God I’m glad the interview process there went no where
If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
531–540 of 683 posts
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#532I'm no Elon fan, but why does essentially everyone in these threads automatically assume he is wrong? Has no one here worked at companies where there was more dead weight than talent? Where 80% of the work being done is by 20% of the people, and there are whole teams that do almost nothing? What if there is no clean, efficient way to discover who should be fired and so Elon's fallback plan is to test for who really w…
I keep trying to figure out how many employees actually built twitter in the first place. I've been on there a long time, but have never been a heavy user. Twitter seems like it was mostly complete a long long time ago. It's changed far far less than say facebook over the years. I'm sure stuff has changed but I would struggle to remember what's different than say 10 years ago. They had 2000 people when they IPOed. Bu…
at the time of their ipo, the user base was smaller. as your user base grows, obviously you need significantly more people to run the organization.
when the user base grew (we'll ignore the insane chaotic ways scaling impacts technological needs) so did the needs of a significant existence in other countries, those countries laws, the societal and cultural impacts, advertising in other countries, etc...
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Also: SpaceX and Tesla were heavily subsidized with taxpayer money. To date, something like 98% of SpaceX contracts are govt. I’m not sure about the Boring company but I suspect its business model is heavily dependent on taxpayer funds too. Although he's often held up as a paragon of free market capitalism, it looks like a lot of his business ventures are actually the result of crony capitalism.
Also, neither were built by musk.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#534Now he's saying that he wants people to fly in to present their code to him by midnight. On the Friday before Thanksgiving. Into one of United's big hubs. With 14 hours notice. And a lot of cold fronts over the eastern seaboard. Likely more like 10 hours with travel times and the line of potential people that are presenting. I'm honestly gobsmacked. Look, if you're on of those engineers and are unfortunate enough to…
Right? The only way this shit show would be worthwhile is if it were starring John Candy.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#535What 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?
It's a question I've been thinking about during this. The current narrative is that Musk is destroying value, which he probably is, but what if Twitter was as bloated as he thinks it was. What if he gets a core of 500 people working hard and twitter not only stabilizes but grows and innovates and becomes worth 10x. That's honestly a pretty scary notion for a lot of software engineers. CEOs will (and some already have…
The issue is, if Musk wants to find a core team of hardcore devs, I don't think the way he's acting is going to attract them. People who are great and know they are great probably don't want to be treated this way, unless they've drunk the Kool-Aid. It'd be more productive for Musk to be humble and actually have a plan to "win" in order attract top talent, top talent also wouldn't want to stay for a dickbag who seems to be very clueless. If Musk had a grand plan, keeping it secret is very very counterproductive. It gives off the air "I know I've been seemingly acting like a fucking idiot, but trust me, I have a plan, do you want to join?", how many would think "let's trust him now", if they haven't drunk said Kool-Aid.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#536Earlier 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.
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.
They don't burn money like that.
If your conspiracy theory has motive truth, it's more likely Saudis want what china has in TikTok or others: the ability to monitor it.
Unfortunately, just like the other far right clones, this plan only works if it's popular.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#537What 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?
It's a question I've been thinking about during this. The current narrative is that Musk is destroying value, which he probably is, but what if Twitter was as bloated as he thinks it was. What if he gets a core of 500 people working hard and twitter not only stabilizes but grows and innovates and becomes worth 10x. That's honestly a pretty scary notion for a lot of software engineers. CEOs will (and some already have…
I don't want to oversell Twitter -- I don't even like it (today). But most of the software we work on is frankly boring, even redundant or pointless at worst. Twitter may not be rockets or electric cars, but it is something most people are familiar with and its impact (Good, bad, whatever) is sizable.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#538Earlier 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.
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.
> He is trying to destroy the company, literally.
I don't buy this as he's doing it in a way that makes him look like an incompetent fool.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
It hardly offsets the fact that he massively overpaid for Twitter in the first place. For 44 billion he could have easily handpicked a team and built a new product without all the issues Twitter has. He'd have to actually compete against Twitter but that should be too hard for a genius.
Building a Twitter clone is so trivial that it's basically become the new todo list app for people showing off any new web technology. The value of Twitter has nothing to do with the product, and everything to do with the name and market share. For that reason, it's been almost impossible for any other alternative to call itself a real Twitter competitor.
You could do a lot of things for 40 billion though. Same could be said about Tesla, building a car from scratch and mass producing is almost impossible, no way it could challenge the entrenched car makers. Yet look what happened.
And again, he overpaid, massively. Just to fire 50-90% of entire workforce and to lose a lot of Twitter's biggest customers due to his erratic behavior.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#540Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 upg…
Spending days figuring out a few boring lines of change that has an outsized impact would, imho, be a fairly compelling bit of code to show off. IMHO while he might be crazy and way out of line, he's effectively asking people to reinterview for their jobs, except instead of doing blind code tests he's asking them to show off the best work they've done recently.
So, for information: as the program was asked to do more and interface with more (and since the output formatting keep changing every semester), most of the code logic was deported in the configuration files.
Nothing really had any outsized impact in the last 12 months of the project imho. Once the minimum viable product was done, every bit of improvement i did was either simplifying, performance-related or adding more configurability (and test, and documentation).
I did a piece of code that adapted to the ES request that i really like and could be showed off, but it took me three weeks, but 90% of what i parametrized could be hardcoded and it would have changed nothing in the long run.