From Google to Twitter | Hacker News Reader

From Google to Twitter

ma.nu

122 pointsnikivi96 comments

That post was from March 2022. The author has since been laid off: https://ma.nu/blog/bye-twitter

> Q: What do you mean by stack-ranking engineers? What were the criteria?

> A: Raw number of lines of code over a certain period (a year I think)

Wow.

Genuinely incredible this happened in 2022. Holy shit. Which shitty manager was responsible for this a performance metric at Twitter? Should have been the first on the chopping block.

You’re kidding right? The rumors are Elon and co were responsible. So not on the chopping block.

Have a citation? I understand Elon isn’t the most popular figure here but my sense is this is adding fuel to fire and should be backed up.

Firstly: please note that companies have no obligation to reveal this information, and therefore will not.

Secondly: If a manager under Musk made this decision, Musk is responsible as well, unless he renounces it and holds the people who made this decision accountable.

There were lots of reports that Elon asked people to print out code and bring it to Tesla engineers for review. They’re Rumors and pretty easy to find. Wrapped up in the whirlwind of news from the last 24 hours was that LOC was a metric used. Also rumored was that Elon asked that his name not be included on any negative memo (presumably out of negative publicity?).

So no I can’t get a citation, and everything is rumors but they’re laying off 3500 people so prepare for lots of rumors floating around.

I worked at a zombie startup in the early 2000's. One of the "managers" was in charge of tracking engineer performance. He would look at the number of lines added or modified. We were using CVS at the time. One guy would just add or remove white space to get his count up. Eventually this manager was laid off.

It definitely still happens; one group I recently worked in at Google used LOC and CL (pull requests) counts as a metric during calibration. One engineer I worked with got his code review count up by becoming a well-known rubber stamp, and was publicly rewarded for it. Entirely predictable results followed.

Clever way of earning more money. What a stupid metric.

Elon bans Kanban and the Toyota Production System at his car company so you shouldn't be surprised about dinosaur mentalities...

Well it depends. If let’s say you wrote 50 lines of code the entire year and your title is software engineer then I think some questions should be raised.

And in between the original post and your post is this post: https://ma.nu/blog/not-going-anywhere

Which is just kind of funny

We are in a world were some employee can claim ownership of a the job in someone else company. Absurd

That's from April. So it's not relevant to their recent firing.

Can you point me where specifically did he do it?

I hereby claim ownership of all the jobs. Including yours and everyone else that comments on HN.

Also, previous HN discussion [1] about the author's cartoons while he was at Google. He also has a wikipedia page [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27778774

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manu_Cornet

I think Manu's original "org charts" diagram needs to be updated to include Twitter.

Perhaps Musk on top with a gun, shooting everyone on the bottom?

From the last week, I think it would be more apt for Musk to be shooting his own foot, and then exclaiming "Why would the activists do that?"

Based on the note he posted from HR he was fired for cause and wasn’t “laid off” by the usual definition of same — he was told by HR that he had violated several company policies and his employment was being terminated immediately.

[1] https://ma.nu/blog/img/2022-11-01_bye_twitter/termination_em...

Sharing so much information about a company you work for publicly may have been considered a fireable offense. Gives hackers a lot of insight on how to infiltrate a company and what their weaknesses may be.

What did he share?

Details about internal tools and structure that only someone on the inside would have knowledge about. I'm not saying they aren't known already but it is a slippery slope when you decide to share information about your employer publicly... Here probably not enough in itself but if I recall there was some other things that led up to the firing.

Are you referring to the comics? I’m sure that they were discussed prior to him joining. He ran the Google comic for years.

I'm referring to the blog post link that was part of this comment thread. Did you read it?

Apparently some of the layoffs in Twitter are being portrayed as for cause[1], which follows the trend of SpaceX's layoffs that tried not to be classified as layoffs by instead firing employees for cause.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/29/technology/twitter-layoff...

Yeah given the context I think it is obvious that he got fired for advertising an extension that makes it easier to download your emails.

