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

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

#431

Post by closeparen »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #119
Havoc wrote: post #57

Surprised how sceptical all the comments here are. Dick or not the guy has a talent for building companies

Particularly interesting argument they’re making too, that Twitter is a bunch of write-only code, unreadable by any other engineers.

With time, reading, discussion, reflection, practice, and experimentation you can integrate into a team and grow to understand how things are, then why they are, then how that's working out, and finally how they can be improved. This process takes months, even years.

It's very unlikely that an outsider could be shown a random diff on a random component in a Twitter-sized architecture & even know what it's doing or why, let alone make a reasonable judgement on whether it's a good idea or the best way.

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

#432

Post by cube00 »

ctvo wrote: post #249

What a fabulous time for security researchers. Hello IT? This is Bob from Tesla here. I require full access to audit data and source code per Mr. Musk’s request. You hadn’t heard? That’s because Mr. Musk fired your boss this morning now add my personal email to the system.

I wonder if the typical executive tyrant who weaponizes fear to get their bonuses is more likely to have their staff caught by social engineering attacks like these.

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

#433

Post by Retric »

vasco wrote: post #387
threeseed wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hir…

If I look at my company's gitlab statistics, the best engineers correlate with the top third of number of PRs not only in quality (perceived) but also in volume (number of open/merged PRs). I hear this a lot of the mythical top level engineer that thinks for 3 days and then bursts a small PR that changes the world, but I haven't seen it. Mostly because for good things to get pushed out in the real world, they are bro…

I have seen it, but it really depends on the type of problems being solved and the overall team.

The most valuable team member generally fills in for whatever the team struggles with. Sometimes that’s making thousands of minor UI changes, other times it’s spending months writing 4kb of highly optimized code to avoid spending 10’s of millions replacing existing hardware.

The difficult bit when looking for people who will adjust to the needs of a team is by definition they aren’t working on the same things in different environments.

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

#434

Post by fzeroracer »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #253
lohii wrote: post #154

If someone completely new to my codebase came along and tried to evaluate my code I'd laugh. You can't jump in and "evaluate" without knowing context and being familiar with the features.

What’s more funny is how people commonly believe like this their code is so special or different than everyone else’s. Reverse engineering a large code base is not anywhere as hard as most software engineers somehow believe. I was tasked with analyzing a large code base from a company that my employer had been an investor in and as part of their investment had been given IP rights, the company employees were floored…

And how long exactly did that take? I'm going to cast doubt on your story because in my experience people that often claim to understand how a codebase works in a quick amount of time tend to be full of it and end up blowing things up when they try to change or modify things.

The codebase often isn't the issue, it's the use cases and the reasons why it evolved into the form it did.

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

#435

Post by code_runner »

trident5000 wrote: post #428
alerighi wrote: post #393

This is a very stupid thing to do. First, code is not the issue. Code can be rewritten in not a lot of time, when you have clear what to write. Twitter is not something so complex, in principle, thus it shouldn't be that difficult (a team of 10 good programmers in a month can probably rewrite everything). The thing where is 99% of the complexity and you can't redesign in a month is the infrastructure, how data is sto…

Its not stupid because he knows and trusts his engineers at Tesla. He knows nobody at Twitter. Hes probably trying to get an understanding of whats going on without relying on a bunch of employees who might not like him. It takes a while to build an employee base you trust, certainly in his situation.

I believe you’re missing the point. Random code reviews performed by people in a whole different sector aren’t the best way to find out “what’s going on”.

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

#436

Post by jquery »

kjksf wrote: post #362
inferiorhuman wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inte…

You know what else is below most CEOs? Tweeting poop emojis when given a rundown on why his arguments are specious.

Elon is a mixed bag. He’s reminds me of a living Steve Jobs, in a way. People sometimes forget he’s human like the rest of us.

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

#437

Post by cptaj »

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…

And if you indeed make "more lines!" the guiding metric for developer performance, you're setting yourself up for a world of pain because they will sure as hell find out and start gaming the metric. This will lead to a feedback loop of rising expenses and tech debt.

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

#438

Post by inferiorhuman »

kjksf wrote: post #362
inferiorhuman wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inte…

  Counterpoint: what other CEO would be involved in low level stuff like
  looking at code or personally interviewing newly acquired employees?
None, because that's not the role of the CEO.

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

#439

Post by trident5000 »

code_runner wrote: post #435
trident5000 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not stupid because he knows and trusts his engineers at Tesla. He knows nobody at Twitter. Hes probably trying to get an understanding of whats going on without relying on a bunch of employees who might not like him. It takes a while to build an employee base you trust, certainly in his situation.

I believe you’re missing the point. Random code reviews performed by people in a whole different sector aren’t the best way to find out “what’s going on”.

I never said it was the best way, but it may be the most viable option. And you dont have Tesla engineers personally go through the code, you have them sit down with twitter engineers and have them walk through how it works. Its probably a general understanding exercise.

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

#440

Post by howlin »

bdowling wrote: post #102
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.

It would be reasonable for Twitter to pay Tesla for the audit work, because otherwise it would be a misuse of Tesla resources to only benefit the Tesla CEO.

Even if TWTR paid TSLA, this is still an obvious conflict of interest.
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