17 ms·

Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired

166 points by samizdis 4y ago

KindAndFriendly 4y ago
https://archive.ph/ESpwJ https://archive.ph/ESpwJ
spaced-out 4y ago
>My colleague, whom I liked a lot, was never going to get it done in time without help, so we all pitched in. I actually quite enjoyed it. I wasn’t really thinking about whether those changes were good for Twitter; I just really liked being part of that community, working together on a deadline. I even slept on a sofa in the office on Saturday night. 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.
- spoils19 4y ago
  A user on HN, kamaal, posted something that many on this site agree with: > 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.
  - bobleeswagger 4y ago
    It's kind of sad when you have the perspective. Nobody working for a tech company in an at-will agreement is a wage slave, period. People just want to be victims, though.
  - biohax2015 4y ago
    For real. Go work at an insurance company if you can’t take the heat.
  - ddellacosta 4y ago
    I understand the point being made, but this is fundamentally naive and counter-productive for everyone who wants to be working in this industry as a software engineer. Engineers are going to get exploited: just shrugging and saying "but we get paid well enough" means stuff like this: https://hirecloud.io/hr-and-recruiting-news/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valleys-most-celebrated-ceos-conspired-to-drive-down-100000-tech-engineers-wages/ https://hirecloud.io/hr-and-recruiting-news/the-techtopus-ho... will continue to happen over, and over, and over. 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.
    - tylersmith 4y ago
      People like the OP are not fighting for scraps, they're doing what they love and enjoying their lives while getting scraps. People that don't enjoy doing that stuff resent them because they have to compete at stuff like they don't like to do for scraps. That's only a negative for one side.
      - aks_tldr 4y ago
        Until people like OP wake up one day and see what they been doing in name of "love", it all comes crashing down. been there done that.
    - lumenwrites 4y ago
      Shouldn't people be free to make up their own minds and make their own choices? 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.
      - ddellacosta 4y ago
        I may be trying to persuade, but I'm not being prescriptive. I'm just stating the logical outcome of behaving based on the thinking in the post I was responding to.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    On the other hand it'd be great if people lucky enough to be caught in a temporary storm of spying-ad-supported stupid money would use some of that leverage to improve workers' rights more broadly rather than working overtime for free. If you're exchanging time for money, you ain't on the capital side of the struggle.
  - NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
    On the other hand "exempt" employees as we're legally defined, make less money per hour the more we work because we're "exempt" from overtime pay. 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.
  - civopsec 4y ago
    Just saying that you are “lucky” without considering the fact that you make money for your employer makes you into a simp for your employer. So you’re privileged, you say. What about your employer?
- fnimick 4y ago
  Not just that, but every employee who wants to work nights and weekends puts pressures on those who don't to catch up or be cut. It's a race to the bottom that leads to people who do have things they need to do scheduling emails to go out late at night, changing the times on their commits, etc to look like they are as "committed" as the rest of the team. It's harmful and damaging and I'm not at all surprised that people here support it.
  - tylersmith 4y ago
    If people are scheduling emails and faking commits to feign value then they should absolutely be cut.
    - blooalien 4y ago
      > "If people are scheduling emails and faking commits to feign value then they should absolutely be cut." 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.
    - fnimick 4y ago
      So when your new teammate decides to start working through the weekend and suddenly you need to do so as well in order to match them in the performance review, what's your response? And notice that I didn't say anything about the quality of work being delivered - when you need to be visibly pulling overtime with the exact same work output in order to compete, what do you do?
      - nostrademons 4y ago
        So I'm actually in that situation (I have young kids and can't realistically work more than 8 hours/day), and my actual response was: switch into management and have the young, enthusiastic employees work for me. 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.
- ketralnis 4y ago
  It's kind of a weird situation. As told, this person enjoyed what they were doing and hanging out with their friends, and that happened to be on a project that benefited their employer. This sounds like it's not your problem. 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.
  - spaced-out 4y ago
    This is very true, and there's certainly nothing I could do if our industry becomes filled with people who are willing and eager to put in 70 hour weeks for months at a time. 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.
    - godshatter 4y ago
      This is probably why they got fired: > 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.
- joshuamcginnis 4y ago
  Generations of workers fought for the _choice_ to not work weekends. Some people, including myself, are happy to work weekends and long hours if its worth it. The point is, it should be the workers choice and if they don't like it, they should be able to leave and find something better. There are clearly still plenty of engineers at Twitter who have done the cost-benefit analysis and decided staying was right for them.
  - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    If it doesn't cost the company significantly extra (say, due to overtime), then the company's interest is increasing work hours for everyone to the max. In such a situation, other workers doing so, and getting discretionarily rewarded for it simply erodes the position of those who, rightfully, refuse to work more than they need to. 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.
