8 ms·

Twitter is firing the people who worked on Vine. http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/10/27/twitter-strong-q3-fires-employees-shutters-vine/ http://www.digitalm

by Keverw 10y ago

Twitter is firing the people who worked on Vine. http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/10/27/twitter-strong-q3-fires-employees-shutters-vine/ http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/10/27/twitter-strong-q3... Really love how you are doing the opposite for this thread. I guess It helps people get prospective on both sides :)

wellworld 10y ago
Thanks! I'm really tempted to post about the suffering, near-fraud and deceit in my company, but I figure it'll be all over the news soon.
- a3n 10y ago
  Careful. It doesn't matter enough to risk your wellbeing.
  - yarou 10y ago
    The truth always matters. I'd rather be a truthful mendicant than a lavishly rich liar.
    - a3n 10y ago
      To the point of winning a lawsuit but losing everything else? It doesn't matter in the sense that most of these disrupters are just going to disappear from lack of need anyway. They're so much spaghetti, thrown on the wall by VC to see what sticks. The lie is that most of it matters.
    - xyzzy123 10y ago
      Mm how about a polite, forgiving person who is decently well off? I would say that it pays to be forthright, but understanding. Granted there are exceptions. Bear in mind that one person's "unvarnished truth" might come from a lack of experience or high expectations that are difficult to meet at scale and in a commercial environment. There are generally a lot of tradeoffs being made in companies. A "tire fire" of php might be compensated for by testing and deployment practices or hell it might just be a fun place to work if you can live with the mess. On the other hand, you might have "architect driven design" where everything is a diamond on paper but the implementation is 8 kinds of design pattern wrong. Or you might have a great technical team and codebase but no actual value proposition (the funny part is that success itself invites people and pressures that unsuccessful products don't have - some of the best places I've worked had unsuccessful products but great management and teams... once success and revenue kick in, suddenly there are a lot more suits and stakeholders)... Or you could have some kind of situation where not only is the work pointless, the organisation is so utterly dysfunctional that... you'd definitely leave if it didn't pay so damn well. One person's "super messed up" is another person's "this is exactly where I want to work". Some people function well in less structured environments and some in more... so what is truth versus just a perspective? (agree there are exceptions where the truth must be told. I draw the line at not getting paid...)
      - yarou 10y ago
        Epistemologically, I agree with you. What I was getting at is that if your employer is knowingly doing something unethical (again, relative, but let's hand waive that for a moment), I feel like it is your duty to report it and publicize it.
- anon400232 10y ago
  You could share thoughts on Glassdoor, right? I would like to find (or create) a service where we can talk about the real dirt at companies. Encouraging honest accounts without disparagment is a hard balance. Building an identity and reputation system where reviews are trustworthy is hard, especially if you also want anonymity. Like many people, I've worked at places with big problems. In cases where friends apply, I strive to give an honest account of my experience. Different people can tolerate different levels and kinds of crazy. In most cases, I still know people at such companies. I want to offer constructive criticism in a public setting, because I think this could help companies and people can change for the better. I want them to find a way to succeed.
  - a3n 10y ago
    > I would like to find (or create) a service where we can talk about the real dirt at companies. I'd be waiting for the wikileaks dumps of that service, followed by firings. Data wants to be naked and exposed.
    - pennaMan 10y ago
      Why would such a service hold leak worthy data?
      - a3n 10y ago
        Actually wikileaks was an unthought player. More likely (if at all) someone who sells data or just likes to watch things burn. It was a bit knee jerk on my part, as I've become much more reluctant to spread my data footprint. If the data isn't there, it can't be stolen.
  - phamilton 10y ago
    Blind was pretty awesome when I was at Yahoo during layoffs. It's died down a bit since though.
  - flukus 10y ago
    > because I think this could help companies and people can change for the better. The first lesson you'd learn is that these companies would rather shoot the messenger, which would be you in this case.
- blobbers 10y ago
  Its already hit the news, friend. Unfortunately Wells Fargo continues to trudge on.
- rednet 10y ago
  Nothing to do with taxis is it? Sounds a bit like a formerly popular search engine?
desdiv 10y ago
I did a double-take when I saw Twitter posting[0] in the Who's Hiring thread. What's the rationale here? Why are they firing and hiring at the same time? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851502
- krrishd 10y ago
  I might be wrong but it makes sense to spend more hiring dollars where they'll increase the bottom line (which is why they're still hiring) while reducing spending in places that are negatively contributing?
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    Yet, you can just get your current employees on a room, and tell them to stop doing those actions that won't increase the bottom line, and start doing those ones that do. Obviously, people have different talents, and can't do equally well any task you ask them. But I really doubt Twitter even tried. No company tries. More likely they froze their employees tasks beforehand so they could be better evaluated.
- flukus 10y ago
  > Why are they firing and hiring at the same time? Because downsizing via attrition is a death sentence. The worst people are the most likely to stay and then new hires will be unlikely to stick around and deal with the code from the worst people. Once the spiral starts it's hard to get out of.
  - _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
    I always found if funny companies touting "We're hiring only the best" and then "We firing the worst".
    - jknoepfler 10y ago
      Companies can self-consistently seek to hire the best and fire the worst from the the hired-pool. 1. Hiring is a noisy process. You can tune your hiring test to lean more towards false negatives or more towards false positives, but you cannot (at this juncture in history) eliminate a large amount of bias (error) from evaluations of candidates. 2. Regression to the mean ensures that any hiring process that sets a "high bar" will result in pool of developers who are on average below that bar. 3. as an employee remains at a company, the bias in your evaluation process should decrease dramatically. One can, and probably should try to weed out false positives, especially if one is trying to reduce payroll. Companies can self-consistently seek to hire the best and fire the worst from the the hired-pool.
patmcguire 10y ago
Twitter is a known tire fire. When I was out in San Francisco everyone who worked at Twitter had a shell-shocked look and talked about the experience the same way they would if they'd just gone to use the restroom and found a dead body.
- dmerrick 10y ago
  Honestly that seems like par for the course for the area of town the Twitter HQ is in
- ryhamz 10y ago
  "the same way they would if they'd just gone to use the restroom and found a dead body." If that restroom had been basically showing for weeks that it was going to have a dead body in it any time now. Would still be surprising, but I'd be somewhat braced for it.
- d23 10y ago
  Can anyone actually give any details here or is everyone just gonna do the "nudge nudge wink wink" thing?
  - lizavp 10y ago
    Vine was warned by their power users and Vine ignored them.
  - patmcguire 10y ago
    I don't know any specifics of Vine. I didn't get a whole lot of details of the internals of Twitter, it seemed to be the usual complaints about companies — "things get done for the wrong reasons", "sudden changes in direction", "bizarre politics", "only care about the money now" — but compressed into a much shorter time frame.
ZenoArrow 10y ago
RE 'prospective', did you mean 'perspective'?

