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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

#651

Post by jgb1984 »

lijogdfljk wrote: post #103

I'd love to see some code snippets that he likes.. because i can't grasp what would make good screenshots in this context. If i were Elon i'd want to see "dumb" looking code which brings together a larger, complex thing in a simple way. The larger picture is complex, but composed of simple primitives. Every piece looks unimpressive because experience taught the right abstractions to write things in a simple, testable…

To be honest I doubt Elon could even write a fizzbuzz in a language of choice if his life depended on it. Nothing but hot air that guy. He's as much an engineer as I'm a neurosurgeon.

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

#652

Post by CrypticShift »

ProjectArcturis wrote: post #612
dont__panic wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Occam's Razor? interesting. I thought I was applying this one: the simplest mental strategies able to propel you to the top of the capitalist and media elite. "Being incredibly impulsive" may seems straightforwardly "true" but it does not look "sufficient" as explanation to me.

Maybe The truth is somewhere in the middle. I don't know.

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

#653

Post by khazhoux »

qwytw wrote: post #648
khazhoux wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he’s brought in buddies, and heads of engineering from tesla and spacex.

Right, they must be experts at what Twitter is doing. Industrial, electric, rocket engineering etc. is basically the same as frontend/backend development. To be fair I can't tell if your post is sarcasm or not.

Why would it be sarcasm? I read somewhere (?) that Elon brought in his eng leads from SpaceX and Tesla to help him sort things out.

At any rate, I think you'd be mistaken to believe that there aren't top-notch software engineers at SpaceX and Tesla. They both have front-end tools, massive backend systems, data pipelines at huge scale, metrics and analysis systems, and so forth.

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

#654

Post by ruszki »

erulabs wrote: post #270

I 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…

This sounds good, and it would be a fine goal. The problem is that the very-very short deadline contradicts any good reasons, and he handles the whole situation terribly. I don’t think that there is any competent developer, who didn’t resign, or started to search a new job after the past few weeks (except who are religiously blind Musk fans, and people on visas). Even if only half of the stories are true. I did quit jobs for way less.

The goals which you wrote can be achieved with far superior tools, which wouldn’t have alienated developers, whose skills are really-really valuable on the market. In such environment, as what Musk created, they are the first who will abandon the ship. They have every possibility to work in any kind of environments what they want.

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

#655

Post by martin_a »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #642
martin_a wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The linked article quotes a mail where Musk asks to see "the most salient lines of code".

Unfortunately, "salient" does not mean anything similar to "fancy", which invalidates the original grandparent's statement (unless you can cite something else).

As I didn't knew the word, I gave it to DeepL for translation and in German it translates to words which would be used for extraordinary and over-the-top things (herausragend, hervorragend, hervorstechend). If someone would have used these, I'd have understood it as a call to show my best code.

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

#656

Post by nemo44x »

toofy wrote: post #515
nemo44x wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that is you're skipping a step. You need to drop the dead weight so-to-speak before locating the people that can ship code and are loyal. He has been very aggressive to be sure, but the media is following this unlike any other reorg because Twitter is their livlihood.

> ... but the media is following this unlike any other reorg because Twitter is their livlihood. i think this is a strange read on the importance of twitter for the media. twitter itself, as a technology just doesn't matter. it isn't the tech that creates the network of value, its the people. and we know from centuries of history, people will just shift to the next spot over--the bar that was popular last week is jus…

Lol ok. No one is going anywhere other than a few nerds that are having meltdowns desperately trying to find an alternative. It’s hilarious to watch!

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

#657

Post by quonn »

mortehu wrote: post #630
belligeront wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why do you think that's absurd? With a microservice architecture you can easily hit that rendering a personalized feed.

Because those requests happen within the Twitter datacenter. There's no goo reason to assume they should be slower from India.

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

#658

Post by joshspankit »

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 agree with this. In fact, I don’t even know if Musk cares whether people actually review the submissions.

This could be a very simple process of keeping them running through obstacle courses while the “weak” ones self-eliminate.

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

#659

Post by gofwrath »

rich_sasha wrote: post #71
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 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?

If I were at Twitter and received this email, I would be providing code and commits focused on business impact. Saliency is scoped to something, and without explanation that 'something' is likely the business. The context is engineering at twitter, not programming. In other words, not silly one liners that are not immediately obvious but instead business critical code that moved the needle -- however bland.

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

#660

Post by readthenotes1 »

Uhhrrr wrote: post #594
readthenotes1 wrote: post #520

What an opportunity to bring a blank page and claim to have deleted thousands of lines of clutter while still delivering functionality

Usually when you pull off a large negative LoC change there's some pretty good code to show off in place of it.

He only wanted one picture though...
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