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.
Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet. If anything, it's gotten better now that I don't need to log-in to scroll through someone's feed. Best change they've made in years, from where I'm standing.
But generally, yeah. I've heard a lot of people question Twitter's opex and headcount over the years, from HN to daily standup meetings. Twitter is a big company that ships a small handful of products, of which only Twitter for iOS and Twitter for Web really seems to matter. As long as they don't fire their sysops and iOS developers, most Twitter users would probably never notice a difference.
> Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.
…except you know the entire company? The one that lost most of its only revenue source overnight [1], became immediately flooded with hate speech [2], lost a meaningful chunk of its most valuable users [3] and started attracting a huge amount of regulatory oversight knocking at the door [4].
And yet the website is still here. If you want to critique the new leadership, than do it by all means. The actual employees seem to be doing a fine job at reduced-capacity though, and they've even managed to make a few changes I like. The point still stands - Twitter was operating way above it's means. If it actually requires 7500 engineers to keep running, then Twitter doesn't stand a chance anyways. Something tells me that's not the case, though...
It's not hard to maintain a frozen codebase with a skeleton crew. This is practiced routinely at many organizations during end-of-year holidays when many people take PTO.
However, not many companies can survive with a permanent code-freeze, which is why companies don't just fire the "excess" folk who take PTO between December 25 and January 1, even though "things were fine" in that timeframe
Well muski boy probably fired many people that will be expensive to replace I heavily doubt most of developers in twitter work on its core functionality.
Many of them probably could be fired without much repercussions on company, the problem really is that there is no way in hell to judge that quickly and immediately start firing.
The core functionality can be replaced by a single, albeit particularly skilled, final year university student project.
It's the load balancing, the advertising, the billing system, the >200 legal jurisdiction's worth of regulation [0], lobbying both for and against various regulations, auditing everything for legal disputes, the dynamic battle with scammers and spammers who want to figure out and get around the spam filters, and the security updates (some of which they need to write themselves and not just install on all their machines).
Probably some other stuff as well, but this is already like a Monty Python sketch.
[0] not just each nation, but e.g. all the different US states
Individually these are fatal mistakes. Collectively it’s clear… It’s over for Twitter under Musk.
They might be able to sell it to someone for a fraction of the price they have paid for it but every day that he stays in charge the less they will be able to sell it for.
Unfortunately there is not anyone dumber than Musk to whom he might sell the platform. That being said, even Musk isn't capable of destroying Twitter (at least yet). The site is still here, and all the profiles with their 280-character messages still load.
Trust me, I want Twitter to suffer the worst death of all. It's just not likely that Elon Musk will be the reason why the site falls, at least not from a technical standpoint.
What metric would you use? Daily impressions? Those seem to be up. Posts? Also up. Impressions, posts, and status codes are the measure of success (status codes of course being a proxy for earnings as well as operations given that if they go out of business they won't be returning status codes at all).
Politely.. it’s very clear from this post that you don’t seem to have any background in anything business related.
None of those things are going to have any impact on the eventual outcome here.
I was pretty clear about the very specific problems they are facing and how any one of them individually is potentially fatal for them. Without solutions to those problems the end result is going to be the same it’s just the timeline that’s in question.
"I sold all my fire extinguishers, got rid of all my insurance, and got rid of the locks on my doors yesterday, and nothing has happened! This proves no one needs any of these things."
But for a one-time charge for a lawsuit settlement, it was profitable just before Musk took over, it was not operating above its means (it almost certainly is now, despite the cuts, because of the loss of advertising revenue on top of the enormous debt service costs Musk loaded it up with to finance the acquisition.)
> The actual employees seem to be doing a fine job at reduced-capacity though
Keeping the lights on in the core app? Maybe (subjectively, I’m seeing more problems with app behavior, and seeing more reports of them, but that could, at least in part, be more attention being on it.) With the kind of safety that is of concern to moderators, no, despite Musk’s claims of reduced hate speech and other objectionable content by Twitter’s count, outside analysis has that skyrocketing.
Basic business functions? Well, missing payroll in a couple of EU jurisdictions is kind of a big deal.
So, no, I would say the existing crew isn’t doing a great job of keeping Twitter running, though the most clear problems aren’t in app function, but other business-critical functions. But, it wasn’t just engineers that were cut, and keeping the lights on, without innovation, is probably the easiest function to maintain with deep cuts, since software doesn’t actually rot.
>Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.
But a bunch of stuff did break. Famously 2FA stopped working, there has been an explosion of spam, and other widely reported issues- which are only the ones we know about - there could very well be some truely abhorrent stuff going under the hood to keep the wheels from falling off.
The idea that a week or two of something other than total violent collapse being a measure of how well you're handling staffing has got the smell of management track thinking all over it.
2 weeks is certainly nothing, I agree that the proof will be in the pudding. But so far, I remain unconvinced that Twitter is going to "break" in the traditional sense. If stuff goes down, we have protocol for bringing it back up. When 2FA dies, the process for recovering it is the same under Musk as it was under Dorsey.
We'll really just have to wait and see what happens. I really want Twitter to destroy itself beyond repair, but the core platform seems intact.
This isn’t entirely true fwiw. That assumes a constant load on the systems. If you start running into a capacity crunch on a given system, your best case is scale horizontally or vertically using established procedures. But if you hit a limit there (vertical scaling limit, architectural limit) and actually need to refactor? Good luck!
> Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.
This logic is just specious. Passing judgment on a large, distributed system based on its continued uptime is a bit like arguing that firing the flight crew of a jumbo jet was a good idea because the autopilot is working. It betrays a lack of understanding of what is really going on.
Most of their big advertisers have jumped ship as well, their revenue will have cratered. Of course as a private company they won't need to disclose by how much, but engineers can't be paid with likes and retweets.
Twitter brought in $5bil in revenue in 2021. That doesn't sound broken. Whether they spent that money efficiently, and whether they could avoid FTC fines, is a different issue.
> That was broken when he bought it.
You know what, you're kinda right, he did load up Twitter with an interest burden of $1bil/year when he completed the purchase. And then he scared off all the advertisers. So sure, he broke it when he bought it.
I think there's a huge chasm between "management can't stop overspending beyond their decently high revenue" and "management is actively scaring away their revenue generators". I guess technically the former is "broken" but it's not broken in the same way the latter is.
I mean musky boi did show up that being the case. But it's not the firings that directly caused that, it's musk's starting to make sweeping changes from the get go and ones that drove the ad money away.
> If anything, it's gotten better now that I don't need to log-in to scroll through someone's feed
This is what drove me to stop using Twitter and over to nitter as a frontend. If they finally stopped doing that, I can happily start browsing their actual website again.
> Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.
That's a pretty terrible take. Fire your entire IT staff and your stuff will all keep working for a while at most places. That doesn't make that IT staff pointless. They aren't hamsters that run on a wheel that powers everything, they are there to anticipate & correct problems as they come up.
You can't make this type of claim within a couple weeks of the layoffs. If Twitter continues to operate without a hiccup for the next year or two then sure try to make that claim. But to say it at this point is just ridiculous.
Also stuff already broke during the firings - like 2FA had issues already.
BTW, I still get this, and it used to just make me go "oh well, I guess they don't want me to look at this web site" and close the window. But someone recently tipped me off to something I am embarrassed I never noticed before: if you actually click "login" on that popup and then cancel the next dialog, you can continue browsing un-pestered.
I'm using Chromium on desktop Linux, I can scroll through recommended content and user profiles without getting the fullscreen login modal anymore. Maybe it's not rolled out to mobile yet?
> Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.
it hasn't been long enough to be able to say that yet. if you get rid of all firefighters, that doesn't mean the whole world will immediately catch fire.
Their cost in last 4-5 years grew faster than profits, their user base didn't increase that much, which means they have been hiring people that have less and less to do with turning profit to the company.
What musk is doing is, well, clown fiesta, but it's easy to look at twitter finances and see someone isn't making company's money
Well, you need one person to press the big red "restart container" button in Kubernetes, and another person to bump the resource limits. So at least two people, in my professional experience.
Twitter had almost the same number of people as SpaceX. One of those companies launches a rocket a week, multiple manned missions a year to the ISS, operates a global satellite internet constellation, and is building a ship that can go to Mars. The other company.. does what?
I don't see how you can compare two unrelated companies staffing levels. You are simply implying complexity has a direct correlation to the correct workforce amount.
Walmart has 2.3 million employees but it's just a store. Why do they need that many when SpaceX has N employees and is launching rockets
How large of a sales team does SpaceX have (or need)? How about SpaceX's privacy compliance and data governance? Red team to try to see how a feature could be used nefariously? Internationalization of the content? Moderation and content teams to make sure that the sales or marketing doesn't have to answer awkward questions about why advertisements are showing up in disreputable parts of the site?
Yes, Twitter doesn't build physical things or operate any store fronts... but that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of complexity that is within the company and the way that it maintains its funding.
That's exactly the point - Twitter had sales reps & SpaceX didn't. Twitter had moderators and SpaceX didn't. The companies have different external-facing relationships at every level, even ignoring the obviously massive unrelated engineering differences.
Wow, you seem to know a lot about running multibillion dollar companies in completely different industries!
So let's imagine you run Twitter and you're operating in every western country on the planet. Now, all those countries have different laws and regulations. Are you, the CEO/coder/whatever going to be the one who sits down with regulators and discuss the nuance of their laws? How are you going to deal with law enforcement requests? FOIA requests from journalists? What kinds of information can you store about users in different locales? What kind of government compliance do you need to have in place for enterprise customers? How many hours per week are you allowed to require for workers in Germany? Can your translation contractors in Poland work through the holidays? Or maybe you consider lawyers just another one of those pesky salespeople/moderators who gets in the way of genius?
That's just one tiny segment of the company. Try to imagine how many other moving parts there are besides the four roles of "CEO," "coder," "salesperson," and "moderator."
You don't know what they need, you don't have any useful information.
The only reason you think they are over staffed is because you don't like the political views of the majority of employees and you disagree with their content moderation policy. That's it and it's so obvious.
> The only reason you think they are over staffed is because you don't like the political views of the majority of employees and you disagree with their content moderation policy.
No, it's because they haven't done anything innovative in a decade and their product is much simpler than a ton of tech companies with half the staff... Their stock price was super depressed and they were losing what, $4 million per day?
It's super obvious for anyone remotely financially literate that they were way overstaffed. Any buyer would have laid off at least half the staff...
Has hundreds of millions of users and had an awful lot of advertiser accounts. How many accounts does SpaceX have? Yes, a lot more now that they've got their Internet service, but managing users is labor intensive, even if you don't provide many means of contact. Advertisers, especially large brand accounts, is labor intensive too, and if you lose half your big accounts because you cut staff willy-nilly, there goes a lot of revenue.
Managing satellites is labor-intensive. Setting up a really big database and talking to advertisers is not rocket science. Both companies could probably operate with a lower headcount, but Twitter is fat and everyone knows it. They're not worth $44 billion in their wildest dreams, and they've already been hemorrhaging revenue for the better half of a decade. An operationally viable Twitter does not include 7500 employees, unless ~6000 of them are working on something other than Twitter.
Everyone knows it because it's what everyone on the right has been stating without evidence for weeks. You've heard it so much it's become like an obvious fact even though you can't point to any hard evidence. I say this because you make statements like that. As if you are saying "The capital of France is Paris".
You also said
"Twitter does not include 7500 employees, unless ~6000 of them are working on something other than Twitter."
How do you know how many employees it takes? How do you know 1500 is all they need? You just keep making statements without any backing them up nor do I think you can unless you're C level at Twitter
Also any company might be losing money with staff being the main reason but still need that level of staff.
> Twitter had almost the same number of people as SpaceX.
Nope! Spacex has 9500 employees
> multiple manned missions a year to the ISS
Over 100k people worked on Crew Dragon Crew-2 mission from three different locations in making sure it's a success. But, here you are drinking cool-aid
If you count all the programmers who wrote all the libraries, platforms, operating system's that Twitter is built on, that would also be over 100k.
A great example - Boeing had more money, more people and the same external support and they STILL haven't launched a vehicle yet. SpaceX has beat them by almost 4 years and counting. You'd think with '100k people' they could do it by now right?
> If you count all the programmers who wrote all the libraries, platforms, operating system's that Twitter is built on, that would also be over 100k.
Again, OP didn't do that. In the article, Elon Musk's quote didn't reference "all the programmers who wrote all the libraries, platforms, operating system's that [SpaceX] is built on."
Normal according to who, exactly? Like where is your reference point for 'normal'? I've worked for companies at scale and have never dealt with these sort of problems before because usually there's an understanding that employees when laid off aren't going to do anything bad (unless you're perhaps cutting them out of severance and spiting them, which...).
Do you have any reference points or reasons why you believe this is normal contrary to my own professional experience?
Across basically every company I've worked for - this is normal. And many of those companies are not 3k+ employee tech companies. Think 10 to 100 engineers.
It's actually a requirement for many compliance certifications in the US - previously employed staff are not allowed access to your systems.
