Hacker News Reader

Comment by honkdaddy | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, I have a close friend who worked on Twitter's "Health" team whose job at one point was building mini games for the support/moderation staff to play during company mandated breaks in between looking at racist tweets and CP. He coasted for a while then moved onto a job with more work.

This is entirely anecdotal, but from the little I know from his couple months there, Twitter has no idea what to do with the huge amount of engineers they employ. This is by no means an endorsement of Musk, but the company could use some new direction I think.

View on HN

That seems like an actually valuable, human thing to work on vs the garbage many devs find themselves working on. Mini games can also be super engaging to build and are a showcase for creativity… I’m really not seeing the problem.

Get them a steam account? It's cheaper

They could just give support staff a proper break and let them do whatever they want with that break (including playing the games they want to play if they deem necessary)

I am an ex-Twitter engineer with long tenure. You are sharing hearsay. It's not worth very much.

So....tell us the truth.

At the scale of a company like Twitter, my point of view ain’t worth much either and pretending to hold the truth would be pretentious.

While I understand what you’re getting at, this is basically pointless, because nobody is going to accept hand wavey “you can never know, so don’t even try!”-type answers. Even if that is the best way to go.

I’m not accusing GP of this necessarily, but quite often the view “since we can’t know everything, we can’t know anything” is considered wisdom.

To the GP: we all understand that your experience isn’t the same experience of everyone, but it is AN experience, and would be useful to us who don’t have any experience.

"All models are wrong. Some models are useful."

There is a difference between the truth and a truth. It wouldn't be pretentious to share something of your story and how you saw it in the larger picture.

That’s fair but disinformation and the lack of actions against it was part of why I left Twitter. As such, I feel strongly about my experience not being interpreted as the truth or that a significant portion of the company shares the same views as I do.

I feel like public discourse has increasingly been more and more polarizing and anecdotes and hearsay are being leveraged to create further divisions.

I can certainly share your concern here, but not sure what can be done about this. Since you probably have done more thinking in this space, what are some things you think are possible?

Which part is hearsay?

> This is entirely anecdotal, but from the little I know from his couple months there, Twitter has no idea what to do with the huge amount of engineers they employ.

I wonder why I keep getting LinkedIn and email notifications about engineering jobs at Twitter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com