Twitter engineer says he was fired for helping coworkers who faced layoffs (he developed a Google Chrome extension to allow employees to download and save corporate emails and attachments)

Reuters on MSN ^ | November 8, 2022 | Daniel Wiessner

[dennisw]

This is why Elon terminated the useless eaters with extreme prejudice. Internal sabotage of whatever they (mostly millennial types) could get their grubby little communist paws on.

[tired&retired]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-n91vtTxPs

[vaskypilot]

Why is an extension needed? I usually just use print to pdf. I bet the twitter employees wanted to download more data than referenced in the article

[Timber Rattler]

He should be prosecuted for stealing company property.

[catnipman]

if he was like almost all of those laid off, he wasn’t fired for cause and is still an employee during the WARN period while he’s receiving severance pay ... however, he’s now violated his contract to refrain from publicly criticizing the company and could NOW be fired for cause, thus eliminating his severance pay ...

[Bruce Campbells Chin]

Personal stock statements would be sent to your home, or accessible in ways other than through the company email systems.

[varyouga]

No. Paper is minimized and filing cabinets are a thing of the past in most offices. It’s simply a waste of a space and resources at this point.

More offices are even fully eliminating the cubicle since there no need for employees to keep anything at their desk.

When I first started there was so much paper from printed archives my company leased storage space and had several employees just to maintain it. Now all those papers are backed up in the space of one small book. It is much easier to look at and search through piles of documents via big screen. Original digital files are also much better for forensics than printed versions.

For my business I save archives onto a second cloud and then onto external discs in 2 different locations that are normally disconnected from the network and kept in a faraday bag.

For the rare times I do get a paper original of something important, that is kept in a cabinet. But these days that is pretty much never and we are 99.99% digital. The only important things I can think of still kept on paper are some license certificates from the government.

[eyeamok]

Why hasn’t he been arrested for Theft and Embezzlement??

[AppyPappy]

Twitter didn’t allow you to download emails and attachments?

Strange...

[chaosagent]

Well, a while back I did IT support for a large Texas state university. ALL of our pension stuff, vacation stuff, sick leave accumulation, HR stuff, came through our university email.

You could ask for it to be mailed to you, but they discouraged that since it was more work for them.

And where outside the company are you going to get your vacation/sick leave totals to be sure you got paid the correct amount in your severance pay?

[Bruce Campbells Chin]

Presumably, they could just print their stock options. More importantly, the extension apparently didn't distinguish between stock options or anything else, and could download any email and attachment. The guy said:

"That would ensure workers could save important documents such as statements reflecting their stock in Twitter, performance reviews, and other human resource documents, he said."

And the "such as" means that those are just examples -- it would be any document. So it could be confidential work meetings or anything, and he sent this extension to every employee to use on the company email system without asking permission. That's a no-brainer firing offense, almost certainly a direct violation of a written company policy regarding their system.