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

washingtonpost.com

201–210 of 1001 posts

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

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> For an unfathomable amount of the people working at twitter the answer will be zero lines of code. True, but an accusatory calendar invite still isn't a good way to do this. He could find out himself from the commit history/JIRA tickets, with the additional benefit of not putting people on the defensive and making a poor first impression. Then again, relationship building isn't really his style, so this doesn't sur…

Heaven forbid the people who show up with blank printed pages be made to feel defensive. Relationship might suffer so much they might just have to break up permanently.

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

#203
I don't at all object to code reviews/evaluation, but the thing I wonder about is this: I rarely open an empty file and write some big block of code. 98% of the time I'm fixing bugs in legacy code or shimming in some new feature. It would be trivial to produce the diffs I generated in the past 30 or 60 days, but the volume of code isn't really a great metric for my productivity.

There may be some three line change that was the result of eight hours of debugging and analyzing how to best fix the bug without disturbing the stuff that is working. Is that more or less productive than someone who cut & pasted a 100 line routine they found via google?

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

#204

Someone probably told elon to look into the 'plumbing' of twitter. He brought a sink just in case.

The joke was “Let that sink in”.

> The joke ...

Don't jokes have to be funny?

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

#205

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?

People always do this with Elon... it doesn't matter if he's making cars, building rockets or taking on social media, the general consensus is that he doesn't know what he's doing and will fail. But, who's the richest man in the room? Who was right and who was wrong? People can hate on Elon all they want, but it's pure ignorance to think that we know any better. Let the man work his magic, I'm curious to see what he…

He was given the money, team, idea, and government connections by this guy for SpaceX at least:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career

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

#206

This is pretty standard procedure when a company gets bought. The new owners will conduct a review and decide who to keep and who to get rid of. They have probably been given a target of how many people they want to lay off and are evaluating who is worth keeping. It’s not worth staying at a company that gets acquired, you’ll either get laid off or be asked to do the same work with less people, and awful morale.

Respectfully, very little of this seems to be operating by standard procedure. Have you seen the incoming CEO ask people to bring printouts of their code, ever?

I have definitely seen them replace whole systems without ever looking at or evaluationg the code.

Doing that seems like an improvement.

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

#207
post #6
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…

From Musk’s POV, a bunch of solid, well-rounded, and experienced engineers you trust might be enough to tell you “this guy is full of shit” when talking to new people. Maybe it’s less about code quality and more about eng quality.

I think that's all besides the point. Does anyone think any of Twitter's problems are related to code quality? Literally go read the unit test suite and you'll what it does and if it works. If he just wants to cut heads, cut them from verticals you want to exit (whatever they might be). What the hell could he possibly achieve with this stunt? It feels more like the old cliche about your first day at prison where you should pick the toughest guy and beat him up to establish dominance.

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

#208
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What hubris to think that your system is so complex that other engineers couldn't understand it.

The hubris is thinking Tesla engineers (who are offered worse pay and wlb relative to Twitter) are coding masters of every domain. I won't even snipe at their own software here. It takes a long time to onboard to a big mature infrastructure that is serving hundreds of millions of users for people moving from a similar company, even longer if your day job is whatever Tesla engineers are doing. And that's onboarding, n…

Pay and work life benefits are generally independent of technical competence. But I agree with the rest of your comment.

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

#209

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?

People always do this with Elon... it doesn't matter if he's making cars, building rockets or taking on social media, the general consensus is that he doesn't know what he's doing and will fail. But, who's the richest man in the room? Who was right and who was wrong? People can hate on Elon all they want, but it's pure ignorance to think that we know any better. Let the man work his magic, I'm curious to see what he…

Or as they say in devout circles "the lord works in mysterious ways, who are we to question his divine judgement?"

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

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, very little of this seems to be operating by standard procedure. Have you seen the incoming CEO ask people to bring printouts of their code, ever?

Musk is reportedly looking to cut deadweight before Nov 1st when equity vests -- with layoffs possibly happening over the weekend. He might already have a basic idea of key teams and for non-key teams he might be looking to cut very fast. I absolutely have done things like this when acquiring companies - sat with people, asked them to basically interview for their own jobs while showing me the most important thing th…

Do you understand why people who aren't making lots of money from it might be angry and upset about this process?
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