Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired
economist.com
economist.com
I still don't really understand what there is worth talking about here. Twitter is notoriously overstaffed, and any new management would start by cutting non-essential engineer positions.
But generally, yeah. I've heard a lot of people question Twitter's opex and headcount over the years, from HN to daily standup meetings. Twitter is a big company that ships a small handful of products, of which only Twitter for iOS and Twitter for Web really seems to matter. As long as they don't fire their sysops and iOS developers, most Twitter users would probably never notice a difference.
…except you know the entire company? The one that lost most of its only revenue source overnight [1], became immediately flooded with hate speech [2], lost a meaningful chunk of its most valuable users [3] and started attracting a huge amount of regulatory oversight knocking at the door [4].
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/11/28/twitter-loses...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-hate-s...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweet...
[4] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/11/30/tech/twitter-eu-complianc...
However, not many companies can survive with a permanent code-freeze, which is why companies don't just fire the "excess" folk who take PTO between December 25 and January 1, even though "things were fine" in that timeframe
Many of them probably could be fired without much repercussions on company, the problem really is that there is no way in hell to judge that quickly and immediately start firing.
It's the load balancing, the advertising, the billing system, the >200 legal jurisdiction's worth of regulation [0], lobbying both for and against various regulations, auditing everything for legal disputes, the dynamic battle with scammers and spammers who want to figure out and get around the spam filters, and the security updates (some of which they need to write themselves and not just install on all their machines).
Probably some other stuff as well, but this is already like a Monty Python sketch.
[0] not just each nation, but e.g. all the different US states
They might be able to sell it to someone for a fraction of the price they have paid for it but every day that he stays in charge the less they will be able to sell it for.
Trust me, I want Twitter to suffer the worst death of all. It's just not likely that Elon Musk will be the reason why the site falls, at least not from a technical standpoint.
But for a one-time charge for a lawsuit settlement, it was profitable just before Musk took over, it was not operating above its means (it almost certainly is now, despite the cuts, because of the loss of advertising revenue on top of the enormous debt service costs Musk loaded it up with to finance the acquisition.)
> The actual employees seem to be doing a fine job at reduced-capacity though
Keeping the lights on in the core app? Maybe (subjectively, I’m seeing more problems with app behavior, and seeing more reports of them, but that could, at least in part, be more attention being on it.) With the kind of safety that is of concern to moderators, no, despite Musk’s claims of reduced hate speech and other objectionable content by Twitter’s count, outside analysis has that skyrocketing.
Basic business functions? Well, missing payroll in a couple of EU jurisdictions is kind of a big deal.
So, no, I would say the existing crew isn’t doing a great job of keeping Twitter running, though the most clear problems aren’t in app function, but other business-critical functions. But, it wasn’t just engineers that were cut, and keeping the lights on, without innovation, is probably the easiest function to maintain with deep cuts, since software doesn’t actually rot.
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 two of something other than total violent collapse being a measure of how well you're handling staffing has got the smell of management track thinking all over it.
We'll really just have to wait and see what happens. I really want Twitter to destroy itself beyond repair, but the core platform seems intact.
This logic is just specious. Passing judgment on a large, distributed system based on its continued uptime is a bit like arguing that firing the flight crew of a jumbo jet was a good idea because the autopilot is working. It betrays a lack of understanding of what is really going on.
The only system that does not require ongoing maintenance is one that no one uses.
From article: "As soon as Musk actually took over, there were always three things that had to be done by yesterday." I wonder why...
And hell, hiring that many people at once is a lot of work to whoever left...
A large company is more than their website. Legal teams, regulatory compliance, infosec, etc. Apparently most of that is gone.
Apart from Twitter's ability to generate revenue.
> That was broken when he bought it.
You know what, you're kinda right, he did load up Twitter with an interest burden of $1bil/year when he completed the purchase. And then he scared off all the advertisers. So sure, he broke it when he bought it.
And him firing a bunch of people wasn't why companies stopped paying him (why would they care?), it was every other thing he did with the platform.
This is what drove me to stop using Twitter and over to nitter as a frontend. If they finally stopped doing that, I can happily start browsing their actual website again.
That's a pretty terrible take. Fire your entire IT staff and your stuff will all keep working for a while at most places. That doesn't make that IT staff pointless. They aren't hamsters that run on a wheel that powers everything, they are there to anticipate & correct problems as they come up.
You can't make this type of claim within a couple weeks of the layoffs. If Twitter continues to operate without a hiccup for the next year or two then sure try to make that claim. But to say it at this point is just ridiculous.
Also stuff already broke during the firings - like 2FA had issues already.
it hasn't been long enough to be able to say that yet. if you get rid of all firefighters, that doesn't mean the whole world will immediately catch fire.
Yet. That we know about. As the system trends towards entropy.
What musk is doing is, well, clown fiesta, but it's easy to look at twitter finances and see someone isn't making company's money
Walmart has 2.3 million employees but it's just a store. Why do they need that many when SpaceX has N employees and is launching rockets
Yes, Twitter doesn't build physical things or operate any store fronts... but that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of complexity that is within the company and the way that it maintains its funding.
