.

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

#267

Post by test098 »

bottlepalm wrote: post #255
mandeepj wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. But, that's not what happened or I implied. Read for yourself -> http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

If you count all the programmers who wrote all the libraries, platforms, operating system's that Twitter is built on, that would also be over 100k. A great example - Boeing had more money, more people and the same external support and they STILL haven't launched a vehicle yet. SpaceX has beat them by almost 4 years and counting. You'd think with '100k people' they could do it by now right?

> If you count all the programmers who wrote all the libraries, platforms, operating system's that Twitter is built on, that would also be over 100k.

Again, OP didn't do that. In the article, Elon Musk's quote didn't reference "all the programmers who wrote all the libraries, platforms, operating system's that [SpaceX] is built on."

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

#268

Post by factsarelolz »

kdmccormick wrote: post #182
heleninboodler wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It dials up the expectations of others who are in the same employment pool as you. It hurts future generations of workers by eroding the expectation of work-life balance that we are lucky enough to have achieved in our industry. > > To me, it is pretty clear: if you put your extra time into for-profit work, you suck. What an odd perspective. I was brought up to recognize that hard work and going above and beyond wh…

I should be clear that I am talking about expectations of time, not expectations of effort or competance. I work 40 hours a week, no more. (If paid overtime were a thing at my company, I might do more. But it's not.) I bust my ass during those 40. Sometimes I work on personal side projects in my free time for fun or to sharpen my skills. If you want to be promoted, I'd rather you work harder and smarter, not more. If…

You don't work 40 full hours a week. No one actually _works_ every single minute of a 40 hour work week. There's lunch for one, bathroom breaks, interruptions by coworkers, meetings that they may not even need you in, etc, etc.

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

#269

Post by test098 »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #230
kllrnohj wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly the point - Twitter had sales reps & SpaceX didn't. Twitter had moderators and SpaceX didn't. The companies have different external-facing relationships at every level, even ignoring the obviously massive unrelated engineering differences.

5000 salespeople and moderators? Please... They don't need that. Besides, my comment was about Walmart, which has over 10,000 stores... So of course they have more employees than Twitter by a huge margin.

Wow, you seem to know a lot about running multibillion dollar companies in completely different industries!

So let's imagine you run Twitter and you're operating in every western country on the planet. Now, all those countries have different laws and regulations. Are you, the CEO/coder/whatever going to be the one who sits down with regulators and discuss the nuance of their laws? How are you going to deal with law enforcement requests? FOIA requests from journalists? What kinds of information can you store about users in different locales? What kind of government compliance do you need to have in place for enterprise customers? How many hours per week are you allowed to require for workers in Germany? Can your translation contractors in Poland work through the holidays? Or maybe you consider lawyers just another one of those pesky salespeople/moderators who gets in the way of genius?

That's just one tiny segment of the company. Try to imagine how many other moving parts there are besides the four roles of "CEO," "coder," "salesperson," and "moderator."

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

#270

Post by omeze »

toto wrote: post #244

As a reminder, Whatsapp had *35* engineers for 450M users at the time of its acquisition by FB (2014). It had *50* engineers for 900M users (2015). https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us... .

these comparisons to whatsapp are really tiring, twitter is a totally different product. twitter is more similar to facebook than whatsapp from an engineering requirement's perspective, messaging is a minor feature of twitter's. even from a non-tech perspective, the presence of public data & the moderation requirements that entails alone makes it operationally different enough to not be a good comparison...
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