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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

#471

Post by jvanderbot »

carabiner wrote: post #318
jvanderbot wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, you don't build a spaceflight / rocket company in a vacuum, or from scratch as a software engineer. He poached top talent and got the job done from the bank and his twitter account. Not that I'm knocking that (it worked!), but the "Elon is a great engineer" trope is questionable. Look: http://larsblackmore.com/ That's the kind of person who makes spacex successful.

Yeah but put that MIT guy at Boeing or LM, and you get the same disposable rockets they've been building for 100 years. You need a crazy guy at the top to allow for crazy things, otherwise you'll get the same results. If you put a bunch of Google engineers under Oracle or Cisco management, you get Oracle or Cisco in the end.

> Yeah but put that MIT guy at Boeing or LM, and you get the same disposable rockets they've been building for 100 years.

I don't think he'd have gone there. But you're right, that a good vision is absolutely going to attract the right talent and make a cohesive company. It's just that's not engineering that's management.

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

#472

Post by khazhoux »

piva00 wrote: post #332
khazhoux wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Engin…

I’m actually not defending Elon. A blanket “show me ten git snippets” is dumb. This is a horrible way to start off as new boss. I’m only saying, there’s way too much apologism in this thread for not having tangible work results.

To your point, if I started as new manager for a team and the TL said they mostly wrote RFCs and design docs, my next question would be whether those docs led to an actual implementation (by orher people is ok). IF it turned out they write go-nowhere docs and sit in meetings giving obvious advice all day, then I’ll flag it as a potential problem that needs deeper investigation.

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

#473

Post by user3939382 »

guelo wrote: post #446
user3939382 wrote: post #378

When you’re the richest guy in the world you have big enemies and friends, whose tentacles of power reach far and wide and can move populations for or against you. I have enough executive experience to be 100% sure that none of us have a complete picture of what’s going on behind the scenes, with his political or business relationships. It’s been fascinating to see how pliable public opinion is with the influence of…

> influence of these media stories The influences are from Elon's actions and tweets as well as leaks from insiders. Media conspiracy theories are not relevant here.

It’s not a “conspiracy theory” why do you think Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post? Because he loves journalism?

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

#474

Post by tppiotrowski »

scarface74 wrote: post #440
tppiotrowski wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really? In every large tech company whose leveling guidelines I’ve seen (including my own), “being able to code well” only separates junior developers from mid level developers. After that it’s about “scope” and “impact”. Looking at the git blame tells you nothing about the skillset it takes to be successful at any large tech company at a senior level.

> git blame tells you nothing about the skillset it takes to be successful at any large tech company at a senior level

100%. I don't care who has "scope" or "impact" or is "senior". I want to sit next to the developer I can ask about the pro/cons of any web development framework, that can help me analyze a heap dump, or explain why some transitive dependency is getting pulled in at compile time.

These are the ones I'm successful finding with git blame. They're the ones that can help me get stuff done.

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

#475

Post by maxlamb »

Twitter is now officially the Hunger Games for software engineers, complete with all doors being locked so people can’t escape. Maybe when Musk said he wants Twitter to become more of a video/content site, he meant bringing a film crew to Twitter, turn HQ into a real life hunger games for the few engineers left, and make a show out of it!

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

#476

Post by daxfohl »

haolez wrote: post #58

What 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?

Layoffs are happening across the industry anyway. This means more work per person, and the increased competition for jobs means negotiating power for wages will go down. So this is all happening regardless, just in a less dramatic fashion.

But yeah likely if Twitter does well then we'll also see a bunch of copycat douchebaggery at the C level because "it worked for Elon". For whatever reason, history seems to show us that any time some douchebag succeeds, all the wannabes come out of the woodwork to emulate it.

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

#477

Post by ryanwaggoner »

Teandw wrote: post #410
qwytw wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> those who cannot physically get to Twitter HQ are excused Probably means that if there are no actual flights from where you're to SF and that you couldn't get there in time no matter how much you wanted. Not exactly the same thing...

There is literally no reason to think he means that. That seems more like a deep personal hatred of someone and just trying to find the worst in everything they say or do.

Any benefit of the doubt he was entitled to went out the window a long time ago.

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

#478

Post by dont__panic »

Teandw wrote: post #447
dont__panic wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon has clearly read enough Hacker News to ask the question we've all been asking for the last... 5? 10? years. "What do all of those engineers do at [Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Netflix/Google]". That's a fine question to ask -- it's clear that plenty of those engineers aren't contributing real value. They're working on passion projects, or side projects like React or Docusaurus, or pie-in-the-sky next-gen products,…

"...and looks like he's on the cusp of running a company that's been around for over a decade into the ground in the next few weeks." What do you base that on? There's no evidence to point the company is going downhill or improving at the moment. You seem to be basing this on a personal hatred for Elon and nothing else.

Many (newly) former Twitter employees have raised concerns about essential services now left unattended.

Reports indicate the internal beta build Twitter instance has slowed down significantly this week -- a sign that services, code, or other essential infrastructure is being neglected.

Musk fired half the company and drove two-thirds of the remainder to quit. He's asking the remaining employees to print out their code contributions to prove their worth.

These things might not be explicit signs of trouble in the company, but I sure wouldn't read them as positive. A shakeup could be a good thing in the long term if the company has stagnated... but there's no guarantee.

I raised multiple explicit examples in my previous post; here's some more. I think Elon is a complete dunderhead, because it's hard not to think so based on his behavior. I still think Twitter is at a very high risk right now of collapsing. With him making such dramatic moves as CEO, isn't it impossible to separate his bad behavior from Twitter's future?

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

#479

Post by alsodumb »

pschuegr wrote: post #336
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…

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.

I get the sarcasm but Jeff and Sanjay actually code quite a bit even today with their senior fellow titles: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...

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

#480

Post by mike_d »

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.

He is trying to destroy the company, literally.

Twitter's now second largest investor and likely cash backer of Elon's shares is Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz. Twitter was a huge enabler of the Arab Spring and leaders of oppressive regimes around the world would love to see it shuttered.

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