This is a terrible example and you know it. Walmart has physical stores everywhere.
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.
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."
The only reason you think they are over staffed is because you don't like the political views of the majority of employees and you disagree with their content moderation policy. That's it and it's so obvious.
Has hundreds of millions of users and had an awful lot of advertiser accounts. How many accounts does SpaceX have? Yes, a lot more now that they've got their Internet service, but managing users is labor intensive, even if you don't provide many means of contact. Advertisers, especially large brand accounts, is labor intensive too, and if you lose half your big accounts because you cut staff willy-nilly, there goes a lot of revenue.
"but Twitter is fat and everyone knows it"
Everyone knows it because it's what everyone on the right has been stating without evidence for weeks. You've heard it so much it's become like an obvious fact even though you can't point to any hard evidence. I say this because you make statements like that. As if you are saying "The capital of France is Paris".
You also said
"Twitter does not include 7500 employees, unless ~6000 of them are working on something other than Twitter."
How do you know how many employees it takes? How do you know 1500 is all they need? You just keep making statements without any backing them up nor do I think you can unless you're C level at Twitter
Also any company might be losing money with staff being the main reason but still need that level of staff.
Nope! Spacex has 9500 employees
> multiple manned missions a year to the ISS
Over 100k people worked on Crew Dragon Crew-2 mission from three different locations in making sure it's a success. But, here you are drinking cool-aid
But, that's not what happened or I implied. Read for yourself -> http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
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?
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."
Do you have any reference points or reasons why you believe this is normal contrary to my own professional experience?
It's actually a requirement for many compliance certifications in the US - previously employed staff are not allowed access to your systems.
If you're in an office - you can wait until you grab the employee and put them in a conference room to fire them before cutting access (as long as security is there to escort them out afterwards). When everyone is remote - that is not an option.
ex: item number 1 for SOC 2 compliance is
----
Access controls
—logical and physical restrictions on assets to prevent access by unauthorized personnel.
----
When an employee is terminated - they are unauthorized personnel.
It's funny that they would fire people in this way, then turn around and ask the remaining folks to sign up for "working long (uncompensated) hours at high intensity".
They are trying to have it both ways.
I've never seen that attitude last beyond the initial 50 or so employees at a startup, and it sure as fuck doesn't last past the "we're installing monitoring software on all your machines" stage.
Work is what you do to get paid - it's not your family. It's not your friend. Don't treat it like it is.
That doesn't mean don't take it seriously, or respect it - just understand that work is your family like a hooker is your girlfriend - it's only true until the money runs out.
To me, the way y'all present it is not the norm. It's working for a company that clearly does not trust its employees and treats them poorly. If you find yourself working for those kind of places frequently then please realize that it is not the norm and you should not try and normalize it.
You keep coming back to this - but even in companies where they do trust the employees - legal compliance is not a joke. If you're doing anything at all with customers who are in any of the following businesses...
Healthcare
Banking
Gov
Finance
Law practice
etc...
Then you turn off access when you fire an employee. Period. You can like them all you want, in which case you might go grab drinks with them afterwards - but you don't fuck around with access to your systems, because you lose your compliance certifications, or you get breached, and you lose a bunch of fucking money, you lose your enterprise contracts, and you yourself likely get fired.
This is not standard procedure for a voluntary exit at most companies. The employee puts in their two weeks, works the time, and exits. The assumption is good faith on both ends, because the employee has chosen to leave.
It absolutely is the standard procedure for GETTING FIRED. The other standard part of getting fired is that the company has already decided they no longer need your skills or expertise (excluding twitter's situation, where they decided poorly - according to the news).
If you're laying off 100 people - the odds that any one of them might do something silly is very low. But that chance * 100 is usually considered an unacceptable risk from a security standpoint. Multiply it by several thousand, and it's absolutely not ok to leave the keys to the kingdom with that many fired employees.
All it takes is one drunk employee holding a grudge and you get a really nasty mess on your hands. Not to mention legal hot water.
Elon? Is that you?
Elon Musk, previously adored by many for futurist technology advocacy and largely forgiven for quirky-billionaire-behavior is now on the "bad guy list". This is "public opinion", from my perspective. It is now common to hear people saying: "He didn't really build that" "His family had money" "His family had a mine" "He's a fascist" "He's a racist because of where/when he was born"
Any and every attempt to report on the fallout from Musk buying twitter will command the headlines. Doesn't matter if it's the same strategy any other takeover management would employ. That's irrelevant. Musk? Bad Guy.
So: "Elon Bad. Twitter suffer. Here's an example..."
Presumably any private equity firm would also have came to a conclusion of reducing headcount.
They wouldn't have done so in a single week based on ridiculous analysis. And wouldn't have done so in a way to destroy the morale of remaining workforce.
Any private equity firm would probably not have come to the recommendation of purchasing a firm that was, in ongoing terms, narrowly profitable in a transaction that would saddle the firm with about a third of its annual pre-acquisition revenue, several times its annual profit, and a sizable share of its project post-acquisition reserves in annual debt service costs, even if the particular buyer wasn’t one where the mere prospect of the purchase would disrupt revenue.
As much as they can be very much be criticized, there is a sense in which criticizing Musk’s post-acquisition actions at Twitter is akin to criticizing actions of the Titanic’s officers and crew after the encounter with the iceberg.
April 25th, Twitter Locks Down Product Changes After Agreeing to Musk Bid
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/twitter-l... --- https://archive.ph/CK1X1
> For now, Twitter won’t allow product updates unless they’re business-critical, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. The company accepted a $54.20-a-share bid from Musk after a whirlwind courtship that began with the Tesla Inc. magnate disclosing a 9% stake in Twitter earlier this month.
> Product changes will require approval from a vice president, the people said. Twitter imposed the temporary ban to keep employees who may be miffed about the deal from “going rogue,” according to one of the people.
April 26, Twitter is protecting its source code from disgruntled employees, reports say https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/26/twitter-lock-source-code-e...
---
For several months, nothing that was not business critical was released (or done). If you were on something that wasn't business critical, you were likely waiting for a fire to fight, working on the "ok, maybe after this all blows over I can deploy this - but not until then."
In either case, not having something to do that was more pressing than helping out a person would not be surprising.
In the context you have provided - yes. But in the context of my professional experience it is rather surprising. Note that the author has not mentioned he was uncomfortable sitting there doing nothing. What he mentioned was:
>we all pitched in. I actually quite enjoyed it.
That looks like that was the first time for him ever. Also quite surprising - for me and my experience.
PS. Also:
>As soon as Musk became owner, there were always three things that had to be done by yesterday
Sweet Jesus. Just "as soon"? Just three??
I don't think any of it had to do with people having "nothing better to do on their own projects".
I don't know about you, but if my new boss, the one that threatened to fire 3/4ths of the staff, told me to do something, it doesn't matter what I was working on before, my sole new project would be what the boss wanted.
>Some of us had worked through the weekend trying to help out a colleague who’d been given an insanely tight deadline
Note: the deadline was given to "a colleague", not to "our team". Same here:
>My colleague, whom I liked a lot, was never going to get it done in time without help, so we all pitched in.
Also note that he seems to never have worked on such a schedule before:
>I actually quite enjoyed it.
>As soon as Musk became owner, there were always three things that had to be done by yesterday
Just when? Just three??
To be fair, that's been going on at least 2-3 years. Way before he got involved with Twitter.
I guess the real question is, why should anyone expect Elon to have exemption from the hate game that everyone else is apart of?
This is almost a truism. When someone reaches an extreme position, they can never be ordinary again and they will be judged by absolute terms.
I'm not defending the clickbait content a lot of outlets engage in but I'm concerned that if the "corporate media" disappeared tomorrow a lot of things would go uninvestigated. I'm also not sure that the number of stories published is a worthwhile metric either. Maybe one truly eye-opening investigative story is worth a hundred boring clickbait articles, I don't really see how you'd quantify it.
If you're genuinely confused by this kind of usage, and actually believe that those absolute terms are used sincerely, then I don't know what to tell you... maybe try to understand culture and language usage better?
I'm pretty sure the original was hyperbole but more accurate statement would be "most of what corporate media produces have zero or negative value and is just facilitator for the clicks"
It's a poor contribution to a conversation about the value of media as business enterprise because it's really not clear what the hyperbole is or what the common relatable point is supposed to be. And it might even be subtly nihilistic or privileged ("who's to say I can't believe whatever the hell I want regardless of what them news people say, they're probably just pushing what they want to believe just I like I am anyway").
So "only some fraction of the corporate media's output has intellectual value" would be an improvement. Increased clarity often is.
And it could lead to actually useful understanding, which is that a LOT of things which have high rates of mediocre or even useless output still have value.
But sure, that statement is an improvement because it at least makes clear that if you were to remove the corporate media tomorrow something of important value would be lost. Something the original statement definitely does not convey.
We can even go as far as to say that corporate media likely will not disappear anyway, and if it were to, in 2022, it would just be repackaged in a different format with new corporate or neo-corporate entities in its place.
In conclusion, and irrespective of the hyperbolic rhetoric of “corporate media produces nothing of value” or the more analytically amicable, “only the tiniest fraction of corporate media produces value”, I hereby declare an end to all corporate media and it’s theoretical subsequent reiterations.
If anything, corporate "news" spam drowns out these deeply researched investigative stories because, as GP said, the market conditions favor drama farming clickbait over an "exposé of highly toxic hazards inside Florida’s only battery recycling plant" which, while clearly important and deeply researched, I have never heard of.
That said, most of these journalists are from "corporate media," so that it "produces nothing of intellectual value" is as you say incorrect.
We get it, you are uninformed. It was in major newspapers, was on PBS Frontline, and was adapted for radio, and it won a Pulitzer. You haven't heard of it, that's on you.
* E.U. Settles on Russian Oil Price Cap After Fraught Talks
* A phony climate foundation in Germany helped Russia complete Nord Stream 2 after U.S. sanctions threatened to derail it.
* U.S. Employers Add 263,000 Jobs, Showing Strong Demand for Workers
* Why are middle-aged men missing from the labor market?
* Alex Jones Files for Bankruptcy
* As Officials Ease Restrictions Amid Protests, China Faces New Pandemic Risks
* Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find
* Kanye West was suspended from Twitter after posting a swastika.
