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

washingtonpost.com

191–200 of 1001 posts

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

#191
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 machin…

> 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.

Yes, collecting telemetry is quite equivalent to making a globally-distributed, many-to-many messaging platform available to everyone in real time.

> For an unfathomable amount of the people working at twitter the answer will be zero lines of code.

One of our most productive engineers left the company with negative several hundred thousand lines of code impact over his career. What would he print out?

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

#192
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.

I get the impression you aren’t a software engineer. So to clarify: AI is not generalized enough to the point where there’d be much common expertise unless, say, this code review was very narrowly focused on computer vision. And even then this article specifically talks about code review, which, unless you have the context of the Twitter codebase isn’t going to be very meaningful. You might do this if you’re buying a teeny tiny startup with no real engineering culture - not (formerly) publicly traded company.

I’be been a software engineer for nearly 2 decades and have been involved in multiple technical due-diligence endeavors. At best, you’re just grokking the big-picture and looking for any major red flags. Getting involved in individual code reviews is not a useful exercise outside of understanding a team’s SDLC and various coding practices - for an org the size of Twitter all of that stuff should have been documented and shared during due diligence (which Musk waved) - injecting outside engineers into the code review process is just an expensive and sloppy way to uncover what could otherwise be gleaned in an easier fashion.

I do see one big red flag for Twitter: it now has leadership that doesn’t trust the engineering organization. For a technology company that can be fatal if not resolved quickly.

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

#193
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.

Are these the same Tesla AI experts that can't make FSD work?

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

#194
post #154

If someone completely new to my codebase came along and tried to evaluate my code I'd laugh. You can't jump in and "evaluate" without knowing context and being familiar with the features.

Do you not think you could sit down with somebody and explain it?

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

#195
post #155

I went in assuming that this was going to be a hit piece. It's not quite that bad, but there's elements like that. I have no idea who this "former Tesla engineer" is or what their biases and motivations are, or how the article authors found them. It seems perfectly reasonable for Elon to bring in some people he knows he can trust to help evaluate how Twitter actually works. I presume he's competent enough to do any n…

> It's pretty clear to me that there are elements of the elite media-political complex that are terrified of Elon purchasing Twitter because he's not part of their crowd and they won't be able to control him and through him what is and isn't allowed on Twitter. IMO all articles about this should be read with that in mind.

It's pretty clear there are elements of the Hacker News community who are obsessed with "cancel culture" and think Elon is some kind of billionaire, infallible savior who will "stick it" to all those terrible wokes who are ruining the tech industry as the protected bro-space it's been for decades. IMO all hacker news comments should be read with this in mind.

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

#196

Didn't Musk get rich solving complex problems? The ink isn't even dry yet and there is a rush to judgement, speculation, and wild assumptions that are simply shameful. How many cars did Tesla sell on the day after his investment?

Quoted post unavailable.

he may have been rich from his family, but he became Rich from zip2 and x.com/paypal (and subsequent re-investments)

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

#198
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.

Whos to say that these TSLA engineers didnt take PTO time and Musk is paying them a consulting rate?

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

#199
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 better to find out more details before having an emotional reaction. Maybe they're Tesla engineers, but they're moonlighting on Twitters dime?

Are these the engineers that are dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight?

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

#200

I dunno why any Twitter engineers would be really trying that hard right now. Passively destroying Twitter from within by not trying, and trying to make a billionare lose 44 billion dollars is a significantly more fun and interesting challenge than making Twitter a better product.

Because they don't have a union so they were excluded from all the big-boy negotiations at the sale, and they've no way to resist the demands of their bosses. They can put up, or shut up. Or just complain pathetically.
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