Elongate, birdsite saga | Michał "rysiek" Woźniak

Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦's posts Post Back to profile

Elongate, birdsite saga

Well this is entertaining:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221104192459/https://twitter.com/mcmillen/status/1588604007030747136

> Reportedly, Elon stack-ranked Twitter engineers by "lines of code written in the last year" and fired the bottom X%, which likely means he's gotten rid everyone who worked on particularly challenging things, like security, privacy, performance, & reliability.

There is not enough 🍿 in the 🌏 for this. This means that :birdsite: let fired some of their most experienced engineers.

#Elongate

Like 4 Nov 2022 at 19:49 | Open on mstdn.social

31 comments | Expand all CWs

Patryk Gronkiewicz

oh yeah, measuring velocity with SLoC, my fav

4 Nov 2022 at 19:51 | Open on pleroma.gronkiewicz.dev

Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦

Elongate, birdsite saga

Just a reminder, this is the same :birdsite: that runs 500k servers, 60% of them so outdated, that many are not even supported by the OS vendor anymore.

Whose technical staff, every single one of them, has direct access to production environment. Because they develop on it. Because there is no testing/staging environment.

All this coming from former CISO, Mudge:
https://archive.org/download/whistleblower_disclosure
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Testimony%20-%20Zatko%20-%202022-09-13.pdf

Just a reminder, this is the same :birdsite: that runs 500k servers, 60% of them so outdated, that many are not even supported by the OS vendor anymore.

Whose technical staff, every single one of them, has direct access to production environment. Because they develop on it. Because there is no testing/staging environment.

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4 Nov 2022 at 20:07 | Open on mstdn.social

Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦

Elongate, birdsite saga

And if you don't want to read all ~200 pages of this, I don't blame you!

I have, however, read all of them and noted out the most interesting stuff:
https://rys.io/static/TwitterWhistleblowerRevelationsExcerpts.html

Or nice version over at @tomasino's:
https://wiki.tomasino.org/Twitter-Whistleblower-Revelations-excerpt

Or the raw Markdown:
https://rys.io/static/TwitterWhistleblowerRevelationsExcerpts.md

It's juicy!

And if you don't want to read all ~200 pages of this, I don't blame you!

I have, however, read all of them and noted out the most interesting stuff:
https://rys.io/static/TwitterWhistleblowerRevelationsExcerpts.html

Or nice version over at @tomasino's:
https://wiki.tomasino.org/Twitter-Whistleblower-Revelations-excerpt

Expand text...

4 Nov 2022 at 20:09 | Open on mstdn.social

Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦

Elongate, birdsite saga

The point is, if your infrastructure is basically constantly on fire and you are one bad deploy away from your whole service crashing and burning into oblivion, perhaps this is not the time to fire your most experienced technical staff.

You know, just an idea. :blobcatthinksmart:

4 Nov 2022 at 20:11 | Open on mstdn.social

ben

Elongate, birdsite saga

@rysiek Honestly, the most insane thing to come out recently is "stack ranking by lines of code".

Like, what?

Is this Microsoft in 1997?

4 Nov 2022 at 20:14 | Open on chaos.social

Chumchum Tumtum

@sqrt2 @rysiek when I heard that he had asked people to print out code, I knew shit was going to get _really_ bad, _really_ quickly

4 Nov 2022 at 20:18 | Open on social.linux.pizza

rootfs :oh_no:

Elongate, birdsite saga

@sqrt2 @rysiek I can't stop looking at this trainwreck. It's bad, but also really funny!

(not so much for the staff being fired, funny as in Musk thought buying Twitter was sensible and his decisions throughout).

4 Nov 2022 at 20:31 | Open on mastodon.org.uk

Lauri

Elongate, birdsite saga

@sqrt2 @rysiek

BillG is quoted saying ”measuring programmer progress by LoC is like measuring aircraft progress by weight,” and IIRC this was in the mid-nineties. So it’s worse than MS a quarter of a decade ago.

4 Nov 2022 at 20:51 | Open on piipitin.fi

ben

Elongate, birdsite saga

@rytmis @rysiek Not convinced that's a real quote, though (on the basis that if it were, it'd surely be on the Wikiquote page, but apparently there's no reliable source for that).

4 Nov 2022 at 21:10 | Open on chaos.social

Lauri

Elongate, birdsite saga

@sqrt2 @rysiek

Welp, at the very least it’s a misattribution that’s two decades old—I remember it floating around the net in the early ’00.

4 Nov 2022 at 21:13 | Open on piipitin.fi

Ben S.

Elongate, birdsite saga

@sqrt2 @rysiek even Steve Ballmer was laughing at IBM for caring about SLOCs around 1996.

4 Nov 2022 at 23:49 | Open on mastodon.sdf.org

Chris [list of emoji]

Elongate, birdsite saga

@rysiek

I can't find the link now, but I've heard that he's fired all of the SRE team. Which means it's very likely that Twitter will just fall of the Internet and never come back.

4 Nov 2022 at 20:56 | Open on freeradical.zone

DELETED

Elongate, birdsite saga

@suetanvil @rysiek what a tender world that would be 😌

4 Nov 2022 at 22:03 | Open on masto.ashfurrow.com

FuzzFace ☢️ :clippy:

Elongate, birdsite saga

@ashfurrow @suetanvil @rysiek In 10 years this will be an excellent dark comedy film on HBO. And we will tell the younger generation that this madness was not only darkly funny, but completely true. They of course will not believe us.

4 Nov 2022 at 22:07 | Open on epsilon-ix.masto.host

Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦

Elongate, birdsite saga

@fuzzface 10 years? HBO? It's going to be a crappy docudrama on Netflix in 6mo.

@ashfurrow @suetanvil

4 Nov 2022 at 23:51 | Open on mstdn.social

FuzzFace ☢️ :clippy:

Elongate, birdsite saga

@rysiek @ashfurrow @suetanvil In that case it will be a multi-season situation comedy that will feature a doozy of a third season cliffhanger. Wil Wheaton will appear in mid-third season episode as Ash Furrow, admin of an upstart Mastodon server. John Malkovich will play Elon Musk. Original music by “Weird” Al Yankovic and The Go-Gos. And then Netflix will cancel it without a fourth season or a satisfying conclusion. ☮️💚 :mastodon: