I don’t know fellas, this Elon guy sounds pretty based to me.
All snark aside, I can sympathize with his request. Every company does this, he’s asking for people to show they’ve been productive.
If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
301–310 of 683 posts
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#30210 years ago I was at a place where a new CEO came in and fired 80% of the tech team. It was a hard scramble for the surviving engineers, including me, and we had some episodes of being down, but we pulled through it and the site survived. I think a balanced view of Twitter right now is that Elon Musk has made some mistakes, but in the end, Twitter will be fine, and in 6 months it might be more profitable than ever b…
> more profitable than ever before.
Not if all the big advertisers leave...
> In 6 months all of the advertisers will have returned
Why? If the economy declines ad spending will fall and the industry is more competitive than ever, it's a buyers market. Also most seem to have left because they didn't want to be associated with Musk rather than due to technical/policy issues with Twitter itself.
> his roll out of subscription features will be slower than he wanted
Which is probably a good thing for Twitter, would move it to the pros parts.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#303Man, people are so assumptive and negative about one of the world's greatest innovators today. Hasn't he earned any respect? I know layoffs are really tough but does anyone really believe there was no reason for them at Twitter? He's got a tough task in front of him and getting to the barebones team of mission driven people seems like a plausible first step towards a better tomorrow. The assumption that only the worst employees will stay seems odd to me, I would bet that there's some population of employees that believe in their new ceo and believe what he is doing is necessary for a chance at a thriving company.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#304I'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…
>I'm no Elon fan, but why does essentially everyone in these threads automatically assume he is wrong?
Have you seen any move these past weeks that can potentially be constructed as a good idea, without invoking a brilliant master plan that nobody else understands?
Occam’s razor, etc.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#305I 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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Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#306Elon 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.
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.
And nearly every decision he's made has driven away Twitter's best developers, who could probably be useful in reducing the headcount in an efficient and non-shambolic fashion.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#307I'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…
> 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?
That's presumably what he thinks he's selecting for, but is it really? In my experience on sinking ships the least useful people are the ones who often stick around longer, simply because they're worried they can't easily find another job.
That aside, I'm not sure that willingness to submit to the whims of Musk (and be really hardcore or whatever) correlates in any way with actual capability to contribute. Even if it does, the trait is unlikely to be distributed evenly across the myriad departments in Twitter, so in the best case it's going to impact certain parts of the business disproportionately.
But realistically, my gut check is that selecting for sycophants and masochists is more likely to leave you with a bunch of dysfunctional psychopaths than it is to leave you with highly competent contributors.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#308Earlier 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?"
Totally agree. As distasteful as Elon’s process may be, at the end of the day all of us making boatloads of money should be able to point to our results and deliverables. If an engineer is making $200k and wrote a couple hundred lines of code all year, that’s probably a problem. Certainly, only a relatively few people should have the valid excuse that their work doesn’t involve writing code.
I can show you my results and deliverables all you want, but they're definitely not going to be measured in the number lines on code in a screenshot. Come on, you know this
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#309Comments 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.
He's trying to build a culture of engineer abuse.
I'm sure he'll succeed in building it. The game industry manages it, for example. You can abuse and burn out engineers if that's what you really want.
That said, I wouldn't say abused engineers are particularly more productive. He can work them 9/9/6 while he's at it, I don't think that'll help Twitter succeed.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
When has Elon not shared a plan? He tends to announce everything before they've even started working on.