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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

#701
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.

I’m a TSLA holder and I don’t mind at all. The everyday minutiae don’t concern me as long as the big picture for Tesla is in focus and with in reach

How does Musk acquiring Twitter have anything to do with the big picture of Tesla?

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

#702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Making a Twitter clone that could handle 10 users is indeed quite trivial. Making one that would handle 0.4M+ users is not.

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

#703

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.

[deleted]

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

#704
post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Another technique is "versioning" when instead of fixing a function, you duplicate it and slowly migrate callers of this function to its new version.

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

#705

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…

I once reviewed code for a company that got purchased. I took less than a few hours to reach conclusion. There were 7 developers and in 2 months only one was writing code. The entire team but that one developer was fired. Twitter has grown a reputation for being slow and a rest and vest haven. Won't be surprised if they are looking for people not writing code. On a different note, If you're in a large org and all you…

> I once reviewed code for a company that got purchased. I took less than a few hours to reach conclusion. There were 7 developers and in 2 months only one was writing code. The entire team but that one developer was fired. Twitter has grown a reputation for being slow and a rest and vest haven. Won't be surprised if they are looking for people not writing code.

I ran across some developers (in multiple orgs over the years) that would produce large amount of almost purposefully unmaintainable code. Yes, they were “productive”, and no, the stuff they produced made no difference and was a waste (both features wise and code wise since). 100% of these codebases turned out to be unsalvageable and were rewritten. It just would usually take orgs many months, usually after such developers leave to realize the complete and utter waste they left.

Not saying there are no slackers, it’s just productive devs are not necessarily those that produce the most of code.

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

#706
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.

How do you know Twitter or Musk aren't paying for those contractors to come and assess the code?

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

#707

what a waste of everyone's time. as a manager, I can tell you that even my smartest engineers go through highs and lows in their career and there are days when they push out code like there's no tomorrow and days when they don't push out anything because you know there's life outside of work that affects them (their dog passed away or their wife filed for divorce or their daughter is sick and was taken to ER etc). An…

It's especially dumb _after_ buying a company to be acting like the developers are so incompetent across the board that they could be judged on this criteria. Elon just bought all this IP -- now he's going to make extremely rash decisions about who is contributing and who is not based on this very flawed methodology?

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

#708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Making a viable business out of it is hard.

Even Twitter wasn’t able to figure that part out

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

#709

This is a very stupid thing to do. First, code is not the issue. Code can be rewritten in not a lot of time, when you have clear what to write. Twitter is not something so complex, in principle, thus it shouldn't be that difficult (a team of 10 good programmers in a month can probably rewrite everything). The thing where is 99% of the complexity and you can't redesign in a month is the infrastructure, how data is sto…

Just the iOS app is 2.5 million lines[1]. Good luck writing tenth of that from scratch in a month.

[1] https://twitter.com/bhcarpenter/status/1585834343766773761

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