Have you seen the cartoons? I think the extension was probably the "last straw"

Cool that the new free speech-haven twitter doesn't allow advertising extensions internally or cartoons.

Some proponents of free speech really only care if their speech is curtailed and care little about anyone else's.

The "for cause" thing is just to save money. I don't think the reason matters as long as there was some reason Elon could use.

> Cool that the new free speech-haven twitter doesn't allow advertising extensions internally or cartoons

See his recent complaint that advertisers are bailing after his Paul Pelosi bullshit. He at least asserts the belief that he's entitled to advertisers, I guess because his "free speech" means everyone else loses freedom of association, or something.

I cancelled my Tesla due to the Paul Pelosi tweet. It was the last straw. Was supposed to be picking the car up tomorrow after waiting seven months. It makes me sad because I love the car, we sold our 2021 to buy a 2023, but I just can’t stand to be associated with Elon or support him/send him money. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling like this. He represents to me some of the absolute worst things about the world I see and the exact opposite of how I want the world to be headed.

No offense but it is sad that it took you this long to figure it out and cancel the order.

I guess I kept trying to ignore it, the car is that good and I loved not using fossil fuels and how cheap it was to drive it.

In my defense, he has ramped up his horrible behavior greatly in the last six or seven months to a near crescendo now.

The blue not-really crossing out of the data of the other persons involved is great. My god, who wouldn't love to work with such an individual.

Hmm, you have a way to pull email addresses out of that picture?

Yes, I'm not sure highlight it by saying anything more is worthwhile, but yes it's possible to pull the name from this. Interestingly for me at least not the email, but still

haha, I'll be danged

Manu definitely screwed up when he censored that message. I don't think it was intentional, but considering that he's a world class software engineer and he's writing a blog post for software engineers, he should have done a better job

Wow, I’d missed the update on that post and hadn’t realized he’s a named plaintiff on the class-action suit against Twitter. Nice.

The author comes off as a bit of a boat rocker. It looks like he was on the HR radar before Elon even purchased Twitter.

This is definitely one of the most interesting and insightful descriptions of working at a FANG company ive read.

The only note worth mentioning is confusion around the pod system, which I think actually sounds surprisingly effective for creating "culture". The op looks for an engineerimg explanation to justify meeting up with a group of disparate employees working on different projects, at different levels, and in different facets of the company. To me it sounds like a genuinely productive way to create relationships and "water cooler" interactions by letting it not have some ulterior motives related to the product.

That might be bias and optimism on my parent, and I'm sure the reality isn't that pretty either.

It's somewhat insightful, but a bit misleading.

So much of what's been mentioned here simply depends on what part of Google you're working in. It's just so massive; different orgs and product areas have vastly different ways of doing things even though there is an attempt to standardize across the whole company.

I guess the author did implicitly mention that this was just their own experience.

Something I noticed over the past 14 years is that I feel managers are becoming increasingly less technical.

Sure, they did some coding at some point but I doubt many were ever very proficient and just managed to coast until they become managers and had to drop the farce of knowing how to code.

The amount of junior level mistakes and architectural issues I spot around are incredible.

I wonder if it's a reflection of the increasingly complex tech landscape or a reflection of the increasingly politic and "soft skills first" corporations.

Why would managers be technical? The skills required of managers are totally distinct from the skills required to design and implement computer systems. The idea that you promote ICs into management is a weird, bad one.

THANK YOU!!!!!!

I feel like management that can roughly estimated difficulty of a task, or at the very least distinguish possible from impossible is an asset.

In my experience, since I have 3 side projects going on at the same time I'm employed full time, the best possible scenario is to have the worst technically able manager possible. For the last 3 years, I've been allocated to 3 different projects (on my full time job), all under the same manager. The guy is clueless, and I and my team members can give any estimate whatsoever for a task completion, it's always accepted. On top of that, I'm full remote since the start of the pandemic. Life is great and I've never been so productive... for me and my projects of course. On the other hand, the company that employs me is the one that suffers. Twitter seems to be just like my company, and at least my employer has the excuse of being a typical government owned inneficient piece of garbage.

