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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

#241

Post by khazhoux »

piva00 wrote: post #143
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?"

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…

In this hypothetical, did the staff engineer do anything besides attend meetings in the last 12 months? Did they write any code, or design docs, or actually contribute anything?

Elon’s a jerk, but this thread seems to be full of people saying “I deliver value even though I can’t actually demonstrate any evidence of it.”

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

#242

Post by josefresco »

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.

> "Elon is a great engineer"

Even his "physics degree" is apparently BS

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

#243

Post by gizmo »

zamalek wrote: post #10

I can barely believe this man started a spaceflight company. He must have had some incredibly subordinates to pull that off; not only did they have to deal with him, but they also had to bootstrap spaceflight.

His ability to attract top tier talent and work them hard is second to none. And frankly, many great engineers want to work hard and want to work with other great engineers who want to work hard on something that matters for society. That rules out most Silicon Valley startups.

Electric cars and SpaceX are intrinsically cool to work on, but it remains to be seen whether working on "Twitter 2.0" will be interesting enough for Elon to attract enough talent.

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

#244

Post by Teandw »

DimitriPetrova wrote: post #5
radicaldreamer wrote: post #4

Feels like Elon has gotten a bizarre conspiracy into his head where there are phantom employees on the payroll or something...

The entire payroll team resigned yesterday so that's probably correct for the moment.

Might have all resigned because they knew the days of them riding the gravy train were over. It's hard to put any meaning to that without knowing more detail.

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

#245

Post by golem14 »

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…

But will the remaining eng be what he wants?

I assume he already laid off most h1bs, who would say and do anything to not get deported but might not be the best engineers.

Still, the people that claim to work 'hardcore' might just say that. They might survive for 3 months, which is how much severance they are forfeiting.

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

#246

Post by drchopchop »

errantmind wrote: post #223

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 w…

That would make more sense if 1) he had a coherent plan 2) he could motivate the good 20% to stick around 3) he had some way to differentiate high vs low performers.

Instead, he now gets an effectively random layoff, with potentially whole/important teams vanishing, and biased so that the best people (who can easily find jobs) are most incentivized to leave.

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

#247

Post by qwytw »

khazhoux wrote: post #153
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?"

In an org with thousands of software engineers, shouldn’t most of them be writing code? Feels like everyone wants to be the exception, and just assumes “someone else” should do actual hands-on work

It's the other way around, The smaller the org the more lines per code you would expected per engineer. Scaling codebases is hard.

> Feels like everyone wants to be the exception

Right. You can easily write 10x the number of lines than an average engineer and create negative value for the product.

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

#248

Post by thinkingemote »

cududa wrote: post #151
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.

Went to confirm this for myself and: lol. Also, poke around the loaded JS - most certainly not minified

theres a bunch of interesting strings too. Things about being a super follower and users being paid for that. Uploading 1080p video

""Support your favourite people on Twitter for bonus content and extra perks.""

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

#249

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

khazhoux wrote: post #153
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?"

In an org with thousands of software engineers, shouldn’t most of them be writing code? Feels like everyone wants to be the exception, and just assumes “someone else” should do actual hands-on work

No, and this is a core misunderstanding of the profession.

The job of software engineers is to design and implement solutions to business problems with technology. The job of a software engineer is not merely "write code." Writing code will almost certainly be the smallest percentage of a skilled engineer's time. They need to be spending their time thinking and designing.

We're talking about solving extreme scaling problems at extreme scales here, not churning out crud apps at a local freelance studio.

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

#250

Post by yunwal »

riskable wrote: post #162
jnwatson wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of staff devs do nothing but coordinate and plan technology.

That's not "doing nothing" it's "doing bureaucracy" and IMHO it's a lot more mentally exhausting than coding. Imagine if every hour of every work day in your calendar is full of various forms of "planning" meetings. How are you supposed to write code and attend all this nonsense at the same time? You can't. To be fair it sure feels like doing nothing but employers consider it necessary and a job that only senior peop…

I've been in one of these jobs before, and it's certainly exhausting. I'm not necessarily convinced it's useful though. It always seemed like a lot of planning and replanning of work that prevented anything from actually getting done.
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