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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

#361

Post by jaxn »

spamizbad wrote: post #192
nightski wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Counter-point: Tesla is rumored to be working on a phone. That team could be very interested in Twitter for shareholder-value reasons.

Do we have any reason to believe it was Tesla’s AI engineers?

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

#362

Post by kjksf »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #322
fleddr wrote: post #301

I think most are missing that this is a code review + loyalty review. For sure a software engineer from Tesla, or even a manager, can get an idea of how valuable/productive a coder is without fully understanding the code in detail. How many PRs? What does the code do? How was it reviewed? What value does it bring to stakeholders (users, business revenue)? Sure enough this way you can get a rough idea of how much work…

I think most are missing that this is a code review + loyalty review. I think most people realize that it's more than a code review, in fact I suspect that it's such a transparent loyalty review is exactly why so many people's feathers got ruffled. For sure a software engineer from Tesla, or even a manager, can get an idea of how valuable/productive a coder is without fully understanding the code in detail. Yeah, may…

Counterpoint: what other CEO would be involved in low level stuff like looking at code or personally interviewing newly acquired employees?

Things like that are beneath most CEOs.

This is exactly what makes Musk a different (and better) CEO. When needed he'll sleep on the factory floor and help fix manufacturing issues and when needed he'll look at the code.

Plus, I assume the code is not the biggest part of the interview but provides context for something to talk about.

Musk interviewed ALL of the early SpaceX employees (not exclusively, but he was one of the interviewers).

Those who were interviewed by him say that he's very good at figuring out if someone is good or a bulshitter.

So I assume he's doing the interviewers at Twitter for the same reason: to separate chaff from the wheat

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

#363

Post by threeseed »

fleddr wrote: post #301

I think most are missing that this is a code review + loyalty review. For sure a software engineer from Tesla, or even a manager, can get an idea of how valuable/productive a coder is without fully understanding the code in detail. How many PRs? What does the code do? How was it reviewed? What value does it bring to stakeholders (users, business revenue)? Sure enough this way you can get a rough idea of how much work…

I think that is actually a terrible way to measure the qualities of an engineer.

The most valuable engineers to me are the ones that can bring a thoughtful, elegant, well-implemented solution to a business problem. And typically that doesn't translate to lots of PRs, often is not appreciable from non-engineers and can not be easily judged in a few days. But their work almost always stands the test of time.

Before hiring/firing people it would seem prudent to me to at least spend some time getting to know the dynamics in the team, the challenges facing them and then evaluate who deserves to be there or not. I really don't understand what the big rush is here.

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

#365

Post by sojournerc »

seydor wrote: post #124
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.

Yeah, making 20x on my investment really was foolish

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

#366

Post by [deleted] »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #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 th…

[deleted]

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

#367

Post by asdffdsa »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #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 th…

Exactly, more code isn't better

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

#368

Post by SkyPuncher »

lgleason wrote: post #347
fleddr wrote: post #301

I think most are missing that this is a code review + loyalty review. For sure a software engineer from Tesla, or even a manager, can get an idea of how valuable/productive a coder is without fully understanding the code in detail. How many PRs? What does the code do? How was it reviewed? What value does it bring to stakeholders (users, business revenue)? Sure enough this way you can get a rough idea of how much work…

Number of PR's means very little with overall productivity. It's a vanity metric.

It's only useful in debugging a bad situation. Larger PRs are associated with slower development velocity. However, it's not clear if that's because larger PR tend to come from inexperienced developers or experienced developers are making significantly more complex changes.

Anecdata: It took me 4 weeks to write a 250 net new lines of code line PR. Normally, I'll write about 1k lines of code per week. I ended up having a tasks that significantly changed security models and required a lot of small, distributed changes.

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

#369

Post by spullara »

Forge36 wrote: post #359
lgleason wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Number of PR's means very little with overall productivity. It's a vanity metric.

100% I made 400 last year. It was two fixes across many files owned by many different teams. Ideally it would have been two. Sometimes playing the politics game is required.

To be fair Twitter has a monorepo.

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

#370

Post by walrus01 »

pwthornton wrote: post #355

Tesla is a hardware company not known for stellar software. Both its self-driving/driver assist capabilities are suspect, and the functionality of the giant tablet UI could be better. You hear a lot of requests to be able to use Apple CarPlay in Teslas. Teslas are probably better than the vast majority of car companies, particularly the UI of the touch controls and system, but it still seems weird to me to have engin…

For those who don't remember, one example of just how badly they can fuck up their software, the operating system on Teslas for a number of years was based on a default Ubuntu that wrote logs which destroyed the SSD. Exceeded the total write wear leveling endurance after just 1-2 years of use of the car. Required total motherboard replacement on a great number of cars, because of course the ssd was permanently soldered down.
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