That's a classical strategy to get obedient subordinates
If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
601–610 of 683 posts
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's simple, Elon Musk has no clue what he is doing. Can he code.to save his life? Does he know anything about engineering from Tesla or SpaceX, beyond catchphrases?
He used to be able to code. He created zip2 (predecessor to MapQuest) practically by himself apparently.
He also pissed people off by insisting PayPal runs on Windows instead of Linux. Hey, I have fond memories of coding for the Windows platform for fun, but especially back in the day we kind of scoffed at those who wanted to run mission-critical systems on a Windows server.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#603I'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…
Couldn't these all be part of the plan, though? Make himself look incompetent so that people underestimate him?
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#604Even 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…
I think what happens is his strange behavior is proportional to how little he sleeps. He has a spectrum between mildly unusual to full Kanye. While I'm usually not in favor of professional unions for programmers, I think that's the only option at Twitter at this point unless people are ready to quit en mass.
I am really wildly speculating here, but I wonder if his source of energy is something like Aderall, and if that has any effects on people who are already “troubled” by their giant egos. And lack of sleep doesn’t help.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#605Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Couldn't these all be part of the plan, though? Make himself look incompetent so that people underestimate him?
Why do we need to assume that it’s always 5D chess? It usually is what it looks like - a man who strategized himself into a corner and is now flailing.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#606Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.” ;-)
You're completely right, maybe a software developer's total contribution to the bottom line can be conveyed with a few snapshots of context-less code. Maybe every complex problem humanity faces today has an equally easy solution. Maybe nuance and being methodical is for chumps.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's simple, Elon Musk has no clue what he is doing. Can he code.to save his life? Does he know anything about engineering from Tesla or SpaceX, beyond catchphrases?
Everyone who actually worked for him say that he understands all the engineering intricacies. Karpathy said that. Tom Mueller publicly defended Elon on multiple occasions: https://mobile.twitter.com/lrocket/status/151291923068914892...
Considering that he lashes out at the smallest slight, I'm rather unsurprised that people depending on him for their livelihood sing his praises.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#608What 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…
> This means more work per person
Or it might just mean less stuff gets done.
My company’s had enough turnover without adequate replacement lately that pretty much everything that isn’t high-priority maintenance now just gets backlogged.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#609I 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…
"Anyone who has worked at a large enough company knows there is a solid 10-15% of folks doing nothing" In my experience those do-nothings tend to be near the top of the pyramid. At the engineer level it's harder to get away with doing nothing because you're constantly being told what to do and then you get evaluated to see if you actually did what you were tasked with doing. As you go higher up the food chain, some c…
I've been the lone guy seriously working in a team of do-nothing.
You can definitely get away doing nothing as an engineer if the project manager is too busy or does not care. Also works if your direct manager is himself a do-nothing, or a developer that for promoted and actually does not have any management knowledge or experience.
Of course the real problem is that the whole organization is dysfunctional, but there is no right or easy way to fix this problem, except try to identify the honest guys and fire everyone else. Because most of the alternatives ends up with the minority of productive guys quitting.
Re: If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
#610Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the new boss has enough time to throughly review the contributions of every employee in the company? To be fair is the number of engineers left in Twitter falls to double digits this just might become possible...
Twitter has like less than 1000 employees. If half are getting this review for 10 minutes each that's 83 hours. A team of 8 that he trusts can do that in a day. No it's not thorough, but it's a start and you can schedule more thorough reviews as needed.
First off, it had a lot more than 1000 employees when this started.
But this thread is missing the forest for the trees: take my coworker for example.
He's become such a pivotal player because he stayed at the company much longer than the average tenure in our industry.
Why did he do that? Well, my hunch is the fact no one sweats him if he needs to pick up his kids from school, he can work from home as needed, he's not expected to work 80 hours a week... all play into that.
So it doesn't really matter if you realize he's valuable, fire half the company and start talking about extreme work hours and he'll rightfully leave.
People like him such experts at the specifics of their jobs that even 30 hours of their work is worth more than 80 hours of some loyal Elon drone who might have all the zeal in the world, but can't magically recreate 6 years worth of being deeply embedded in a company.
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We already saw Twitter employees saying Elon has fired people who fit in this category.
And to add fuel to dumpster fire, those people tend to have stayed due to a bond with the job. Start shaking it up by getting rid of people they build camaraderie with and doubling work hours and they'll leave.
After all, having a resume showing years of executing at a high level in a company like Twitter is a huge boon. Money was raining from the sky until very recently and these people ignored it and stayed put. You can't find people like that easily in our industry.