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

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

#441

Post by oska » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 2:00 AM UTC

BoorishBears wrote: post #358

oska wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very broadly speaking, HN is the forum of choice for the 'Web 2.0' and VC backed startup culture that went along with it, i.e. what is commonly perceived now as Silicon Valley culture. This culture is becoming increasingly reactionary now that their power is threatened/fading. Musk, while part of the early rise of that culture in the late 90s is now well outside it (represented by his move from California to Texas) a…

As someone well outside that circle, has it ever occurred to you that some people just don't like Elon "Pedo Guy" Musk? And same people double down on the dislike because his supporters are the kind of people to paint not liking him must actually be a sign that you're just upset that you're losing your non-existent grip on non-existent power? - Elon went from cool eccentric paypal/electric car/taking us to mars geniu…

Why are you assuming I am an Elon Musk supporter, or that I even like him? And it's fine if you don't like him; it's fine for anyone to not like him.

What I am commenting on is the reactionary attacks frequently made in this forum against Musk's business efforts, in this case his taking over of Twitter, with many ppl forecasting doom, despite his business success already across a wide range of domains. An objective observer would say that given his track record (truly extraordinary and historic in the case of SpaceX), he's probably got a decent chance of making a success of this twitter acquisition too. A decent chance, note, I'm not saying his success is guaranteed. (And obviously the way he pursued the acquisition of twitter showed impulsivity and some lack of strategic planning; that criticism is fine.)

There's a number of comments in this thread suggesting that Musk only surrounds himself with 'yes men'. I, like others, have noticed how he does favour a cohort of sycophants on twitter, so perhaps there is some truth in this direction. But it's a nonsense to think he would fully do this in business and succeed with extraordinarily difficult technological challenges like developing a re-usable rocket. This point was made in one of the few rebuttals to this nonsense in this thread:

> I guarantee Elon is surrounded by yes-men.

>> That's not how you build a spaceship.

So, to repeat, intelligent criticism of Musk's business decisions is fine; personal dislike towards him is fine (although I would suggest that people take care of how much they are being influenced by the highly hostile presentation of him in the corporate press). What is not fine is reactionary, frankly idiotic attacks on him, which is what we frequently and not at all usefully see in so many HN threads. And why these attacks? Again, I would suggest that it's because Elon has quite frequently stood up to Silicon Valley power or more specifically its celebrated causes (deplatforming for 'hate speech', work from home, lockdowns, 'pronouns', etc) and that is greatly resented.

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

#442

Post by code_runner » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 2:00 AM UTC

threatofrain wrote: post #147

spaceywilly wrote: post #7

This is pretty standard procedure when a company gets bought. The new owners will conduct a review and decide who to keep and who to get rid of. They have probably been given a target of how many people they want to lay off and are evaluating who is worth keeping. It’s not worth staying at a company that gets acquired, you’ll either get laid off or be asked to do the same work with less people, and awful morale.

You say "the new owners" but Tesla is not the new owner. Is it really standard procedure for employees from another company of the same CEO to do labor on the CEO's new company? And is printing out code really standard? Like, if you have the prerogative to review company code, why wouldn't you rather just use code tools on a computer, such as Git? I wouldn't be quick to dismiss the idea that this is a show.

To your point, can’t they just poke around the recent activity across all of twitters repos? Surely these brilliant Tesla engineers can figure that out.

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

#443

Post by rjzzleep » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 2:00 AM UTC

aroman wrote: post #413

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…

> a team of 10 good programmers in a month can probably rewrite everything unless you scope-down "everything" to the point of triviality, that is ludicrously underestimating the intrinsic complexity of twitter's product surface, and all the plumbing and necessary tools that lie beneath

given how many people twitter employs and how many features actually get shipped at twitter, I'd say scope-down isn't that terrible of an idea

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

#444

Post by salmonet » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 2:02 AM UTC

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.

I am surprised this is the top comment. Yes, I am sure they have done the paperwork for these "tons of thousands of dollars." I think it is unlikely that many shareholders are concerned about this exercise

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

#445

Post by photochemsyn » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 2:03 AM UTC

Twitter's core operation is running a massively distributed database, as I understand it, where concurrency issues are pretty important to get right. See Data-Intensive Applications (2017), Part II: Distributed Systems (Replication, Partitioning, Transactions, etc.) for an overview.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensiv...

Just guessing, you'd think Starlink would be more experienced in that area than either Tesla or SpaceX? I suppose there are things like remote software updates and internal working databases to manage at SpaceX and Tesla, but it seems managing satellite traffic is a closer match.

Who knows, they might be, I really don't trust WaPo reporting anymore.

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

#446

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 2:03 AM UTC

throwaway0asd wrote: post #316

dh2022 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. But is all of this PR worth $44 billion?

Yes, Twitter was the primary tool he used to inflate the market value of his properties and manipulate the market in his interest.

I wonder if it would be legal for Elon to secretly boost his own tweets. And more broadly, uprank posts that support him and downrank those that disagree.

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

#447

Post by qaq » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 2:03 AM UTC

tootie wrote: post #313

Thaxll wrote: post #278

How Tesla engineers are relevant into evaluating Twitter code.

How is evaluating code relevant to evaluating the company?

Who to keep and who to let go, Tesla runs it's own large scale datacenters they might be evaluating shifting workloads to onprem

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

#448

Post by longrod » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 2:04 AM UTC

I think people are looking at this the wrong way. It's not so much about the code as it is about establishing an authority. Musk takeover is often regarded as banditry and I wouldn't be surprised if the employees didn't take him seriously in the beginning. This is his way of saying, "I don't trust you, I don't know what you have been up to but things are going to be different so better get used to it."

Using Tesla engineers is just to get everyone talking. I don't think they can get a clear picture by looking at last 30 days of code but they can use this as reason to lay a lot of people off. Not that Musk needs reasons, obviously.

In my mind I think Twitter is going to go on a very, very different direction than we all expect. You have to understand that Musk isn't after the big dollar here but rather he is experimenting which has a lot of chances to fail. Twitter could become extraordinary or it could become utter trash, we'll have to wait and see. Personally, I am quite excited to see where this goes.

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

#449

Post by fzeroracer » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 2:05 AM UTC

ergocoder wrote: post #414

smt88 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any slightly competent software leader would know that you can track every character of code written by any dev using version control. Printing it out as a mark of honor/shame is something a petty, arrogant tyrant would do. Musk has been around people who are afraid to say no to him for too long.

> Printing it out as a mark of honor/shame is something a petty, arrogant tyrant would do I'll call it... after talking to a few twitter engineers who said they didn't hear anything about that. "Printing it out" is fake news. "Reviewing code in the last 60 days" is probably real. It seems fake news is okay as long as it fits our narrative.

It's not. There have been multiple twitter engineers that have shared that the print out stuff was real [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/leahculver/status/1586145696163373056

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

#450

Post by joezydeco » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 2:06 AM UTC

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”.

Those who think this is a code review for the sake of looking for bugs or architecture issues are missing the point.

It's an intimidation factor on Musk's part. Are you willing to play along and show your work? Or are you going to huff and puff and complain about it? Maybe you're hiding something, or maybe you're not going to be a cooperative resource going forward. Now you're on the cut list.

Maybe the code will get glanced at for a moment. Most of us can tell well written code from spaghetti without running it through a compiler. But still, that's not the prime objective here.