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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

#571

Post by HDThoreaun »

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 ?

He's not actually trying to document programming prowess with screenshots. They've already fired everyone they want to fire, this is some sort of "welcome to twitter 2.0" ritual

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

#572

Post by khazhoux »

lentil_soup wrote: post #563
khazhoux wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only at home these days. First fifteen years of my career, as engineer and TL, I wrote a ton of code — every day was for coding, and even late nights and weekends for the extra-fun projects. Now as a manager and sometimes architect, no code from me but I still review code and spend time stopping bad ideas, getting teams to work together, and all that fun stuff. But I still regard code merged into master, as the ultim…

So you wouldn't have a single screenshot of code to show for the past year either? So, you DO understand what we're trying to say on this thread. I don't get why you are defending this measure as a valid way to measure engineers

No, I completely disagree with the premise here that only a minority of the software organization should actually be expected to deliver code.

As a manager, it’s not in my job description anymore. And when I put on an architect hat, my output is design docs and aligning many different opinions between teams. Also, the senior-most people on my team are no longer coding 100% of their time (they’re designing, reviewing, mentoring) and that’s obviously ok and good.

...But if >50% my team spends every week only mentoring others and attending meetings and writing design docs (as someone else suggested here), I think it would be appropriate to ask what the heck is going on. The idea that for a typical rank-and-file developer (not the TL, manager, architect, etc) that they should be seen as productive software developers without being able to show even a handful of code examples over the course of a year, I’m sorry but I just don’t understand how such a software org would ever actually function.

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

#573

Post by HDThoreaun »

nemo44x wrote: post #369
martin_a wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You read the news that he cancelled working from home and then locked everybody out of office? Does that look like a plan to you? Does anything that happend in the last weeks look like a plan to you? The blue checkmark disaster for example?

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.

Hard to believe he actually identified the top 20%, and if he did hard to believe he convinced them to stay.

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

#574

Post by spoils19 »

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'…

Precisely. I once had a really good architect who could design resilient, scalable systems that had a large positive impact to the company. Want to know what the problem was? He had no git commits for the last 6 months, so when I ran git blame over our repositories, I couldn't judge how he could analyze a heap dump.

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

#575

Post by camel_Snake »

the_arcadian wrote: post #555
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 anyw…

Regarding your first point, I'm not sure why this sentiment exists. Twitter isn't any more free-speech than it was before. We've seen some accounts un-banned, like Babylon Bee but not Donald Trump. We've seen plenty other accounts newly banned as well for what is clearly parody. Feels like a wash on that front.

I'm relying on hearsay now, but if some employees were really let go for bad-mouthing Elon in the company slack[1], that's certainly not a company attitude congruent with the principals of free speech. It's also notably a reversal of previous Twitter policy, which encouraged free discussion whether critical of leadership or not.

[1] https://nitter.net/caseynewton/status/1592539948745650176

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

#576

Post by HDThoreaun »

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 it was cheap and he values journalism

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

#577

Post by cyanydeez »

danans wrote: post #494
rchaud wrote: post #81

Even as long-time skeptic of Musk's ballyhooed business/engineering acumen, I have no clue what's going on here. Surely nobody at this level could be this brazenly incompetent when it comes to communicating a vision and building some sense of unity. Even the biggest fakers in the world are self-aware about the importance of maintaining the illusion of power and control. If you had told me that these emails were being…

> Surely nobody at this level could be this brazenly incompetent when it comes to communicating a vision and building some sense of unity. Why don't you think someone at that level could be so incompetent? Megalomania and being out-of-touch reinforce each other. History, from ancient to the present, is full of wealthy, powerful, and paranoid people acting incompetently and thereby doing tremendous damage in the proce…

And we just had half a decade of watching someone who's only skill was grifting peoples beliefs

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

#578

Post by HDThoreaun »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #226
kibwen wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From screenshots ? There's no way that Musk has any ability to judge the quality of a programmer based on "up to 10" screenshots of code entirely divorced from its context, especially since he is not a programmer and has no experience whatsoever with any of Twitter's codebases.

Yeah that's wild, so you have like maybe 80-150 lines per shot to prove your worth. What is he looking for, algorithm interview tricks like a quick sort or graph traversal? He's in for a shock when he learns most coding isn't what is done in interviews--I bet most Twitter engineer's best work would look like some ugly tangle of complex syncronization logic to allow highly parallel processing. Fast, efficient code isn…

> What is he looking for, algorithm interview tricks like a quick sort or graph traversal?

This is so obviously not the point of the exercise that it feels like bad faith. I doubt he's firing anyone at this point. Just looking to see how does what and talk with them about their impact. The code examples are just to get the ball rolling. Basically everyone in leadership at twitter is gone, Musk needs to figure out who can be trusted to keep things from collapsing, not who to fire.

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

#579

Post by khazhoux »

ferrumfist wrote: post #359
Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, and this is a core misunderstanding of the profession. The job of software engineers is to design and implement solutions to business problems with technology. The job of a software engineer is not merely "write code." Writing code will almost certainly be the smallest percentage of a skilled engineer's time. They need to be spending their time thinking and designing. We're talking about solving extreme scaling p…

Junior/Mid Perspective: "I was hired to write code, sometimes I solve business problems" Senior/Staff's Perspective: "I was hired to solve business problems, sometimes I write code"

Hacker News Perspective: “I’m a software developer — how dare you ask to see my code! How dare you even imply that developers should be writing code! The best software organizations are the ones where barely a few people (out of thousanda of developers) actually write any code at all.”

;-)

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

#580

Post by HDThoreaun »

qwytw wrote: post #287
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.”

No. They're saying it's impossible to demonstrate in 10 random screenshots with code lines in it. Not if Musk asked for Powerpoint presentations...

The thing about powerpoint presentations is that the slides are not the focus. What the presenter says is.
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