Twitter Engineers Are Resigning | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Engineers Are Resigning

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33 pointskoyanisqatsi15 comments

People worthy of respect. Likely excellent at their job as well. Those who cant leave right now time your exit mid project. Treat musk as he treats his employees.

This is unfair to these who will stay. Musk will see or feel no difference, he is quite insulated from all that, but immediate colleagues of these who quit will feel the heat strongly.

Company is not only "proverbial Musk".

> This is unfair to these who will stay. Musk will see or feel no difference, he is quite insulated from all that, but immediate colleagues of these who quit will feel the heat strongly.

That kind of thinking is misplaced loyalty: you think you're being loyal to your colleagues, but really you're being loyal to the owner. Trying to protect your colleagues from a toxic workplace is just a recipe for more toxicity.

Musk will see or feel a difference if Twitter's technology organization collapses to the point that they have trouble maintaining the site (e.g. return of the fail whale).

How's "protecting your colleagues from a toxic space is a recipe for more toxicity"? And there should be no "trying" there. I fail to see a line that you drawn.

Please, explain.

Replace "colleagues" with "siblings," and "toxicity" with "alcoholic parent." Maybe that will make it more clear. By "going along with" the situation, you are enabling it. Of course, it's complicated. Enabling a bad situation might provide cover for other people (as you suggested), but it also perpetuates the bad situation. My personal belief is that if I can get out without endangering myself or others, I should. My act will help empower others to make the same decision.

I think you have employed reduction to absurdity to make it "more clear".

No, the situations are profoundly different.

I think you have done the same. Comparing an abusive employer to an alcoholic parent is an exaggeration, I agree, but I did that on purpose to help make the moral arguments more clear. However, I absolutely don't agree that the comparison is absurdly different, and I don't agree in the least that the situation are profoundly different. Having suffered through toxic work places myself, I can say with certainty that some can create an enormous amount of stress, even to point of causing someone's death.

You did a reduction to absurdity on purpose, thank you very much for clarifying that.

You also continue reduction to absurdity by suggesting that toxicity implies someone's death. Sometimes it did, but it takes much longer time than couple of months.

As we are talking about Elon Musk and quite short span of time, I think your suggestions are also manipulations in an attempt to cancel Elon Musk's Twitter [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmvmJonKqpI - "you will not belong to anyone!" a quote from Soviet classic movie.

Twitter, being so far a nice place to work [2] on par with Google, suddenly became toxic place everyone needs to quit. I do not think this is really the case, even remotely.

[2] https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Twitter/reviews

Urging anyone to do what can cause them immediate (financial) harm is not good or ethical.

> How's "protecting your colleagues from a toxic space is a recipe for more toxicity"? And there should be no "trying" there. I fail to see a line that you drawn.

You almost certainly don't have the power to "protect your colleagues from a toxic workplace," especially by the mere act of not quitting. So all you can do is try and fail.

If you leave, you have a better chances of actually making things better for yourself, and that may cause the dominoes to fall and get others do the same.

Protection is not an absolute term. My (in)action can be more or less protective, more or less helpful.

Others can be quite not ready to do the same as I do or plan to do. By helping them to do what they can do best, I am too doing my best.

And I am not even talking about definition of toxicity in work place. What one can see as a dream work place, others can see as a toxic wasteland.

> By helping them to do what they can do best, I am too doing my best.

You need to keep in mind the bigger picture: you all work for the owners, not for each other, and the owners have no loyalty to you. Blurring that fact is an excellent way to be manipulated, because you can be deceived into being loyal to something that does not deserve it.

And frankly the kind of thinking you seem to be advocating has no barrier preventing it from justifying the absurd. Why not volunteer to take a pay cut, to help your colleagues from feeling the heat by allowing the team to have a larger headcount with its budget?

I see completely contrarian picture about manipulation: you try to manipulate me and others (who read us) that abrupt quitting is the only way to go and that thinking about how to lessen harm to my colleagues is amoral as it is further goals of the owner of the company.

You equate company to the owner, I think that company is also other people.

> You equate company to the owner, I think that company is also other people.

Volunteer for a pay cut to help your coworkers, then.

Next update, full self tweeting..

In all seriousness, I find it an interesting case. There is a lot of speculation on how essential individuals and teams are to a business, let's check back here in a year or so.

At my current gig, some key engineers were let go of, and certain parts of the stack are struggling (and they are reaching out via backchannels). At the same time, the graveyard is filled with irreplaceable people...

Wild ride for sure at Twitter engineering right now.

isn't it obvious that twitter is the de facto public square, dominated by liberals and operated in a way to bias society?

and now that a vaguely not-beholden-to-democrats figure is in power they're all switching their tune to disingenuous free speech advocacy?

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