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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

#351

Post by FireBeyond »

someguy212 wrote: post #8

Guess that means the office is no longer closed. I just hope whoever processes severance checks is still working.

> I just hope whoever processes severance checks is still working.

In the dotcom era, I was in the middle of a mass layoff. At the meeting, "everybody go back to your desk and dial extension 1234, and you will get a message with your employment status, instructions and next steps".

PBX crashed.

PBX took a while being brought back up because, well, the people responsible for supporting it wanted to find out whether _they_ were some of those laid off before deciding whether they wanted to bring it back up.

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

#352

Post by [deleted] »

b112 wrote: post #269
drchopchop wrote: post #246

Earlier 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?

[deleted]

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

#353

Post by tppiotrowski »

gigel82 wrote: post #225

Comments 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.

Interesting. I find git blame sufficient to assess engineering talent on a shared code base. Sometimes I read through a file and there's clarity and other times it's spaghetti. The ones who write with clarity are the ones I want my desk next to. Sometimes they are not even the ones that management is promoting.

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

#354

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

DabbyDabberson wrote: post #20
castrodd wrote: post #9

Did Elon lead his other companies this way and we just didn’t know? Or has he suddenly lost his ability to make good decisions?

People I know at SpaceX are terrified of him. They all secretly track when he comes into the office, and actively hide from him.

That sounds like what I've heard about Steve Jobs.

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

#355

Post by cowuser666 »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #123
Teandw wrote: post #78

Earlier 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?"

A lot of Seniors/Staff don't write "code". They're architecting/planning/guiding. If I'm a Senior Staff DevOps engineer who maintains our entire Kube infra, am I gonna show Elon some sweet YAML configs? "Oh here's my Go templating for our org wide Helm charts that isn't really novel but is really important?"

Counterpoint: yes?

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

#356

Post by FireBeyond »

mmcgaha wrote: post #119

If he is trying to cut staff, it would be easier to just institute a drug policy and fire everyone who tests positive. That is going to hit about 25% in any company that isn't already doing drug tests.

Yeah, I'm amused when people say he's all liberal/libertarian.

The only person allowed to smoke weed at a Musk company is Musk. Everyone else better piss clean.

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

#357

Post by JansjoFromIkea »

helen___keller wrote: post #309
gigel82 wrote: post #225

Comments 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.

The game industry manages it because a lot of people dream of making games, in the same way as I'm sure Tesla and SpaceX have a lot of extremely dedicated employees because the work they're doing is literally a life long dream.

There's some very interesting things to solve and achieve at a platform like Twitter but I doubt very many people have had them as life long targets for themselves to achieve.

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

#358

Post by pmoriarty »

colechristensen wrote: post #203
rchaud wrote: post #81

Even as long-time skeptic of Musk's ballyhooed business/engineering acumen, I have no clue what's going on here. Surely nobody at this level could be this brazenly incompetent when it comes to communicating a vision and building some sense of unity. Even the biggest fakers in the world are self-aware about the importance of maintaining the illusion of power and control. If you had told me that these emails were being…

I think what happens is his strange behavior is proportional to how little he sleeps. He has a spectrum between mildly unusual to full Kanye. While I'm usually not in favor of professional unions for programmers, I think that's the only option at Twitter at this point unless people are ready to quit en mass.

It would actually be really interesting if the remaining staff at Twitter tried forming a union at this juncture.

How many more of his employees would Musk be willing to fire or make enemies over this without completely ruining the shell of a company he still owns?

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

#359

Post by ferrumfist »

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #249
khazhoux wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an org with thousands of software engineers, shouldn’t most of them be writing code? Feels like everyone wants to be the exception, and just assumes “someone else” should do actual hands-on work

No, and this is a core misunderstanding of the profession. The job of software engineers is to design and implement solutions to business problems with technology. The job of a software engineer is not merely "write code." Writing code will almost certainly be the smallest percentage of a skilled engineer's time. They need to be spending their time thinking and designing. We're talking about solving extreme scaling p…

Junior/Mid Perspective: "I was hired to write code, sometimes I solve business problems"

Senior/Staff's Perspective: "I was hired to solve business problems, sometimes I write code"

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

#360

Post by 62951413 »

curiousgeorgio wrote: post #237

Elon 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).…

Now imagine him dropping the leetcode hazing too. That would seal the deal.
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