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I was saying the same thing to friend last night. If I saw “Twitter X-Y” on a resume where X is <=2023 and Y is >= 2023 then I’m going to have questions. The pe

I was saying the same thing to friend last night. If I saw “Twitter X-Y” on a resume where X is <=2023 and Y is >= 2023 then I’m going to have questions. The people attracted to that kind of company run by that kind of person set off red flags for me. H-1B is an acceptable reason, almost anything else isn’t.

bitshiftfaced 4y ago
Why? I'm confused.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  I don’t want people who are workaholics on my team. I want people who aren’t going to burn out and have a good work/life balance. I don’t want people who are sycophants for a billionaire on my team. It shows a lack of good judgement. I don’t want people who think laying off half the staff, revoking WFH out of the blue, and then giving a hazy ultimatum with neither option well defined is a smart move. I want people who know their worth, will speak the truth without fear of reprisal, not mindless followers willing to sacrifice everything for a company or a person.
  - bitshiftfaced 4y ago
    > I don’t want people who are workaholics on my team. That's a big assumption. Maybe they had a great work/life balance before and they see this current imbalance as a temporary inconvenience that's not worth losing their job over. > I don’t want people who are sycophants for a billionaire Another unfair assumption. You could get this information directly by asking a good open ended interview question. > I don't want people who think laying off half the staff, revoking WFH out of the blue, and then giving a hazy ultimatum with neither option well defined is a smart move. I don't understand why staying on automatically means that you think that Musk's actions are smart. > not mindless followers willing to sacrifice everything for a company or a person. They were not willing to sacrifice everything since they were not willing to quit their jobs.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ryandrake 4y ago
What about simply "I had a mortgage to pay, we were going into a recession and all the other tech companies stopped hiring"? I've clinged on to crappy jobs out of desperation during bear markets. This should not be a red flag.
- MarkMarine 4y ago
  So in this situation you're imagining a great engineer, who's been getting paid a twitter level salary and has good perf reviews and good code (one would think, to avoid the chopping block thus far) couldn't take 3 months salary and get another job in that time? I find that difficult to believe. But, like I said, you better have a darn good reason when you're explaining having twitter 2023 in your resume. If that is a good reason, cool. I'm betting the default will be you buy into Elon's lord of the flies type management style and shitposting, and you thought you were smarter than all your co-workers are you're glad to see them gone. Add in some sympathy for the nazis that were banned from twitter, and I see a pretty toxic looking mix. Not a good co-worker.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    Sorry, but I would not quit a job right now, with tech hiring freezing and a recession coming up, unless I were working for literal Nazis or I had at least a year of liquid savings set aside. I've been through 2000 and 2008 and know how hard it was, even for talented engineers. A lot of people reading HN were born after 1992 or so and have never yet been of working age during an acute tech downturn. They have no idea what it's like when zero companies are hiring. It's not a joke.
    - MarkMarine 4y ago
      It's not that bad yet, but please let me put that aside. I get what you're saying about the hiring situation in the future, in general, in the tech industry. I would like to posit that the type of engineers we're talking about at twitter right now would be some of the top 5-10% of software engineers working on distributed web engineering, in general, in the world. Is that fair? They might not be in FAANG or whatever series of letters you want to use this month, we prob drop Facebook and elevate Microsoft, whatever, but I've worked with some open source twitter code and I've interviewed twitter engineers, they seem very very solid to me. If that is true, I also posit there are a lot of second tier companies that would be falling over themselves to replace some of their B tier employees, and replace their existing under performing engineers with these twitter engineers. If the market is what you say, they should be able to get top tier talent on some kind of discount, yes? There are still funded startups as well, and adding a single experienced twitter engineer could elevate the whole team in a startup. So, I see the choice as: stay at twitter... what does that mean. You're working for this dude who just axed all your colleagues for basically no reason, and it's a coin flip when he looks at you and your work if he decides to fire you. Even if you stayed through these two rounds. You're making way less money, as you don't have RSUs in a publicly traded company, you've got some kind of nebulous options in a fiscally fragile company that the CEO is claiming openly could be headed for chapter 11 + the fact that he's just driven away almost all the ad revenue. You look at subscriptions, 22,000 people signed up for Elon's blue check scheme, so you'd need a dozen million people signing up for that to shore up the gap he's created with the debt. You are now one of 3 people on a team that was 75, and lots of other teams are like that. How are you going to create features that will entice more people to subscribe, when you barely have the people to keep the lights on. So, you've looked at all that and decided to stay? Either you're on a visa, or there is something that isn't financial keeping you there (because... you're making way less money) and I would darn sure like to know what that thing is. If you're risk averse, you see this crap storm coming and bailed to find a new job already. Add to that that all these people have had their options paid out just recently as part of the sale. They have cash. They are staying for another reason.

