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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

#371

Post by extheat »

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…

“Better software engineers” to anyone who does software engineering is a joke. It’s an totally unquantifiable measure, and some people use dumb metrics like leetcode capabilities as some IQ test.

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

#372

Post by closeparen »

the_doctah wrote: post #41
jstx1 wrote: 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…

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

What hubris to think you can wander into a system as complex as a $44bn tech company and draw any meaningful conclusions about it at all in a weekend. I mean, in my world we have some regular "tech reviews" with our Sr. Directors/VPs at a pretty abstract slides-and-diagrams level, and even that takes weeks of prep leading up like 4+ hour presentations. For something with only a glancing relationship to code level reality. I have occasionally seen my work reflected in these reviews, and the game of telephone that produces them is quite lossy.

Any competent engineer can come to understand most any part of the system, but it's going to take minimum several weeks to understand at a level where you can seriously challenge the domain experts about what's really going on in a little 0.01% corner of the engineering shop.

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

#373

Post by themitigating »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #351
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…

"The note continues, “Please come prepared with code as a backup to review on your own machines with Elon.” Later, people inside the company reported that Tesla engineers were in fact reviewing the code." Can anyone verify this story?

Imagine I said I could. Why would you believe me if you don't believe the Washington Post?

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

#374

Post by CalChris »

walrus01 wrote: post #370
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 solder…

Yeah, this did happen to my S. It was covered out-of-warranty because the TSA said it would be a good idea if Tesla covered it out-of-warranty. Tesla concurred.

https://www.tesla.com/support/8gb-emmc-recall-frequently-ask...

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

#375

Post by threeseed »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #368
lgleason wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 havin…

> Larger PRs are associated with slower development velocity

There are many reasons PRs can be large.

Often it's indicative of broader issues e.g. lack of automated testing, inadequate CI/CD processes, incomplete business requirements etc.

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

#376

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#377

Post by morpheuskafka »

Jach wrote: post #138
toomanyrichies wrote: post #14

Quoted post unavailable.

Are you a Tesla shareholder?

This isn't an opinion/confidence issue, it is a legal one. If there is even one shareholder (i.e. anyone in the world with $228 to spare) who wants to push this issue, they can. Realistically it would take more than that to make it worth suing, but the point remains that even if 98% of shareholders think this is totally okay, it could still be a huge problem for them.

Additionally, there are various institutional shareholders that don't operate based on their personal opinion of Musk/Tesla, but have specific legal duties to protect their investment in the company.

The SEC could still act on the issue even if it was somehow proven than not a single shareholder actually cared.

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

#378

Post by groffee »

theCrowing wrote: post #337
ozzythecat wrote: post #329

I’m honestly baffled with the obsession with Musk. Many folks here seem to despise him. But we can’t stop obsessing with the guy. At this point, to me it feels like envy. Musk, despite however he is as a person, is wildly successfully across several verticals. Rather than being a suit and tie corporate person, he literally posts memes, and has a IDGAF attitude. Does he owe this crowd anything? Twitter and its board m…

Snakeoil salesmen were hugely successful.

Back in the day snake oil was actually beneficial.

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2022/08/clark-stanley-first-sn...

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

#379

Post by liketochill »

theCrowing wrote: post #337
ozzythecat wrote: post #329

I’m honestly baffled with the obsession with Musk. Many folks here seem to despise him. But we can’t stop obsessing with the guy. At this point, to me it feels like envy. Musk, despite however he is as a person, is wildly successfully across several verticals. Rather than being a suit and tie corporate person, he literally posts memes, and has a IDGAF attitude. Does he owe this crowd anything? Twitter and its board m…

Snakeoil salesmen were hugely successful.

Are tesla and spaceX snake oil?

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

#380

Post by mikeryan »

nmfisher wrote: post #340
mikeryan wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If these numbers are right and they're laying off 50% the workforce, half of me wonders how much Parag could raise to build a new Twitter from scratch and just hire 500 - 1000 talented folks off the street for the venture, I mean if Travis K could raise almost a billion for his shitty ghost kitchen venture I'd have to think they could get enough runway to get something launched pretty quickly. There's so many "What w…

The success of most* social media platforms was largely unconnected with the developers who built it or the underlying software. You can't just hire a few hundred retrenched developers and expect to come up with a successful social media platform after some number of months. Timing, marketing, and user psychology are much more important. * I'd say TikTok is the exception, because delivering (a) instantaneous video an…

I agree with a lot of what you say, but in this hypothetical I'm envisioning this a bit differently then a completely new social network so much as Twitter 2.0 with a very direct focus on getting a large "Lift and Shift" of users directly from Twitter. I should also be clear that I'm assuming a relatively proportional level of talent across Product, Design etc too not just retrenched engineers.
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