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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

#731

Post by runlevel1 »

trident5000 wrote: post #428
alerighi wrote: post #393

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…

Its not stupid because he knows and trusts his engineers at Tesla. He knows nobody at Twitter. Hes probably trying to get an understanding of whats going on without relying on a bunch of employees who might not like him. It takes a while to build an employee base you trust, certainly in his situation.

It's the job of an incoming CEO to (1) gather information from the existing staff, (2) build relationships (and trust) with them, (3) use that information to help inform/tailor strategy, and (4) identify key individuals that can help execute said strategy.

If he needed an outside consult to confirm or refute suspected problems, that's ok, but that's not what happened here. He started off this relationship adversarially, and first impressions matter. This one is going to take some effort to repair. And if it isn't actively repaired, it's going to be a bumpy ride before he starts seeing good progress on his vision.

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

#732

Post by DeathArrow »

bamboozled wrote: post #645
mikeryan wrote: post #282

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…

I've thought the same thing, while Twitter is hard to scale, it's pretty freaking simple product to build, if I had a bit of spare time, I'd be building a clone right now so as everyone leaves Musk's platform they have a place to go.

There are probably Twitter alternatives laying on GitHub. How much people would you expect leaving Musks platform for another one? Are you willing to bet your life savings on it? I hope not, at least not without solid market research.

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

#733

Post by nlitened »

extheat wrote: post #371
pwthornton wrote: post #355

Tesla is a hardware company not known for stellar software. Both its self-driving/driver assist capabilities are suspect, and the functionality of the giant tablet UI could be better. You hear a lot of requests to be able to use Apple CarPlay in Teslas. Teslas are probably better than the vast majority of car companies, particularly the UI of the touch controls and system, but it still seems weird to me to have engin…

“Better software engineers” to anyone who does software engineering is a joke. It’s an totally unquantifiable measure, and some people use dumb metrics like leetcode capabilities as some IQ test.

There absolutely _are_ better and worse software engineers.

There may not be an objective metric to discern a difference between two people of similar skill, but for sure it is easy to tell John Carmack from a junior developer with two years of experience.

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

#734

Post by wiseowise »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #253
lohii wrote: post #154

If someone completely new to my codebase came along and tried to evaluate my code I'd laugh. You can't jump in and "evaluate" without knowing context and being familiar with the features.

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#736

Post by zo1 »

zzzeek wrote: post #195
ufmace wrote: post #155

I went in assuming that this was going to be a hit piece. It's not quite that bad, but there's elements like that. I have no idea who this "former Tesla engineer" is or what their biases and motivations are, or how the article authors found them. It seems perfectly reasonable for Elon to bring in some people he knows he can trust to help evaluate how Twitter actually works. I presume he's competent enough to do any n…

> It's pretty clear to me that there are elements of the elite media-political complex that are terrified of Elon purchasing Twitter because he's not part of their crowd and they won't be able to control him and through him what is and isn't allowed on Twitter. IMO all articles about this should be read with that in mind. It's pretty clear there are elements of the Hacker News community who are obsessed with "cancel…

Coming from someone in the camp you rail against, and judging by the ups and down votes I've done in this thread, I'd say it's 50-50. But judging by how many grey and downvoted posts I've seen that I agree with or think are reasonable comments, I'd say it's much more skewed and one sided.

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

#737

Post by theteapot »

xmprt wrote: post #701
abc_lisper wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's the everyday minutiae.

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

#738

Post by rtev »

threeseed wrote: post #363
fleddr wrote: post #301

I think most are missing that this is a code review + loyalty review. For sure a software engineer from Tesla, or even a manager, can get an idea of how valuable/productive a coder is without fully understanding the code in detail. How many PRs? What does the code do? How was it reviewed? What value does it bring to stakeholders (users, business revenue)? Sure enough this way you can get a rough idea of how much work…

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…

The big rush is the November 1st stock vest. They need people out by Monday at the latest to avoid a massive payday.

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

#739

Post by nebula8804 »

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…

Didn't he just get a golden parachute of around 54 Million dollars? Would a portion of that be enough to get going?

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

#740

Post by DeathArrow »

lupire wrote: post #502
scaramanga wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they don't have a union so they were excluded from all the big-boy negotiations at the sale, and they've no way to resist the demands of their bosses. They can put up, or shut up. Or just complain pathetically.

Or they can join a competing social network.

Facebook is out of cash. And even if they were expanding, Facebook is orders of magnitude more complex, is not sure all ex Twitter employees would have been a good match for Facebook.
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