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.
Including Elon?
If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
421–430 of 683 posts
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most important person on my team can probably no longer write idiomatic code for the platform we use at this point, as the platform has moved forward while he's spent the last 6 years mostly working on high level architecture and tying together systems that range from HMI to Automotive to AI... You could probably fit his committed code for the last 6 months on one page, confuse it for a junior dev's output, and y…
Ok, so that’s one person that just needs to explain his role to the new boss. But the same excuse can’t apply to everyone on the team.
You accidentally stumbled across what everyone else has been complaining about this entire time... he fired 3,700 people in a couple of weeks!
He was asking them to print our their code and show it to a team of his engineers, that didn't exactly leave time for in-depth discussions about non-code impact.
His entire mantra has been code-is-king and claiming people's non-code work was cruft from over-engineering, so it's not exactly like he'd accept that excuse anyways.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Totally agree. But I think you would agree that a good engineer (with lots of exceptions for architects, tech lead managers, etc) should be able to look at their git history and find some nice chunks of code besides just adding comments or cleaning up imports/includes.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#424I'd love to see some code snippets that he likes.. because i can't grasp what would make good screenshots in this context. If i were Elon i'd want to see "dumb" looking code which brings together a larger, complex thing in a simple way. The larger picture is complex, but composed of simple primitives. Every piece looks unimpressive because experience taught the right abstractions to write things in a simple, testable…
yeah how much can you derive from a screenshot anyway? code formatting, variable naming? any references to classes/data structures/whatever not defined in the screenshot can't be attributed to the screenshot owner. maybe everyone is getting fired for putting '{' on a newline??? i have no idea.
In my experience, things like code formatting and style were really predictive of the person’s contributions to a team.
I’m not saying he’s making a strategically wise move. But there are potentially another 100,000 developers in this industry who are in meaningful jeopardy over their jobs, because they are truly bad at it.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
You truly wonder at this? Look at the state of the world the last few years. If you’re lucky or brazen enough they may even let you run a whole country! Qualifications make the people suffer less but historically have never been required for leaders in any venue. In Europe awful kings were simply born to the throne and people had to accept it, for example. We remember ‘X the Cruel’ but none of their subjects. The vic…
It's funny how historically a lot of "kings" were more like dictatorial mayors of small cities to largish collections of huts and many great battles were actually more like cattle raids. The only reason Musk is getting away with any of this is that we've got the pending recession going on and others doing layoffs to jumping jobs isn't as easy for those who remain. I certainly would never go through that dance to prov…
> The only reason Musk is getting away with any of this
Is he though? There are reports of very few people left, and I suspect many of those are stuck on h1bs, rather than there by allegiance to the new mad king.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#426If 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.
Why should a private company not be allowed to lay off staff that they don't need or want?
If the government cares so much about workers, why don't they take care of them themselves, like with a guaranteed job or training program, instead of forcing other individuals to do so?
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a really good question, and much more interesting to me than just commenting on an ongoing train wreck. I suppose that we would need to first decide whether (in this scenario where he succeeded) Elon had actually fixed Twitter , or whether he tore it down to the studs and built a different company out of it, one which happened to be called Twitter, but did something completely different, with new people and ne…
Isn't Twitter about sending short messages to the world or to people who are listening to you? How different are you envisioning Twitter could be? I really just want to make sure this isn't a cop out in the chances his stunts succeed(ie yeah it's successful now but it's different!)
I mean it sounds like he wants it to be a messaging service that functions as a payment service, and possibly also loans money (according to that Q&A session).
I have no idea what his vision for the company actually is, it just sounds like his mantra is "anything is on the table at this point, but we need to make money fast".
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where did he say that he will evaluate if the code is good or bad? He didn't. It's more likely just a way to see what employees think is their most important work.
If the goal was actually to see what employees think is their most important work, that (and criteria) would be specified, instead of playing "what is he looking for" mind games.
He did specify. He asked for most salient. Salient means "most noticeable or important."
He hasn't played any mind games. He's asked for exactly what he wants.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
He'd probably do something just wildly violating labor laws.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#43010 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…
The FTC is a BFD. Compliance with it is baked into Twitter processes and has been for a long time. This idea that developers at Twitter don’t understand the requirements and consequences and have been thrown to the mercy of the wolves recently needs to die.