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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

#501

Post by roflyear »

scarface74 wrote: post #465
DabbyDabberson wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never felt that way at the 3 tech companies I've worked at. More to the contrary, I'd want the CEO or CTO to know me, who i am, and what I've done.

Those tech companies must have been small. Don’t get me wrong. I spent most of my career at small companies. But, currently, my CEO is 7 levels above me in the hierarchy and I’m one of 1.6+ million employees.

I've worked for a top 50 company by market cap and the CEO and other execs we're pleasant people. Well one or two of the execs were assholes but not the 'ill get you fired' assholes.

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

#502

Post by Tronno »

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…

By what means should be people be judged, if not by their public words and actions? Any other factors are, by definition, unknowable.

Musk's words and actions have been very public indeed. What additional context can we gain by speculating about his private thoughts and back-room dealings?

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

#503

Post by scarface74 »

wellareyousure wrote: post #489
scarface74 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my experience, things like code formatting and style were really predictive of the person’s contributions to a team. How would you “measure my contributions to my team” based on my code when I spent weeks dealing with larger strategy issues as a senior developer and working with other developers and being involved in the sales process?

> ...dealing with larger strategy issues as a senior developer and working with other developers and being involved in the sales process? I don't have any way to talk about your specific situation. If you're asking, "how can you generalize broadly about" what sounds like big company problems. Maybe as this economic reshuffling / contraction continues, I expect those big company problems to go away via "reduction in f…

> If you're asking, "how can you generalize broadly about" what sounds like big company problems

The scenario I was referring to was at a 60 person startup where I was responsible for initiatives to make us “cloud native” and micro service focus. We were pivoting to selling access to our micro services to large health care provider networks that are using them for their apps and websites. As an aside, being able to scale independently came in handy when a global pandemic happened in 2020.

It was my third job at small companies where I was brought in to lead company wide technical initiatives.

> Maybe as this economic reshuffling / contraction continues, I expect those big company problems to go away via "reduction in force.

What I mentioned doing above, I now do in the consulting department of a little company I am sure you have heard of. I doubt even with a RIF it’s going to go down from being the second largest employer in the US to a small company anytime soon.

> Because if your folks - superior, subordinates, whatever - couldn't figure out a system to get you focused on programming.

I’ve been a “programmer” at six small companies and two F10 companies over the last 25+ years. Well the first one isn’t F10 anymore thanks to Jack Welch’s decisions.

“Programming” is the least important thing. Twitter’s issues aren’t caused by “bad programming”. It’s the lack of strategy.

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

#505

Post by scarface74 »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #474
scarface74 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

When the big wigs are calling people into the room to lead technical discussions with their largest customers or potential customers, they aren’t going to go through your repos and see who had the best code.

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

#506

Post by scarface74 »

roflyear wrote: post #501
scarface74 wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those tech companies must have been small. Don’t get me wrong. I spent most of my career at small companies. But, currently, my CEO is 7 levels above me in the hierarchy and I’m one of 1.6+ million employees.

I've worked for a top 50 company by market cap and the CEO and other execs we're pleasant people. Well one or two of the execs were assholes but not the 'ill get you fired' assholes.

And you knew the CEO personally at those companies?

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

#507

Post by lern_too_spel »

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #28

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…

Jeff Dean would be dismissed. Sanjay types in the code.

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

#508

Post by Xylakant »

albertopv wrote: post #451
erulabs wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...?

Anyone remember the leap second?

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

#509

Post by sagebird »

deltarholamda wrote: post #322
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…

Yeah, I read this as a stunt to sift out the people who are confident in their abilities and contributions from those who just kind of show up and do some minor edits. I have no idea how many people get through the code interviews at Big Tech and then think they've proved their value and just phone it in, but I guarantee it's not zero. If I have any particular concern it's that this sort of thing misses some real uns…

Elon isn’t an idiot who has never been around real world software development. He will happily accept:” Here's a screenshot of where I fixed an off-by-one error, but it took two weeks of unraveling 137 microservices to find which RPC was guilty.”

Not to mention, it plays into his perception that twitter architecture is too bloated to be productive.

He is likely looking for people who have zero or less than 10 things to show.

I bet you could squeeze by with one big thing to show and nothing else if it is explained.

This sort of net would catch lots of zero screenshot responses for multiple reasons- I doubt there will be any scrutiny applied.

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

#510

Post by themacguffinman »

user3939382 wrote: post #473
guelo wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Because of the prestige and status that comes with it, hardly an unprecedented reason.
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