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Twitter Is Protecting Its Source Code From Disgruntled Employees, Reports Say (techcrunch.com) 273

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Twitter locked down its source code to prevent unauthorized changes, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. The reports say that this change was made to prevent employees from "going rogue" and sabotaging the platform after Elon Musk's $44 billion purchase of the company. Currently, a vice president must approve any changes. After the company announced it would accept Musk's offer to buy the publicly traded platform, it wasn't immediately clear to Twitter's 7,000 employees how their day-to-day would change. Even after a company all-hands, where CEO Parag Agrawal reassured the team that no layoffs were planned "at this time," employees were still left with questions about how they would fare in Musk's takeover. [...] For now, Musk's takeover bid for Twitter remains subject to shareholder and regulatory approval. But if it goes through as expected, we may witness major personnel shifts, resignations and more. A similar shake-up took place when Twitter was listed on the New York Stock Exchange for the first time. By the time the company went public, there were already 90 startups being built by former Twitter employees.
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Twitter Is Protecting Its Source Code From Disgruntled Employees, Reports Say

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  • by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Wednesday April 27, 2022 @09:16AM (#62483614) Homepage Journal

    They're admitting to hiring activists, not good employees.

    By all means quit if you don't like the company direction, no matter which, but for the bosses to fear sabotaging the product indicates that they hired people who are only there to push an agenda, not to do work for the company.

    And nobody is surprised.

    • by Impy the Impiuos Imp ( 442658 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2022 @09:21AM (#62483634) Journal

      Certain employees fear retribution, or wrong politics, or censoring their opinions instead of their enemies'. because that's exactly what they were engaged in doing.

      Why be "Shocked! Shocked!" at this? Even if it is 70% your imagination.

    • for the bosses to fear sabotaging the product indicates that they hired people who are only there to push an agenda, not to do work for the company. And nobody is surprised.

      I think there's truth to that - the core of the generational shift isn't just whether companies ought to be left or right, but whether it's OK for individuals to check their humanity at the door and rent out their bodies and minds to do whatever is dictated by the flow of capital for most of their waking hours. (There's even a series

      • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        I'm old enough to be pretty uncomfortable with breaking down the personal/work divide ("just quit!") The problem is this has lead us to such extreme economic inequality that we are knocking on the doors of societal unrest. Land ownership is becoming the exclusive province of the upper class, like in the version of Europe some of our ancestors fled. And it's very unclear what to do about it.

        I question your thesis. I don't believe the problem is corporations acting in their own interests or expecting their employees to act in the corporate interest at least while on the job or go work somewhere else has lead to inequality. I think rather the biggest source of inequity is the lack of mobility. More specifically DOWNWARD mobility. The big failure of has been allowing to-big-to-fail to be a thing, and individual organizations to have relationships with government that are two strategic to change.

    • Especially in regards to source code?

      This isn't news. Every company does this following a major buyout because layoffs are coming and everyone knows it. This is less about sabotage and more about lazy mistakes being made or people taking secrets to other companies as they exit.

      Christ, it's like nobody on this forum's ever been through a buyout. /. does have a really strong survivor bias though. Lots of guys here think they're hot shit because they survived a few rounds of layoffs.
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by argStyopa ( 232550 )

      Oh I think they definitely ARE hiring wokesters, but let's remember that this sort of shit was normalized during the Trump admin (but growing in currency since Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden tbh).

      Sure, there was the normal inter-presidency shittery - iirc, the departing Clintonian staff removed some "W's" from the keyboards (to make it harder for Geo W Bush typists, I guess).

      The Obama admin was so aggressive about chasing leakers, even journalists started squeaking about it (https://www.outsidethebeltwa

  • by Jfetjunky ( 4359471 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2022 @09:21AM (#62483636)

    it wasn't immediately clear to Twitter's 7,000 employees how their day-to-day would change

    If I worked there I'd be nervous, although Twitter doesn't really do much so perhaps it'll be different. But at other Musk companies, they are pervaded by crazy deadlines, terrible work-life balance, and a shoot-from-the-hip-and-expect-the-employees-to-hit-the-target leader.

    • it's a buyout. New management always wants to "make their mark" and the easiest way to do that is fire a bunch of people and replace 'em with your buddies. That starts at the top and works it's way down.

