While weird, that is probably the time and place where employees will get some equity or cash to stay on.
If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
261–270 of 683 posts
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Plus he could just search for that code in the repo to get the overall context, he probably has access :)
Musk is the guy who couldn't figure out how to run a python script not so long ago so it's doubtful.
Also it's really not something a CEO in a company of such size should be doing...
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does he get away with doing almost nothing? Why can't he be fired?
Lots of staff devs do nothing but coordinate and plan technology.
It seems like a lot of replies to this are reading it as "Lots of staff devs do nothing; they just coordinate and plan technology".
Another way to read this is as saying coordination and planning are the job. They "do nothing but", as in "only do".
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#264Earlier 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.
or that the theatre is only on when its only audience member is seated?
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ben Horowitz write this thing about wartime vs peace time ceos and I think it was particularly salient: https://hbr.org/2011/04/peacetime-ceos-vs-wartime-ceos For a long time tech was eating the world and the more engineers you had the more likely you were to accidentally walk into a massive piece of the pie (the google model). Now things are more mature and there’s probably just less opportunity to do that. But real…
> For a long time tech was eating the world and the more engineers you had the more likely you were to accidentally walk into a massive piece of the pie (the google model). Now things are more mature and there’s probably just less opportunity to do that. Might be true, just easily might not be. Seems too uncertain to draw conclusions. Like, why didn't this happen ten years ago? Twenty? OK, take those explanations. Wh…
Maybe they could? I’d love to see it, I love the engineering friendly culture, But we do seem to be a in a lull.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It’s probably more of a filter to see who can’t even come up with 10 examples of work they’ve delivered over the course of a year. I do a lot of code reviews, and it’s very obvious who on the team barely churns out useful code —- even just from the low density and volume of their code.
run a git blame on any file and you're likely to see a dozen or more people touching it. You would need a large chunk of freshly-written code unmolested by your coworkers. And what's that even going to prove? You're not inventing any novel algorithm. You're going to write whatever code your PM wanted written to support whatever stupid features or A/B test they wanted done. And Elon's going to sit there and judge the worth of that? Based on what metric?
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It’s probably more of a filter to see who can’t even come up with 10 examples of work they’ve delivered over the course of a year. I do a lot of code reviews, and it’s very obvious who on the team barely churns out useful code —- even just from the low density and volume of their code.
It must be amazing to have such good will that even batshit crazy behavior is rationalized as somehow reasonable. Elon's going off the deep end.
The primary role of leadership is to feed tasks and guidance to skilled people who your organization has selected based on known temperament and skillset.
If you run a software company and don't know you employ who can code you are at titanic slipping beneath the waves status still calling on skilled ship designers.
It's done he burned 44B by being a bad leader.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
At my last exit interview, my CEO was asking me how he could improve his understanding of the engineering team. I threw out the idea that he could meet with people for 15 minutes on a rotation. He explained that he couldn't do that without terrifying people. Just because people are scared of the CEO doesn't mean most CEOs weaponize this into a tool of micromanagement.
It's a sad comment on the corporate world that so many are terrified of those they work for.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#269I'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.
he had a coherent plan
So if he doesn't share his actual plan with you, the media, and his competitors, he doesn't have a plan?
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#270I think people miss the point with the "tell me what code you've written in the last 6 months" task. The idea is hopefully not to qualitatively quantify anyones work - the idea is to find folks who have nothing whatsoever to show, and yet have titles like "staff software engineer". Anyone who has worked at a large enough company knows there is a solid 10-15% of folks doing nothing. The new leadership probably asked the infrastructure team if they could keep the site online if all development stopped, and they probably said "easily". I don't think twitter is in any risk of disappearing - the real question is if velocity can be regained or not.