If you're in an office - you can wait until you grab the employee and put them in a conference room to fire them before cutting access (as long as security is there to escort them out afterwards). When everyone is remote - that is not an option.
ex: item number 1 for SOC 2 compliance is
----
Access controls
—logical and physical restrictions on assets to prevent access by unauthorized personnel.
----
When an employee is terminated - they are unauthorized personnel.
I think it's more the dichotomy of companies asking for high levels of commitment, loyalty & trust, but offering none in return.
It's funny that they would fire people in this way, then turn around and ask the remaining folks to sign up for "working long (uncompensated) hours at high intensity".
I mean - no offense... - but if you still think corporate entities have any real loyalty you've clearly not been paying attention for a long time.
I've never seen that attitude last beyond the initial 50 or so employees at a startup, and it sure as fuck doesn't last past the "we're installing monitoring software on all your machines" stage.
Work is what you do to get paid - it's not your family. It's not your friend. Don't treat it like it is.
That doesn't mean don't take it seriously, or respect it - just understand that work is your family like a hooker is your girlfriend - it's only true until the money runs out.
The only scenario where I see this being an even remotely reasonably request is if you think someone is a severe risk for harming your systems should they be laid off. In every large company I've worked for (including ones involving high security systems) the standard was that you'd give people a week notice, maybe two weeks of an impending layoff along with a decent chunk of severance. This way those people being laid off could do a knowledge transfer and ensure that their domain experience wasn't lost and that you maintain a good business relationship with your employees.
To me, the way y'all present it is not the norm. It's working for a company that clearly does not trust its employees and treats them poorly. If you find yourself working for those kind of places frequently then please realize that it is not the norm and you should not try and normalize it.
It's quite normal, unfortunately. Nobody trusts their employees in a $44 billion company, definitely not in the wake of a highly-televised hostile takeover. They have the MDM software, they intend to lay off the employees anyways... there's no wrongdoing here as far as I can see. This is just how they do things outside the startup sphere, it's not like the CEO is going to schedule you a final Zoom call and have their receptionists bring you a bouquet of roses.
> It's working for a company that clearly does not trust its employees and treats them poorly. If you find yourself working for those kind of places frequently then please realize that it is not the norm and you should not try and normalize it.
You keep coming back to this - but even in companies where they do trust the employees - legal compliance is not a joke. If you're doing anything at all with customers who are in any of the following businesses...
Healthcare
Banking
Gov
Finance
Law practice
etc...
Then you turn off access when you fire an employee. Period. You can like them all you want, in which case you might go grab drinks with them afterwards - but you don't fuck around with access to your systems, because you lose your compliance certifications, or you get breached, and you lose a bunch of fucking money, you lose your enterprise contracts, and you yourself likely get fired.
Yes, access controls are critically important for many companies in many domains. My employer operates under such operating procedures. It seems reasonable that if your software collects and stores user information, employee access to all systems should be tightly controlled, and "turned off" if an employee is fired, laid off, or quits.
This is a great way to quickly lose critical information from your engineers. The few companies that do follow what you recommend end up scrambling when a key infrastructure engineer leaves, they immediately cut access and realize that he was the only one who knew how to work certain parts of the system. If you're the kind of company that conducts exit inteviews (which are the majority of large tech organizations) then you're no longer going to get any valuable info out of them by burning bridges like this.
You're misunderstanding the difference between a voluntary exit and a firing.
This is not standard procedure for a voluntary exit at most companies. The employee puts in their two weeks, works the time, and exits. The assumption is good faith on both ends, because the employee has chosen to leave.
It absolutely is the standard procedure for GETTING FIRED. The other standard part of getting fired is that the company has already decided they no longer need your skills or expertise (excluding twitter's situation, where they decided poorly - according to the news).
If you're laying off 100 people - the odds that any one of them might do something silly is very low. But that chance * 100 is usually considered an unacceptable risk from a security standpoint. Multiply it by several thousand, and it's absolutely not ok to leave the keys to the kingdom with that many fired employees.
All it takes is one drunk employee holding a grudge and you get a really nasty mess on your hands. Not to mention legal hot water.
Many, many companies, particularly larger ones (5,000+ employees, but Silicon Valley companies are more likely than non-tech companies of a given size to employ "advanced" IT features like MDM) are concerned with potential sabotage by suddenly laid-off employees, particularly in the U.S. Have you ever worked anywhere with MDM installed on your company-provided devices?
One company I'm personally familiar with announced a layoff at a branch office a couple months in advance. When the main branch people showed up two months later to manage the layoff, the building was looted clean and nobody was there. Even the furniture was gone. Only trash remained.
When I was laid off security walked me from a conference room near the exit to my car. I was not even allowed to collect my stuff from my desk, had to have a friend bring it to me after.
This happened to my boss, the IT manager at a law firm, when he was fired. Part of his firing was due to complaints by the IT staff, the rest for other reasons. I deactivated his account while he was at lunch, his staff -- three of us, as I remember -- were told to leave for the day, and he was escorted out when he returned from lunch.
> don't really understand what there is worth talking about here.
Elon Musk, previously adored by many for futurist technology advocacy and largely forgiven for quirky-billionaire-behavior is now on the "bad guy list". This is "public opinion", from my perspective. It is now common to hear people saying: "He didn't really build that" "His family had money" "His family had a mine" "He's a fascist" "He's a racist because of where/when he was born"
Any and every attempt to report on the fallout from Musk buying twitter will command the headlines. Doesn't matter if it's the same strategy any other takeover management would employ. That's irrelevant. Musk? Bad Guy.
So: "Elon Bad. Twitter suffer. Here's an example..."
Presumably any private equity firm would also have came to a conclusion of reducing headcount.
They wouldn't have done so in a single week based on ridiculous analysis. And wouldn't have done so in a way to destroy the morale of remaining workforce.
> Presumably any private equity firm would also have came to a conclusion of reducing headcount.
Any private equity firm would probably not have come to the recommendation of purchasing a firm that was, in ongoing terms, narrowly profitable in a transaction that would saddle the firm with about a third of its annual pre-acquisition revenue, several times its annual profit, and a sizable share of its project post-acquisition reserves in annual debt service costs, even if the particular buyer wasn’t one where the mere prospect of the purchase would disrupt revenue.
As much as they can be very much be criticized, there is a sense in which criticizing Musk’s post-acquisition actions at Twitter is akin to criticizing actions of the Titanic’s officers and crew after the encounter with the iceberg.
I mean, the running joke in the industry was that you could fire 90% of Twitter's workforce and the company would still run fine. Judging by how few features they've shipped in the past few years, I'm still convinced that's the case.
