Don’t lots of companies do layoffs? Why don’t they all get this much attention? Surely messy layoffs aren’t uncommon.
Because Musk is a politically polarizing figure. Like pretty much everyone and everything these days.
Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
91–100 of 159 posts
Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
#92Would 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.
Is this part of that social contract I never get to read?
I think every headline about layoffs and restructurings and companies shutting down are proof that some people do in fact get to fire whoever they want whenever they want.
Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
#93Earlier 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…
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Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Possibly true but I would imagine the team created an internal Bible of all accessibility requirements and that all of that information wasn't siloed in the heads of each employee in that department.
And I'm sure it'll stay on that unvisited Confluence page for a year or so till some doing some cleanup goes "A11y team? They left agees ago." and deletes it.
It's actually much cheaper to buy more disk drives than to pay somebody to delete files.
Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
#95The extreme and somehow flowery language in all these posts from Twitter engineers is so indicative to me of some kind of delusional rot. “My team worked SO hard every single day to Change The World, the smartest people on the planet Earth, the greatest engineers ever to touch a keyboard, no one has our scale, no one has our problems.” So caught up in their own bullshit that they are like fat, happy hens who don’t se…
You have so much vitriol toward and schadenfreude over the pain of a person who... helped vision and motion impaired people use Twitter? Yikes.
It’s a sense I get from the collection of posts not just this one in particular. Perhaps harsh and hyperbolic. What happened feels like a clash of two worlds - the soft sounding environment of Twitter and the sometimes brutal or cruel environment that Musk clearly encourages (though he would argue it’s just efficient and necessary I’m sure).
I saw one thread where people who were one day posting #lovewhereyouwork got fired the next day after working over the weekend for a project Musk announced by email on a Saturday. It’s like they couldn’t imagine that a flippant billionaire was working them and slaughtering them like sheep. So used to a corporation that coddled them, that they walked into it smiling. I don’t use terms like bullshit hatefully…I think it is bullshit. Smart and well intentioned people, but sort of delusional nonetheless. Talking about missing time with family because, “I get to solve problems at scale no one else does.” Companies are not families, what you are doing is not always important. I think calling each other “Tweeps” is an example of this. You forgot that when the easy money party stops they will treat you like what you are to them, a line item.
Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
That actually is the commonly accepted industry term. Like i18n and l10n
Haven't heard l10n. If anyone else is wondering, that's localization. Tbh a11y is the main one that makes sense. I don't get what the point of i18n and l10n acronyms is besides saving us some typing and generally fitting into the vague category of "giving a crap about users often not considered in design"
It’s been terminology used since the 80s. Just because you haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it hasn’t been around for a long time. It was coined by DEC.
It’s also the reason why Arabic text can be output on the screen, Ruby characters can be used and screen mirroring is usable for UIs that need RTL layouts. You really should look it up before criticising it.
It deals with things as small and as important as date formats, number seperators, punctuation marks, monetary formats, support for different calendar systems, capitalisation rules… you name it, it encompasses it.
It’s a genuine discipline. It’s used extensively in Windows, Mozilla and LibreOffice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_local...
Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
We all hate to see people losing their jobs, but it's been known for a very long time that Twitter had an extremely bloated headcount. I'm not at all surprised that something called the "Accessibility Experience Team" was one of the first groups to get cut.
Uh... Why?
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Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not how civilized societies work. You don't just get to fire whoever you want whenever you want.
Is this part of that social contract I never get to read? I think every headline about layoffs and restructurings and companies shutting down are proof that some people do in fact get to fire whoever they want whenever they want.
> civilized societies
Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Anyone can get it for $8/month" is a lot closer to free speech ideals than "You can get it if you're lefty enough".
If you think the bannable offenses on Twitter only gave enough room for the left, you are not just to the right of that, but more like far right extremism. Twitter did and does, in fact, tolerate right-wing and conservative views. It is full of them. Don't mistake hate speech, disinfo, racism or whatever you think twitter was violating 'free speech' for as being the right wing. It is not.
Yes, like when they banned people for proposing that Covid came from a lab.
Or when they banned people for stating that the vaccine doesn’t eliminate transmission.
Both largely consensus views now.
Very hospitable to alternative viewpoints indeed. Maybe in a bubble
Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Possibly true but I would imagine the team created an internal Bible of all accessibility requirements and that all of that information wasn't siloed in the heads of each employee in that department.
It's a sign of where it's going though. Will the accessibility info be kept up to date? Will the other teams pay attention to it as much if there's not an internal "force" keeping it on people's mind? Will it be considered at a similar level again in the future? The answer to all of these might be "yes," but getting rid of the employees who are most responsible for this doesn't exactly strike me as an act that views…
There's presumably a gap between the current level and what's legally required, and they can afford to let things slip a bit without getting in trouble.