Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 1001 posts

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

#451

Post by smt88 »

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.

The article says only some engineers received the invite to print code, and Washington Post's sourcing (some engineers at Twitter) is the same as yours.

Casey Newton is reliable and says the same: https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-takes-over-twitter

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

#452

Post by cactusplant7374 »

Nathanba wrote: post #353
antipaul wrote: post #150

Working as a coder in a non-tech industry for a multinational, I appreciate that someone so high up cares about something as “rudimentary” as code.

I think so too, I'm impressed that he wants to personally look at code at all. His ability to evaluate it deeply is not relevant, one thing is for sure: he can ask deeper questions than if he had no code to talk about. That alone is a big bonus when you need to do an evaluation of a person, having something concrete to talk about.

Why would the code be relevant to generating more profit? It doesn’t seem like the domain of a CEO.

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

#453

Post by dboreham »

longrod wrote: post #448

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 en…

It's the same thing riding a horse.

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

#454

Post by colinmhayes »

dh2022 wrote: post #302
dzink wrote: post #261

Musk is a seller above all else. Every day he finds a new way to draw attention to his projects. The news about Twitter give him even more distribution and by nature more sales towards Tesla and his other companies. Tesla engineers on site for interviews is a great idea for Twitter and for Tesla as both get more PR than before. A lot of people have lost interest in Twitter for more than political reasons and I’m exci…

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

Musk's twitter presence have turned Tesla from a $100 billion cap company to a $700 billion one.

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

#455

Post by kibwen »

longrod wrote: post #448

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 en…

Only incompetent managers (and executives) think that "authority" is interchangeable with "respect". Fortunately for Musk, incompetence rarely disqualifies billionaires from anything.

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

#456

Post by throw_m239339 »

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.

> You can't jump in and "evaluate" without knowing context and being familiar with the features.

Yes you can, it's called an audit and there is nothing wrong with that. The company you work for should have regular security audits for instance, ideally done by a third party rather than internally to eliminate bias. This isn't a "code review".

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

#457

Post by VirusNewbie »

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”.

It may not be the best way, but I could certainly see it having some value.

Twitter has a ton of home grown tooling that a company it size wouldn't have if it was started today.

Is the team of people maintaining their custom stream processing engine really going to say "You could probably just replace this whole team by using Flink"? Repeat for their custom NoSql DB, their batch processing engine, their RPC framework etc.

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

#458

Post by ratsmack »

longrod wrote: post #448

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 en…

Every company I was with when it sold had lawyers come in and inform everyone that all processes are frozen, no equipment can move or be transferred while inventory is taken, everyone involved with computers surrender their passwords to their incoming engineers... etc, etc, etc. It is standard practice and there is nothing nefarious about it.

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

#459

Post by robryan »

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”.

They don't really need to find out anything meaningful. They are basically just putting Twitter employees on notice that they may be going deep into the details when assessing where the company is at and what changes they might want to make.

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

#460

Post by jmyeet »

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.

If this sort of thing concerns you, you should already be pissed because it's not the first time it's happened.

Remember SolarCity? SolarCity was one of Elon's companies. SpaceX had bought a large number of solar bonds. One interpretation of this was to keep the company afloat. A court disagreed [1]. When SolarCity became insolvent it was bought out by Tesla.

So one of Elon's companies bought out another of Elon's companies to save the third Elon company.

There is this myth that exists of Elon being some kind of tech deity but there's a much better case to be made that he's simply a highly privileged technocrat who has quite successfully failed upwards his entire career [2].

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/27/elon-musk-wins-shareholder-l...

[2]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-many-failures-of-elon-...

Post reply on HN