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

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

#221

Post by cududa »

pifm_guy wrote: post #44
DabbyDabberson wrote: post #20

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.

It's really noticeable that work on site at spacex really ramps up before an Elon visit, and then pretty much stops when he leaves again. If he doesn't visit for a few weeks, nothing gets done.

Alternative theory:

They save all the "stuff that requires physical activity" to when he visits, some of it for show, and actually are doing the real work when he's not there. It's hilarious to think that what you can see from the fence line, constitutes an assessment of what work is being done

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

#222

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

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?"

Here's a different take. I was a Staff Engineer at one job. Want to know what my best work one year was? An outsourcing contract I spent a few months negotiating.

Any code I checked (that year anyway) in paled in comparison to the value I added by doing that.

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

#223

Post by errantmind »

I'm no Elon fan, but why does essentially everyone in these threads automatically assume he is wrong?

Has no one here worked at companies where there was more dead weight than talent? Where 80% of the work being done is by 20% of the people, and there are whole teams that do almost nothing?

What if there is no clean, efficient way to discover who should be fired and so Elon's fallback plan is to test for who really wants to continue working for the company vs. who is apathetic?

I'm not saying it will necessarily work, but I'm also not going to assume he is grossly incompetent either.

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

#224

Post by ProjectArcturis »

adventured wrote: post #152
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.

That's not what Elon thinks based on his actions. 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's definitely the bet he's making. I think most of the best people will leave because they can make the same money working normal hours. He'll end up with those who can't find another job, those stuck at Twitter because of visas, and some unknown percentage of his desired "hardcore" employees.

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

#225

Post by gigel82 »

Comments talking about how Musk will look at those screenshots of code and somehow determine an employee's worth are hilarious.

This obviously has nothing to do with evaluating a developer's quality; this is a classic move dictators do to determine who has chugged the kool-aid all the way (who are the most loyal and subservient underlings willing to demean themselves to this level). Nothing more, nothing less.

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

#226

Post by qbasic_forever »

kibwen wrote: post #117
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?"

From screenshots ? There's no way that Musk has any ability to judge the quality of a programmer based on "up to 10" screenshots of code entirely divorced from its context, especially since he is not a programmer and has no experience whatsoever with any of Twitter's codebases.

Yeah that's wild, so you have like maybe 80-150 lines per shot to prove your worth. What is he looking for, algorithm interview tricks like a quick sort or graph traversal? He's in for a shock when he learns most coding isn't what is done in interviews--I bet most Twitter engineer's best work would look like some ugly tangle of complex syncronization logic to allow highly parallel processing. Fast, efficient code isn't always nice to look at or read.

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

#227

Post by MarkMarine »

Barrin92 wrote: post #76
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 literally just some bizarre hazing ritual. Trying to evaluate whether code is good or bad from some screenshots without understanding the context and being familiar with the codebase makes no sense anyway. Anyone can show you ten screenshots of formally well written code and you have no idea whether it's useless or not.

how many commits of the fast inverse square root are being added to twitter's codebase right now, you think?

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

#228

Post by Terretta »

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?"

> A lot of Seniors/Staff don't write "code". They're architecting/planning/guiding.

This is a problem.

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

#229

Post by cesaref »

moonchrome wrote: post #192
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I've found it to formalise the realisation that there are a number of developers who are hands on and keep the stuff running in production, and rather than employ another bunch to do this, it might make more sense to just leave the developers to it.

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

#230

Post by dont__panic »

xwdv wrote: post #177
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.

Software Engineers aren’t doing things all the time but there is a tremendous amount of company knowledge and experience locked up in them. You basically pay to keep them employed for when you need them. They are paid for value not hours.

Well said. I think this is where the 4-day work week and WFH pushes in the software industry get their momentum: most of us don't need to work 40 hours in an office with a manager looking over our shoulder to provide that value.
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