bitshiftfaced 4y ago

Why? I'm confused.

joshstrange 4y ago
I don’t want people who are workaholics on my team. I want people who aren’t going to burn out and have a good work/life balance. I don’t want people who are sycophants for a billionaire on my team. It shows a lack of good judgement. I don’t want people who think laying off half the staff, revoking WFH out of the blue, and then giving a hazy ultimatum with neither option well defined is a smart move. I want people who know their worth, will speak the truth without fear of reprisal, not mindless followers willing to sacrifice everything for a company or a person.
- bitshiftfaced 4y ago
  > I don’t want people who are workaholics on my team. That's a big assumption. Maybe they had a great work/life balance before and they see this current imbalance as a temporary inconvenience that's not worth losing their job over. > I don’t want people who are sycophants for a billionaire Another unfair assumption. You could get this information directly by asking a good open ended interview question. > I don't want people who think laying off half the staff, revoking WFH out of the blue, and then giving a hazy ultimatum with neither option well defined is a smart move. I don't understand why staying on automatically means that you think that Musk's actions are smart. > not mindless followers willing to sacrifice everything for a company or a person. They were not willing to sacrifice everything since they were not willing to quit their jobs.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ryandrake 4y ago

What about simply "I had a mortgage to pay, we were going into a recession and all the other tech companies stopped hiring"? I've clinged on to crappy jobs out of desperation during bear markets. This should not be a red flag.

MarkMarine 4y ago
So in this situation you're imagining a great engineer, who's been getting paid a twitter level salary and has good perf reviews and good code (one would think, to avoid the chopping block thus far) couldn't take 3 months salary and get another job in that time? I find that difficult to believe. But, like I said, you better have a darn good reason when you're explaining having twitter 2023 in your resume. If that is a good reason, cool. I'm betting the default will be you buy into Elon's lord of the flies type management style and shitposting, and you thought you were smarter than all your co-workers are you're glad to see them gone. Add in some sympathy for the nazis that were banned from twitter, and I see a pretty toxic looking mix. Not a good co-worker.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  Sorry, but I would not quit a job right now, with tech hiring freezing and a recession coming up, unless I were working for literal Nazis or I had at least a year of liquid savings set aside. I've been through 2000 and 2008 and know how hard it was, even for talented engineers. A lot of people reading HN were born after 1992 or so and have never yet been of working age during an acute tech downturn. They have no idea what it's like when zero companies are hiring. It's not a joke.
  - MarkMarine 4y ago
    It's not that bad yet, but please let me put that aside. I get what you're saying about the hiring situation in the future, in general, in the tech industry. I would like to posit that the type of engineers we're talking about at twitter right now would be some of the top 5-10% of software engineers working on distributed web engineering, in general, in the world. Is that fair? They might not be in FAANG or whatever series of letters you want to use this month, we prob drop Facebook and elevate Microsoft, whatever, but I've worked with some open source twitter code and I've interviewed twitter engineers, they seem very very solid to me. If that is true, I also posit there are a lot of second tier companies that would be falling over themselves to replace some of their B tier employees, and replace their existing under performing engineers with these twitter engineers. If the market is what you say, they should be able to get top tier talent on some kind of discount, yes? There are still funded startups as well, and adding a single experienced twitter engineer could elevate the whole team in a startup. So, I see the choice as: stay at twitter... what does that mean. You're working for this dude who just axed all your colleagues for basically no reason, and it's a coin flip when he looks at you and your work if he decides to fire you. Even if you stayed through these two rounds. You're making way less money, as you don't have RSUs in a publicly traded company, you've got some kind of nebulous options in a fiscally fragile company that the CEO is claiming openly could be headed for chapter 11 + the fact that he's just driven away almost all the ad revenue. You look at subscriptions, 22,000 people signed up for Elon's blue check scheme, so you'd need a dozen million people signing up for that to shore up the gap he's created with the debt. You are now one of 3 people on a team that was 75, and lots of other teams are like that. How are you going to create features that will entice more people to subscribe, when you barely have the people to keep the lights on. So, you've looked at all that and decided to stay? Either you're on a visa, or there is something that isn't financial keeping you there (because... you're making way less money) and I would darn sure like to know what that thing is. If you're risk averse, you see this crap storm coming and bailed to find a new job already. Add to that that all these people have had their options paid out just recently as part of the sale. They have cash. They are staying for another reason.