I doubt that's actually true (I don't doubt that Twitter had too many employees, but I think 90% redundant is a bit hyperbolic), but even if it was, there are good ways and a bad ways to reduce workforce. Musk chose pretty much the baddest of the bad ways.
Right in the article: blue check mark changes. And how a lot of people had nothing better to do on their own projects than to help a person in charge to complete changes.
> For now, Twitter won’t allow product updates unless they’re business-critical, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. The company accepted a $54.20-a-share bid from Musk after a whirlwind courtship that began with the Tesla Inc. magnate disclosing a 9% stake in Twitter earlier this month.
> Product changes will require approval from a vice president, the people said. Twitter imposed the temporary ban to keep employees who may be miffed about the deal from “going rogue,” according to one of the people.
For several months, nothing that was not business critical was released (or done). If you were on something that wasn't business critical, you were likely waiting for a fire to fight, working on the "ok, maybe after this all blows over I can deploy this - but not until then."
In either case, not having something to do that was more pressing than helping out a person would not be surprising.
>In either case, not having something to do that was more pressing than helping out a person would not be surprising.
In the context you have provided - yes. But in the context of my professional experience it is rather surprising. Note that the author has not mentioned he was uncomfortable sitting there doing nothing. What he mentioned was:
>we all pitched in. I actually quite enjoyed it.
That looks like that was the first time for him ever. Also quite surprising - for me and my experience.
PS. Also:
>As soon as Musk became owner, there were always three things that had to be done by yesterday
> And how a lot of people had nothing better to do on their own projects than to help a person in charge to complete changes.
I don't think any of it had to do with people having "nothing better to do on their own projects".
I don't know about you, but if my new boss, the one that threatened to fire 3/4ths of the staff, told me to do something, it doesn't matter what I was working on before, my sole new project would be what the boss wanted.
> It is now common to hear people saying: "He didn't really build that" "His family had money" "His family had a mine" "He's a fascist" "He's a racist because of where/when he was born"
To be fair, that's been going on at least 2-3 years. Way before he got involved with Twitter.
I guess I can buy that some of the criticism is objectively gratuitous but, humans hating everything another human does, if that human is hated themselves, isn't really anything new.
I guess the real question is, why should anyone expect Elon to have exemption from the hate game that everyone else is apart of?
Well, no one wants him to have exemption. But every discriminator tool that always answers positive, is a useless discriminator tool. Anyone can use or not use that tool. Personally, I think participating in the whole hate fest diminishes one's self so I don't. But to each their own.
The only really important aspect here is that he is a bad business man and Tesla and SpaceX had to manage Elon rather than then the other way around in order to be successful.
It does seem to be the case, I'm just not sure what's worth reading into here. Billionaires do stupid and terrible things constantly, if any of these passionate sideliners actually cared about that stuff then they'd be out for Larry Ellison's head for buying Lanai, or asking Steve Jobs about his $40 million jet.
The Jet doesn't have a family to feed. Also, people complaining probably have been using twitter and have a little virtual skin in the game. Maybe you could call that entitlement.
The whataboutism never fails to show up. It's entirely possible to attempt to address one issue and having missed, not looked into or plain having been wrong about another one.
This isn't an issue, though, and there's no way to address it. A traded company went through a hostile takeover and the current customers aren't happy - it's a story as old as capitalism itself. If people object to the way it was sold, they should criticize the free market. If people are unhappy with billionaires using their money to tangibly hurt the planet, there are much scarier boogeymen to hunt down than the guy who everyone on Twitter hates.
"Bad things happen all the time", "we can't change it can we" and "there are worse people" are cop outs at best. People can worry about multiple things, and things can get talked about.
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.
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.
The vast vast vast majority of content news media generates is not like that, its drama farming and reposts. The actual investigative journalism is a very small minority.
So the statement "corporate media produces nothing of intellectual value" is false.
I'm not defending the clickbait content a lot of outlets engage in but I'm concerned that if the "corporate media" disappeared tomorrow a lot of things would go uninvestigated. I'm also not sure that the number of stories published is a worthwhile metric either. Maybe one truly eye-opening investigative story is worth a hundred boring clickbait articles, I don't really see how you'd quantify it.
Ugh, can we stop interpreting everything so literally? People embellish and use hyperbole for effect. Whenever someone says "always" or "never" (or similar terms), they very rarely actually mean those absolute terms, because most things in the world have exceptions, and most people actually do know that.
If you're genuinely confused by this kind of usage, and actually believe that those absolute terms are used sincerely, then I don't know what to tell you... maybe try to understand culture and language usage better?
> So the statement "corporate media produces nothing of intellectual value" is false.
I'm pretty sure the original was hyperbole but more accurate statement would be "most of what corporate media produces have zero or negative value and is just facilitator for the clicks"
Would you be more satisfied with, "Only the tiniest fraction of corporate media's output has intellectual value?" People often make statements that make what is approximately true absolute, for simplicity of expression or for style: "Nobody should be out in this kind of weather!" "The oboe is an ill woodwind that nobody blows good."
I'd accept "Nobody should be out in this kind of weather!" or "Nobody can play the oboe!" as a kind of colloquial hyperbole that works in part because people know it's hyperbole and there's a shared sentiment ("we all would find being out in this weather or the difficulty of learning to play the oboe well relatable").
It's a poor contribution to a conversation about the value of media as business enterprise because it's really not clear what the hyperbole is or what the common relatable point is supposed to be. And it might even be subtly nihilistic or privileged ("who's to say I can't believe whatever the hell I want regardless of what them news people say, they're probably just pushing what they want to believe just I like I am anyway").
So "only some fraction of the corporate media's output has intellectual value" would be an improvement. Increased clarity often is.
And it could lead to actually useful understanding, which is that a LOT of things which have high rates of mediocre or even useless output still have value.
Well like I just said, I'm not convinced looking at it through overall number of worthy/unworthy stories published is a metric that makes a lot of sense.
But sure, that statement is an improvement because it at least makes clear that if you were to remove the corporate media tomorrow something of important value would be lost. Something the original statement definitely does not convey.
I am formally challenging the notion that if corporate media were to disappear, people would suddenly lose their will to report and investigate on serious affairs that make up the tiny fraction of valuable content. If anything, there is a likelihood that people would even feel more compelled to do so with the understanding that they cannot expect major news outlets to do the work for them. I do however champion the loss of the will to report on everything other than that in corporate media’s hypothetical absence.
We can even go as far as to say that corporate media likely will not disappear anyway, and if it were to, in 2022, it would just be repackaged in a different format with new corporate or neo-corporate entities in its place.
In conclusion, and irrespective of the hyperbolic rhetoric of “corporate media produces nothing of value” or the more analytically amicable, “only the tiniest fraction of corporate media produces value”, I hereby declare an end to all corporate media and it’s theoretical subsequent reiterations.