Where can I apply?

I'm not american nor do I live there, but I'm pretty sure the public sector is a mess everywhere. Just embrace the cynicism and have a great quality of life.

> The skills required of managers are totally distinct from the skills required to design and implement computer systems

Some of them are, sure, but one of the skills necessary to effective management is understanding of the work being managed (especially the work at the immediate subordinate level and, if it exists, the next level down.) At the executive level, that probably doesn’t require more than very casual awareness of any of the line work, but at the level of first and second line managers it absolutely does, and its usually a lot easier to find a worker with the right talent to learn the additional skills of management than a “generic manager” who can OJT learn the domain.

I’ve spent most of my adult life in and around tech orgs, and the next even half-competent line- or second-level manager that didn’t start out as an IC I meet will be the first.

I know a lot of people agree, but the most effective organization I ever worked in had managers who _only_ knew how to order furniture, arrange travel, and sign expense reports. The less effective orgs have all had managers who at some level or another believed they were involved and knowledgable about the work.

The person who can estimate effort and risk, and sort the truth from the B.S., is your tech lead. The person who can do the seating chart, and relay the work products of the tech lead up the chain, is the manager.

Two major concerns of running an organization:

1) The top knows what the organization is capable of and can set achievable goals 2) That the bottom is incentivized to do things that achieve the goals of the company

A manager being technical helps #1, information flows upward more accurately.

I think #2 is more nuanced, but when you have a boss, you are directly incentivized to please the boss, not directly incentivized to achieve the goals of the company. Those can be different things and the less technical a manager is, the more different they can be.

This isn't an argument for just promoting individual contributors, though, since lacking management skills also makes both of these problems worse.

It is an argument for flatter organizations. Maybe that's a better way to look at it, every layer of management makes 1) and 2) more difficult. (A fully flat organization wouldn't have either problem at all.) But if a manager has both management and technical skills, it's more of a partial management layer.

Smaller orgs should be mostly flat. When I see 20 person companies with too many "directors" and "managers", it's a bad sign. Too many bosses, not enough workers.

The smaller the org, the more you want someone that actually understands the work being managed. Maybe your team is getting work done fast, but it's not done right: no documentation, few tests, architectural flaws, performance issues, security problems... Someone should be able to understand the trade off made, and be able to explain them. When one of your engineers gives you an estimate, you need to understand if it's reasonable. Is it too optimistic? Is he blowing smoke up your ass and spending 2 months on a 2 week job? Poor management sets arbitrary deadlines and wonders why they aren't met.

Firmly disagree. While a manager doesn’t need to be a productive engineer, they do need to be able to call out bullshit. And that is really tough if you don’t speak the language.

Multiple times I’ve had engineers tell me something was impossible, or strictly necessary, or too hard, when it demonstrably wasn’t. If you let too much of that happen, your product suffers.

You have staff+ level engineers for that

You get downvoted, but I share your observation (been programming for ~20 years). Sad to see HN deciding to downvote a perfectly valid opinion instead of engaging with it.

It absolutely makes a difference if the manager knows the domain in which he works. The fact that there is a lot of inept managers that started as programmers does not really discredit that.

A lot of this (eg especially the in house stuff) comes from Google starting over a decade before twitter.

OSS just wasn’t as good then

A lot of OSS now is from folks that had experience at google or were aware of what was going on there — or who built things so that they could make things like the best folks (at the time). Some OSS is even from Google of course (eg k8s, chrome dev tools, etc.).

Landscape is of course very different now.

Google is slowly moving towards more OSS and external vendors as stuff gets better

Also google has +27k software engineers.

This person writes a twitter specific cartoon that he hosts on his website

They are quite pointed and amusing and he does not discriminate in throwing any of the counter parties in this story under the bus ->

https://twittoons.com/36 - on previous CEO

https://twittoons.com/38 - on the media

https://twittoons.com/3 - on being public

https://twittoons.com/32 - on Elon

Something about that just makes me uncomfortable, I'm not sure I would appreciate it if were his peer.