    - joshuamcginnis 4y ago
      There's a mountain of evidence that companies (which by the way, often includes employee who hold equity in the companies they work) are incentivized towards increased productivity but not hours worked. That so many companies are now offering "unlimited vacation", "wellness days", and "no work Fridays" is indictive of this. 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.
- mrazomor 4y ago
  Well said! Thanks for calling it out. > 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.
- zamalek 4y ago
  It's not only that it's "not cool," but the outcomes of long hours don't match the expectations. The concept of "more person-hours in, more productivity out" heralds from the days of Ford, and strictly applies to individuals performing rote jobs on a factory floor (to a certain degree): tightening bolt after bolt, painting the car hoods as they roll by, nailing two pieces of wood together, etc. Human biology is adept at building up physical stamina when exposed to continued physical stress. During the alleged information age we have seen (time and time again) that our biology is woefully inadequate at building up mental stamina: we just get mentally exhausted (i.e. stupid). 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.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    This is an important point that gets overlooked in these discussion. Which is weird because I thought most programmers had learned the hard way that coding while tired is a surefire way to just generate more work.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    > 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.
- matwood 4y ago
  > 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. 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.
- throw8383833jj 4y ago
  I totally agree. 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.
  - deltree7 4y ago
    Can you apply your brilliant logic to Elon Musk who works 100 hours per week? or Warren Buffett who still goes to work? Many people enjoy work.
    - throw8383833jj 4y ago
      Gladly. 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.
    - noahchumsky 4y ago
      Do you seriously think Elon works 100 hours a week? What evidence do you have to support this? 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).
      - rurp 4y ago
- bsder 4y ago
  > 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. 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.
- civopsec 4y ago
  I thought about commenting on this. But I figured that people would just take the argument down the path of indirectly competing about who the most passionate hacker (tm) is.
- octopolus 4y ago
  > 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 Just stop, please. There's nothing wrong with working long hours and people enjoy it, let them live in peace.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    That entirely depends on compensation.
- chasing 4y ago
  "Hey, boss. I'm going to need you to go ahead and pay me twice as much this week. Unfortunately I'm not going to be able to work any extra. But just think of the sense of accomplishment you'll have seeing me drive into the parking lot in the new car that you helped make happen! High five!"
newaccount2021 4y ago
[dead]
smoldesu 4y ago
The "hacking" hook is simply that their Macbook went into MDM lockdown mode. That's completely normal for companies at-scale, and I can understand why they'd want to lock the devices before laying people off. If the opposite had happened, they'd be writing an article about how Twitter failed to protect their files and angle it as a "they're running out of staff" article. 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.
- infamouscow 4y ago
  Corporate media produces nothing of intellectual value. It merely continues to exist because their business model, advertising, allowed them pivot into being drama generating entertainment machines.
  - duxup 4y ago
    > Corporate media People like to read that stuff.
    - kelnos 4y ago
      Do they, or are they emotionally manipulated into reading it? 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.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    I agree. However, Twitter employees know what they signed up for, so this article is really just taking advantage of people who have never heard/seen this happen. It's fairly common in the industry, even if the results are disappointing and impact is ineffectual.
  - afavour 4y ago
    It feels good to say stuff like that but it's not really true. A look over Pulitzer Prize winners from previous years will show deeply researched investigative stories and have had a real impact on public awareness.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Raed667 4y ago
This is why I tell everyone I ever work with: "Don't have any personal document on your work laptop that isn't backed somewhere personal" 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.
- GloriousKoji 4y ago
  I don't mix personal data and work but they sure can present enough gray areas. Things like digital copies of paystubs, ESPP details, and W4 can only be accessed while employed and on the company network. I leaned that one the hard way a year later when doing taxes.
  - Raed667 4y ago
    The scary wake-up call for me when I heard the story of someone who informed their manager of their 2-week notice. And instead of having 2 weeks to sort everything out, they got locked out immediately.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      I began disentangling things from my previous employer about a year before I actually left. 2 weeks notice would basically be a formality, I'd have effectively quit months before anyway.
    - throwdingding 4y ago
      Our business has to do this for security reasons upon learning an employee is no longer going to have an ongoing relationship. However, we explain this to the employee ahead of time, and the two weeks are still paid - the employee just doesn't get to touch sensitive information anymore.