Your average individual would have investigated something regardless of the presence or absence of corporate media, mostly because these stories don't just immediately happen; they take months of work where the public obviously has no clue what is or isn't being looked into.
But your average individual also doesn't, and realistically won't, have the reach of corporate media. That's where their value lies: they are able to get stories out to millions of people and the recognition behind their name to give credibility to the reporting.
> But your average individual also doesn't, and realistically won't, have the reach of corporate media. That's where their value lies: they are able to get stories out to millions of people and the recognition behind their name to give credibility to the reporting.
The irony of this is that the reach of corporate media is effectively deadened due to the reason that we’re having this discussion at all: the same outlets bely their own influence by publishing worthless content. In a world without corporate (news) media, there are still other ways to get news out through the wire.
Credibility is a good point, but speaks to a larger discussion on whether credibility in the media is based off of reputation, legacy, acolytes, accolades, etc?
At the end of the day, if the fall of corporate media effectively obliterates peoples will to “speak truth to power”, as the journalists like to say, then society is in pitiful shape and those whose will would disappear along with the Post, the Times and the Tribune lack integrity.
Well, question is really who will pay investigative journalist ? Independently funded ones would be overall better option but that's not exactly easy sell ("I might or might not produce some content once in a while") and "getting the name for yourself" first is pretty much requirement for crowdfunding.
Yet people doing the investigation have to eat and if they are good at their jobs it's better that they do their job, full time, instead of having "investigative journalist" as a hobby in addition to their "normal" job
Your’re tiptoeing around the gravity of situations such as, “how some lawyers and doctors rigged a system to deny benefits to coal miners stricken with black lung disease, resulting in remedial legislative efforts.” [Pulitzer Prize winning investigation, 2014] I would hope that the people who are involved in uncovering actions like this don’t perceive their practice as a mere job or a hobby, relative to whether they’re paid for it.
In the scenario we’re discussing (a world without corporate media), people who truly care enough about events, plots and schemes that threaten the moral fiber, dignity, agency and safety of humanity will see to it that they’re uncovered. That is unless, all investigative journalists are frauds who are driven only by glory and gold.
What you’ve described would be “better”, sure. It would be “better” if it rained during a drought than if it didn’t. But what are people going to do in the meanwhile?
Is “corporate” media the only kind of media there is that can present the news either way?
I don't think the grandparent meant "nothing" literally. But I would agree that the vast majority of corporate media reporting is garbage. The Pulitzer Prize winners are unfortunately the rare exceptions to the norm.
You are referring to the other extreme in terms of types of writers. These investigative journalists compose a tiny percentage of the overall population of corporate media writers.
I just took a look at the Pulitzer Prize winners for investigative reporting[0] and I havn't heard of any of them from the last ten years. Didn't look any further.
If anything, corporate "news" spam drowns out these deeply researched investigative stories because, as GP said, the market conditions favor drama farming clickbait over an "exposé of highly toxic hazards inside Florida’s only battery recycling plant" which, while clearly important and deeply researched, I have never heard of.
That said, most of these journalists are from "corporate media," so that it "produces nothing of intellectual value" is as you say incorrect.
> I havn't heard of any of them from the last ten years. Didn't look any further... I have never heard of
We get it, you are uninformed. It was in major newspapers, was on PBS Frontline, and was adapted for radio, and it won a Pulitzer. You haven't heard of it, that's on you.
Wow. This is kind of hurtful being that I consider myself informed about topics I'm interested in. For example YMTC's 232-layer NAND flash was something I heard about as soon as it broke. I don't have a newspaper subscription so it's hard to keep up with everything being that most news on the internet is the same rehashed for content years on end or meaningless celebrity trivia/drama.
Top 10 articles from the front page of nytimes.com right now:
* E.U. Settles on Russian Oil Price Cap After Fraught Talks
* A phony climate foundation in Germany helped Russia complete Nord Stream 2 after U.S. sanctions threatened to derail it.
* U.S. Employers Add 263,000 Jobs, Showing Strong Demand for Workers
* Why are middle-aged men missing from the labor market?
* Alex Jones Files for Bankruptcy
* As Officials Ease Restrictions Amid Protests, China Faces New Pandemic Risks
* Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find
* Kanye West was suspended from Twitter after posting a swastika.
* Cameroon Tries to Become Third African Nation to Advance
* From The Athletic: Follow real-time updates from Serbia vs. Switzerland.
Sure, some of these (e.g. first twitter headline) seem to follow an agenda, but most of these are just plain old news. It is easy to think "all of this is available on Twitter or through other independent journalists", but twitter has the luxury of being able to look at what the papers are reporting on. If you didn't have the likes CNN, NYT and the BBC, you wouldn't have reporters at white house press conferences, people reporting from Ukraine, nor any sort of real curation of the news.
Are there blind spots? Of course. Twitter is way better in some niche areas. Do the news outlets show biases? Yes, of course. But without the big news outlets, twitter wouldn't have as much to go off of. I like to think of it the other way around... imagine that corporate media didn't exist. You'd have thousands of independent journalists looking into different things with no curation. Eventually, some of them would realize that to be effective, they need to form groups, since some areas are too big for one person to cover. Eventually, small groups that people followed would grow larger as they try to report on more and more things. Eventually, they'd collectivize and form larger "corporations". You'd be back to square one.
And I'm just talking about plain old news. All of this is leaving aside the big and costly investigative pieces that some of the larger outlets are able to put together. Go and read anything at https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/206 and tell me if anyone but "corporate media" would be able to do anything even close to these.
BuzzFeed News won for its innovative series exposing China’s mass detention of Muslims and was named a finalist for its colossal FinCEN Files investigation into the global banking industry.
Though make sure that you differentiate BuzzFeed News from BuzzFeed... the later is the way that makes money that is able to support news site without needing subscriptions and paywalls.
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.
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.
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.
Because most people don't actually care all that much about privacy, at least when the consequences aren't immediately obvious.
Sure, if you flat-out ask someone if they'd be comfortable posting their bank statements on Facebook, they'd say no, of course not. But even if people know that their employer can snoop on the contents of their work laptop (I imagine some people don't realize), it's a hypothetical threat. And often people have some sort of implicit trust in their employer, anyway, for some strange reason.
In my experience, most people put personal things on their work laptop, and don't think twice about it. Unfortunately you're actually the "weird" one, even though I totally agree with you.