Exactly, it comes off as immature and that he is not serious about his work. I think art is a great hobby but there is no need to bring people you work with into your comics.

More importantly that person created the well known Goomics: https://goomics.net/

>They are quite pointed and amusing and he does not discriminate in throwing any of the counter parties in this story under the bus

You are right, there even are comics poking fun at the moderatorial slant of the site! Oh wait no, there isn't any.

https://twittoons.com/26, seems true

Pretty much exactly what I expected. You can replace Google with any other "old school" big tech company (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon) and Twitter with everything that came after it (Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, Slack and every other successful or failed startup in the last two decades) and the comparison would look the exact same.

Apple and Netflix do not engineer their tooling in house. Googe and Fb do to a large extent and Amazon is somewhere inbetween. So no, not exactly the same

This particular person has been posted about 3-4 times today, at least that's made the front page. I've seen more posts on this person than on Musk himself today.

I'd rather read about a random squirrel than Musk… if even for just one day.

It was a real culture shock to go from a smaller company to Google, and this article illustrates why very well. Almost every other bay area tech company does local development on Mac laptops, uses something like Slack extensively, and outsources tooling. Despite its constant hiring Google is so insular that there are many long time Googlers who are not only unused to these things, but completely unaware that they're the norm outside Google.

Having never worked at a FANG, naturally Twitter sounds so much closer to the norm for me... but I'm a little surprised at how close it is. Maybe it's a mix of inferiority complex and "the mysterious unknown" but I expected more??

Still, Phabricator looks like it has terrible, terrible UX. Is that correct to assume?

“I then posted a link to the extension on an internal Slack channel. On the same day, I was fired and that post was taken down”.

Yes, why even post this on slack?

You know there is a major shift in management and everyone is under a microscope. Conversations are likely to be monitored and this seems like something that a company can perceive as a threat as now e-mails can be leaked.

Was surprised twitter used Phabricator and Jira given how bad the UX of those is.

Phab's is pretty good, in my experience. At least for engineers. Jira is of course atrocious.

I remember using and managing Phabricator a couple of years ago and its UX was horrible. Also, wasn´t its developemnt kind of discontinued at some point in the pass?

That part is a pain, yes. It's pretty much just hanging on for now until people migrate off of it. But I don't mind the UX much, find it pretty easy to use.

I'm now working on a team using Jira with a kanban setup.. have to be honest, first time in decades that I've seen/used Jira and not wanted to pull what's left of my hair out.

what's a good alternative to Jira?

Depends on your size, needs, scale, visibility and other requirements...

I've seen good/bad usage of Azure DevOps. You can also use Trello, or actual cards/tape on a wall. It's just the first time I haven't hated Jira.

I personally love https://height.app now

Linear

I suppose firing lots of people works better if the tools aren't inhouse creations.

Unrelated to the posted link but relevant since it involves the author. Author is one of the few who was terminated early Nov. [0] and now is part of lawsuit against Twitter for mass firing.[1][2]

[0]. https://ma.nu/blog/bye-twitter

[1]. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40...

[2]. https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/4/23440304/twitter-mass-fir...

>Was this a violation of a corporate policy? Not unless it could be proven that the downloaded message file was moved away from the corporate computer

A bit later

>21:17 Disconnected from everything mid-meeting, laptop goes blank

Clearly his tool was designed and intended to download emails to explicitly take it off the corporate computer. What point is there in releasing a tool for downloading documents ON the corporate computer ("wanted to save some important documents before potentially losing access") when you entirely lose access to that corporate computer in case of termination. This in combination with the cartoons and other rebellious antics as noted in his blog posts I'm not surprised he got fired.

A few extracts from the webpage, for a TLDR;

> but Twitter “TLMs” (“tech lead managers”) are more managers and less “tech”.

> I feel like engineers at Twitter are less diligent at adding comments and documentation to their code.

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