- kadoban 4y ago
  Anything you do on work hardware, it the US is pretty much free range for them to snoop into as much as they want. Putting that kind of stuff on your work laptop is just unthinkably weird to me. Why would anyone do that?
retskrad 4y ago
It's fascinating how Elon Musk supporters on Twitter cheered, almost like a sports team, when the Twitter employees got fired in such inhumane ways by Elon Musk. Don't his supporters realize that Elon would do the same thing to them if they worked at Twitter? The stereotype about conservatives ring true - they don't care about others until it affects them personally.
- badpun 4y ago
  Employing people who barely provide any value is no good for anyone in the long run. Full employment was always the primary goal of all communist countries, so (state) companies were practically required to employ everyone on the job market. 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.
  - factsarelolz 4y ago
    This 100%. 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.
  - MikePlacid 4y ago
    It's fun to see a simple plain truth downvoted. 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...
    - tartoran 4y ago
      Would you mind reframing what you’re trying to say here (because it doesn’t make much sense in this context)?
beau_g 4y ago
>My boss was fired. So was his boss. And his boss’s boss. And their boss. 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- telotortium 4y ago
  I might expect that at Google, but Google also has 20 times the employees.
- amrocha 4y ago
  seems pretty normal to me. Engineer -> team leader -> director -> VP -> CXO
- buzzdenver 4y ago
  To add to the sibling post: 5^5 is around 3000. So 5 engineers have a team leader, 5 of them are under a director, etc... So 5 layers sounds about right for a Twitter sized company.
heywherelogingo 4y ago
Is this Economist promo week?
- NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
  It's Musk hating week.
  - godshatter 4y ago
    I thought that was last week.
    - ilyt 4y ago
      Nope, that was laughing at musk week
usedtoprog 4y ago
As Denis Leary said: "Life sucks. Get a fucking helmet"
brailsafe 4y ago
This has roughly happened to me many times. It gives you a bit of trauma, and now every time anything ecen vaguely off happens, I think I've been fired. Lots of people don't know what it's like, welcome to the club.
ElijahLynn 4y ago
> 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.
azanar 4y ago
It seems many commenters in several threads are making the same point. I'll summarize it here: > 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.
- kelnos 4y ago
  It's the human equivalent of the race to the bottom. A company with deep pockets (or VC funding) might sell a product at or below cost to try to muscle out competitors. The end result is either a monopoly (where the company can then raise prices up to whatever profitable levels they want) or long-term lower prices and weak margins. 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").
that_guy_iain 4y ago
> 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 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.
- amrocha 4y ago
  lol He wrote a JS script that clicks a a button in your inbox. That's not "bypassing security" in any way.
  - factsarelolz 4y ago
    It's staging data for exfiltration. This is an attempt to take property and data not owned by the employee.
    - amrocha 4y ago
      If this was true they would have disabled the download email button. Stop siding with the company by default.
      - leereeves 4y ago
        It's obviously true, unless Twitter employees were regularly using work e-mail for personal data. You don't need a tool to download a few performance evaluations. 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.
EarlKing 4y ago
> 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. 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.
- factsarelolz 4y ago
  I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought the same when reading those lines.
  - EarlKing 4y ago
    The hilarious part is they literally buried the lead in the last paragraph. Nothing says "our readers will definitely think this guy deserved to get fired and not read any further if we tell them this" than burying it in the last paragraph.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  Do employees have the right to access past performance reviews manually? If so, it's not "exfiltrating company property". Do you draw the line at automation?
  - scottcodie 4y ago
    Twitter's actions seems like retaliation against the employee for enabling other employees to collect evidence of discrimination. Performance reviews often exist to reduce the companies liability when firing people off, but being fired with good performance reviews can work against them.
- heleninboodler 4y ago
  Oh, come on, "exfiltration of company property" when we're talking about personal performance evaluations is a pretty huge stretch. I'd characterize this as "Don't make cheeky slack posts alluding to the fact that you're looking for a new job and helping others do the same."
orsenthil 4y ago
> 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. --- Seems straightforward, isn't it? Why would a company tolerate such a tool and a toolmaker?
toto 4y ago
As a reminder, Whatsapp had *35* engineers for 450M users at the time of its acquisition by FB (2014). It had *50* engineers for 900M users (2015). https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/#:~:text=When%20the%20company%20was%20acquired,almost%20entirely%20on%20its%20own https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us....
- amrocha 4y ago
  You must not work in tech if you think Twitter and Whatsapp are in any way comparable
- omeze 4y ago
  these comparisons to whatsapp are really tiring, twitter is a totally different product. twitter is more similar to facebook than whatsapp from an engineering requirement's perspective, messaging is a minor feature of twitter's. even from a non-tech perspective, the presence of public data & the moderation requirements that entails alone makes it operationally different enough to not be a good comparison...

