From Google to Twitter

That post was from March 2022. The author has since been laid off: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ma.nu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;bye-twitter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ma.nu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;bye-twitter</a>

This is definitely one of the most interesting and insightful descriptions of working at a FANG company ive read.<p>The only note worth mentioning is confusion around the pod system, which I think actually sounds surprisingly effective for creating &quot;culture&quot;. The op looks for an engineerimg explanation to justify meeting up with a group of disparate employees working on different projects, at different levels, and in different facets of the company. To me it sounds like a genuinely productive way to create relationships and &quot;water cooler&quot; interactions by letting it not have some ulterior motives related to the product.<p>That might be bias and optimism on my parent, and I&#x27;m sure the reality isn&#x27;t that pretty either.

Something I noticed over the past 14 years is that I feel managers are becoming increasingly less technical.<p>Sure, they did some coding at some point but I doubt many were ever very proficient and just managed to coast until they become managers and had to drop the farce of knowing how to code.<p>The amount of junior level mistakes and architectural issues I spot around are incredible.<p>I wonder if it&#x27;s a reflection of the increasingly complex tech landscape or a reflection of the increasingly politic and &quot;soft skills first&quot; corporations.

A lot of this (eg especially the in house stuff) comes from Google starting over a decade before twitter.<p>OSS just wasn’t as good then<p>A lot of OSS now is from folks that had experience at google or were aware of what was going on there — or who built things so that they could make things like the best folks (at the time). Some OSS is even from Google of course (eg k8s, chrome dev tools, etc.).<p>Landscape is of course very different now.<p>Google is slowly moving towards more OSS and external vendors as stuff gets better

This person writes a twitter specific cartoon that he hosts on his website<p>They are quite pointed and amusing and he does not discriminate in throwing any of the counter parties in this story under the bus -&gt;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twittoons.com&#x2F;36" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twittoons.com&#x2F;36</a> - on previous CEO<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twittoons.com&#x2F;38" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twittoons.com&#x2F;38</a> - on the media<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twittoons.com&#x2F;3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twittoons.com&#x2F;3</a> - on being public<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twittoons.com&#x2F;32" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twittoons.com&#x2F;32</a> - on Elon

Pretty much exactly what I expected. You can replace Google with any other &quot;old school&quot; big tech company (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon) and Twitter with everything that came after it (Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, Slack and every other successful or failed startup in the last two decades) and the comparison would look the exact same.

This particular person has been posted about 3-4 times today, at least that&#x27;s made the front page. I&#x27;ve seen more posts on this person than on Musk himself today.

It was a real culture shock to go from a smaller company to Google, and this article illustrates why very well. Almost every other bay area tech company does local development on Mac laptops, uses something like Slack extensively, and outsources tooling. Despite its constant hiring Google is so insular that there are many long time Googlers who are not only unused to these things, but completely unaware that they&#x27;re the norm outside Google.

Having never worked at a FANG, naturally Twitter sounds so much closer to the norm for me... but I&#x27;m a little surprised at how close it is. Maybe it&#x27;s a mix of inferiority complex and &quot;the mysterious unknown&quot; but I expected more??<p>Still, Phabricator looks like it has terrible, terrible UX. Is that correct to assume?

“I then posted a link to the extension on an internal Slack channel. On the same day, I was fired and that post was taken down”.<p>Yes, why even post this on slack?<p>You know there is a major shift in management and everyone is under a microscope. Conversations are likely to be monitored and this seems like something that a company can perceive as a threat as now e-mails can be leaked.

Was surprised twitter used Phabricator and Jira given how bad the UX of those is.

I suppose firing lots of people works better if the tools aren&#x27;t inhouse creations.

Unrelated to the posted link but relevant since it involves the author. Author is one of the few who was terminated early Nov. [0] and now is part of lawsuit against Twitter for mass firing.[1][2]<p>[0]. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ma.nu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;bye-twitter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ma.nu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;bye-twitter</a><p>[1]. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storage.courtlistener.com&#x2F;recap&#x2F;gov.uscourts.cand.403270&#x2F;gov.uscourts.cand.403270.1.0_2.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storage.courtlistener.com&#x2F;recap&#x2F;gov.uscourts.cand.40...</a><p>[2]. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;11&#x2F;4&#x2F;23440304&#x2F;twitter-mass-firing-class-action-lawsuit-violation-federal-warn-act-notice" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;11&#x2F;4&#x2F;23440304&#x2F;twitter-mass-fir...</a>

A few extracts from the webpage, for a TLDR;<p>&gt; but Twitter “TLMs” (“tech lead managers”) are more managers and less “tech”.<p>&gt; I feel like engineers at Twitter are less diligent at adding comments and documentation to their code.