by Keverw 10y ago

wellworld 10y ago

Thanks! I'm really tempted to post about the suffering, near-fraud and deceit in my company, but I figure it'll be all over the news soon.

a3n 10y ago
Careful. It doesn't matter enough to risk your wellbeing.
- yarou 10y ago
  The truth always matters. I'd rather be a truthful mendicant than a lavishly rich liar.
  - a3n 10y ago
    To the point of winning a lawsuit but losing everything else? It doesn't matter in the sense that most of these disrupters are just going to disappear from lack of need anyway. They're so much spaghetti, thrown on the wall by VC to see what sticks. The lie is that most of it matters.
  - xyzzy123 10y ago
    Mm how about a polite, forgiving person who is decently well off? I would say that it pays to be forthright, but understanding. Granted there are exceptions. Bear in mind that one person's "unvarnished truth" might come from a lack of experience or high expectations that are difficult to meet at scale and in a commercial environment. There are generally a lot of tradeoffs being made in companies. A "tire fire" of php might be compensated for by testing and deployment practices or hell it might just be a fun place to work if you can live with the mess. On the other hand, you might have "architect driven design" where everything is a diamond on paper but the implementation is 8 kinds of design pattern wrong. Or you might have a great technical team and codebase but no actual value proposition (the funny part is that success itself invites people and pressures that unsuccessful products don't have - some of the best places I've worked had unsuccessful products but great management and teams... once success and revenue kick in, suddenly there are a lot more suits and stakeholders)... Or you could have some kind of situation where not only is the work pointless, the organisation is so utterly dysfunctional that... you'd definitely leave if it didn't pay so damn well. One person's "super messed up" is another person's "this is exactly where I want to work". Some people function well in less structured environments and some in more... so what is truth versus just a perspective? (agree there are exceptions where the truth must be told. I draw the line at not getting paid...)
    - yarou 10y ago
      Epistemologically, I agree with you. What I was getting at is that if your employer is knowingly doing something unethical (again, relative, but let's hand waive that for a moment), I feel like it is your duty to report it and publicize it.
anon400232 10y ago
You could share thoughts on Glassdoor, right? I would like to find (or create) a service where we can talk about the real dirt at companies. Encouraging honest accounts without disparagment is a hard balance. Building an identity and reputation system where reviews are trustworthy is hard, especially if you also want anonymity. Like many people, I've worked at places with big problems. In cases where friends apply, I strive to give an honest account of my experience. Different people can tolerate different levels and kinds of crazy. In most cases, I still know people at such companies. I want to offer constructive criticism in a public setting, because I think this could help companies and people can change for the better. I want them to find a way to succeed.
- a3n 10y ago
  > I would like to find (or create) a service where we can talk about the real dirt at companies. I'd be waiting for the wikileaks dumps of that service, followed by firings. Data wants to be naked and exposed.
  - pennaMan 10y ago
    Why would such a service hold leak worthy data?
    - a3n 10y ago
      Actually wikileaks was an unthought player. More likely (if at all) someone who sells data or just likes to watch things burn. It was a bit knee jerk on my part, as I've become much more reluctant to spread my data footprint. If the data isn't there, it can't be stolen.
- phamilton 10y ago
  Blind was pretty awesome when I was at Yahoo during layoffs. It's died down a bit since though.
- flukus 10y ago
  > because I think this could help companies and people can change for the better. The first lesson you'd learn is that these companies would rather shoot the messenger, which would be you in this case.
blobbers 10y ago
Its already hit the news, friend. Unfortunately Wells Fargo continues to trudge on.
rednet 10y ago
Nothing to do with taxis is it? Sounds a bit like a formerly popular search engine?