There have been a number of times in my career where HR emailed personal material (e.g., legal agreements, tax documents, etc.) to my work email, effectively forcing me to exfil my own personal data off the work laptop to the personal laptop. In HR's mind, it's a company document, because it pertains to an employee. But to me, it needs to persist beyond my employement, e.g., because the company wants me to honor the terms of the agreement, or because law requires it.
One of these times was during a layoff that I was a part of.
(But also, people are lazy, and personal stuff ends up on work machines.)
Mostly because we generally work during the same business hours other people are? If you ever have to deal with an insurance issue, sign a lease, take out or refinance a mortgage, buy a car... etc... its probable that you will have to print something out at the office, sign it, scan it and send it back to someone- and now its essentially open for the company to read. Even if you aren't downloading and printing something, even logging into a website is more or less the same thing for a determined snooper. Sometimes its just a matter of convenience, but it can add an irritating delay or worse.
I try to avoid it as much as possible, but its unavoidable in at least some cases. I am not going to take a day off of work just because I have to call about a billing issue and need to login to my account to give the details to a service representative.
From a sustainability perspective, it’s regrettable that regulations are so fixated on the physical machine. It would be entirely possible to logically segment a work environment from a personal environment on a machine without one’s processes spilling over into the other’s. But nope, we all lug two laptops and two phones (if you use iOS).
Samsung does it with Knox and it works perfectly. If the company wants they can wipe out the Knox environment but my personal files and apps are completely separate. Even the company VPN works just inside the Knox environment.
Because of convenience. It is an easy mistake to make. If you have to print something like a rent agreement, do you use your office printer or go through the hassle of sending it to FedEx to print? Also, when you have home office setups configured for your work, it can be a pain to switch everything to your personal laptop, if you even have one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wiped the computer they gave me and installed my own OS. If I quit or they fire me there is a three month period where I have to work for them anyway.
It would be ideal to have two computers, but I don’t feel like committing to such an expense (it would have to be about equally powerful) in this economy and all that.
In France, I have the same 3 months period where I still have to work. If they decide to lock my computer during this period, I'm free to stop working and tell them to provide me with a new computer ASAP since I cannot do anything at all.
Unless they want to fire you and then they still could remove those 3 months and give you some money instead. It would be stupid of them to give me a free salary for 3 months: either they fire me properly, or they give me a computer.
> 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.
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."
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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").
There was a possibility I proposed, which I think you missed. Maybe they _aren't_ miserable. They might be suffering in some ways. They might even complain about it. That doesn't mean they are miserable. They may find other joy that makes up for the suffering.
If we can't agree on this, we'll probably not agree on anything else. It'll mean you've decided on a premise that I think is false. I'll just keep seeming ignorant to you.
_Should_ they be miserable? Perhaps. Maybe they have a false consciousness. Maybe they need to understand better the societal effects they are responsible for. These are debatable. To _presume_ this is true, though, seems to me kind of arrogant.
> 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?
> 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.
Like a judge is going to understand that after lawyers spend hours talking about data theft and how they have policies and how the security team had concerns.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The sad fact is that most people really care about their 150 or so closest acquaintances, somewhat care about people in their various tribes, and try and largely fail to have much compassion for outsiders. For the majority of people, their espoused political leanings are rationalizations they tell themselves to cover selfish underlying motivations.
Elon has his fanboys, who are going to fan. I think they probably skew fiscally and regulatorily laissez-faire, socially progressive, and middle-aged more than they skew classical conservative.
> The sad fact is that most people really care about their 150 or so closest acquaintances
Which is the best reason that upper-middle class people are screaming about Twitter layoffs. The worst reason is just because they repeat what they've read to each other as a proxy for conversation.
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.
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...
I will be glad to clarify your understanding of my story, but it is hard to do when you have not described what your understanding is. But let me try. The context was:
Thesis:
Employing people who barely provide any value is no good for anyone in the long run.
Argument:
Full employment was always the primary goal of all communist countries, so (state) companies were practically required to employ everyone on the job market.
(My comment was: Plain, simple truth.) The argument continues:
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.
(My comment was: Plain, simple truth again. My story: just an illustration what my "living experience" as a software engineer was in these conditions. Basically: if your do not want to spend a lot of time in lines, you can't get milk. Not enough milk was produced to cover all the money paid to all the workers. Only sour milk to those who prefer to spend their time working.)
I'm suspicious many redesigns came from just that.
The app is needed, so we hire people to make app. We got a bunch of designers and developers to develop UI in a team.
But OH NO!, WE DID A GOOD JOB! EVERYTHING WORKS AND IS EASILY EXTENSIBLE!
What next? There isn't enough work on the new stuff ? We just add UI for a feature other team develops every so often, that's not enough work to go by.
And, more importantly, MANAGER CAN'T MAKE THEMSELVES LOOK GOOD when doing only maintenance and not delivering features.
What to do, what to do? I know ? Let's rewrite perfectly functioning UI again! Let's fuck around with stuff that works fine already. Make it look "modern" while we're at it. Use new framework so we can't reuse that much code. That will keep the devs busy and manager getting bonuses!
> 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
Do you have any examples? Did they identify as Musk supporters? One or two tweets with a sufficiently high amount of replies and 'likes' should be enough. Otherwise, I'd wonder if you are painting a narrative.
Layoffs aren't particularly inhumane, they're common, especially after a change of leadership. If you want workers' rights, fight for them. It's bizarre to make it into a soap opera of judging the moral worth of great men.
It's bizarre how Musk has been propped up into a surrogate for the bad aspects of capitalism, especially by an administration that just overruled a union vote through legislation.
That statement is inaccurate for many reasons. Employees in India and other countries were offered nothing. The “severance” is really 1 month severance and 2 months garden leave, which is required under WARN and may not be paid if employees get another job. This is a direct contradiction of the terms of the merger.
If you trust Elon to do the right thing for employees after seeing the class action lawsuits at Tesla (and more are on the way for Twitter), I have a bridge to sell you.
Still waiting on someone to explain what is "inhumane" about getting laid off with a severance package. Remember we are talking about employees working at a big tech firm. They'll find work elsewhere, and have had pay above the national average. They likely have plenty of savings.
I don't give a shit about Elon or Twitter. My comment was just holding someone accountable for the narrative they were creating. Typical for HN to have someone jump in with an irrelevant reply.
"Here is an excerpt of letters shared with employees in India and reviewed by CNBC-TV18:
“Today is your last working day at the company, however, you will remain employed by Twitter and will receive compensation and benefits through your separation date of January 4, 2023.""
Highly disagree. You can't just throw money at a problem to make it go away.
These are real people with real lives that were needlessly disrupted on what is supposed to be a day for love and thankfulness. Sure is a shitty and inhumane way to thank your employees.
