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Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#71
post #3

> One former Tesla engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe the matter but was not involved, said Tesla engineers would have trouble capably assessing Twitter’s code. Distributed systems, the large-scale and spread-out network that Twitter is composed of, are not the automaker’s specialty, the person said. > The “idea of Elon being flanked by his Tesla engineers reviewing Twitter code is…

Tesla engineers don't just work on in-vehicle code though. The servers and systems needed to implement Tesla's telemetry and software updates would be in the same ballpark of expertise, albeit with much less scale and different requirements than Twitter.

But Musk got started by confounding x.com/PayPal, which does have very similar engineering needs as Twitter. It's not like Musk is a newbie to this stuff, people pretending that he's clueless in this domain just want to feel schadenfreude.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#72
I'm curious as to how existing Twitter employees get compensated after the sale. Do they have to stay for some amount of time to collect payouts on their shares?

These actions only make logical sense if the goal is to make life unpleasant for employees, and get a lot of them to quit.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#73
post #3

> One former Tesla engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe the matter but was not involved, said Tesla engineers would have trouble capably assessing Twitter’s code. Distributed systems, the large-scale and spread-out network that Twitter is composed of, are not the automaker’s specialty, the person said. > The “idea of Elon being flanked by his Tesla engineers reviewing Twitter code is…

Isn’t twitter a pretty simple thing… db with writes and reads… it was maybe still is rails? I don’t know MySQL , Pgsql have come a long way and most of the hard parts would be scaling these services…. Keeping good caches in memory with redis or memcached… not really sure I see twitter being all that crazy other then it being so many people and so many years of edge case handling they would be hard for an outsider to follow … but it’s not like it was handling a complex UI or enterprise style hacks for a handful of worth it customers…

Would be really interesting to see the code base for sure and definitely exciting to modify a code base handling so much traffic… not sure I can recall a fail whale in many years so maybe they did something right or maybe fearing the whale set the large organization into stone code fear

Contrast that with Tesla and ever car is requesting data from Tesla servers and many many different complex interactions with much more complex engineering to accomplish a task and id imagine the Tesla engineering to be pretty impressive… but who knows it probably does not handle the same amount of read or write traffic…

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#74

This is pretty standard procedure when a company gets bought. The new owners will conduct a review and decide who to keep and who to get rid of. They have probably been given a target of how many people they want to lay off and are evaluating who is worth keeping. It’s not worth staying at a company that gets acquired, you’ll either get laid off or be asked to do the same work with less people, and awful morale.

Respectfully, very little of this seems to be operating by standard procedure. Have you seen the incoming CEO ask people to bring printouts of their code, ever?

A Twitter engineer walks into a programming interview.

Interviewer: So this is just a quick question to warm up with. Imagine you have to write a program that is supplied a number n and prints out, for each number in order from 1 to n, the string Fizz if it is a multiple of 3, the str-

Engineer: Okay, so first I'll install cups. What model of printer am I using?

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#75
post #65

I'd be pissed off if I were a TSLA stock owner. Is Twitter paying Tesla to contract out these employees for their work? Otherwise, it's tons of thousands of dollars Tesla is pissing away on behalf of the CEO's side-hustle.

You'd arguably have a case that Musk is not acting in the interest of Tesla and is using his Tesla position to enrich himself rather than the Tesla company. Exactly what the "CEO is supposed to serve shareholders" is all about.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#76

I’m still looking for a concise term for “someone who claims to be an expert but immediately reveals beyond any doubt that they have no clue what they’re saying, simply by opening their mouth on the subject.” Having Tesla engineers over to review Twitter code is definitely that. It’s ridiculous.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has referred to this concept as "epistemic arrogance". In "The Black Swan", Taleb defines it the following way:

> Epistemic arrogance: Measure the difference between what someone actually knows and how much he thinks he knows. An excess will imply arrogance, a deficit humility. An epistemocrat is someone of epistemic humility, who holds his own knowledge in greatest suspicion.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#77
post #57

Surprised how sceptical all the comments here are. Dick or not the guy has a talent for building companies

Or Twitter was run incompetently since its founding. We wouldn't be in this shit show if Twitter wasn't a disaster to begin with.

Edit: Grammar

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#78
post #65

I'd be pissed off if I were a TSLA stock owner. Is Twitter paying Tesla to contract out these employees for their work? Otherwise, it's tons of thousands of dollars Tesla is pissing away on behalf of the CEO's side-hustle.

I'm not pissed and I am a stockholder.

To me it makes a lot of sense. I doubt they are reviewing the entire code base. It seems like Elon is particularly interested in the automated systems that control content and detect bots. To that end, Tesla has a lot of expertise in AI systems.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#79
post #65

I'd be pissed off if I were a TSLA stock owner. Is Twitter paying Tesla to contract out these employees for their work? Otherwise, it's tons of thousands of dollars Tesla is pissing away on behalf of the CEO's side-hustle.

I’m a TSLA holder and I don’t mind at all. The everyday minutiae don’t concern me as long as the big picture for Tesla is in focus and with in reach

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#80

I’m still looking for a concise term for “someone who claims to be an expert but immediately reveals beyond any doubt that they have no clue what they’re saying, simply by opening their mouth on the subject.” Having Tesla engineers over to review Twitter code is definitely that. It’s ridiculous.

I don't know about the Tesla engineers, but printing out code is a great hallmark.
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