desdiv 10y ago

I did a double-take when I saw Twitter posting[0] in the Who's Hiring thread. What's the rationale here? Why are they firing and hiring at the same time? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851502

krrishd 10y ago
I might be wrong but it makes sense to spend more hiring dollars where they'll increase the bottom line (which is why they're still hiring) while reducing spending in places that are negatively contributing?
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  Yet, you can just get your current employees on a room, and tell them to stop doing those actions that won't increase the bottom line, and start doing those ones that do. Obviously, people have different talents, and can't do equally well any task you ask them. But I really doubt Twitter even tried. No company tries. More likely they froze their employees tasks beforehand so they could be better evaluated.
flukus 10y ago
> Why are they firing and hiring at the same time? Because downsizing via attrition is a death sentence. The worst people are the most likely to stay and then new hires will be unlikely to stick around and deal with the code from the worst people. Once the spiral starts it's hard to get out of.
- _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
  I always found if funny companies touting "We're hiring only the best" and then "We firing the worst".
  - jknoepfler 10y ago
    Companies can self-consistently seek to hire the best and fire the worst from the the hired-pool. 1. Hiring is a noisy process. You can tune your hiring test to lean more towards false negatives or more towards false positives, but you cannot (at this juncture in history) eliminate a large amount of bias (error) from evaluations of candidates. 2. Regression to the mean ensures that any hiring process that sets a "high bar" will result in pool of developers who are on average below that bar. 3. as an employee remains at a company, the bias in your evaluation process should decrease dramatically. One can, and probably should try to weed out false positives, especially if one is trying to reduce payroll. Companies can self-consistently seek to hire the best and fire the worst from the the hired-pool.

patmcguire 10y ago

Twitter is a known tire fire. When I was out in San Francisco everyone who worked at Twitter had a shell-shocked look and talked about the experience the same way they would if they'd just gone to use the restroom and found a dead body.

dmerrick 10y ago
Honestly that seems like par for the course for the area of town the Twitter HQ is in
ryhamz 10y ago
"the same way they would if they'd just gone to use the restroom and found a dead body." If that restroom had been basically showing for weeks that it was going to have a dead body in it any time now. Would still be surprising, but I'd be somewhat braced for it.
d23 10y ago
Can anyone actually give any details here or is everyone just gonna do the "nudge nudge wink wink" thing?
- lizavp 10y ago
  Vine was warned by their power users and Vine ignored them.
- patmcguire 10y ago
  I don't know any specifics of Vine. I didn't get a whole lot of details of the internals of Twitter, it seemed to be the usual complaints about companies — "things get done for the wrong reasons", "sudden changes in direction", "bizarre politics", "only care about the money now" — but compressed into a much shorter time frame.

ZenoArrow 10y ago

RE 'prospective', did you mean 'perspective'?