Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 683 posts

Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now

#141

Post by giraffe_lady »

castrodd wrote: post #9

Did Elon lead his other companies this way and we just didn’t know? Or has he suddenly lost his ability to make good decisions?

What do you mean "we" the information has been out there for years for anyone who wasn't trying not to see it. The racism lawsuits, the article by his ex-wife, the thai cave thing, the SEC case, his general behavior on social media and the people he publicly associates with. It paints a picture of someone who is, at best, unreliable, thin-skinned, egotistical, and reckless.

Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now

#142

Post by Macha »

Tenoke wrote: post #113
butterlesstoast wrote: post #15

Elon has this bizarre conspiracy in his head where he thinks software engineers don't do anything until he realizes they do everything. Btw, a dev build is in prod right now. Or someone forgot to minimize the JS. Tons of import map issues.

I'm a software engineer and I still suspect Twitter will be on average no worse (could be better even) with 1/3rd or less of its current engineer count.

It's current engineer count as of today, or it's current engineer count as of 2 weeks ago?

By all accounts after the layoffs, voluntary resignations in response to layoffs, and people who refused the ultimatum and so probably consider themselves laid off, it's not clear Twitter even has a skeleton crew

Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now

#143

Post by piva00 »

Teandw wrote: post #78
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #7

Imagine thinking you can judge anything about a developer (especially Senior/Staffs) from screenshots of code. Elon has truly lost the plot.

Of course you can? It's basically asking to see what you consider your best work. If you're earning 100k a year and the most important code you show is how you turned a link colour from light blue to blue -- then your $100,000 a year job has now become questionable. It's hardly losing the plot to ask someone "What have you achieved and what do you think your best work is?"

How do you expect a staff engineer in the middle of driving a multi-year project to revamp some large crufty part of the architecture to a better state, something that will pay off in 3-5 years time, be able to take screenshots of their "best work" to prove to Elon Musk they're worth it?

It's a special kind of hell, it manages to be much worse than the hell it is on having to politically push this kind of project to multiple layers of decision-making higher management to get enough buy in because it's a damn expensive project.

Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now

#144

Post by christkv »

Macha wrote: post #126
danrocks wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really that bizarre of a conspiracy? If you browse Blind for a day you kind of lose the faith in software engineering as a profession. People proud for making $400k while working 5 hours a week.

I'd suggest the problem there is reading Blind uncritically. There's at least as many trolls as serious posters

TC please

Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now

#145

Post by disintegore »

Tenoke wrote: post #113
butterlesstoast wrote: post #15

Elon has this bizarre conspiracy in his head where he thinks software engineers don't do anything until he realizes they do everything. Btw, a dev build is in prod right now. Or someone forgot to minimize the JS. Tons of import map issues.

I'm a software engineer and I still suspect Twitter will be on average no worse (could be better even) with 1/3rd or less of its current engineer count.

I'm personally surprised that with so much of the workforce gone, and internal operations being total bedlam, the only thing that went down were 2FA emails.

Someone at Twitter knew what they were doing. Let's hope they didn't get swept up.

Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now

#146

Post by makestuff »

danrocks wrote: post #89
butterlesstoast wrote: post #15

Elon has this bizarre conspiracy in his head where he thinks software engineers don't do anything until he realizes they do everything. Btw, a dev build is in prod right now. Or someone forgot to minimize the JS. Tons of import map issues.

Is it really that bizarre of a conspiracy? If you browse Blind for a day you kind of lose the faith in software engineering as a profession. People proud for making $400k while working 5 hours a week.

I don't think the issue is all on the engineers. Empire building at big tech companies is how we get to a place where some engineer can work 5-10 hours per week doing essentially nothing of value. The entire management track is set up to promote people who have X number of reports under them. A manager who makes 1b in revenue with a team of 10 will be passed up for a promotion over a team of 50 that makes 100m but looks busy.

Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now

#147

Post by Lapsa »

"most salient lines of code" - just yesterday I joked that next thing Melon gonna do is pay for amount of lines of code. I mean - it's pretty close to that. just when you think there's no way it gets more absurd, dude magically appears with new craziness :D

Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now

#148

Post by bcrosby95 »

rich_sasha wrote: post #71
MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #28

The thing I don't get is the hyper-focus on salient or "fancy" code. We're not all Jeff Dean and most code is bland and boring plumbing work anyways. Even in awesome ML powered systems, it's still 99% bland foundation, 1% cool algorithms. Hell, as a manager, you don't want only "rockstar" developers because they'll become bored working on the plumbing code, which again, is most work. From datascience there's the phra…

It's simple, Elon Musk has no clue what he is doing. Can he code.to save his life? Does he know anything about engineering from Tesla or SpaceX, beyond catchphrases?

All personal accounts I've heard of from people that work there are yes, he does know about engineering and is incredibly smart.

But that doesn't mean you know how to run a social media company, and trying to pivot Twitter's work culture on a dime is going to be chaotic.

FWIW I think he's a toxic asshole, but that doesn't mean he's an idiot.

Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now

#149

Post by duped »

jvanderbot wrote: post #96
haolez wrote: post #58

What if Twitter actually succeeds after this? I'm not saying that it's likely, but what if? Let's imagine it as a thought exercise. What will this say about the current state of software engineering in startups and big techs?

-- In this comment I said a dumb thing about stock price for a private company --

The stock can't rebound, it's a private company now. Whatever price it's available for on the private equity market will be unknown and/or fake.

Twitter stock didn't tank, it actually stayed really high because he was locked in to purchase it well beyond the market value (as the entire sector was falling). It oscillated a bit, but you couldn't really call it a tank (especially in light of how the rest of tech was doing at the time)

Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now

#150

Post by lzooz »

butterlesstoast wrote: post #15

Elon has this bizarre conspiracy in his head where he thinks software engineers don't do anything until he realizes they do everything. Btw, a dev build is in prod right now. Or someone forgot to minimize the JS. Tons of import map issues.

>Btw, a dev build is in prod right now. Or someone forgot to minimize the JS. Tons of import map issues.

That's the way it works. Maps aren't uploaded to production so they fail to load for you.

Post reply on HN