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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

#281

Post by JohnBooty »

khazhoux wrote: post #170
kibwen wrote: post #117

Earlier 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’s surely this. Unless he’s even more clueless about this than I think he is…. this is his feckless way of figuring out who does what.

I’m guessing the screenshots themselves will be less relevant than their owners’ description of what the depicted code actually does.

This is all very dumb and I’m not defending the way he’s doing this.

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

#282

Post by martin_a »

331c8c71 wrote: post #193
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?

The linked article quotes a mail where Musk asks to see "the most salient lines of code".

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

#283

Post by Teandw »

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.

Where did he say that he will evaluate if the code is good or bad? He didn't. It's more likely just a way to see what employees think is their most important work.

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

#284

Post by makestuff »

jvanderbot wrote: post #211
makestuff wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You'd be surprised how much space/robotics is just analytics and reporting. But I get the sentiment. If you want to get into robotics, coursera courses and some ML knowledge can go a long way in today's hiring market.

Yeah that makes sense, maybe the grass is always greener, but I think even if I was doing reporting pipelines at a robotics company I would enjoy it more than the reporting pipeline I currently work on in the adtech industry.

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

#285

Post by plorg »

nerdjon wrote: post #85

Does this mean he is actually looking to do more firings After the massive exodus yesterday?!? This is just... Honestly at this point this is just fascinating to watch from the outside and I feel bad for everyone impacted. Particularly those that had no choice but to stay (Visa's)

For better or worse I would assume the opposite: a great number of the engineering leads are gone and he's looking for people to replace them. If that's the case, though, just being an epic coder will not necessarily make you successful as a leader.

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

#286

Post by selimthegrim »

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…

So Twitter is the movie Mother?

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

#287

Post by qwytw »

khazhoux wrote: post #241
piva00 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.”

No. They're saying it's impossible to demonstrate in 10 random screenshots with code lines in it. Not if Musk asked for Powerpoint presentations...

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

#288

Post by nemo44x »

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…

It's pretty much what they have been doing since the acquisition. It's based on 80/20 rule thinking and is taught in MBA programs.

First they dropped orgs and teams they just didn't find useful any longer like large swaths of the HR team, marketing, etc. Then they asked leaders to identify the bottom ~30% of performers and culled them.

Now you're left with the "better half" of the company. But Musk isn't through yet - he needs to identify of that remaining 50% who the top performers are. So he created a variety of things to do to locate the people that get things done and those that have silently quit or are just resting on their reputations from previous accomplishments.

Now that you've identified the top talent you let everyone else know they can stay or go. This is the loyalty test to see who is culturally compatible and is invested in the mission. to many it comes off as crass and hurried and unplanned, but the entire point is to create an easy exit for people.

Musk has done all this rapidly and aggressively, but none of it is weird. He is unique in that he has access to resources others don't and answers to no one which can be good or bad. The end goal is he must believe that there's a solid core and a lot of rotten culture around it. Get rid of that and give that core the resources they need to succeed. Twitter will be hiring a lot of people in the coming months and this core of people will be doing the recruiting.

We'll see if this plan works!

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

#289

Post by pschuegr »

This is a great way to reduce the workforce to high-performing junior staff and people who like to build code castles.

A better way to find high performers would be "send me an email summarizing the code that you've deleted and why".

(Not saying that doesn't have it's own problems, there's ultimately no substitute for understanding)

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

#290

Post by [deleted] »

erulabs wrote: post #270

I 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 t…

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