Somehow no one took notice or summarized the whistleblowing doc describing work at pre musk twitter and it's hilarious:
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683/twitter-whistleblower-disclosure.pdf
tweet threads talking about it:
start with:
https://archive.md/CEuaa
then read
https://archive.md/fK7jf
Highlights:
Twitter employees installed spyware on their work computers for external orgs
Twitter does not have separate dev/testing/staging/production environments, all commits were made to live
51 percent of the company (5000 people) had access to privileged systems
One data center going down could cause all of twitter's data to be lost. Shortly after the whistleblower warned his higher ups about this, this almost happened:
Good thing twitter has backups right? Turns out they don't have any backups of employee computers. They had a system but it broke and they just never fixed it:
It was impossible to secure production and track who made what commits:
"dont worry we have employees taking home privileged info, this is good for us"
They didn't do any checks on employees who wanted access to privileged information:
unsurprisingly, there were foreign spies at twitter:
Remember when Parag Agrawal was appointed CEO and people were defending the fact that he has an engineering background?
Parag was literally a falling upwards Pajeet and these problems that were outlined above started during his time as CTO. During his time as CTO;
Parag was warned that there were thousands of failed logins daily to twitters engineering systems. He ignored it:
There's tons to read through but its hilarious.