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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

#571

Post by pbronez »

bumby wrote: post #256
throwaway728274 wrote: post #29

For a variety of performance car nerd related reasons, I’ve not paid too much attention to Tesla. But iirc, there have been a couple threads here and elsewhere about Tesla making “expedient” choices in Eng, with a lot of horrible bodges around critical components. It definitely left me with an impression that Tesla was a place with low engineering quality — though again, I have no source at hand here, and don’t feel…

> Tesla was a place with low engineering quality SpaceX has had a somewhat similar reputation (at least early, it may have changed for the better). For example, they had a spectacular failure related to bad material quality in a strut.[1] It's common practice in aerospace quality to have "coupons" kept, tested, and traceable for these types of critical components. Apparently, SpaceX wasn't follow this procedure and t…

Interesting. My impression is that SpaceX has delivered some extraordinary results by throwing out a lot of conventional wisdom and starting over from first principles. This anecdote suggests they’re humble enough to re-adopt standard practices when experience shows their value.

Seems like a good approach… if the cost of failure is manageable.

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

#572

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#573

Post by kweingar »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #570
kweingar wrote: post #567

The most bizarre aspect of this was when Twitter engineers were told to print out their code on paper. There is literally no good reason to do that. At best it is staggering incompetence. At worst it is an intentionally pointless and expensive exercise that serves purely as a loyalty test.

Nah paper is still more efficient than computers in quick meetings. You can imagine many seconds being wasted if they were on a laptop and the engineer needs to find his files. Paper the UX is perfect and instant.

Paper is instant until you say “can you show me that part of the code that handles X” or “where is this function defined” and then it’s multiple orders of magnitudes slower.

(Editing to say, you could also just tell the engineers “hey make sure your code is pulled up and ready to go before the meeting starts”)

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

#574

Post by idontwantthis »

cptaj wrote: post #437
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.

As a Vim user, I’ll happily expand my for loops with just a couple of key presses

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

#575

Post by electriclove »

johnnyAghands wrote: post #558

I don't see what the big deal here is. I feel like it's the obvious move. He wants a no nonsense review of the current state of things at Twitter, and isn't wasting time. I'm assuming these engineers he trusts and wants an objective review instead of some bs from folks too removed.

Exactly! There is too much hate here on anything he does. It just makes sense that he’d want to get people that he trusts looking into this.

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

#576

Post by NegativeK »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #570
kweingar wrote: post #567

The most bizarre aspect of this was when Twitter engineers were told to print out their code on paper. There is literally no good reason to do that. At best it is staggering incompetence. At worst it is an intentionally pointless and expensive exercise that serves purely as a loyalty test.

Nah paper is still more efficient than computers in quick meetings. You can imagine many seconds being wasted if they were on a laptop and the engineer needs to find his files. Paper the UX is perfect and instant.

"Please send us links to your changes before the meeting begins." And display them on a large screen.

I don't think it's really relevant, though. The entire situation is cruel and silly.

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

#577

Post by sjs382 »

vlovich123 wrote: post #536
lupire wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have failed to source this claim after some searching: > 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-technical "manager type" and refused to ask him any technical questions. Is there some news report you’re referencing or som…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33366381

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

#578

Post by parkingrift »

mikeryan wrote: post #282
Tiktaalik wrote: post #46

I dunno why any Twitter engineers would be really trying that hard right now. Passively destroying Twitter from within by not trying, and trying to make a billionare lose 44 billion dollars is a significantly more fun and interesting challenge than making Twitter a better product.

If these numbers are right and they're laying off 50% the workforce, half of me wonders how much Parag could raise to build a new Twitter from scratch and just hire 500 - 1000 talented folks off the street for the venture, I mean if Travis K could raise almost a billion for his shitty ghost kitchen venture I'd have to think they could get enough runway to get something launched pretty quickly. There's so many "What w…

Twitter isn’t some engineering marvel. Anyone could go build a scalable Twitter clone. There are a handful of competitors on the market and a few open source projects. All things considered, it’s easy.

Making a viable business out of it is hard.

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

#579

Post by jpgvm »

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…

Tesla stores an absolutely silly amount of captured training data. They are very familiar with large distributed databases.

What makes Manhattan special (Twitters internal database) isn't it's scale (FB, Google, etc operate DBs which much higher scale) but it's multi-engine paradigm and other cool features.

The Tesla folk that are there probably aren't even DB specialists though, they are likely just there to evaluate the lay of the land and start the process of working out which teams are pulling their weight and which aren't.

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

#580

Post by seattle_spring »

throwaway09223 wrote: post #90
aaronharnly wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Musk is reportedly looking to cut deadweight before Nov 1st when equity vests -- with layoffs possibly happening over the weekend. He might already have a basic idea of key teams and for non-key teams he might be looking to cut very fast. I absolutely have done things like this when acquiring companies - sat with people, asked them to basically interview for their own jobs while showing me the most important thing th…

He's planning on laying off people without even letting their next equity tranche vest? I'm sorry but what an absolute piece of human garbage.
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