Great, now you have money but your life was disrupted during what most call a global recession and with thousands of highly skilled engineers also out there trying to find a job.
While you’re caring for a newborn or desperately trying to remain in the country.
During thanksgiving.
So how exactly does giving someone money not make this a shitty and heartless thing to do? You know, what some might call “inhumane”?
Once again, throwing cash at the problem doesn’t fix it. Getting money might be nice, but it doesn’t magically fix the lack of a job.
I think it comes from the fact that musk & his cult got shit thrown their way from Twitter-leaning people when he started talking about free speech, as it appeared that they were unhappy that Twitter might stop banning people that have "incorrect" political opinions.
So the firings is seen as "karma" coming back to people that "didn't wanted free speech", even if fired person might be utterly unrelated to the whole thing.
> fired in such inhumane ways
gotta complain to your legislators here, musk would be fucked if he tried shit like that in EU...
> The stereotype about conservatives ring true - they don't care about others until it affects them personally.
That's basic human group behaviour and nothing characteristic for any political group. The other side behaves literally identical. Or, well, as usual, the some individuals in the group do, but, also as usual, the more extreme elements of a group often form its public image.
> 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.
>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.
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.
I appreciate that you represent both sides of argument here, but I've found a way to frame it for myself that removes all the dissonance:
You work for a large, for-profit company. You have some free time outside of the typical 9-5 M-F work week and you would like to spend some of it working. Great! You could:
* contribute to an an open source project or start your own
* start a side project/business
* volunteer somewhere
* take an online course
* exercise
* goof off
* do almost anything else
The effects of these on on society and yourself range from neutral at worst to helpful at best.
Instead, you choose to:
* contribute extra unpaid time to your employer
This may enrich your life, but it definitely enriches the shareholders of your company. It dials up the expectations of others who are in the same employment pool as you. It hurts future generations of workers by eroding the expectation of work-life balance that we are lucky enough to have achieved in our industry.
To me, it is pretty clear: if you put your extra time into for-profit work, you suck.
You only care because you're competing with them, but that's not really their problem. That doesn't resolve any of the dissonance at all. What if their motivation isn't enjoyment but money, so they're choosing to outcompete you. What if they're doing that because they have to feed their very hungry family and their family is hungrier than yours. Does that change the calculus? You're walking into this with a set of values and just assuming that everybody else has the same ones so you can throw them on the table and say, see?
But that's exactly what makes it complex, that they don't have the same values and they live next to you in the same world you do.
I'm still just as split on how to feel about enjoyable overtime but I'm not at all conflicted that your take that anybody else is obligated to maximise your metric instead of their own is a bad take.
> What if they're doing that because they have to feed their very hungry family and their family is hungrier than yours. Does that change the calculus?
Yes, it does. I should have been more clear in the outset: I am frustrated by people who work more than 40 hours because they enjoy doing it, not because they need to in order to make ends meet.
If you work 60hrs/week in order to pay off student loan debt and feed your kid, my heart goes out to you. If you work 60hrs/week because it's your idea of fun, please log out of work and get a hobby... you're actively making harder for the parent with loan debt to capitalize on the extra 20hrs/week they're putting in.
> You're walking into this with a set of values and just assuming that everybody else has the same ones so you can throw them on the table and say, see?
I mean, kinda, yeah! I value being able to work <=40 hours a week. If you don't value that, we're going to disagree.
To reduce it to a contrived version: If you value being able to litter because it lets you get where you are going faster, I think you suck! We have divergent values, and I don't have any qualms saying that you pursuing your values actively works against my values.
> It dials up the expectations of others who are in the same employment pool as you. It hurts future generations of workers by eroding the expectation of work-life balance that we are lucky enough to have achieved in our industry.
>
> To me, it is pretty clear: if you put your extra time into for-profit work, you suck.
What an odd perspective. I was brought up to recognize that hard work and going above and beyond what was expected is admirable and will get you appreciation, recognition, and advancement. Voluntarily doing work that you think needs doing because you want to be valued isn't bad, it's a life lesson. I got my first software testing job by going above and beyond my menial mailroom duties. I got my first software engineering job by going above and beyond my testing duties. I got all my promotions, bonuses, and stock grants and more than a few job offers by consistently doing more than I had to do.
If there's a project that I'm enthusiastic enough about to want to spend a weekend working on it? Hell yes, I'm going to do it, and I'm going to enjoy myself without worrying that someone else thinks I'm raising expectations beyond the bare minimum. Maybe someone with that attitude just isn't offering as much to an employer and they should get comfy with the idea of others outperforming them.
I should be clear that I am talking about expectations of time, not expectations of effort or competance.
I work 40 hours a week, no more. (If paid overtime were a thing at my company, I might do more. But it's not.) I bust my ass during those 40. Sometimes I work on personal side projects in my free time for fun or to sharpen my skills.
If you want to be promoted, I'd rather you work harder and smarter, not more. If a coworker of mine got promoted because they worked weekends, I would actually be pretty frustrated at them.
Try to recognize that there are people who would rather work more than harder and that's ok. You provide your value and I'll provide mine. To be frank, I'm not sure I'm capable of working harder, but the occasional weekend project because you're fired up about the goals or the challenge is exhilarating. For you to think you can dictate that I shouldn't ever do that seems kind of selfish to me.
PS: how dare you work harder than me! You're raising the bar and that's not fair! ;)
Well, first off, I haven't put any numbers on it, so 60 hours is made up. Second, I'm not saying I'm going to "slack" during the 40 and waste 20 hours, I'm just talking about doing a normal job (with a normal amount of slacking interspersed. Let's not ignore that I'm posting on HN during my standard business hours at this very moment). And third, I am capable of adjusting how much time I need for hobbies and family on any given day, and sometimes I'll happily trade a saturday with hobbies or family to do some good work. I honestly don't know what it would be like to have a job that I never ever felt passionate enough about to willingly put in a little extracurricular time. It sounds horrible.
You don't work 40 full hours a week. No one actually _works_ every single minute of a 40 hour work week. There's lunch for one, bathroom breaks, interruptions by coworkers, meetings that they may not even need you in, etc, etc.
Another interesting way to split the difference: identify a need at $work that could really use a better open source solution that $work could use off-the-shelf. Go write that on your free nights/weekends as an independent open source project that's more-broadly useful to others outside of $work, and then when you're back on the clock, switch hats and make use of it.
With this hybrid approach, you're still advancing the cause at $work, but you're not doing it directly or exclusively for them, and the open source project will have visibility, scope, and utility beyond $work and your employment there. You never know, it might even be the start of future promising career opportunities.
