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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

#382

Elon 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.

Is it really that bizarre of a conspiracy? If you browse Blind for a day you kind of lose the faith in software engineering as a profession. People proud for making $400k while working 5 hours a week.

Why? One of my projects I saved ~14mil in one year. Youd break even on my employment after 28 years

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

#383

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.

If you took a shit-pile of code I was involved in, I could intelligently discuss the code, why it is as it is, the history, the f(possible) future, and overall have a good discussion around it.

This “code printout” talking point is just… obnoxious.

I hire this way - I don’t care about a coding interview, I care about how you think about my your work and your ability to speak to it.

I have yet to see concrete evidence of malfeasance here and yet… the circle jerk continues.

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

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the thing... Tesla and SpaceX were revolutionizing electric cars, batteries and launching humanity into the stars.

Twitter allows hot takes and racism, not exactly comparable.

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

#386

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).…

Past performance does not make every action an individual does correct.

That's true, which is why I explained why I think he's making smart moves.

Maybe he has departed from his usual trajectory towards success, but at this point (given his history), the burden of proof falls on the people who think he's lost his mind to explain precisely why they assume they know more than he does.

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

#387
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seriously wondering if this is drug related. I dont think he was always this erratic.

That single puff of a joint on JRE definitely decreased his IQ by 40-80 points.

The one that he didn't inhale?

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

#389

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…

Quoted post unavailable.

> We don’t ever, ever want B players on an A team.

Define B players.

I've hired engineers not because they are the most amazing coders, but because they are amazing at finding out what is wrong organizationally and then making the needed friends to help move things along.

I've hired engineers who are catalysts for making other engineers perform better.

I've hired engineers who wrote solid code, at a reliable speed, but whom I wouldn't describe as "brilliant". I could assign them a feature and know they'd hit the deliverable date +/- a day, every single time.

Sure I had rockstar 10x engineers, but it takes all types, and focusing on "amount of quality code churned out per hour" is only going to work in certain organizations at certain times in a company's life.

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

#390
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk is the guy who couldn't figure out how to run a python script not so long ago so it's doubtful. Also it's really not something a CEO in a company of such size should be doing...

Running a python script is hard if you're a dev but not a python dev. I got into all varieties of dependency hell on macOS last time I tried to stand up a simple python project I git cloned.

Using git might be hard as well if you hadn't done any actual development in the last 15-20 years. Understanding Twitter's codebase without having worked with it all would be a magnitude or two harder.
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