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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

#211

Post by jvanderbot »

makestuff wrote: post #196
jvanderbot wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, you don't build a spaceflight / rocket company in a vacuum, or from scratch as a software engineer. He poached top talent and got the job done from the bank and his twitter account. Not that I'm knocking that (it worked!), but the "Elon is a great engineer" trope is questionable. Look: http://larsblackmore.com/ That's the kind of person who makes spacex successful.

Unrelated but I wish the market/VC/wallstreet put more value into hardware. I know why they never will (lower margins and harder to scale) but as an engineer I would much rather work on something like space ships or automation in robotics over just another internal reporting service that is being rebuilt just to deliver a report in 1 hour instead of 1 day.

You'd be surprised how much space/robotics is just analytics and reporting. But I get the sentiment. If you want to get into robotics, coursera courses and some ML knowledge can go a long way in today's hiring market.

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

#213

Post by fknorangesite »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #181
DimitriPetrova wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire payroll team resigned yesterday so that's probably correct for the moment.

I'm guessing they were just offered a half-decent severance and didn't want to work there anyways?

> and didn't want to work there anyways?

Who would, anymore?

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

#214

Post by sidewndr46 »

swamp40 wrote: post #136
michpoch wrote: post #88

I am curious if he tried the same at Tesla or SpaceX: "Hello dear mechanical engineers, please bring photos all the cars/rockets that you created in the last 6 months".

I would think that would work rather well, since it is 100% visual.

I'm not that type of engineer, but I suspect it would be much easier as well. An ME could just show a picture of whatever part he designed. If it's part of the car's running gear it is unlikely to be something un-needed. If that person was an EE, they could just show a picture of the wiring harness potentially if they built that. The car is basically just a static display without that.

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

#215

Post by cesaref »

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?"

What if your most important contribution so far this year has been removing 10,000 lines of code?

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

#216

Post by ghufran_syed »

kibwen wrote: post #117
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?"

From screenshots ? There's no way that Musk has any ability to judge the quality of a programmer based on "up to 10" screenshots of code entirely divorced from its context, especially since he is not a programmer and has no experience whatsoever with any of Twitter's codebases.

Plus he could just search for that code in the repo to get the overall context, he probably has access :)

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

#217

Post by awinder »

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?"

Presumably this case was covered in the first round of layoffs when they stack ranked engineers by lines of code produced in the last (6 months? 1 year?)

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

#218

Post by dont__panic »

Teandw wrote: post #128
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 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.

Elon has clearly read enough Hacker News to ask the question we've all been asking for the last... 5? 10? years. "What do all of those engineers do at [Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Netflix/Google]".

That's a fine question to ask -- it's clear that plenty of those engineers aren't contributing real value. They're working on passion projects, or side projects like React or Docusaurus, or pie-in-the-sky next-gen products, or reinventing the wheel in-house, or infrastructure, etc. Many are working on similar projects in separate silos of large companies, completely unaware that they have "twin" teams elsewhere in the org solving damn near the same problem, but not in a generalized way.

The big problem is that Elon has no idea what the fuck he is doing. I don't mean to disparage anyone, but jeez... the guy has fired thousands of people in the last few weeks and looks like he's on the cusp of running a company that's been around for over a decade into the ground in the next few weeks. Over the holidays. And who's going to deal with the issue? Oh yeah, the H1B visa holding employees who can't escape. He's officially a jerk, and that's not even counting the times when he called innocent people child molesters, or spouted lies about crypto, or tried to manipulate Tesla stock, etc. etc.

TL;DR: Elon is an idiot trying to use internet wisdom to run a company. This whole situation reminds me of when some rich person you know tries to run a small business, like a coffee shop or an ice cream shop, and they screw up just about every piece of it... because they don't get the fundamentals. Elon does NOT get the fundamentals, based on observations of him over the last few years. It's clear he's just a lucky rich kid with a big ego and lots of confidence who loves smoking weed and ruining other people's lives.

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

#219

Post by tibbydudeza »

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?"

Where do you see yourself in 5 years - dumbest HR question ever - earn bucket loads of more money ???.

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

#220

Post by CrypticShift »

IMHO (my first and I hope last Elon comment), at a higher level of cognition, Elon is just playing two simple games: maximum buzz (media game), and maximum control (politics game).

All his public persona, including all that pre-acquisition drama, is just for maximum buzz (Who cares about a few hundred millions ?)

All this post-acquisition drama is just for maximum control (over Twitter and ?).

If this is the case, some superhuman resilience and confidence are certainly needed. And if you have them, it is just mind-boggling how you can generate and control such a colossal level of human activity and attention by using a few words here and there.

I'm not trying to be condescending or original here. I'm really just refusing the idea that the inner-Elon is really as conflicted as it appears, so I'm refusing to react to his games (because as I can afford to, not like twitter employees for sure)

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