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

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

#191

Post by Terretta » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:53 PM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #169

Teandw wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're misunderstanding the situation. It's not that ALL software engineers don't do anything. It's that Twitter has so much staff, you start to question what can they all actually be doing. If someone had 10 people cleaning a small apartment every day, you'd question what were they actually doing. That wouldn't make sense.

Conversely, if you had 7,000 people cleaning an apartment occupied by a few million people across the globe, that might make some sense. There's no doubt that Twitter could be leaner than it was as of September, but haphazardly firing employees at random and alienating the most employable of the remainder into resignation is not the way to go about it. He could have spent a few months getting to know the place, but d…

Not if all few million people live in the same few variants of one apartment, and the same cleanup cleaned all of them.

TBC, talking about the code part.

There's another Twitter, which is not code, but guest and resident services. Your example holds there.

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

#192

Post by moonchrome » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:53 PM UTC

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #123

Teandw wrote: post #78

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?"

Do you actually write software then ? In practice I've found DevOps to mean "sysadmins who know how to write scripts and understand enough development process to be supportive".

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

#193

Post by 331c8c71 » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:53 PM UTC

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…

I am lost. Where did Musk say anything about fanciness of the code? Or is it your interpretation of what he said?

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

#194

Post by vasco » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:53 PM UTC

disintegore wrote: post #145

Tenoke wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they stopped builds, should be stable. All the infrastructure I've ever worked with has been the most stable when developers aren't pushing to production. 95% or more of incidents are caused by deployments. If you send everyone home, and things autoscale, it can stay up for a good while without SRE or similar functions having to do something.

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

#195

Post by tonetheman » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:53 PM UTC

r721 wrote: post #104

Animats wrote: post #53

Does Twitter have a management team right now? Who are the top 5 people there? Does anyone know? Musk can't do it all.

According to Vox: "Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, Sriram Krishnan, Alex Spiro, Jared Birchall" https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/11/12/23452396/elon-musk-twi...

I would not want to be on that list.

If it does tank they were part of it.

Hopefully somewhere in the twitter headquarter they are yelling at him to stop. It would be great once times passes to hear their side.

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

#196

Post by makestuff » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:53 PM UTC

jvanderbot wrote: post #125

Kon-Peki wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently when they first met, she gave him a dressing down and told him a bunch of things he needed to do to be successful. He then tracked her down and hired her to do all the things.

Right, you don't build a spaceflight / rocket company in a vacuum, or from scratch as a software engineer. He poached top talent and got the job done from the bank and his twitter account. Not that I'm knocking that (it worked!), but the "Elon is a great engineer" trope is questionable. Look: http://larsblackmore.com/ That's the kind of person who makes spacex successful.

Unrelated but I wish the market/VC/wallstreet put more value into hardware. I know why they never will (lower margins and harder to scale) but as an engineer I would much rather work on something like space ships or automation in robotics over just another internal reporting service that is being rebuilt just to deliver a report in 1 hour instead of 1 day.

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

#197

Post by whatever1 » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:53 PM UTC

Capitalist learns the hard way that his company is worth nothing without its labor

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

#198

Post by deckard1 » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:54 PM UTC

drewbeck wrote: post #110

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.

The "conspiracy" in that case is poor management and oversight, not slacker devs. One of the (many) aspects of this that Elon has not grasped.

the whole thing really does feel like when VW tried to blame engineers for their emissions scandal. Engineers do not set hiring goals or vision for the company. They are not responsible for coming up with features. Yet they are getting 100% of the blame right now.

This is really about two things. 1) Twitter can't afford the debt burdens Elon put on them and 2) Elon really resents being forced to buy a company he does not want and is sticking it to people in the most asinine way possible.

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

#199

Post by johannes1234321 » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:54 PM UTC

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?

A difference is that with SpaceX and Tesla he was involved in the growth as CEO.

With Twitter he is an outsider coming in to a company serving a very different market, with existing structures and projects he can't know about.

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

#200

Post by Benanov » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:54 PM UTC

I don't even know why one would bother. Oh you want me to justify my job? I have a better idea - how about you try to find someone else to do what I was doing, without my help.

Good luck!

--I don't work at Twitter