166 points by samizdis 4y ago

https://archive.ph/ESpwJ https://archive.ph/ESpwJ

>My colleague, whom I liked a lot, was never going to get it done in time without help, so we all pitched in. I actually quite enjoyed it. I wasn’t really thinking about whether those changes were good for Twitter; I just really liked being part of that community, working together on a deadline. I even slept on a sofa in the office on Saturday night. 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.

spoils19 4y ago
A user on HN, kamaal, posted something that many on this site agree with: > 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.
- bobleeswagger 4y ago
  It's kind of sad when you have the perspective. Nobody working for a tech company in an at-will agreement is a wage slave, period. People just want to be victims, though.
- biohax2015 4y ago
  For real. Go work at an insurance company if you can’t take the heat.
- ddellacosta 4y ago
  I understand the point being made, but this is fundamentally naive and counter-productive for everyone who wants to be working in this industry as a software engineer. Engineers are going to get exploited: just shrugging and saying "but we get paid well enough" means stuff like this: https://hirecloud.io/hr-and-recruiting-news/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valleys-most-celebrated-ceos-conspired-to-drive-down-100000-tech-engineers-wages/ https://hirecloud.io/hr-and-recruiting-news/the-techtopus-ho... will continue to happen over, and over, and over. 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.
  - tylersmith 4y ago
    People like the OP are not fighting for scraps, they're doing what they love and enjoying their lives while getting scraps. People that don't enjoy doing that stuff resent them because they have to compete at stuff like they don't like to do for scraps. That's only a negative for one side.
    - aks_tldr 4y ago
      Until people like OP wake up one day and see what they been doing in name of "love", it all comes crashing down. been there done that.
  - lumenwrites 4y ago
    Shouldn't people be free to make up their own minds and make their own choices? 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.
    - ddellacosta 4y ago
      I may be trying to persuade, but I'm not being prescriptive. I'm just stating the logical outcome of behaving based on the thinking in the post I was responding to.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  On the other hand it'd be great if people lucky enough to be caught in a temporary storm of spying-ad-supported stupid money would use some of that leverage to improve workers' rights more broadly rather than working overtime for free. If you're exchanging time for money, you ain't on the capital side of the struggle.
- NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
  On the other hand "exempt" employees as we're legally defined, make less money per hour the more we work because we're "exempt" from overtime pay. 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.
- civopsec 4y ago
  Just saying that you are “lucky” without considering the fact that you make money for your employer makes you into a simp for your employer. So you’re privileged, you say. What about your employer?
fnimick 4y ago
Not just that, but every employee who wants to work nights and weekends puts pressures on those who don't to catch up or be cut. It's a race to the bottom that leads to people who do have things they need to do scheduling emails to go out late at night, changing the times on their commits, etc to look like they are as "committed" as the rest of the team. It's harmful and damaging and I'm not at all surprised that people here support it.
- tylersmith 4y ago
  If people are scheduling emails and faking commits to feign value then they should absolutely be cut.
  - blooalien 4y ago
    > "If people are scheduling emails and faking commits to feign value then they should absolutely be cut." 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.
  - fnimick 4y ago
    So when your new teammate decides to start working through the weekend and suddenly you need to do so as well in order to match them in the performance review, what's your response? And notice that I didn't say anything about the quality of work being delivered - when you need to be visibly pulling overtime with the exact same work output in order to compete, what do you do?
    - nostrademons 4y ago
      So I'm actually in that situation (I have young kids and can't realistically work more than 8 hours/day), and my actual response was: switch into management and have the young, enthusiastic employees work for me. 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.
