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If this is true - who knows - then it reflects rather badly on the people who were fired - as they didn't implement safeguard for a 'run over by a bus' scenario

If this is true - who knows - then it reflects rather badly on the people who were fired - as they didn't implement safeguard for a 'run over by a bus' scenario when they were in charge.

dragonwriter 4y ago
There’s “someone got run over by a bus outside of our control” and “The people in charge direct a bus to run over everyone covering a key function”. You don’t really plan for the latter scenario when you are in charge, instead, you just don’t direct a bus to do that. If your successor decides to do that, that’s…on them.
zer0tonin 4y ago
There's "run over by a bus" and "90% of the company got ran over by a bus" scenarios. The second one is rarely worth implementing.
- walrus01 4y ago
  There's also possibility of: "If this person hadn't been fired, they could use some other form of credentials within twitter's internal systems plus a passphrase they have memorized to login to the private-key-repository system where the credentials for the root CA are stored and retrieve them. But as they were fired abruptly they are not inclined to help Musk. And nobody has asked them".
  - concordDance 4y ago
    Arent abrupt firings the norm in the USA? My company had layoffs last year and the US people were gone the same day.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > Arent abrupt firings the norm in the USA? Abrupt firings of everyone with critical access, primaries and backups, is not, because its suicide. (Also why critical access roles are vetted carefully, because you want to make sure there is a lower-than-normal chance you will need to fire any of them, since that’s how you minimize the chance of a situation where you’d want to fire enough of them to cause a critical situation.) If you do need decide there’s a problem that requires you to fire those people, you find every way possible to delay firing some of them while you expand the set of people with that access (which may be only momentary, by compelling them to hand over credentials as part of the exit process, if you have confidence that you can do that successfully.)
    - PeterisP 4y ago
      Sure, but you do abrupt firings of whole teams only if you don't need what these teams do. It is quite reasonable if a company's response plan for scenario "what if we intentionally shoot ourselves in the head" is "don't do that, why would we do that?".
- a2800276 4y ago
  Not to forget the "90% get fired my an egotistical maniac who expressed his distain by quite publicly calling them lazy useless pieces of shit" scenario. That scenario is also seldom considered.
raizer88 4y ago
Maybe building it right cost 5x, and you have a budget for 1x. Sometime money is not unlimited even at FAANG
- DoctorOW 4y ago
  To add on, people forget that Twitter was never really FAANG. It not only wasn't profitable but had no monetization plan for years. I'm sure it paid off for all the investors who got Elon's money but even as a Facebook competitor they don't have Facebook money.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    TWAANG wouldn't sound bad tho
  - orwin 4y ago
    It was profitable in 2019 and 2020, and could have been in 2022 (the first semester was huge, probably because of all the stuff happening all over the world).
- ilyt 4y ago
  We have 7 racks and 3 people working in ops and built Puppet setup "right". It's not hard. And their setup was probably right too. Just that nobody plans for "bus hit our entire ops team"
  - jojobas 4y ago
    More commonly you don't plan for it, you make sure the entire ops team are never on the same bus, same plane, preferably not even in the same city.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      All fine and good. Until the new owner just fires everyone over night anyway. At which point, I guess, it is not the previous ops team's problem anymore.
fredoralive 4y ago
Or they had a "run over by a bus" scenario that assumed that the entire team wasn't going to be run over by a bus all at the same time?
- tedivm 4y ago
  I've worked at companies where we've had policies about how much of the company can travel together (ie, how many people can be on the same plane). If your entire team is fired then the company is the problem, not the team.
nindalf 4y ago
It reflects rather badly on you that you're talking mad shit without knowing their circumstances. What's the bus factor on your systems? Can they handle literally every person being fired overnight?
rsynnott 4y ago
It's normal to plan for scenarios where you abruptly lose some people. It's... less normal to plan for scenarios where you abruptly lose basically everybody; in most cases where that happens the company is basically dead anyway, so they're arguably not worth planning for. Say you're planning, well, _anything_, and someone says "but in five years, a weird billionaire might buy the company and mismanage it to such an extent that your contingency plans don't work". There's a good argument that the proper response is that (a) that is largely the weird billionaire's problem and (b) that it is impossible to defend against an arbitrarily incompetent speculative future weird billionaire. If someone takes a hammer to an electricity distribution board and electrocutes themselves, the normal response is not "well, that's the electrician's fault; they should have thought of that". If true, this would "reflect rather badly" on exactly one person. But, y'know, it'll need to join a rather long queue of poorly reflecting things.
delfinom 4y ago
It's management job to plan for run over by a bus scenario, not the people whose job is to actually implement things.

