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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

#791

Post by nxm »

thwayunion wrote: post #788
jiggawatts wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people developing a system that controls two-ton death machines get their panties in a twist about having to demonstrate basic competency in a memory-unsafe language… it’s probably good that they quit. Airline pilots don’t quit in a huff because they have to demonstrate basic competency annually.

This take might have more credibility if Tesla weren't facing criminal charges for its failure to deliver autopilot.

Criminal? No one is going to jail for failure to deliver on a very difficult AI problem

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

#792

Post by rvba »

completelylegit wrote: post #346

Once upon a time at Tesla, Elon brought SpaceX staff in to weed out the undesirables. The autopilot team didn’t like being quizzed on basic c/c++ questions and that was the first time almost all of AutoPilot quit. Or so I heard.

As much as I dont like Elon, I wonder how much of them quit since they couldn't answer those questions.

Probably I will get tons of downvotes, but there is this strange myth here (and on reddit) that there are no incompetent programmers.

When in reality there are tons of incompetent programmers, just like there are incompetent people in any other job.

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

#793

Post by chippiewill »

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…

Some Tesla engineers will be better than Twitter engineers and vice versa, but the Tesla engineers aren't there as a bastion of better software engineering.

They're a "trusted" external party that Elon can use to get an unbiased assessment of what's going on internally at twitter and get a better picture of what's valuable and what's not. If you ask a senior engineer at Twitter the same questions you'll get a very different set of answers, not necessarily wrong answers but a different perspective. Unless Elon's an idiot he'll be doing both.

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

#796

Post by nxm »

armatav wrote: post #655

Thread is insane; he's checking to see who's doing actual work.

Exactly… it was published that many engineers at Twitter haven’t been doing anything useful/sitting around for a long time now. Time to cut the fat. Moreover, seems like a bash Elon thread

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

#797

Post by itronitron »

xg15 wrote: post #777
braingenious wrote: post #151

All of this is so funny in general. It seems possible that Twitter might go the way of Tumblr in that goofy policy changes alienate the core userbase. I couldn’t imagine betting billions of dollars on a property that could basically just become a valuable-ish domain in the future.

Slight difference: Tumblr's core userbase were edgy teenagers and porn consumers, Twitter's core userbase appears to be press people, marketing professionals, celebrities and politicians. I think this userbase will be less inclined to just move on to Mastodon and more to make demands to Musk instead.

>> Twitter's core userbase appears to be press people, marketing professionals, celebrities and politicians

all the more reason that everyone else will just leave, except for the bots

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

#798

Post by fab1an »

beachy wrote: post #763
segmondy wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Larry Ellison famously once said "if you aren't a developer, and you aren't a salesman, then tell me real slow just what it is you do".

I guess in the case of Oracle, the answer is most likely "a lawyer" :D

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

#799

Post by giantrobot »

ergocoder wrote: post #666
kweingar wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I was a Twitter engineer, I'd be trying to figure out how to maximize my severance package right about now. Absolutely. This is how I would spend every minute of my workdays until the eventual layoff. It’s a degrading experience for sure, but it could pay off big.

What are some strategies for this? I can't think of any and would have been a sitting duck.

Get everything in writing. If someone wants an in-person meeting with no notes taken send an e-mail to them afterwards confirming what was said in the meeting. That way you have a paper trail of what was said/known and when.

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

#800

Post by EricDeb »

segmondy wrote: post #529
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…

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…

This is a inaccurate in my opinion. Obviously all developers should be writing code but in my experience there's usually about half new feature work and half maintenance. A lot of the maintenance is of projects written by people no longer at the company. I guess you're advocating for a policy of complete silo-ing where devs only ever work on what they wrote in the first place and no one can jump in and help other teams under any circumstance, but at least the companies I've worked at have not advocated for that policy
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