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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

#451

Post by albertopv »

erulabs wrote: post #368
Xylakant wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree strongly, and I currently run an infrastructure team. Things break because of changes to the system. Assuming the entire infrastructure team wasn't fired, it should be dramatically easier to keep the service online assuming all development has stopped.

Changes to a system can come in many ways, e.g. we had a noticeable increase in our db size because of a new customer data, what was ok. before wasn't after. Of course it's different for twitter. And what about security? Update to libraries, dependencies...?

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

#452

Post by [deleted] »

Teandw wrote: post #428
hamburglar wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#453

Post by orwin »

hnarn wrote: post #291
rwhyan wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before doing so, please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code.

“Salient” is not a synonym of “fancy”.

In case of code, isn't it basically the same?

I mean, i spent 20 months working on a project for a bank recently. I had a lot of salient code at the beginning, fun little algorithms and cool regex.

The last iteration of the code i committed, the salient part was basically a lisp interpreter (if lisp was formatted like json), but everything else was plain and boring. The last issue i had is that the ES version was upgraded and the python library i used to connect to ES was version locked, and did not work.

I think that for the next 4 years, this will be the only type of modifications my SRE ex-collegue who now own the code will make. Still, it can take days.

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

#454

Post by Tempest1981 »

chasd00 wrote: post #175
lijogdfljk wrote: post #103

I'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.

> getting fired for putting '{' on a newline

And you can't determine the most important factor: tabs vs spaces

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

#455

Post by scarface74 »

erulabs wrote: post #270

I 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…

A staff software engineer wouldn’t be showing impact writing code. When I was a senior developer at a much smaller company when I was responsible for the overall direction of the infrastructure and processes, I would spend weeks with little code under my own name while working with other developers, customers, being the tech person on pre-sales calls, etc.

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

#456

Post by boringg »

snoopy_telex wrote: post #323
boringg wrote: post #90

I 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

Fair - I was hoping for a view of things as it deteriorates not necessarily absolute.

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

#457

Post by dilyevsky »

tonetheman wrote: post #195
r721 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Vox: "Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, Sriram Krishnan, Alex Spiro, Jared Birchall" https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/11/12/23452396/elon-musk-twi...

I would not want to be on that list. If it does tank they were part of it. Hopefully somewhere in the twitter headquarter they are yelling at him to stop. It would be great once times passes to hear their side.

Two of them are on All-in podcast with Chamath. It did not sound like they opposed anything Elon was doing.

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

#458

Post by wittycardio »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #148
rich_sasha wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's simple, Elon Musk has no clue what he is doing. Can he code.to save his life? Does he know anything about engineering from Tesla or SpaceX, beyond catchphrases?

All personal accounts I've heard of from people that work there are yes, he does know about engineering and is incredibly smart. But that doesn't mean you know how to run a social media company, and trying to pivot Twitter's work culture on a dime is going to be chaotic. FWIW I think he's a toxic asshole, but that doesn't mean he's an idiot.

He might not be an idiot but that doesn't mean he knows how software works either

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

#459

Post by bena »

CrypticShift wrote: post #436
bena wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He already has maximum control of Twitter. There is nothing more he can do to control Twitter. He is at maximum Twitter control.

Twitter is not just a corporation you buy. At the very least, it is also the life and labour of all it employees. So you can never have absolute control. There is always resistance.

Maybe the real Twitter was the friends we made along the way.

If his goal was control of the hearts and minds of all the employees in the company, he's going about that poorly.

The only people I see speak positively about what he's doing are people not working for Twitter at all.

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

#460

Post by Tempest1981 »

maxbond wrote: post #155
jimbob45 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that true of most CEOs though? When a CEO comes around, you have nothing to gain and your entire employment to lose. Edit: The point is not that we all reside in toxic workplaces. The point is that there is no upside to interacting with a CEO. A parallel situation might be giving a loaded pistol with a child. In that case, the upside is that they now have one thousand and one chew toys instead of one thousand.…

At my last exit interview, my CEO was asking me how he could improve his understanding of the engineering team. I threw out the idea that he could meet with people for 15 minutes on a rotation. He explained that he couldn't do that without terrifying people. Just because people are scared of the CEO doesn't mean most CEOs weaponize this into a tool of micromanagement.

> meet with people

Maybe after 2 or 3 times it gets better. Build up a rapport first.

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