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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

#201

Post by qwytw »

adventured wrote: post #152
butterlesstoast wrote: post #15

Elon has this bizarre conspiracy in his head where he thinks software engineers don't do anything until he realizes they do everything. Btw, a dev build is in prod right now. Or someone forgot to minimize the JS. Tons of import map issues.

That's not what Elon thinks based on his actions. He's trying to decimate the workforce on purpose, although it's not going as smoothly as he hoped from outside appearances. He wants huge numbers of Twitter employees to quit, and he has been very clearly laying out the terms for behavior for the type of people he would like to run Twitter with. He's intentionally shaking the tree violently. He's hoping that the types…

I highly doubt the majority of engineers who are actually good at what they do would be willing to remain in such a toxic environment Musk is creating.

Also so far he has displayed very little understanding of what engineers actually do (the bring you screenshots thing and the way he responded to one of them correcting him on Twitter and a bunch of other cases don't paint the brightest picture).

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

#202

Post by ceres »

kibwen wrote: post #169
Teandw wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're misunderstanding the situation. It's not that ALL software engineers don't do anything. It's that Twitter has so much staff, you start to question what can they all actually be doing. If someone had 10 people cleaning a small apartment every day, you'd question what were they actually doing. That wouldn't make sense.

Conversely, if you had 7,000 people cleaning an apartment occupied by a few million people across the globe, that might make some sense. There's no doubt that Twitter could be leaner than it was as of September, but haphazardly firing employees at random and alienating the most employable of the remainder into resignation is not the way to go about it. He could have spent a few months getting to know the place, but d…

And yet WhatsApp had 55 employees at acquisition.

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/whatsapp-bought-for-19-b...

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

#203

Post by colechristensen »

rchaud wrote: post #81

Even as long-time skeptic of Musk's ballyhooed business/engineering acumen, I have no clue what's going on here. Surely nobody at this level could be this brazenly incompetent when it comes to communicating a vision and building some sense of unity. Even the biggest fakers in the world are self-aware about the importance of maintaining the illusion of power and control. If you had told me that these emails were being…

I think what happens is his strange behavior is proportional to how little he sleeps. He has a spectrum between mildly unusual to full Kanye.

While I'm usually not in favor of professional unions for programmers, I think that's the only option at Twitter at this point unless people are ready to quit en mass.

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

#204

Post by techdragon »

Tenoke wrote: post #113
butterlesstoast wrote: post #15

Elon has this bizarre conspiracy in his head where he thinks software engineers don't do anything until he realizes they do everything. Btw, a dev build is in prod right now. Or someone forgot to minimize the JS. Tons of import map issues.

I'm a software engineer and I still suspect Twitter will be on average no worse (could be better even) with 1/3rd or less of its current engineer count.

1/3 … sure.

But the current reports are in the vicinity of 60% to 90% of the companies employees.

Obviously it’s extremely hard to get accurate numbers because one minute it’s reply yes to this or your gone, the next it’s report to this room, then batches are getting rehired because they are essential to operations and it’s jumping around like the staff head count graph has arrhythmia.

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

#205

Post by justapassenger »

dshpala wrote: post #22
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #7

Imagine thinking you can judge anything about a developer (especially Senior/Staffs) from screenshots of code. Elon has truly lost the plot.

That would be nice. I know a senior developer that doesn't actually do anything, he had like 2 small CLs this year. But apparently he can't be fired, so he is just there, increasing work load for everyone else.

I'm a senior developer at bit tech and I had 1 small CL this year.

I've spent whole year aligning a team strategy with an overall company strategy, and making sure that rest of the people on my team build is actually fitting into that strategy.

In the past, team spend many years build custom stuff, that always had to be thrown away. Now, work we're doing is a part of a company direction, our expertise influenced it, and as a result we're no longer building throw away things, but also building something that impacts the whole company. I'll be blunt - I've made people on my team 10x more productive as a result.

At bigger companies there's many ways you can be a senior developer. Does it sucks that people need to do stuff like that? Oh yeah, I'd prefer to have 100s of CL this year. But that's often a motion, not progress. As a senior, I'm accountable to make sure we make progress.

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

#206

Post by chrisseaton »

crooked-v wrote: post #63
chrisseaton wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Twitter experiences massive usage surges every year during the World Cup.

> every year during the World Cup

Wat?

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

#207

Post by MarkMarine »

Teandw wrote: post #78
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #7

Imagine thinking you can judge anything about a developer (especially Senior/Staffs) from screenshots of code. Elon has truly lost the plot.

Of course you can? It's basically asking to see what you consider your best work. If you're earning 100k a year and the most important code you show is how you turned a link colour from light blue to blue -- then your $100,000 a year job has now become questionable. It's hardly losing the plot to ask someone "What have you achieved and what do you think your best work is?"

That's like asking an artist to bring screen shots of the best 10 brush strokes.

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

#209

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

khazhoux wrote: post #153
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of Seniors/Staff don't write "code". They're architecting/planning/guiding. If I'm a Senior Staff DevOps engineer who maintains our entire Kube infra, am I gonna show Elon some sweet YAML configs? "Oh here's my Go templating for our org wide Helm charts that isn't really novel but is really important?"

In an org with thousands of software engineers, shouldn’t most of them be writing code? Feels like everyone wants to be the exception, and just assumes “someone else” should do actual hands-on work

Every organization is different but no, I don't think most of them should be writing code. I wouldn't put any kind of quantifier on it. Software development is not just "writing code". Shipping code from ideation to production is more complicated than layman want to make it out to be, especially at these scales. This dystopian "nobody works" fantasy that some people wish for is simply that, a fantasy. I'm willing to bet most, if not all Twitter developers were above average across the industry and were producing work of value.

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

#210

Post by Teandw »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #123
Teandw wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you can? It's basically asking to see what you consider your best work. If you're earning 100k a year and the most important code you show is how you turned a link colour from light blue to blue -- then your $100,000 a year job has now become questionable. It's hardly losing the plot to ask someone "What have you achieved and what do you think your best work is?"

A lot of Seniors/Staff don't write "code". They're architecting/planning/guiding. If I'm a Senior Staff DevOps engineer who maintains our entire Kube infra, am I gonna show Elon some sweet YAML configs? "Oh here's my Go templating for our org wide Helm charts that isn't really novel but is really important?"

Then the email wasn't targeted to you. So all of what you said instantly becomes irrelevant.
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