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Twitter was down

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Re: Twitter was down

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don’t do that. You deserve better as a worker. If a company is unable to function without infringing on the free time of their workers, that company should not exist.

I believe GP said he had fun. People should be allowed to work how they want to, they have the freedom (especially in this industry) to go elsewhere. I've pulled late nights, they bought us pizza and gave us a half day later. Sometimes you have to put in work during critical times. It's certainly not construction work anyway, people are kinda soft here sometimes.

Maybe he had fun, but almost everyone has better things to do than to spend 24hr+ at their office in a row.

I worked some 16 hour shifts (got OT) and I regret it.

Re: Twitter was down

#452

Worth noting Twitter’s status page claims it is “operational” and no events are listed under history section for past 180-days, which is obviously wrong: - https://status.twitter.com/ * Not to mention the SSL certificate appears to be expired too. ———- EDIT-01: Appears there’s a status page just for the API: - https://api.twitterstat.us/ EDIT-02: Wow, Twitter is using Twitter to post status updates: - https://twitter…

> * Not to mention the SSL certificate appears to be expired too. Love that detail. Just the icing on the top that says "everybody who was vaguely aware of this particular infrastructure is gone."

Oh man, no way. If that is the case, some people thought I was full of shit when I said, "watch it, in the mass layoffs they fired that one guy who knows all about the certs." There is always that one guy and unfortunately he always gets canned.

Re: Twitter was down

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all depends. If a business operates expecting this from employees, that business is being abusive. If a business got into trouble and employees are sacrificing to help it out, that's just an emergency. And it should be exceedingly rare -- if it's not, that's a poorly run business.

Certainly. I've been in a poorly run business that did this, and I quit. But I don't mind working late every now and during crunch time, it gets paid forward, usually with time off later. It's about your relationship with your company. My point was from the sounds of it GP had a good relationship and had fun and no-one on HN should tell them what to do because they don't know the situation.

99% of companies who need this don't pay it forward.

Re: Twitter was down

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don’t do that. You deserve better as a worker. If a company is unable to function without infringing on the free time of their workers, that company should not exist.

> deserve better as a worker I had equity in the outfit, I made my first million from it, and again, I had fun. If the CEI were at home partying, it would have been a different story. But we were all there. Kidding, coding and trying to keep something we were building together alive.

Glad it worked for you. For every person like you there are a thousand where they were mistreated and it didn't lead to success.

Re: Twitter was down

#455
post #151

There were many different hypotheses on the outcome of Elon firing 80%+ of Twitter employees: 1. The site would crash and burn the next day. 2. Nothing would change. All those engineers were anyways just sitting around. 3. There would be no immediate impact (servers can run by themselves after all), but the site would slowly degrade over time as institutional knowledge around maintenance, upkeep and all the various s…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter was down

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sending best of luck to the engineers. ... mostly around the hope they can jump ship before the Titanic pulls them under.

Why would you stay at Twitter? Even if you believe in the platform and the mission, this has to be one of the most stressful work environments in tech right now. The only cases I can think of for staying: - Unfortunate H-1Bs tied to the job. (We really need to make it easier for these folks to switch jobs and keep their visa!) - A feeling one needs the job and can't easily get work elsewhere. Perhaps living paycheck…

Could also be that they have enough money saved up and don't actively need a job, so they're happy to ride this one out until the end and because they don't need the job they don't really get stressed or anything - if they get fired no big deal.

If they actually make it all the way to the end, maybe being the last man standing there actually does have some perks we don't yet know about?

Re: Twitter was down

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody, but you must see how this can be abused to do so. A system that can be abused will be abused given the right incentives. As it stands companies are incentivized to pay as little for labor as they can get away with, and if they are allowed to “allow” workers to work excessive overtime, they will. And it will cost every other worker our free time. If you enjoy your work, that’s great, just do your work during w…

I'm simply saying you don't know the situation, how GP was compensated, etc. Yes, shit companies exist and abuse their employees. You quit and move on. There's no indication that this was happening.

I think we might be arguing about different things here. You’re saying that it worked for OP, that is fine, I don’t disagree with that, however I do disagree with this practice, because as a whole it is not good for us workers in this industry. This behavior is ripe for abuse, and companies do abuse it unless there is a collective action against it (through regulation, union contracts, etc.)

Like you said, if you work for a company which expects this from you, and you quit as a result, they can simply hire someone else that takes the abuse, and that is not a good prospects for us workers in this industry. Which is the reason I’m asking OP not to do this. Even though they had fun and were handsomely compensated, this behavior does a net disservice for the rest of us.

Re: Twitter was down

#458
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunate H-1Bs tied to the job. Or we could reduce the hoops & cycle time for legal immigration. The US has an opportunity right now to cement itself as the leader in technology for the next 2-3 decades and stave off the impending population growth crisis if we could find a way to enable people who want to live here to live here.

Or we could force these tech companies flush with cash to pay market rate and watch salaries rise or let these companies leave the country if they can’t afford to do business here. These are the richest companies on the planet and they don’t need a labor subsidy, they just want one and are powerful enough to get their way.

> leave the country if they can’t afford to do business here

Be careful what you wish for.

Re: Twitter was down

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> deserve better as a worker I had equity in the outfit, I made my first million from it, and again, I had fun. If the CEI were at home partying, it would have been a different story. But we were all there. Kidding, coding and trying to keep something we were building together alive.

Glad it worked for you. For every person like you there are a thousand where they were mistreated and it didn't lead to success.

> every person like you there are a thousand where they were mistreated and it didn't lead to success

And they should have recourse. That doesn’t mean we ban or automatically condone the practice.

Re: Twitter was down

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't fire or alienate hordes of engineers with firm-specific talent. Especially for a product/service as mature as Twitter.

I honestly think the engineering/ops problems are the least of their failures. They bled revenue not because of outages, but because wild policy swings and chaotic management style alienated some of their biggest customers. If they had frozen features and left the existing policies in tact, I suspect we would have a dramatically different narrative about the layoffs. If brief interruptions like this are the worst tha…

I mean the core issue is poor and capricious management either way.
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