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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

#551

Post by sangnoir »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #529
greatpostman wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what everyone is afraid of. His firings are an assault on the professional credibility among a lot of people

I think this is exactly it. Elon and the possibility of his success threatens the worldview of a lot of people.

He's a terrible person and I empathize with the people who are suffering because of his huge, but fragile ego. I would hate for the Elon-idolizers to adopt his abrasive style, thinking that makes them good or radical leaders. That idea terrifies me, and reminds me of Steve-Jobs-wannabes who didn't realize he succeeded in spite of his manner. You can treat people with respect and still succeed; I have no kind words for anyone who inspires disrespect/looking down on employees (fellow engineers).

Regardless of Musks success or failure at Twitter, the concentration of wealth in fewer hands will march on (due to automation and software eating everything, eventually, software will eat software). The middle-class SDE-type have been ignoring this reality for a while now, feeling safe because we thought we could find a different well-paying job at the drop of a pin. The bimodal income in the Software world is about to become more defined, with more folk shifting to the lower-income peak.

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

#552

Post by belligeront »

orange_joe wrote: post #327
errantmind wrote: post #223

I'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 understand wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt, but his decision making around twitter has basically been disastrous from the start. 1. Bought the company at an overinflated price and tried to back out, but was ultimately forced by the court to buy it 2. Half baked rollout of the twitter blue which caused brands to flee the platform after major reputation damage. 3. Laying off half the company, and then ha…

He's also acted with hubris with his engineering claims. For example claiming that the reason twitter is slower in india is that there are 1200 RPC calls, which is pretty absurd.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592176202873085952

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

#554

Post by robocat »

some-guy wrote: post #319
b112 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he had a coherent plan So if he doesn't share his actual plan with you, the media, and his competitors, he doesn't have a plan?

He keeps changing Twitter Blue, he tried to back out of the deal but then came back, he randomly changes his mind based on questionable troll account replies. For every good idea he has (I'm not convinced the engineering of Tesla or SpaceX was mainly his ideas), he has many other terrible ones (Hyperloop, Tesla Boring tunnels as transport, etc). I believe he's just an attention-seeker and is becoming far more unhinge…

Jim Keller talks about his impression of Elon after working with him - skip to 1:20:50 and watch the next 4 minutes of this interview: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA (the whole interview is full of effing amazing insight, IMHO).

Jim also talks about Elon’s engineering skills at the 50 minute mark for about 6 minutes in this interview: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1TmuJSbms9c

Elon seems like a complete tool to me. But here is Jim, a proven smart engineer-type, give a strongly positive opinion on Elon’s engineering ability. Many effective people have personality traits I abhor.

Unless you have worked with Elon yourself, and you are a good engineer yourself, you are just making shit up. I think it is normal to hate, but at least try to be honest.

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

#555

Post by the_arcadian »

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…

There's some willful denial here on HN and in other places that 1) twitter is being punished because it seems its role as supporting free speech rather than policing misinformation, 2) Elon Musk, as founder of Paypal and CEO of Starlink, has more than enough Internet / technical knowledge to run a site like twitter, 3) twitter itself is just not all that complicated and was probably due for an overhaul / rewrite anyway, and 4) investors don't buy companies to run them the exact same way that they were run before, they do it because they see both wasted resources and additional value and opportunity, which means they're always going to lay off some people and hire others.

Ultimately, twitter will be judged by its users, and whether they find value in the site, and whether its financially viable - income meets expenses. I think twitter's free speech & openness virtually guarantees the former, since everyone will be able to find something that they like on the platform and ignore the rest. The latter will be opaque for quite a while, since twitter is now private and, I assume, won't be disclosing its financial data except as required by taxes / regulation.

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

#556

Post by throwaheyy »

orwin wrote: post #453
hnarn wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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 upg…

No, it’s not. In fact, if the fanciness of your code is the only thing that contributes its salience, that’s a negative.

10 lines of salient code could be the entry point into some subsystem you wrote, or where you integrate with another system. It wouldn’t look fancy but it’s salient.

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

#557

Post by pschuegr »

alsodumb wrote: post #479
pschuegr wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I wonder if there is a U-curve in the "code produced vs seniority" graph where once you get senior enough you have people under you who can deal with $immediate_situation for you?

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

#558

Post by the_arcadian »

andreysolsty wrote: post #331

If 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.

I'm not sure how this is the lesson you're taking away from twitter when the workers are getting three months severance, unlike your typical service sector worker who can basically be fired by their manager on the spot. The US is a dynamic economy and your compensation is for the most part whatever you can negotiate. At the VP level it's not uncommon to get severance packages of a year or more at $200-300k, and at the C-suite level the numbers can hit millions of dollars.

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

#559

Post by fragmede »

rich_sasha wrote: post #513
bcrosby95 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OK, so how do I square that up with a request to document programming prowess with screenshots ?

That he doesn't have any other way to look at any code because he doesn't have a Phabricator account

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

#560

Post by b112 »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #484
nemo44x wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like MBA-101, just accelerated a lot. Drop the bottom, identify the best of the best, ask everyone else to commit or get out. The solid core replaces them with the top performers in their network they want to work with. I'm convinced Twitter Blue was a test to see who gets shit done there, to help identify the top performers. Obviously the trick is keeping the top performers.

But the cost of Twitter Blue was to actively drive away your major revenue stream, the advertisers. When you're saddled with a ton of debt actively driving away your revenue doesn't seem like MBA-101 to me.

Unless those advertisers won't be coming along into the new, changed twitter anyhow.
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