ketralnis 4y ago
It's kind of a weird situation. As told, this person enjoyed what they were doing and hanging out with their friends, and that happened to be on a project that benefited their employer. This sounds like it's not your problem. 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.
- spaced-out 4y ago
  This is very true, and there's certainly nothing I could do if our industry becomes filled with people who are willing and eager to put in 70 hour weeks for months at a time. 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.
  - godshatter 4y ago
    This is probably why they got fired: > 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.
joshuamcginnis 4y ago
Generations of workers fought for the _choice_ to not work weekends. Some people, including myself, are happy to work weekends and long hours if its worth it. The point is, it should be the workers choice and if they don't like it, they should be able to leave and find something better. There are clearly still plenty of engineers at Twitter who have done the cost-benefit analysis and decided staying was right for them.
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  If it doesn't cost the company significantly extra (say, due to overtime), then the company's interest is increasing work hours for everyone to the max. In such a situation, other workers doing so, and getting discretionarily rewarded for it simply erodes the position of those who, rightfully, refuse to work more than they need to. 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.
  - joshuamcginnis 4y ago
    There's a mountain of evidence that companies (which by the way, often includes employee who hold equity in the companies they work) are incentivized towards increased productivity but not hours worked. That so many companies are now offering "unlimited vacation", "wellness days", and "no work Fridays" is indictive of this. 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.
mrazomor 4y ago
Well said! Thanks for calling it out. > 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.
zamalek 4y ago
It's not only that it's "not cool," but the outcomes of long hours don't match the expectations. The concept of "more person-hours in, more productivity out" heralds from the days of Ford, and strictly applies to individuals performing rote jobs on a factory floor (to a certain degree): tightening bolt after bolt, painting the car hoods as they roll by, nailing two pieces of wood together, etc. Human biology is adept at building up physical stamina when exposed to continued physical stress. During the alleged information age we have seen (time and time again) that our biology is woefully inadequate at building up mental stamina: we just get mentally exhausted (i.e. stupid). 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.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  This is an important point that gets overlooked in these discussion. Which is weird because I thought most programmers had learned the hard way that coding while tired is a surefire way to just generate more work.
- concordDance 4y ago
  > 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.
matwood 4y ago
> 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. 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.
throw8383833jj 4y ago
I totally agree. 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.
- deltree7 4y ago
  Can you apply your brilliant logic to Elon Musk who works 100 hours per week? or Warren Buffett who still goes to work? Many people enjoy work.
  - throw8383833jj 4y ago
    Gladly. 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.
  - noahchumsky 4y ago
    Do you seriously think Elon works 100 hours a week? What evidence do you have to support this? 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).
    - rurp 4y ago
bsder 4y ago
> 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. 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.
civopsec 4y ago
I thought about commenting on this. But I figured that people would just take the argument down the path of indirectly competing about who the most passionate hacker (tm) is.
octopolus 4y ago
> 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 Just stop, please. There's nothing wrong with working long hours and people enjoy it, let them live in peace.
- ilyt 4y ago
  That entirely depends on compensation.
chasing 4y ago
"Hey, boss. I'm going to need you to go ahead and pay me twice as much this week. Unfortunately I'm not going to be able to work any extra. But just think of the sense of accomplishment you'll have seeing me drive into the parking lot in the new car that you helped make happen! High five!"

