If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from this whole debacle, it’s that US employment law is fucked. I can’t believe worker protections are so poor in such a forward thinking, modern country. The things he’s getting away with sound like something out of a Victorian factory.
If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
331–340 of 683 posts
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#332Earlier 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.”
Yes, of course they did: design docs, RFCs, some PoCs to validate assumptions on small scale, etc. that's all part of a staff engineer job.
Now the question is: does Elon have enough technical expertise (or access to such) to be able to judge if a collection of assorted 10 screenshots without context of some GDoc pages, some shoddy PoC code and comments on RFCs is up to par with his bar of what a Staff Software Engineer title should produce? I highly doubt it.
It's not about showing evidence of work, it's that technical work can differ so much depending on context and constraints that it's impossible to demonstrate its value in such a reductive way, it's simple and clear stupidity to even ask to be demonstrated that way.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#333Did Elon lead his other companies this way and we just didn’t know? Or has he suddenly lost his ability to make good decisions?
His history at X.com and then PayPal is definitely of someone who tried pushing their own technical delusions down the throats of other technical people, there he got fired for it. It seems minor now but at the time he was pushing for PayPal's tech stack to ditch Linux and use a Microsoft stack instead. Peter Thiel backstabbed him to oust him for that. I know someone that works at Tesla and they say that when Elon co…
Yup, at PayPal, as CEO, it was "it's cool and all you have this working prototype of PayPal, but really, I think it should be Windows and ASP, so let's start fresh."
Board of Directors: "We're not going to do that".
I don't think it was backstabbing on Thiel's part (though I despise the man, personally) - there was very little in the way of cogent argument beyond Musk not really knowing Linux at the time. And to be clear, he wasn't CEO because he was a founder/PayPal was his idea/his technical vision and direction - he was only CEO because he was the largest shareholder of the two companies when they merged.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#334Imagine thinking you can judge anything about a developer (especially Senior/Staffs) from screenshots of code. Elon has truly lost the plot.
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?"
> It's hardly losing the plot to ask someone "What have you achieved and what do you think your best work is?
that's not what's being asked, they're asking for screenshots of code. Which is not the same.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#335Elon is a genius - seriously. Having worked at similar companies myself, I have a pretty good sense for how this went down (mostly speculation of course): • On day 1, Elon probably talked privately with some of the head engineers at Twitter. He told them he wanted to trim the fat, and asked them how much could be cut while basically keeping the lights on and the website up (accepting some risk of temporary outages).…
Past performance does not make every action an individual does correct.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#336I 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…
Yes, we all know that the bigger the software creature's title is, the more lines of code the creature must leave behind. Jeff Dean is well known for changing hundreds of thousands of lines a day! he has a whole team of reviewers just following him around and LGTMing his mighty trail.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#337I'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…
The problem is not that Elon is getting rid of the dead weight, but in the fact that he seems to be alienating the good talent in the process.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#338I 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…
> the idea is to find folks who have nothing whatsoever to show, and yet have titles like "staff software engineer".
Shouldn't that have been the idea *before* they laid off half the employees?
How fucking idiotic of a leader do you have to be to lay off half the company and *then* try and figure out who is producing literally nothing of value?
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#339What if Twitter actually succeeds after this? I'm not saying that it's likely, but what if? Let's imagine it as a thought exercise. What will this say about the current state of software engineering in startups and big techs?
He's not doing anything unusual - he's just doing ti very aggressively and quickly. He dropped the bottom 50% as reported on by managers and now he has identified the best of that 50% and asked everyone else to either commit or get out. This is standard operating procedure but it is usually done over the course of many months to over a year instead of like 1 month in this case.
If it works then I think senior managers will be more willing to reorg quickly and build from the solid core.
However, I'm not sure it will change most things at most places. Managers love headcount more than anything. Each person under them makes them more important. Managers love this. I've had roles where I don't need anymore headcount but I was forced to add it because my managers wanted more headcount.
Worst case, we'll have profitable tech companies far earlier in the lifecycle.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#340Now he's saying that he wants people to fly in to present their code to him by midnight.
On the Friday before Thanksgiving.
Into one of United's big hubs.
With 14 hours notice.
And a lot of cold fronts over the eastern seaboard.
Likely more like 10 hours with travel times and the line of potential people that are presenting.
I'm honestly gobsmacked.
Look, if you're on of those engineers and are unfortunate enough to have to go through this insane reapplication for your job on ~1/2 day's notice, then I think you owe it to the poor people that are trying to fly in to drag this thing out as long as possible and stall, Stall, STALL.