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Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#101

Post by AustinDev »

Waterluvian wrote: post #21

I’m still looking for a concise term for “someone who claims to be an expert but immediately reveals beyond any doubt that they have no clue what they’re saying, simply by opening their mouth on the subject.” Having Tesla engineers over to review Twitter code is definitely that. It’s ridiculous.

Might you think that they're not actually reviewing code and that the journalists are idiots? Because all evidence I've seen about journalism is that it's completely skin deep and often blatantly wrong. It's likely the engineers are reviewing architecture and looking at how the whole system works.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#102

Post by bdowling »

ipqk wrote: post #65

I'd be pissed off if I were a TSLA stock owner. Is Twitter paying Tesla to contract out these employees for their work? Otherwise, it's tons of thousands of dollars Tesla is pissing away on behalf of the CEO's side-hustle.

It would be reasonable for Twitter to pay Tesla for the audit work, because otherwise it would be a misuse of Tesla resources to only benefit the Tesla CEO.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#103

Post by swader999 »

yrgulation wrote: post #56
marstall wrote: post #26

I was thinking the "30-60" day time window may be a somewhat subtle way of catching out engineers who haven't written a thing in that amount of time. that would be one way to identify low-performers. not unproblematic by a long shot, but quick, and probably somewhat effective. and it wouldn't require any deep knowledge of twitter's codebase on the part of the reviewers.

Are we back to measuring performance in klocs? I can get you a bunch of incompetent devs that change hundreds ofines of code a day. All you need to do is change indentation and eols or just rewrite basic stuff too lazy to understand.

Change the formatting lol.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#104

Post by grogenaut »

smt88 wrote: post #51
marstall wrote: post #26

I was thinking the "30-60" day time window may be a somewhat subtle way of catching out engineers who haven't written a thing in that amount of time. that would be one way to identify low-performers. not unproblematic by a long shot, but quick, and probably somewhat effective. and it wouldn't require any deep knowledge of twitter's codebase on the part of the reviewers.

Any slightly competent software leader would know that you can track every character of code written by any dev using version control. Printing it out as a mark of honor/shame is something a petty, arrogant tyrant would do. Musk has been around people who are afraid to say no to him for too long.

I've been in a few situations where we printed it out. It's just a lot faster than granting someone access to internal systems. It's also a firewall of access if you need that legally. Also you can sort paper into "to look at later" and "seems fine" (like huge chunks of json), it's annoying but not terrible for diligence.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#106

Post by _vertigo »

taf2 wrote: post #73
jstx1 wrote: post #3

> One former Tesla engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe the matter but was not involved, said Tesla engineers would have trouble capably assessing Twitter’s code. Distributed systems, the large-scale and spread-out network that Twitter is composed of, are not the automaker’s specialty, the person said. > The “idea of Elon being flanked by his Tesla engineers reviewing Twitter code is…

Isn’t twitter a pretty simple thing… db with writes and reads… it was maybe still is rails? I don’t know MySQL , Pgsql have come a long way and most of the hard parts would be scaling these services…. Keeping good caches in memory with redis or memcached… not really sure I see twitter being all that crazy other then it being so many people and so many years of edge case handling they would be hard for an outsider to…

I think you're massively underselling how complex it is to run something at scale. It's not a matter of just making the database go fast. Just using the database as an example (even though there's way more to it than just the database), you can scale a database a bit by sharding or running it as a cluster or what-have-you, but you can only shard so wide before you run into other problems which are much harder to solve. Running at a massive scale requires rearchitecting almost everything that came before.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#107

Post by jefftk »

nightski wrote: post #78
ipqk wrote: post #65

I'd be pissed off if I were a TSLA stock owner. Is Twitter paying Tesla to contract out these employees for their work? Otherwise, it's tons of thousands of dollars Tesla is pissing away on behalf of the CEO's side-hustle.

I'm not pissed and I am a stockholder. To me it makes a lot of sense. I doubt they are reviewing the entire code base. It seems like Elon is particularly interested in the automated systems that control content and detect bots. To that end, Tesla has a lot of expertise in AI systems.

Tesla and Twitter both have experience in AI in the sense that Exxon and Unilever both have experience in chemistry.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#108

Post by recuter »

jstx1 wrote: post #3

> One former Tesla engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe the matter but was not involved, said Tesla engineers would have trouble capably assessing Twitter’s code. Distributed systems, the large-scale and spread-out network that Twitter is composed of, are not the automaker’s specialty, the person said. > The “idea of Elon being flanked by his Tesla engineers reviewing Twitter code is…

> Distributed systems, the large-scale and spread-out network that Twitter is composed of, are not the automaker’s specialty, the person said.

You can giggle along with the anonymous source who wasn't involved if you wish but Tesla collects a rather large amount of telemetry and has all manner of micro services crap internally just like Twitter.

I imagine the Twitter codebase itself is a farcical Rube Goldberg machine. Insert your own how many engineers does it take to change lightbulb jokes.

  As part of that process, some engineers received a calendar invite Friday, telling them: “Stop printing, please be ready to show your recent code,” a reference to engineers being asked to show the code they had written in the last 30 to 60 days on their computers.
Sounds like he knows exactly what he is doing. I'd do just that. For an unfathomable amount of the people working at twitter the answer will be zero lines of code.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#109

Post by rtp4me »

Havoc wrote: post #57

Surprised how sceptical all the comments here are. Dick or not the guy has a talent for building companies

Yeah, the Musk haters are out in full force. Perhaps he simply paid them from his own pocket (eg consulting rate) when they were "off the clock" from their day-time job? Seems very logical to me.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#110

Post by jefftk »

deltree7 wrote: post #81
ipqk wrote: post #65

I'd be pissed off if I were a TSLA stock owner. Is Twitter paying Tesla to contract out these employees for their work? Otherwise, it's tons of thousands of dollars Tesla is pissing away on behalf of the CEO's side-hustle.

Quoted post unavailable.

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic?
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