11 ms·
From Google to Twitter
- nikivi 4y agoWas surprised twitter used Phabricator and Jira given how bad the UX of those is.
- ajkjk 4y agoPhab's is pretty good, in my experience. At least for engineers. Jira is of course atrocious.
- xtracto 4y agoI 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?
- ajkjk 4y agoThat 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.
- tracker1 4y agoI'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.
- redanddead 4y agowhat's a good alternative to Jira?
- tracker1 4y agoDepends 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.
- nikivi 4y agoI personally love https://height.app https://height.app now
- ajgrover 4y agoLinear
- cpeterso 4y agoThat post was from March 2022. The author has since been laid off: https://ma.nu/blog/bye-twitter https://ma.nu/blog/bye-twitter
- shric 4y ago> 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- beebmam 4y agoGenuinely 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.
- vineyardmike 4y agoYou’re kidding right? The rumors are Elon and co were responsible. So not on the chopping block.
- mozman 4y agoHave 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.
- beebmam 4y agoFirstly: 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.
- aresant 4y agoThis 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 https://twittoons.com/36 - on previous CEO https://twittoons.com/38 https://twittoons.com/38 - on the media https://twittoons.com/3 https://twittoons.com/3 - on being public https://twittoons.com/32 https://twittoons.com/32 - on Elon
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoSomething about that just makes me uncomfortable, I'm not sure I would appreciate it if were his peer.
- Aleksdev 4y agoExactly, 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.
- the_mitsuhiko 4y agoMore importantly that person created the well known Goomics: https://goomics.net/ https://goomics.net/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fazfq 4y ago>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.
- viig99 4y agohttps://twittoons.com/26 https://twittoons.com/26, seems true
- jokethrowaway 4y agoSomething 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.
- jeffbee 4y agoWhy 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.
- cbtacy 4y agoTHANK YOU!!!!!!
- wolfram74 4y agoI feel like management that can roughly estimated difficulty of a task, or at the very least distinguish possible from impossible is an asset.
- kikokikokiko 4y agoIn 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.
- partiallypro 4y agoThis 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.
- jonny_eh 4y agoI'd rather read about a random squirrel than Musk… if even for just one day.
- paxys 4y agoPretty 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.
- dilyevsky 4y agoApple 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
- firefoxkekw 4y agoA 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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- hericium 4y ago
- leoh 4y agoA 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
- Raed667 4y agoAlso google has +27k software engineers.
- redtriumph 4y agoUnrelated 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 https://ma.nu/blog/bye-twitter [1]. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.403270/gov.uscourts.cand.403270.1.0_2.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40... [2]. https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/4/23440304/twitter-mass-firing-class-action-lawsuit-violation-federal-warn-act-notice https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/4/23440304/twitter-mass-fir...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pearjuice 4y ago>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.
- c4ptnjack 4y agoThis 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.
- okdood64 4y agoIt'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.
- tdeck 4y agoIt 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.
- 6510 4y agoI suppose firing lots of people works better if the tools aren't inhouse creations.
- clevercookies 4y agoHaving 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?
- Aleksdev 4y ago“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.