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.
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If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
321–330 of 683 posts
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#322I 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…
Yeah, I read this as a stunt to sift out the people who are confident in their abilities and contributions from those who just kind of show up and do some minor edits.
I have no idea how many people get through the code interviews at Big Tech and then think they've proved their value and just phone it in, but I guarantee it's not zero.
If I have any particular concern it's that this sort of thing misses some real unsung heroes in any big technical project, i.e. the people who write good documentation and the people who chase down bugfixes. This is important work, but won't be captured by screenshots of code very well. "Here's a screenshot of where I fixed an off-by-one error, but it took two weeks of unraveling 137 microservices to find which RPC was guilty." Important, but not exactly impressive in the way one might think.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#323I have to assume there's a website up somewhere that's putting Twitter on death watch. Who has it's location and if it isn't up, someone should try and get one going! (In reference to systemic software issues, not employees leaving even though there is correlation).
istwitterdown.com
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#324Comments 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.
> demean themselves to this level I guess we have different definitions of what's actually demeaning.
If you think Elon's behavior towards Twitter employees since the takeover isn't abusive and demeaning then we absolutely have different definitions of the word!
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#325I 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…
No sane infrastructure team will answer „easily“ to that question. Things break, all of the time. And infra will need developer input to figure out some of the breakage, let alone fix it. And that‘s not even considering deliberate attacks, fixes for critical security/stability issues etc.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#326Comments 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.
> demean themselves to this level I guess we have different definitions of what's actually demeaning.
As a 30 year software veteran, I'd find it pretty demeaning to be called into a lineup where my CEO was going to judge me based on a verbal quiz about my past 6 months of code and 10 screenshots, and likely fire people based on that assessment.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#327I'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 understand wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt, but his decision making around twitter has basically been disastrous from the start.
1. Bought the company at an overinflated price and tried to back out, but was ultimately forced by the court to buy it
2. Half baked rollout of the twitter blue which caused brands to flee the platform after major reputation damage.
3. Laying off half the company, and then having an uncapped layoff of remaining individuals (probably violated labor law, by placing the voluntary layoff days after the top down layoff, he had 0 control over the effects, which by some reports has meant 88% of people no longer work at the firm)
5. Company was purchased with 12B in debt, meaning he has 1-2B/year in debt payments alone, meaning a path to profitability is challenging.
6. Has had to go back to critical workers to try and retain them.
outside of the leveraged buyout, I’m not grading him on assumptions, but rather the ways in which his actions don’t seem to align with his stated goals.
He wanted a reduction of 75%, may have gotten 88% He wanted no WFH, he had to roll that back He wanted to verify for money, he (effectively) had to roll that back. He wanted to grow revenue, and it’s declined. He didn’t want to buy the company and was then forced to do so.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#328Earlier 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?
Unless his plan is to destroy the value of Twitter (such as it is) then his actions do not suggest a coherent plan.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#329Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I highly doubt the majority of engineers who are actually good at what they do would be willing to remain in such a toxic environment Musk is creating. Also so far he has displayed very little understanding of what engineers actually do (the bring you screenshots thing and the way he responded to one of them correcting him on Twitter and a bunch of other cases don't paint the brightest picture).
I make no wager on whether he can actually reach what he's trying to achieve. Rather, I'm merely proposing what I think he's doing / why he's doing it.
I don't think he can run Twitter very effectively out of San Francisco going forward, after his behavior. He'll try to run it out of Texas instead.