* Cameroon Tries to Become Third African Nation to Advance
* From The Athletic: Follow real-time updates from Serbia vs. Switzerland.
Sure, some of these (e.g. first twitter headline) seem to follow an agenda, but most of these are just plain old news. It is easy to think "all of this is available on Twitter or through other independent journalists", but twitter has the luxury of being able to look at what the papers are reporting on. If you didn't have the likes CNN, NYT and the BBC, you wouldn't have reporters at white house press conferences, people reporting from Ukraine, nor any sort of real curation of the news.
Are there blind spots? Of course. Twitter is way better in some niche areas. Do the news outlets show biases? Yes, of course. But without the big news outlets, twitter wouldn't have as much to go off of. I like to think of it the other way around... imagine that corporate media didn't exist. You'd have thousands of independent journalists looking into different things with no curation. Eventually, some of them would realize that to be effective, they need to form groups, since some areas are too big for one person to cover. Eventually, small groups that people followed would grow larger as they try to report on more and more things. Eventually, they'd collectivize and form larger "corporations". You'd be back to square one.
And I'm just talking about plain old news. All of this is leaving aside the big and costly investigative pieces that some of the larger outlets are able to put together. Go and read anything at https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/206 and tell me if anyone but "corporate media" would be able to do anything even close to these.
BuzzFeed News Has Won Its First Pulitzer Prize
BuzzFeed News won for its innovative series exposing China’s mass detention of Muslims and was named a finalist for its colossal FinCEN Files investigation into the global banking industry.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/pulitzer-priz...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News#Awards_and_recog...
Though make sure that you differentiate BuzzFeed News from BuzzFeed... the later is the way that makes money that is able to support news site without needing subscriptions and paywalls.
Never seen any intellectual value in a BBC drama, comedy, or nature documentary?
The C of BBC does not look like the current practical meaning of corporation for or typical case. Being state-owned change a lot of things.
People like to read that stuff.
There's a difference between "wanting" and "liking" something. The reason doomscrolling on social media is a thing is because people want their fix. Whether or not they truly like it is another matter. Most would probably admit they don't, if they really sat down to unpack everything about it.
You never know when that bank statement, or rent agreement or whatever will suddenly become inaccessible.
Edit: I know we're not supposed to mix personal data with work. But who hasn't downloaded some docs because you need them filled or printed or something.
Putting that kind of stuff on your work laptop is just unthinkably weird to me. Why would anyone do that?
Sure, if you flat-out ask someone if they'd be comfortable posting their bank statements on Facebook, they'd say no, of course not. But even if people know that their employer can snoop on the contents of their work laptop (I imagine some people don't realize), it's a hypothetical threat. And often people have some sort of implicit trust in their employer, anyway, for some strange reason.
In my experience, most people put personal things on their work laptop, and don't think twice about it. Unfortunately you're actually the "weird" one, even though I totally agree with you.
One of these times was during a layoff that I was a part of.
(But also, people are lazy, and personal stuff ends up on work machines.)
I try to avoid it as much as possible, but its unavoidable in at least some cases. I am not going to take a day off of work just because I have to call about a billing issue and need to login to my account to give the details to a service representative.
I guess my experience must not match others', fair enough.
At least you can admit it. Things I've needed a printer for in recent months, off the top of my head:
- Filing a reimbursement claim for going to an out-of-network healthcare provider.
- Filing a reimbursement claim for contact lenses.
- Filing legal paperwork with the county clerk.
- Getting a certified death certificate.
- Passport renewal.
- Change of address without paying a fee.
- Letter to the local postmaster.
- Paperwork for claiming an inheritance through a probate court.
- Printing a shipping label.
- Filing a zoning application.
- Life insurance forms.
The more you adult, the more you discover that you still need paper.
Because of convenience. It is an easy mistake to make. If you have to print something like a rent agreement, do you use your office printer or go through the hassle of sending it to FedEx to print? Also, when you have home office setups configured for your work, it can be a pain to switch everything to your personal laptop, if you even have one.
It would be ideal to have two computers, but I don’t feel like committing to such an expense (it would have to be about equally powerful) in this economy and all that.
Unless they want to fire you and then they still could remove those 3 months and give you some money instead. It would be stupid of them to give me a free salary for 3 months: either they fire me properly, or they give me a computer.
Would in any case be kind of obvious that the employee thad violated the company policy when their desktop doesn’t look like the Mac or Windows one.
> 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.
Gosh, I wonder these two incidents are related?
PROTIP: Don't distribute tools to facilitate the exfiltration of company property and expect to keep your job.
https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us....
> Creating an excessively competitive environment by working longer hours because of an ability and desire to do so is bad civic hygiene.
I can say I understand the sentiment. I personally very much dislike the bind someone puts me in if they do my job for cheaper. I dislike it _more_ when I see them suffering because of the choice they made. I think of the implications, and see a path toward everyone suffering. I want to hold that other individual responsible for increasing suffering in the world.
I take a beat. They've made a poor decision. Or maybe they haven't. Maybe they are suffering in ways I see, but not suffering in ways I don't see. Maybe they seem to be suffering more than they are. Can I do something else about my suffering _other_ than hold them responsible?
