151–160 of 683 posts
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.
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.
He's trying to decimate the workforce on purpose, although it's not going as smoothly as he hoped from outside appearances. He wants huge numbers of Twitter employees to quit, and he has been very clearly laying out the terms for behavior for the type of people he would like to run Twitter with. He's intentionally shaking the tree violently. He's hoping that the types that remain will be his types of employees. He's going to try to rebuild the workforce starting from those, so it's his company in ethos / function.
He thinks Twitter can run with far fewer engineers, and drastically fewer staff overall, than what it was operating with previously. He knows the value of engineers, he has made that part clear: he plainly said that engineers are most of what is important about Twitter, not the rest of the staff, he said it should be an engineer heavy company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?"
A lot of Seniors/Staff don't write "code". They're architecting/planning/guiding. If I'm a Senior Staff DevOps engineer who maintains our entire Kube infra, am I gonna show Elon some sweet YAML configs? "Oh here's my Go templating for our org wide Helm charts that isn't really novel but is really important?"
Feels like everyone wants to be the exception, and just assumes “someone else” should do actual hands-on work
Even as long-time skeptic of Musk's ballyhooed business/engineering acumen, I have no clue what's going on here. Surely nobody at this level could be this brazenly incompetent when it comes to communicating a vision and building some sense of unity. Even the biggest fakers in the world are self-aware about the importance of maintaining the illusion of power and control. If you had told me that these emails were being…
Qualifications make the people suffer less but historically have never been required for leaders in any venue. In Europe awful kings were simply born to the throne and people had to accept it, for example. We remember ‘X the Cruel’ but none of their subjects.
The victors write the history books.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People I know at SpaceX are terrified of him. They all secretly track when he comes into the office, and actively hide from him.
Isn't that true of most CEOs though? When a CEO comes around, you have nothing to gain and your entire employment to lose. Edit: The point is not that we all reside in toxic workplaces. The point is that there is no upside to interacting with a CEO. A parallel situation might be giving a loaded pistol with a child. In that case, the upside is that they now have one thousand and one chew toys instead of one thousand.…
Just because people are scared of the CEO doesn't mean most CEOs weaponize this into a tool of micromanagement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I've read the past few weeks, Elon is mostly just a figurehead at SpaceX at this point and it seems like only his cultural presence (read: making everyone work long hours) is still around. Not sure about Tesla but it seems like it's about the same besides very high level business direction decisions.
I really don't get why corporations in this day and age still make people work long hours. There have been countless studies showing that long hours lead to more mistakes, worse productivity, decreased motivation, worse health, and burnout. Workers are also more likely to leave for a job with a better work/life balance if given the chance. It seems many corporate execs haven't gotten the message yet, and I don't know…
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?"
You could probably fit his committed code for the last 6 months on one page, confuse it for a junior dev's output, and yet firing him would kneecap the team. Other people know individual parts of what he knows, but the value of having one person who knows them all in immeasurable.
I can't imagine a place at Twitter scale didn't have similar individuals.
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 --
EDIT: I assure you, this made sense in response to the non-stock part of the now-edited-away parent comment. :D
... but maybe if he got a medical diagnosis for insanity, maybe he could not have legally bought twitter ?