      This isn't news, it's BAU following a buyout.
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      That and being racist.

      https://www.npr.org/2022/04/14... [npr.org]

      • Wait, that article says that some coworkers were not being nice to the plaintiff, not that Musk wasn't being nice to the plaintiff. Those coworkers are not buying out Twitter.
        • A few individual acts of specific employees don't say anything about the company management. If there's pervasive issues that continually go uncorrected, then at best corporate management doesn't care, and at worst they set a tone and employ policies that encourage such behavior. The article discusses that one specific case, but notes the factory has had many such problems, which management has done little or nothing to address. If they feared blowback from higher-ups for ignoring/covering up racism, they'd
  • by schwit1 ( 797399 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2022 @09:30AM (#62483660)

    The numbers for 2022-04-26 [twitter.com] imply Twitter was monkeying with their users.

    Maybe this is why they had to do a lockdown
    https://twitter.com/HillelNeue... [twitter.com]

    • Musk is at least months away from owning and having any control over the company. Why would Twitter decide to suddenly change their algorithm?

      You think maybe the news of the purchase, which ahs been widely covered by media all around, and especially lauded by right wing media figures (like the ones in this thread) might have brought an uptick of new users to the platform?

      You only have to go on the other /. thread about this to see people already talking about how they would make accounts or return to accou

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Why didn't they have change control like this to start with? Do places just allow all of their developers to commit willy-nilly to whatever repository they want?

    • by jythie ( 914043 )
      I wonder how much of it is bad change control practices at twitter, and how much is bad reporting at Bloomberg.
  • by ebonum ( 830686 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2022 @10:01AM (#62483744)

    I would be really interested in seeing a list of these 90 start-ups and a summary of how it is working out for them.

    Everyone thinks they are the next Elon Musk - until they are all alone and running a company. Then reality hits. Tech companies are especially hard.

    • by msouth ( 10321 )

      > tech companies are especially hard

      Wiring harnesses from some entity in China I only have email contact with. Steel sheet metal fab across the country that likely needs months to get my order in. Surprise tariffs on my embedded boards due to Trump's trade war on China. Failures on some of these boards that leave the HDMI displaying, but frozen, and even a serial connection stops responding, so I have no way to diagnose it and suddenly a bunch of support incidents where the box needs to be shipped bac

  • by CaptainJeff ( 731782 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2022 @10:11AM (#62483776)
    Every major firm doing any kind of software development process should already be doing this! Proper security and change control, reviews, and approvals are key to any mature Software Development Lifecycle. If these basic controls were not in place prior to now, that's ... very surprising and very disappointing.
    • Twitter website is something I could make in a couple months of 10 hour days. It's not surprising that their CM process is not very mature.
      • Twitter website is something I could make in a couple months of 10 hour days.

        Exactly this. And you could make it in a week if you just made a wordpress or other CRM plugin instead of writing the whole platform. I've never understood why it takes Twitter so long to make the simplest changes and why they have so many developers on staff. I mean WTF do they do all day?

        • by juancn ( 596002 )
          One word: scale. The simplest problems when everything is several orders of magnitude bigger, turn very, very difficult.
  • That says a lot (Score:4, Insightful)

    by aerogems ( 339274 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2022 @10:18AM (#62483802)

    The fact that Twitter questions the professionalism of its employees that much is rather telling, and nothing of what it says about Twitter is good.

  • by dbrueck ( 1872018 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2022 @10:23AM (#62483818)

    What on earth? I mean, I know there's always a lot of overhead positions and supporting roles and all that but... 7000 employees?? Wow.

    Maybe the real reason why many employees are unhappy about the purchase is that they know Twitter could be the same hot mess with only a couple hundred people.

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2022 @10:38AM (#62483876)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I hope they're also securing their databases and backups.
  • I was skimming through the company call just to get the gist of how they were communicating, I happened to be listening when he said "no layoffs at this time"....

    If you listen to the audio, it's the most "at this time"iest thing ever said, with "no layoffs", dramatic pause, then "at this time" said rapidly and softly.

    Doesn't take a genius to see the whole army of woke-mind virus enforcers are in peril unless the fly right, and they are mentally incapable of changing how they are.

    • by Tailhook ( 98486 )

      Musk will purge the romper room that is Twitter. If half the staff were fired tomorrow no one would notice.

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