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Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

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

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

> 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.

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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