Example: are they _really_ normalizing mandated weekend work by voluntarily working weekends.
No? Then I think we can start talking about civic hygiene. I think civic hygiene is too complicated of a subject to shoot from the gut about. It is too complicated to reason about from a foundation of resentment.
In the same way, an individual worker might want to work longer hours in order to be more attractive as a candidate for raises or promotions. But often management sees a small number of employees willing to do this, and then starts to expect all employees to do it. In the absence of unions or other collective action, the other employees are forced to keep up. They've raced their labor price to the bottom.
I agree with the "civic hygiene" angle: it's much healthier for people not to do this, and provide better working conditions for themselves and others. But that requires everyone to do the right thing all the time. There will always be enough people who want to get ahead, and are willing to make themselves miserable to do it. I don't think most are being malicious: they don't realize the societal effects of their actions. But those effects happen regardless.
The difficulty of collective action is really the heart of this. If every employee just up and decided one day that the standard would be a 32-hour work week, and people would only work Monday through Thursday, it would... actually happen. Companies would complain, threaten to fire people, fire some people after all. But if everyone could actually stick together for the greater good, it would work. But people can't do that, not 100%. Some can't for legitimate reasons ("I can't risk getting fired or I won't be able to pay rent / buy food / stay in the country"), and some won't for selfish reasons ("If I break ranks and lick the company's boots, I'll be rewarded").
If we can't agree on this, we'll probably not agree on anything else. It'll mean you've decided on a premise that I think is false. I'll just keep seeming ignorant to you.
_Should_ they be miserable? Perhaps. Maybe they have a false consciousness. Maybe they need to understand better the societal effects they are responsible for. These are debatable. To _presume_ this is true, though, seems to me kind of arrogant.
> 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.
---
Seems straightforward, isn't it? Why would a company tolerate such a tool and a toolmaker?
"I built a tool to allow people to copy corporate data so they could find a job easier."
To be fair, it seems like something you should only do if you don't care about getting fired and if you're already on the way out the door. Unless you're migrating from one email provider to another and your company isn't migrating all the data, most companies are going to take offence to that.
He is suing Twitter, I wouldn't be surprised if he lost because Twitter will successfully claim he wrote a tool to bypass security and allow people to steal trade secrets.
He wrote a JS script that clicks a a button in your inbox. That's not "bypassing security" in any way.
Like a judge is going to understand that after lawyers spend hours talking about data theft and how they have policies and how the security team had concerns.
They haven't disabled the "download email button" because there are legitimate reasons for employees to download data (e.g. opening files in local apps), but trying to retain access after being laid off is not one of them.
At least 5 direct reports between a talented engineer working on a critical feature with huge media attention and the leadership? Seems like a lot.
Engineer -> team leader -> director -> VP -> CXO
Elon has his fanboys, who are going to fan. I think they probably skew fiscally and regulatorily laissez-faire, socially progressive, and middle-aged more than they skew classical conservative.
Which is the best reason that upper-middle class people are screaming about Twitter layoffs. The worst reason is just because they repeat what they've read to each other as a proxy for conversation.
I was a software engineer in the Soviet Union. To buy your family something to eat (like milk, or cheese) you should skip work and spend an hour or more standing in lines at a grocery store. I used a different strategy: work late and around 8 pm there were no lines at you could still buy sour milk, bread and canned fish in tomato sauce. I survived on this and was pretty happy cause I liked my job. But remember the requirement: no kids...
Thesis:
Employing people who barely provide any value is no good for anyone in the long run.
Argument:
Full employment was always the primary goal of all communist countries, so (state) companies were practically required to employ everyone on the job market.
(My comment was: Plain, simple truth.) The argument continues:
Many of those people had little to do and so, when people got their salaries at the end of the month, there wasn't that much stuff in the stores to buy with it, as the companies didn't have much of an output.
(My comment was: Plain, simple truth again. My story: just an illustration what my "living experience" as a software engineer was in these conditions. Basically: if your do not want to spend a lot of time in lines, you can't get milk. Not enough milk was produced to cover all the money paid to all the workers. Only sour milk to those who prefer to spend their time working.)
The app is needed, so we hire people to make app. We got a bunch of designers and developers to develop UI in a team.
But OH NO!, WE DID A GOOD JOB! EVERYTHING WORKS AND IS EASILY EXTENSIBLE!
What next? There isn't enough work on the new stuff ? We just add UI for a feature other team develops every so often, that's not enough work to go by.
And, more importantly, MANAGER CAN'T MAKE THEMSELVES LOOK GOOD when doing only maintenance and not delivering features.
What to do, what to do? I know ? Let's rewrite perfectly functioning UI again! Let's fuck around with stuff that works fine already. Make it look "modern" while we're at it. Use new framework so we can't reuse that much code. That will keep the devs busy and manager getting bonuses!
Look at how much the employees of SV/FAANG companies donate to politicians and which ones. It's not hard to see the money laundering going on.
Do you have any examples? Did they identify as Musk supporters? One or two tweets with a sufficiently high amount of replies and 'likes' should be enough. Otherwise, I'd wonder if you are painting a narrative.
