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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

#511

Post by alchemist1e9 »

bagacrap wrote: post #487
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…

I would say it's pretty "special" and well written code if outsiders can come in and quickly understand it. You should have commended them for their work.

That is true. They were definitely a skilled team that had written the system. However I still think most large systems can be reverse “design” engineered fairly easily by someone who is experienced.

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

#512

Post by CodeWriter23 »

closeparen wrote: post #431
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

I’ve been coding for 39 years. I know how the process works. And yes, it does take time to get the deep understanding of any system. But it is not on the scale of impossible for a squad of 10x engineers to answer and/or develop some basic questions in a short time frame. And much more reliable than trusting the existing crew who has been quite publicly represented by persons hostile to their new boss. I do not in any way mean to cast ALL engineers at Twitter in this light. But it is quite clear the bullies there have grown quite accustomed to their pulpit.

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

#513

Post by jquery »

bagels wrote: post #461

Did the Twitter engineers get any kind of retention deal? If I were there, it'd take a lot to convince me to stay with this kind of thing going on.

That’s probably the goal here. Elon is following the cult leader playbook. Make the followers do strange and humiliating rituals.

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

#514

Post by Jach »

ratsmack wrote: post #471
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.

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.

What do you mean by push? Tesla already doesn't run ads, this would be a strange way to start.

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

#515

Post by permo-w »

bpodgursky wrote: post #491
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…

The suggestion algorithms are more of a technical challenge than concurrency, at Twitter scale. Tesla does a lot more ML than SpaceX. (and let's be honest, Twitter hasn't solved the concurrency issues, so I'm not sure there's much to review)

twitter is one of the slowest of all the big modern websites. half the time all it has to load is text and it still takes up to 30 seconds

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

#516

Post by stingraycharles »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #480
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.

This makes no sense, they wouldn’t even know what to look for and likely there is little that would be of use to them.

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

#517

Post by moralestapia »

lupire wrote: post #470
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…

Why would anyone take him seriously when he is making a massive embarrassment of himself on his first day on the job (after doing the same for months leading up to the takeover?) Musk didn't know the bio of the CEO of the company he was buying (who was also former CTO, engineer, Stanford PhD (thesis topic: making decisions under uncertainty), IPhO gold medalist, top tier Indian tech student) and called him a non-tech…

>Why would anyone take him seriously [...]

Well, they should, he is their boss now.

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

#518

Post by stingraycharles »

permo-w wrote: post #515
bpodgursky wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The suggestion algorithms are more of a technical challenge than concurrency, at Twitter scale. Tesla does a lot more ML than SpaceX. (and let's be honest, Twitter hasn't solved the concurrency issues, so I'm not sure there's much to review)

twitter is one of the slowest of all the big modern websites. half the time all it has to load is text and it still takes up to 30 seconds

That’s a site design issue, not a backend / data storage / concurrency algorithms issue.

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

#520

Post by cercatrova »

lupire wrote: post #470
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…

Why would anyone take him seriously when he is making a massive embarrassment of himself on his first day on the job (after doing the same for months leading up to the takeover?) Musk didn't know the bio of the CEO of the company he was buying (who was also former CTO, engineer, Stanford PhD (thesis topic: making decisions under uncertainty), IPhO gold medalist, top tier Indian tech student) and called him a non-tech…

Why does Twitter need to end? Have you before and do you currently use Twitter? I've met and talked to a great deal of cool people on there, such as a lot of prominent people in the web dev space, as well as scientists in various fields.

Twitter is just a social network, it can be used for good or for bad, based on who one follows. That people think it needs to end for whatever reason (or maybe they're only used to the bad parts, or have even never used Twitter which is quite a many people in my experience who talk trash about Twitter) is misguided.

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