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

61–70 of 1001 posts

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

#61

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

the_doctah wrote: post #41
jstx1 wrote: post #3

> One former Tesla engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe the matter but was not involved, said Tesla engineers would have trouble capably assessing Twitter’s code. Distributed systems, the large-scale and spread-out network that Twitter is composed of, are not the automaker’s specialty, the person said. > The “idea of Elon being flanked by his Tesla engineers reviewing Twitter code is…

What hubris to think that your system is so complex that other engineers couldn't understand it.

Oh please, that's a ridiculous assessment of what was said. Coding giant distributed web apps is a very different domain than coding for cars. I wouldn't put much stock in Twitter engineers assessing self driving car code either.

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

#62

Post by gwilikers »

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…

I know of this Twitter thread, but not sure of the authenticity.

https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376

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

#63

Post by sroussey »

whateveracct wrote: post #40
_vertigo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Musk’s POV, a bunch of solid, well-rounded, and experienced engineers you trust might be enough to tell you “this guy is full of shit” when talking to new people. Maybe it’s less about code quality and more about eng quality.

I guarantee Elon is surrounded by yes-men.

No post body was provided.

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

#64

Post by grogenaut »

snotrockets wrote: post #49
8cmj7A wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were asked to print their code and typically this is done as part of diligence _before_ closing. This is not sop. It’s Elon making a show of things.

Very rarely does due diligence involves actual critique of code on paper. Or code reviews at all, for that matter. Edited: technical review isn’t code review.

I've done 2 due diligence in the last 3 years. Both time I read a large part of the code base, and I read the code reviews of the engineers as well. Codebase to find issues with the code but also liabilities that we'd need to deal with. I read the code reviews to help level set for the engineers.

I've done on paper reviews as well where it was just easier than getting access to the code repos. Sure it's like 50 lbs of paper but whatever. The nice thing with paper is you're basically sorting, you toss the interesting pages to one side and the uninteresting to the other.

Both of these were 20 person companies so I could review the 200-500kloc codebases in around 8 hours. It's not the most fun day :)

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

#66

Post by jjfoooo6 »

cbeach wrote: post #50
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 Model S owner here. The software on iOS and car is several years ahead of the competition. It embarrasses luxury German automakers. It’s made with the user in mind, it is elegant, and it is innovative in many surprising ways. For balance, there have been bugs - the linking of key fobs to driver profiles has always been glitchy, and Tesla’s decision to use an inadequate eMMC chip was shortsighted given the volum…

I also own a Tesla and I'd rate their user facing software at a C+ at best. It's better than the competition, sure, but the competition is legacy auto manufacturers with no tradition of expertise in software.

Examples: the mobile app is very clunky and slow, the in-car dashboard devotes half of it's real estate to a visualization of the car's object detection, serving no purpose other than to distract the driver.

It's fine. But the problem domain of Twitter is dramatically different than anything Tesla engineers are working on.

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

#67

Post by MonkeyMalarky »

sidibe wrote: post #43
the_doctah wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What hubris to think that your system is so complex that other engineers couldn't understand it.

The hubris is thinking Tesla engineers (who are offered worse pay and wlb relative to Twitter) are coding masters of every domain. I won't even snipe at their own software here. It takes a long time to onboard to a big mature infrastructure that is serving hundreds of millions of users for people moving from a similar company, even longer if your day job is whatever Tesla engineers are doing. And that's onboarding, n…

On one hand, you can usually safely ignore 99% of code in a system that does the plumbing in a system and focus on the few key algorithms. It wouldn't be a stretch at all to take one of the self driving AI guys and have them evaluate say, an ML classifier used to flag spam/abuse content. That would be well inside their domain.

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

#68

Post by crazytalk »

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?

Makes plenty of sense if said employees no longer have access to source code by the time the interview takes place. Red Wedding silicon valley edition

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

#69

Post by xcrunner529 »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #4

Kind of insulting but understandable coming from an owner that just bought a new toy. He should have done it before he bought it. It's interesting how much publicity this whole situation is getting. Musk must be loving it.

Ah yes the “4dchess” argument that seems to come up anytime a narcissist looks stupid, because it definitely can’t just be that simple.

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

#70

Post by Nicksil »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #61
the_doctah wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What hubris to think that your system is so complex that other engineers couldn't understand it.

Oh please, that's a ridiculous assessment of what was said. Coding giant distributed web apps is a very different domain than coding for cars. I wouldn't put much stock in Twitter engineers assessing self driving car code either.

>Oh please, that's a ridiculous assessment of what was said. Coding giant distributed web apps is a very different domain than coding for cars. I wouldn't put much stock in Twitter engineers assessing self driving car code either.

You don't need to be a part of any particular domain to effectively audit code.

Post reply on HN