It's bizarre how Musk has been propped up into a surrogate for the bad aspects of capitalism, especially by an administration that just overruled a union vote through legislation.
From https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588671155766194176
"Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required."
Seems reasonably generous. Certainly not "inhumane."
If you trust Elon to do the right thing for employees after seeing the class action lawsuits at Tesla (and more are on the way for Twitter), I have a bridge to sell you.
Where did I say I trust Elon or any other CEO?
Still waiting on someone to explain what is "inhumane" about getting laid off with a severance package. Remember we are talking about employees working at a big tech firm. They'll find work elsewhere, and have had pay above the national average. They likely have plenty of savings.
I don't give a shit about Elon or Twitter. My comment was just holding someone accountable for the narrative they were creating. Typical for HN to have someone jump in with an irrelevant reply.
You should probably ask this of the original commenter.
I've not made any claims one way or the other about whether anything inhumane happened.
These are real people with real lives that were needlessly disrupted on what is supposed to be a day for love and thankfulness. Sure is a shitty and inhumane way to thank your employees.
If there is time to get a big bag of money from your employee the holiday month is the best one
While you’re caring for a newborn or desperately trying to remain in the country.
During thanksgiving.
So how exactly does giving someone money not make this a shitty and heartless thing to do? You know, what some might call “inhumane”?
Once again, throwing cash at the problem doesn’t fix it. Getting money might be nice, but it doesn’t magically fix the lack of a job.
So the firings is seen as "karma" coming back to people that "didn't wanted free speech", even if fired person might be utterly unrelated to the whole thing.
> fired in such inhumane ways
gotta complain to your legislators here, musk would be fucked if he tried shit like that in EU...
> The stereotype about conservatives ring true - they don't care about others until it affects them personally.
That's basic human group behaviour and nothing characteristic for any political group. The other side behaves literally identical. Or, well, as usual, the some individuals in the group do, but, also as usual, the more extreme elements of a group often form its public image.
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. It's great the author is fine wasting his weekend working on changes to a verification system that was launched for only a few days, but some of us have family and friends we like to spend time with. Hobbies and other things outside of work that give our lives meaning. Generations of workers fought hard for things like weekends and we shouldn't just glibly throw them away just because we're paid well.
Except you're troubled by it because you're competing with them. You don't have fun hanging out late at work and living on Mountain Dew and Cheetos but you're competing for the same salaries and promotions as people that do. Them glibly throwing away their weekends does affect you because you're in the same competition space as them.
I dunno, I have some dissonance here. I've been young and had fun on a work project and did unpaid overtime because I just really enjoyed it, and I'd have been rightly pretty pissy about it if you unrelated unaffected person on the internet told me to stop. I still do sometimes. But now that I'm older if I were laid off in favour of all-nighter people I'd also be pretty pissy about that.
Especially if those terms changed after I chose an employer based on the stated hours and felt like I met them. The way you "solve" this in a market way is by putting it in the employment terms. I take a job knowing the terms, and maybe I take a pay cut for choosing the non-all-nighters job, fine. But then a Musk can come along and ignore all of that. The protectionist way is regulating the all-nighter folk away but younger me would have absolutely ignored it and a Musk event would have rewarded it in exactly the way you're unhappy about.
You work for a large, for-profit company. You have some free time outside of the typical 9-5 M-F work week and you would like to spend some of it working. Great! You could:
* contribute to an an open source project or start your own
* start a side project/business
* volunteer somewhere
* take an online course
* exercise
* goof off
* do almost anything else
The effects of these on on society and yourself range from neutral at worst to helpful at best.
Instead, you choose to:
* contribute extra unpaid time to your employer
This may enrich your life, but it definitely enriches the shareholders of your company. 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.
Uh huh. So? That's what choose means.
You only care because you're competing with them, but that's not really their problem. That doesn't resolve any of the dissonance at all. What if their motivation isn't enjoyment but money, so they're choosing to outcompete you. What if they're doing that because they have to feed their very hungry family and their family is hungrier than yours. Does that change the calculus? You're walking into this with a set of values and just assuming that everybody else has the same ones so you can throw them on the table and say, see? But that's exactly what makes it complex, that they don't have the same values and they live next to you in the same world you do.
I'm still just as split on how to feel about enjoyable overtime but I'm not at all conflicted that your take that anybody else is obligated to maximise your metric instead of their own is a bad take.
Yes, it does. I should have been more clear in the outset: I am frustrated by people who work more than 40 hours because they enjoy doing it, not because they need to in order to make ends meet.
If you work 60hrs/week in order to pay off student loan debt and feed your kid, my heart goes out to you. If you work 60hrs/week because it's your idea of fun, please log out of work and get a hobby... you're actively making harder for the parent with loan debt to capitalize on the extra 20hrs/week they're putting in.
> You're walking into this with a set of values and just assuming that everybody else has the same ones so you can throw them on the table and say, see?
I mean, kinda, yeah! I value being able to work <=40 hours a week. If you don't value that, we're going to disagree.
