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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

#471

Post by ratsmack »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #75
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.

You'd arguably have a case that Musk is not acting in the interest of Tesla and is using his Tesla position to enrich himself rather than the Tesla company. Exactly what the "CEO is supposed to serve shareholders" is all about.

Do you believe that Musk is not going to push his cars on Twitter? Seems to me that you have access to a fairly large audience on there.

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

#472

Post by bagels »

aaronharnly wrote: post #18
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.

Respectfully, very little of this seems to be operating by standard procedure. Have you seen the incoming CEO ask people to bring printouts of their code, ever?

Do you have any references to this printouts of code? I saw this mentioned on another thread too. I asked about it and was mocked for asking about it.

Is this something that literally is happening? Where can we read about it?

edit: Apparently referring to this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-27/tesla-eng...

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

#473

Post by mden »

mhh__ wrote: post #291
alchemist1e9 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The code is almost never special, the business processes are. Everything seems so incredibly trivial until you reach something that isn't.

Agreed. Most code at the top tech companies isn't interesting or even necessarily good. The hardest part of jumping into a new code base is almost always understanding the problem it's solving rather than the technology used to solve it.

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

#474

Post by ratsmack »

ajross wrote: post #157
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd arguably have a case that Musk is not acting in the interest of Tesla and is using his Tesla position to enrich himself rather than the Tesla company. Exactly what the "CEO is supposed to serve shareholders" is all about.

The counter argument is that Tesla has created more shareholder value over the past few years than any other single company, and in fact more than a ton of whole market segments. I mean, investors know he's sort of a loon, this is hardly the weirdest thing he done[1], and they're still on board. And FWIW: if you really want to structure this in a shareholder-friendly way, Twitter can just pay Tesla a consulting fee.…

> sort of a loon

I prefer eccentric, which may be an advantage for him.

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

#475

Post by dehrmann »

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.

Once Tesla bought Solar City, Musk's cousin's company, it became clear that he's prone to this sort of misuse of resources. I agree that he shouldn't use Tesla resources like this, but it's not out-of-character, either.

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

#476

Post by jamra »

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…

The best engineers I see farm out the easier issues and even some of the hard work. But they supervise and mentor. Counting lines of code disincentivizes mentoring.

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

#477

Post by zackees »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #75
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.

You'd arguably have a case that Musk is not acting in the interest of Tesla and is using his Tesla position to enrich himself rather than the Tesla company. Exactly what the "CEO is supposed to serve shareholders" is all about.

There’s the presumption here that Tesla is footing the bill. For all you know Tesla hired out of these workers on contract and the Twitter is footing the bill.

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

#478

Post by bagacrap »

uptownfunk wrote: post #427
aroman wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Probably not as hard as it seems, Amazon does this regularly with the concept of 2 pizza team. The real challenge is figuring out what is the 20% of Twitter that drives 80% of revenue. Probably basic Twitter posting and ads, and whatever fraud/bot prevention is needed to keep running smoothly.

why would you throw away 20% of your revenue? Obviously a lot of functionality is there to chase marginal percentages of revenue, but it's still worthwhile at Twitter scale.

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

#479

Post by VirusNewbie »

voxl wrote: post #321
LouisSayers wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always do this with Elon... it doesn't matter if he's making cars, building rockets or taking on social media, the general consensus is that he doesn't know what he's doing and will fail. But, who's the richest man in the room? Who was right and who was wrong? People can hate on Elon all they want, but it's pure ignorance to think that we know any better. Let the man work his magic, I'm curious to see what he…

Being rich has almost nothing to do with your ability, talent, or intelligence. It the single most important factor is luck. This is why you often find CEOs looking down on those with PhDs, because they have an inflated sense of self-worth for being "more rich." When in reality a PhD is a very difficult test of your work ethic and creativity, and being a successful CEO is a matter of luck and connections.

>Being rich has almost nothing to do with your ability, talent, or intelligence.

So we should imagine that most self made rich people's IQ distribution is completely matching the general populations, and similarly for their work ethic, no?

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

#480

Post by ed25519FUUU »

photochemsyn wrote: post #445

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 ar…

Everyone thinks that these Tesla engineers are going there to “evaluate” but nobody is really considering them going there to “steal” code to bring to Tesla.
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