There be dragons of course with how exempt employment and copyrights work in the US, though (as in, this might be a trivial case where if the side-project is successful, your employer can claim rights on it). You could come to some agreement with your employer ahead of time about the independence of such projects, though.
If you get paid well and have a unique talent that further incentivizes you to step up and do extra on occasion, what's the big deal? Engineering salaries have never in the history of technology been geared toward clock-watcher/union-boss mindset.
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.
> 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.
My take on this is that this guy is your typical high-performing developer with a huge ego and an attitude that he's untouchable because he's been valued so much at every job he's ever had. He was reckless to release his tool because he never imagined that management would suddenly become so thin-skinned that he'd get fired over something like that. Well, he was wrong about this particular management, and he found out. I haven't tried to find any of his info on social media, but I'd be willing to bet that aside from some public griping about it, he's not feeling like he screwed up big-time. Most likely, he's wearing this as a badge of honor that demonstrates how capricious and short-sighted Elon Musk is to fire a clearly valuable engineer just because that engineer likes to buck authority. The consequences are that now he has a good "why I got fired" story, and he needs to spend a little time and effort finding his next wildly overpaid job. NBD
This makes about as much sense as being upset that some people eat healthy and work out and as a result are more physically attractive/competitive in the same dating market that you're in. Or that some people study and hone their professional craft sometimes before 8:59 AM or after 5:01 PM.
Make your choices and let others make their choices. Not everyone wants to optimize for the same things in life.
Looking at my country laws you'd be entirely fine to pull the all nighters at work but paid 150-200% for it.
That solves all of that, employer can't just convince gullible teenager to get extra work out of them for little benefit and have active motivation to hire enough people to not have to crunch very often (as doing that makes them pay 2x per hour of work).
Those laws are in place because for every "crunching and happy for it" there is ten that stay for longer out of fear that they will get fired for wanting to work normal amount in favour of someone that lives work.
> 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.
Yes. Ressentiment is ubiquitous these days. Nietzsche would be amused but it's not a good look for our culture.
I'm not sure if it's so much resentment as an implicit rewriting of the contract of employment. If I'm contracted for 40 hours a week, but the only people being promoted are the ones who "voluntarily" work 80 hours a week then the revealed policy of the employer is that everyone's being paid to work 80 hours a week, or 60, and if you're doing what was agreed to in the original contract you're slacking off.
You see this plenty even in less extreme examples, my old company had yearly awards for outstanding performance, and there was a clear pattern that the story of why the person had won almost always involved some personal sacrifice in service of the company. No one was winning awards for just being good at their job, showing up every day, and being a value to the team. You had to take a break from your vacation to get on a meeting, or work 2 weeks straight to get the award.
I'm sure the well-meaning among leadership (which I do believe was a decent amount of them) saw this as more of an apology. "Here's something to recognize that you did something you shouldn't have had to do". But functionally, it was creating a culture where you needed to abuse yourself in order to be recognized.
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.
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.
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.
Did Steph Curry or Kobe Bryant harm basketball because they plain worked harder than everyone else? Prince in the recording studio? Did they cause a race to the bottom?
Ok, I'll fill in the blanks here. The race to the bottom happens because other coaches and players see Curry practicing and playing on a schedule that's unhealthy and feel that they need to do the same thing, so they also fail to recover from their injuries.
So yes, overworking does create a race to the bottom.
To pop up a level, your comparison is very bad. In Twitter's case, the "model" behavior is that engineers are working longer hours, and not whether they are producing better results. A better analogy would be a sports player who trained extra hard and extra long, but didn't improve their level of play, but still all other players were expected to work extra long hours anyways.
Prince recorded his first album by himself and played all 21 instruments, so he's not the perfect example for this.
Michael Jordan might be a great example though, he worked harder then anyone else, and ALSO raised the standard of how hard people needed to work on the team beyond the normal limits.
They all did benefit from the Championships that followed, but it was certainly also a strain of the mental health of players like Dennis Rodman.
I thought the parallels was that his hard work would have caused on a strain on his bandmates, which it didn't, because he didn't really have any.
I thought Band Mates was the best comparison, because we were talking about fellow employee's suffering at a company. And if your comparison was of Prince to The Music Industry at large, it sort of works, but sort of doesn't because other musicians are Prince's competitors not team mates.
> Don't turn our field into one where you have to sacrifice your personal life to succeed.
I'm glad you think I have that much power! Seriously I'm not suggesting any such thing. But why shouldn't people who work harder reap the benefits. And more to the point, does that cause a race to the bottom?
> "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.
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?
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.
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.
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-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.
Fighting over scraps isn't the best way to see it, IMO. If I'm busting my ass at a job, it's because I share the vision (if not the capital) of the people I'm working for, want to see that vision executed, and want to take an active part in executing it well.
If that is not the case, it doesn't matter how much I'm being paid, I'm not going to be happy ("self-actualized") for long. Likewise, whether I work 40 or 60 hours a week has no bearing on this. I imagine quite a few people joined Twitter because they believed in the company's stated mission and the vision of its founder. The mission and vision have now changed, so it's appropriate for some of those people to move on, voluntarily or otherwise. Framing it as some kind of Marxist class struggle sheds no light on the issue, and isn't helpful in the least.
> I share the vision (if not the capital) of the people I'm working for, want to see that vision executed, and want to take an active part in executing it well. If that is not the case, it doesn't matter how much I'm being paid, I'm not going to be happy ("self-actualized") for long
This can and should be a condition on top of respecting yourself enough to expect that you are paid for the time you work and have the freedom to establish a good work-life balance based on those hours. Assuming for one second that the folks running the business--if they are any good at it--think about you in anything other than economic terms at the end of the day is simply foolish.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just so I understand, your world view is that normality means disliking your job; anyone who enjoys their job is suffering from stockholm's syndrome. Even if you're making a quarter mil per year, if you stay after-hours with coworker buddies to implement a feature that augments the experience of millions of people, you're a total sucker.
I like my job. I like my hobbies better. I'd still not trade hobbies for job just to give users a feature week early. I'm fine with working extra occasionally but that's what I signed for by picking jobs in ops, not because I think that's good.
Also, OP is OBVIOUSLY talking about people that maybe have few months of savings and have them getting fired heavily affect their lives, not people earning 250k
That's not at all what the GP post said. It's clearly about employees who are fine being exploited at work, not all employees everywhere.
Some employees are OK with working immense amounts of unpaid overtime to please a Musk-type boss. That's a very different situation than the type of employee who has a life outside of work and wants to get paid fairly.
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).
Exactly. A lot of Elon's "working" hours are doing completely unproductive things that he enjoys, like posting childish memes on Twitter or belittling people he has power over.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
"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!"
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.