To reduce it to a contrived version: If you value being able to litter because it lets you get where you are going faster, I think you suck! We have divergent values, and I don't have any qualms saying that you pursuing your values actively works against my values.
What an odd perspective. I was brought up to recognize that hard work and going above and beyond what was expected is admirable and will get you appreciation, recognition, and advancement. Voluntarily doing work that you think needs doing because you want to be valued isn't bad, it's a life lesson. I got my first software testing job by going above and beyond my menial mailroom duties. I got my first software engineering job by going above and beyond my testing duties. I got all my promotions, bonuses, and stock grants and more than a few job offers by consistently doing more than I had to do.
If there's a project that I'm enthusiastic enough about to want to spend a weekend working on it? Hell yes, I'm going to do it, and I'm going to enjoy myself without worrying that someone else thinks I'm raising expectations beyond the bare minimum. Maybe someone with that attitude just isn't offering as much to an employer and they should get comfy with the idea of others outperforming them.
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 a coworker of mine got promoted because they worked weekends, I would actually be pretty frustrated at them.
PS: how dare you work harder than me! You're raising the bar and that's not fair! ;)
I don't understand that at all. You'd rather work 60 and 20 of that slack instead of 40 ? Why would you want to have less time for hobbies/family ?
With this hybrid approach, you're still advancing the cause at $work, but you're not doing it directly or exclusively for them, and the open source project will have visibility, scope, and utility beyond $work and your employment there. You never know, it might even be the start of future promising career opportunities.
There be dragons of course with how exempt employment and copyrights work in the US, though (as in, this might be a trivial case where if the side-project is successful, your employer can claim rights on it). You could come to some agreement with your employer ahead of time about the independence of such projects, though.
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. Passionate young engineers sinking their life into a project only to get the same, or an even worse deal than the people who did less work but were more politically savvy.
> 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 sounds like their intentions were good and I'm not supporting this decision by upper management but it sure seems like an unwise thing to do during an organizational change like this. Especially if you like working 70 hour weeks and helping out peers just for the sake of making someone's life easier.
Make your choices and let others make their choices. Not everyone wants to optimize for the same things in life.
He was undercutting his colleagues by working for free. So it kinda is my problem.
I mean, fine, since people's wages are not the same anyway some people might as well decrease their hourly wage by overextending.
But I feel a need to remind those people of that they are suckers and won't be compensated for it in the end.
The author just got fired.
Still my idea of fun! Can’t do it anymore for health reasons but I still pull all-nighters doing my own retirement projects.
That solves all of that, employer can't just convince gullible teenager to get extra work out of them for little benefit and have active motivation to hire enough people to not have to crunch very often (as doing that makes them pay 2x per hour of work).
Those laws are in place because for every "crunching and happy for it" there is ten that stay for longer out of fear that they will get fired for wanting to work normal amount in favour of someone that lives work.
Yes. Ressentiment is ubiquitous these days. Nietzsche would be amused but it's not a good look for our culture.
You see this plenty even in less extreme examples, my old company had yearly awards for outstanding performance, and there was a clear pattern that the story of why the person had won almost always involved some personal sacrifice in service of the company. No one was winning awards for just being good at their job, showing up every day, and being a value to the team. You had to take a break from your vacation to get on a meeting, or work 2 weeks straight to get the award.
I'm sure the well-meaning among leadership (which I do believe was a decent amount of them) saw this as more of an apology. "Here's something to recognize that you did something you shouldn't have had to do". But functionally, it was creating a culture where you needed to abuse yourself in order to be recognized.
Ultimately, if you pour more person-hours into software (or other "mind jobs") you should expect to get an inferior end product and/or diminished productivity.
Just look at Musk himself: sending out completely idiotic emails at 2AM. At least a portion of his behavior could be attributed to having completely diminished his mental faculties due to overworking himself.
This feels like a really under appreciated point. If you overwork yourself for 10 years it's going to have nasty effects on you.
We can speculate whether overwork is related to Prince's drug addiction and eventual death.
So yeah, failing to rest properly does have bad consequences.
So yes, overworking does create a race to the bottom.
To pop up a level, your comparison is very bad. In Twitter's case, the "model" behavior is that engineers are working longer hours, and not whether they are producing better results. A better analogy would be a sports player who trained extra hard and extra long, but didn't improve their level of play, but still all other players were expected to work extra long hours anyways.
Michael Jordan might be a great example though, he worked harder then anyone else, and ALSO raised the standard of how hard people needed to work on the team beyond the normal limits.
They all did benefit from the Championships that followed, but it was certainly also a strain of the mental health of players like Dennis Rodman.
Why isn't he a good example? He worked hard and wrote a bunch of good music. He didn't seem to cause a race to the bottom.
I thought Band Mates was the best comparison, because we were talking about fellow employee's suffering at a company. And if your comparison was of Prince to The Music Industry at large, it sort of works, but sort of doesn't because other musicians are Prince's competitors not team mates.
Hell, I'd be able to buy a house after a month.
What a fucking stupid comparison...
Don't turn our field into one where you have to sacrifice your personal life to succeed.
I'm glad you think I have that much power! Seriously I'm not suggesting any such thing. But why shouldn't people who work harder reap the benefits. And more to the point, does that cause a race to the bottom?