If this is true - who knows - then it reflects rather badly on the people who were fired - as they didn't implement safeguard for a 'run over by a bus' scenario when they were in charge.

dragonwriter 4y ago

There’s “someone got run over by a bus outside of our control” and “The people in charge direct a bus to run over everyone covering a key function”. You don’t really plan for the latter scenario when you are in charge, instead, you just don’t direct a bus to do that. If your successor decides to do that, that’s…on them.

zer0tonin 4y ago

There's "run over by a bus" and "90% of the company got ran over by a bus" scenarios. The second one is rarely worth implementing.

walrus01 4y ago
There's also possibility of: "If this person hadn't been fired, they could use some other form of credentials within twitter's internal systems plus a passphrase they have memorized to login to the private-key-repository system where the credentials for the root CA are stored and retrieve them. But as they were fired abruptly they are not inclined to help Musk. And nobody has asked them".
- concordDance 4y ago
  Arent abrupt firings the norm in the USA? My company had layoffs last year and the US people were gone the same day.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Arent abrupt firings the norm in the USA? Abrupt firings of everyone with critical access, primaries and backups, is not, because its suicide. (Also why critical access roles are vetted carefully, because you want to make sure there is a lower-than-normal chance you will need to fire any of them, since that’s how you minimize the chance of a situation where you’d want to fire enough of them to cause a critical situation.) If you do need decide there’s a problem that requires you to fire those people, you find every way possible to delay firing some of them while you expand the set of people with that access (which may be only momentary, by compelling them to hand over credentials as part of the exit process, if you have confidence that you can do that successfully.)
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    Sure, but you do abrupt firings of whole teams only if you don't need what these teams do. It is quite reasonable if a company's response plan for scenario "what if we intentionally shoot ourselves in the head" is "don't do that, why would we do that?".
a2800276 4y ago
Not to forget the "90% get fired my an egotistical maniac who expressed his distain by quite publicly calling them lazy useless pieces of shit" scenario. That scenario is also seldom considered.

raizer88 4y ago

Maybe building it right cost 5x, and you have a budget for 1x. Sometime money is not unlimited even at FAANG

DoctorOW 4y ago
To add on, people forget that Twitter was never really FAANG. It not only wasn't profitable but had no monetization plan for years. I'm sure it paid off for all the investors who got Elon's money but even as a Facebook competitor they don't have Facebook money.
- ilyt 4y ago
  TWAANG wouldn't sound bad tho
- orwin 4y ago
  It was profitable in 2019 and 2020, and could have been in 2022 (the first semester was huge, probably because of all the stuff happening all over the world).
ilyt 4y ago
We have 7 racks and 3 people working in ops and built Puppet setup "right". It's not hard. And their setup was probably right too. Just that nobody plans for "bus hit our entire ops team"
- jojobas 4y ago
  More commonly you don't plan for it, you make sure the entire ops team are never on the same bus, same plane, preferably not even in the same city.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    All fine and good. Until the new owner just fires everyone over night anyway. At which point, I guess, it is not the previous ops team's problem anymore.

fredoralive 4y ago

Or they had a "run over by a bus" scenario that assumed that the entire team wasn't going to be run over by a bus all at the same time?

tedivm 4y ago
I've worked at companies where we've had policies about how much of the company can travel together (ie, how many people can be on the same plane). If your entire team is fired then the company is the problem, not the team.

nindalf 4y ago

It reflects rather badly on you that you're talking mad shit without knowing their circumstances. What's the bus factor on your systems? Can they handle literally every person being fired overnight?

rsynnott 4y ago

It's normal to plan for scenarios where you abruptly lose some people. It's... less normal to plan for scenarios where you abruptly lose basically everybody; in most cases where that happens the company is basically dead anyway, so they're arguably not worth planning for. Say you're planning, well, _anything_, and someone says "but in five years, a weird billionaire might buy the company and mismanage it to such an extent that your contingency plans don't work". There's a good argument that the proper response is that (a) that is largely the weird billionaire's problem and (b) that it is impossible to defend against an arbitrarily incompetent speculative future weird billionaire. If someone takes a hammer to an electricity distribution board and electrocutes themselves, the normal response is not "well, that's the electrician's fault; they should have thought of that". If true, this would "reflect rather badly" on exactly one person. But, y'know, it'll need to join a rather long queue of poorly reflecting things.

delfinom 4y ago

It's management job to plan for run over by a bus scenario, not the people whose job is to actually implement things.