newaccount2021 4y ago

[dead]

smoldesu 4y ago

The "hacking" hook is simply that their Macbook went into MDM lockdown mode. That's completely normal for companies at-scale, and I can understand why they'd want to lock the devices before laying people off. If the opposite had happened, they'd be writing an article about how Twitter failed to protect their files and angle it as a "they're running out of staff" article. 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.

infamouscow 4y ago
Corporate media produces nothing of intellectual value. It merely continues to exist because their business model, advertising, allowed them pivot into being drama generating entertainment machines.
- duxup 4y ago
  > Corporate media People like to read that stuff.
  - kelnos 4y ago
    Do they, or are they emotionally manipulated into reading it? 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.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  I agree. However, Twitter employees know what they signed up for, so this article is really just taking advantage of people who have never heard/seen this happen. It's fairly common in the industry, even if the results are disappointing and impact is ineffectual.
- afavour 4y ago
  It feels good to say stuff like that but it's not really true. A look over Pulitzer Prize winners from previous years will show deeply researched investigative stories and have had a real impact on public awareness.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Raed667 4y ago

This is why I tell everyone I ever work with: "Don't have any personal document on your work laptop that isn't backed somewhere personal" 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.

GloriousKoji 4y ago
I don't mix personal data and work but they sure can present enough gray areas. Things like digital copies of paystubs, ESPP details, and W4 can only be accessed while employed and on the company network. I leaned that one the hard way a year later when doing taxes.
- Raed667 4y ago
  The scary wake-up call for me when I heard the story of someone who informed their manager of their 2-week notice. And instead of having 2 weeks to sort everything out, they got locked out immediately.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I began disentangling things from my previous employer about a year before I actually left. 2 weeks notice would basically be a formality, I'd have effectively quit months before anyway.
  - throwdingding 4y ago
    Our business has to do this for security reasons upon learning an employee is no longer going to have an ongoing relationship. However, we explain this to the employee ahead of time, and the two weeks are still paid - the employee just doesn't get to touch sensitive information anymore.
kadoban 4y ago
Anything you do on work hardware, it the US is pretty much free range for them to snoop into as much as they want. Putting that kind of stuff on your work laptop is just unthinkably weird to me. Why would anyone do that?

retskrad 4y ago

It's fascinating how Elon Musk supporters on Twitter cheered, almost like a sports team, when the Twitter employees got fired in such inhumane ways by Elon Musk. Don't his supporters realize that Elon would do the same thing to them if they worked at Twitter? The stereotype about conservatives ring true - they don't care about others until it affects them personally.