While you're 100% correct in that, I do believe the "parent" post is against people being put into situations where they begin to feel that such actions are their only remaining option if they ever want to have a life outside of work.
I feel like this thread contains a lot of people upset that other people are better than them at a game that's not worth playing anyway. Promotion is an extremely artificial game setup so that neither companies nor employees have to play the actual game of capitalism. In a real market economy you deliver value by trading with others; if you feel that others are capturing more value than you, take the other side of the trade. When competition requires that you work 60 hour weeks to be considered good at a field, that's a sign that there are too many people in that field and you should get out of it and instead consider employing that field in your new job instead.
> Let's be honest this is far from what people call slavery. They are being paid multiples of six digit salaries, RSUs and work in one of the most happening tech ecosystems of the world.
> I would love to be a part of something like this. Heck most of us would love to be a part of something like.
> I kind of envy those guys working on these projects. I hope I was the one there.
So, unfortunately, your post encourages what the ones at the top with all the capital love: getting the rest of us fight over the scraps. Because the truth is that it's all scraps to them, and that's how they want to keep it.
If that is not the case, it doesn't matter how much I'm being paid, I'm not going to be happy ("self-actualized") for long. Likewise, whether I work 40 or 60 hours a week has no bearing on this. I imagine quite a few people joined Twitter because they believed in the company's stated mission and the vision of its founder. The mission and vision have now changed, so it's appropriate for some of those people to move on, voluntarily or otherwise. Framing it as some kind of Marxist class struggle sheds no light on the issue, and isn't helpful in the least.
This can and should be a condition on top of respecting yourself enough to expect that you are paid for the time you work and have the freedom to establish a good work-life balance based on those hours. Assuming for one second that the folks running the business--if they are any good at it--think about you in anything other than economic terms at the end of the day is simply foolish.
That's only a negative for one side.
If someone likes that work environment - great, let them work very hard on interesting and meaningful projects, these are the kind of people Elon Musk seems to want to leave at twitter. People who don't like this kind of work environment are free to leave for companies more focused on work-life balance.
If you're exchanging time for money, you ain't on the capital side of the struggle.
The fact this is even legal indicates congress sold out the working class in the '80s.
Sure you may be able to slack off a lot in some jobs, and effectively make more money per hour. But it's an absolute certainty that if you work 80 hours a week, you're not going to be paid more as an exempt employee. It's one of the nice things about being a contractor, you can actually get overtime pay. And as a result most companies will be strict about not making you work more than 40. Funny how that works.
So you’re privileged, you say. What about your employer?
Unless there's a fixed "here's how much extra you will be rewarded, and thus how much it will cost the company" policy about working past normal working hours, people who do so are scabs.
One can find fulfillment in hard work and going the extra mile without that expectation from the employer and without expectation of a tangential reward. There is often intrinsic value in hard work that can be rewarding in and of itself.
There have been times in my life where I stayed late or worked weekends on my own accord because I felt the situation warranted it. I wasn't asked to do it and I didn't get paid extra, but I felt good doing it and in the long-run, the short-term sacrifice yield wonderful long-term gains.
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 that a large segement of people end up with stockholm's syndrom from their employer. they begin to identify with their captor and even take on their values and their beliefs. If you're kidnapped, at least you have some hope of escape. but when you're employed, you are the prison guard who holds the key. so you have no hope of escape, this amplifies the stockholm's syndrom.
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
Some employees are OK with working immense amounts of unpaid overtime to please a Musk-type boss. That's a very different situation than the type of employee who has a life outside of work and wants to get paid fairly.
Many people enjoy work.
Most people do find fulfillment out of work, many even enjoy it, myself included. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't fight to be compensated for what we put in, and doesn't mean we shouldn't practice solidarity with coworkers, many of whom don't have the time to work as much as we do (for example a working mother).
Everyone, even billionaires undergo social conditioning from an early age. Some people have a need to be successful in order to feel good about themselves. they feel they need to "be" someone. And for some, their work becomes a part of their identity.
Becoming a billionaire doesn't free you from all the stuff that's been conditioned into you.
I called Elon’s boss and he corroborated it. His boss even makes him use one of those punchcard machines—how quaint!
> just because we're paid well.
People might try another perspective. Does $200k a year sound good? How about $100k a year?
How many say "yes" to the first, but "no" to the second? While still working weekends and staying late -- that's lying to yourself.
Working unpaid overtime, devaluates the employee. If it comes from more senior colleagues or managers, then it's at risk of creating an implicit culture. One not suitable for people with responsibilities outside the work place.
One of my big hobbies was doing everything I could on a computer way before I got paid to program. I doubt the author considered what they did a waste since they were doing something they enjoyed.
Just stop, please. There's nothing wrong with working long hours and people enjoy it, let them live in peace.
No, it's great that the author helped out a colleague. The fact that it benefited Twitter is secondary.
Helping out your colleagues (who are now all over new companies as they've all been fired from Twitter) is how you build your network, get your next job, get people to give you nice recommendations, etc.
Corporations are amoral and greedy and should not be helped unless they are helping you, but that doesn't mean you should piss on everything and everyone around you either.