If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now • Hacker News Board

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

#611

Post by khazhoux » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 1:26 AM UTC

ferrumfist wrote: post #606

khazhoux wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> maybe a software developer's total contribution to the bottom line can be conveyed with a few snapshots of context-less code.

I've never suggested someone should be fired if they can't produce code snippets. But it's fair to expect people who don't actively code (when they're not managers or have a non-coding title) to have a reason they're not coding. And there are many perfectly great reasons, especially for very senior engineers. But if someone isn't coding and they're not actually doing anything else of particular value... well, they're not valuable engineers.

Code is not the single-and-only decider of an engineer's contributions, but I reject the notion that it can't be a starting filter to evaluate someone's contributions, and the assessment to proceed from there.

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

#612

Post by ProjectArcturis » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 1:28 AM UTC

dont__panic wrote: post #518

ProjectArcturis wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't give him credit for doing all this intentionally. Elon being incredibly impulsive seems to explain everything pretty parsimoniously.

Quick question: is that proper usage of "parsimoniously"? I've only seen it used as a synonym for "stingy," which is close, but not quite the same as the "succinctly" synonym usage here. But I'm aware that regions and time periods drift in word usage, so you aren't necessarily wrong.

Occam's Razor is also known as the Principle of Parsimony; I was using it in that sense.

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

#613

Post by Terretta » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 1:37 AM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #299

Terretta wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of Seniors/Staff don't write "code". They're architecting/planning/guiding. This is a problem.

You want your seniors/staff to have engineering experience, but at some level complaining that they don’t code any more is like complaining that the people who design bridges aren’t going out there and laying concrete foundations 400m deep into river beds any more.

no it'd be like saying people who design bridges don't need to know CAD

you're saying they can't pour footings for a data center -- not the same job at all

(or even can't set up a build system, which, god bless)

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

#614

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 1:54 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #76

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…

It's literally just some bizarre hazing ritual. Trying to evaluate whether code is good or bad from some screenshots without understanding the context and being familiar with the codebase makes no sense anyway. Anyone can show you ten screenshots of formally well written code and you have no idea whether it's useless or not.

I think the only reason is to figure out if people are working.

Any dev I could think of doing their actual job can take 10 screenshots and point what they worked on in the last 6 months. It would be insane if they couldn't.

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

#615

Post by hamburglar » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 2:08 AM UTC

Teandw wrote: post #428

hamburglar wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the goal was actually to see what employees think is their most important work, that (and criteria) would be specified, instead of playing "what is he looking for" mind games.

He did specify. He asked for most salient. Salient means "most noticeable or important." He hasn't played any mind games. He's asked for exactly what he wants.

That is completely a mind game. Salient according to what criteria? Is he going to be happy to see wonderful high level distributed designs? Great coding practices at the micro level? Unit tests? Performance-oriented code? Ops greatness? CRUD boilerplate that any junior IC could jump into without much understanding (seems like this might be a stealth winner if he’s gearing up to build a skeleton crew of low-seniority devs that don’t have a lot of career options). Is feature work sexy to him or does he want to see work that is oriented around KTLO cost minimization? Improvements on usability (decreases support costs)? Reliability? Scalability? Security mindset? (obviously kidding about that last one) There are so many things that are “salient” depending on his priorities and attitudes that this is a fool’s errand.

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

#616

Post by vvxujfihg » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 2:12 AM UTC

throwaheyy wrote: post #556

orwin wrote: post #453

Earlier 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…

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.

I can see this making sense for type signatures and data structures—or class definitions, interface definitions. Not so sure about "entry points". Contracts, abstractions. Typical Haskell code would really lend itself to being summarized like this—typeclass instances, etc.

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

#617

Post by rurp » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 2:16 AM UTC

sagebird wrote: post #509

deltarholamda wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

If this were actually the goal, he could just find a couple hardcore coders who know how to use git and ask them to produce a list of commits by developer for every repo he cares about.

It's hard to tell if he actually thinks he can evaluate people via code screenshots or if this is another dumb hazing ritual, but I can't believe he's really trying to figure out who writes code from this.

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

#618

Post by tennisflyi » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 2:33 AM UTC

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…

> most code is bland and boring plumbing work anyways.

So a decent amount of devs get a nice six-figure salary (RSU, equity), pretty good benefits, kush perks, and more to mess with a template? Órale...

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

#619

Post by chrisseaton » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 2:39 AM UTC

spookie wrote: post #372

chrisseaton wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are football fans really a big part of the Twitter user base?

I would guess so. As long as you are doing business outside North America, this is a fair concern to have.

At least in the UK Twitter was mostly politicians, journalists, and tech.

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

#620

Post by ModernMech » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 2:41 AM UTC

robocat wrote: post #554

some-guy wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 too…

I don't know, it's hard to trust anyone who has worked for a narcissist like Musk to tell the truth about said narcissist in public media. Powerful narcists love to surround themselves by people who are willing to use their credentials to launder the reputation of the narcissist. My favorite example comes from Dr. Deborah Birx regarding fmr. President Trump during the pandemic:

  "He's been so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data. I think his ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues.”

This is just about what Jim Keller says about Musk in the first video. You'll notice when he talks about what he learned from Musk he's very vague, and then he pivots directly to a story about how his friend invented a more efficient electric motor that was better than anything they had. That's a story about engineering prowess, but that story is pointedly not about Musk. Why does he need to pivot to another engineer when talking about engineering prowess? Because he doesn't have anything to say about Musk's engineering prowess, and can only speak to his technical philosophies. Of course those may be sound, and perhaps helps the engineering team, but having ideas about local maxima doesn't make one an engineer.

The second link isn't any better. Jim says Musk is the "real deal" and a great engineer, but instead of examples of that, just talks about how Musk prefers to receive presentations with solutions first, and got upset when they weren't frontloaded. Which is a fine point of view I guess, and maybe is related to managing an engineering process, but all the technical work was done by others.

And finally, as a robotics engineer myself, I have a very hard time listening to anyone from the Tesla autonomous group unless they want to explain why they are testing Tesla's beta quality AP (that is in fact lethal and has caused deaths) on the general public without their awareness or consent. Or explain why after the first decapitation caused by Musk's insistence on not using LIDAR in their cars, this group failed to step up and course correct. Instead they doubled down, and their decisions resulted predictably in nothing getting fixed, leading to a second decapitation. Who exactly made the call on those decisions? That's really all I need to hear from them.