badpun 4y ago
Employing people who barely provide any value is no good for anyone in the long run. Full employment was always the primary goal of all communist countries, so (state) companies were practically required to employ everyone on the job market. 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.
- factsarelolz 4y ago
  This 100%. 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.
- MikePlacid 4y ago
  It's fun to see a simple plain truth downvoted. 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...
  - tartoran 4y ago
    Would you mind reframing what you’re trying to say here (because it doesn’t make much sense in this context)?

beau_g 4y ago

>My boss was fired. So was his boss. And his boss’s boss. And their boss. 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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
telotortium 4y ago
I might expect that at Google, but Google also has 20 times the employees.
amrocha 4y ago
seems pretty normal to me. Engineer -> team leader -> director -> VP -> CXO
buzzdenver 4y ago
To add to the sibling post: 5^5 is around 3000. So 5 engineers have a team leader, 5 of them are under a director, etc... So 5 layers sounds about right for a Twitter sized company.

heywherelogingo 4y ago

Is this Economist promo week?

NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
It's Musk hating week.
- godshatter 4y ago
  I thought that was last week.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Nope, that was laughing at musk week

usedtoprog 4y ago

As Denis Leary said: "Life sucks. Get a fucking helmet"

brailsafe 4y ago

This has roughly happened to me many times. It gives you a bit of trauma, and now every time anything ecen vaguely off happens, I think I've been fired. Lots of people don't know what it's like, welcome to the club.

ElijahLynn 4y ago

azanar 4y ago

It seems many commenters in several threads are making the same point. I'll summarize it here: > 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.

kelnos 4y ago
It's the human equivalent of the race to the bottom. A company with deep pockets (or VC funding) might sell a product at or below cost to try to muscle out competitors. The end result is either a monopoly (where the company can then raise prices up to whatever profitable levels they want) or long-term lower prices and weak margins. 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").

that_guy_iain 4y ago

> 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 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.

amrocha 4y ago
lol He wrote a JS script that clicks a a button in your inbox. That's not "bypassing security" in any way.
- factsarelolz 4y ago
  It's staging data for exfiltration. This is an attempt to take property and data not owned by the employee.
  - amrocha 4y ago
    If this was true they would have disabled the download email button. Stop siding with the company by default.
    - leereeves 4y ago
      It's obviously true, unless Twitter employees were regularly using work e-mail for personal data. You don't need a tool to download a few performance evaluations. 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.

EarlKing 4y ago

factsarelolz 4y ago
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought the same when reading those lines.
- EarlKing 4y ago
  The hilarious part is they literally buried the lead in the last paragraph. Nothing says "our readers will definitely think this guy deserved to get fired and not read any further if we tell them this" than burying it in the last paragraph.
sangnoir 4y ago
Do employees have the right to access past performance reviews manually? If so, it's not "exfiltrating company property". Do you draw the line at automation?
- scottcodie 4y ago
  Twitter's actions seems like retaliation against the employee for enabling other employees to collect evidence of discrimination. Performance reviews often exist to reduce the companies liability when firing people off, but being fired with good performance reviews can work against them.
heleninboodler 4y ago
Oh, come on, "exfiltration of company property" when we're talking about personal performance evaluations is a pretty huge stretch. I'd characterize this as "Don't make cheeky slack posts alluding to the fact that you're looking for a new job and helping others do the same."

orsenthil 4y ago

toto 4y ago

As a reminder, Whatsapp had *35* engineers for 450M users at the time of its acquisition by FB (2014). It had *50* engineers for 900M users (2015). https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/#:~:text=When%20the%20company%20was%20acquired,almost%20entirely%20on%20its%20own https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us....

amrocha 4y ago
You must not work in tech if you think Twitter and Whatsapp are in any way comparable
omeze 4y ago
these comparisons to whatsapp are really tiring, twitter is a totally different product. twitter is more similar to facebook than whatsapp from an engineering requirement's perspective, messaging is a minor feature of twitter's. even from a non-tech perspective, the presence of public data & the moderation requirements that entails alone makes it operationally different enough to not be a good comparison...