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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

#851

Post by [deleted] »

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".

[deleted]

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

#852

Post by [deleted] »

TheChaplain wrote: post #783
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.

Comments like this makes me lose faith i humanity. If I were a engineer at Twitter, I'd do my absolute best up to the minute I have to leave the premises. Because I would care about the company, my colleagues and most importantly for the >200m people who use Twitter for fun, educational, business and those who depend on it. But it's probably because I'm an old beard, who value being honest and ethical, to be the bett…

[deleted]

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

#853

Post by pavlov »

I worked at Facebook and remember what it was like to first face the total complexity of the system.

It’s really hard for me to imagine myself working at a company that deals almost exclusively with machine-generated data (as Tesla does) and being assigned to judge a social platform’s engineering qualify in one day. Cars and spaceships on a closed network are fundamentally “clean” compared to having hundreds of millions of people who produce dirty and often adversarial data.

But I guess the point of this exercise isn’t really to judge code quality, but to drive fear at Twitter.

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

#854

Post by matwood »

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.

You're talking more about standard procedure after an acquisition. The new owners come in and look for redundancies and try to cut there.

This was a change in ownership, not an acquisition. There's an assumption about a lot of dead weight at Twitter. There certainly may be, but it's not simple redundancies (ie, you don't need 2 accounting depts.). Instead they'll have to figure out if Twitter really needs that many people.

My guess is Twitter isn't as over-staffed as people think. Content moderation and multi-country policy likely require a lot of staff. To quote Scott Galloway on his attempted company take overs, "I often find out I'm not as smart as I thought I was, and the existing management isn't as dumb as I thought they were."

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

#855

Post by mr_toad »

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.

Sounds a lot like Ark Fleet Ship B.

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

#856

Post by fredgrott »

Twitter has always been somewhat, let's say not tech IQ in code and tech infrastructure.

I am sure many of us remember some Twitter higher-up claiming Ruby was all they needed only to be let go after they changed the backend to stop using ruby as the back end!

And keep in mind Elon has to answer the US Congress questions about security issues which does in fact require an outside code audit in the first place. It's a good indicator of Elon's true intentions to get a more safe twitter for everyone.

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

#857

Post by matwood »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #682
croes wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Musk has extraordinary capability of extracting every bit of potential a person can deliver. Either you work crazy at your 200% or you are worthless and the company is not for you. You are simply paraphrasing exploitation. >but if you see most of his businesses, his expertise is dealing with governments, contracts and policies makers Looks more like brute force and public shaming to me.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately while reading books about leadership I don't know much about Musk or his companies, but I do know that a single person or a small team can often outperform hundreds of people at a big company. I wonder if he's tapped into that somehow in this case If you're doing something you love with a great team that takes care of you, you can easily work 2x as hard for no extra money wi…

He's tapped into leveraging his sycophants. IMO, that's not leadership, though it can work for awhile.

The problem with his method is there is no one to tell him no, and a leader should instead value critical feedback. I think we've been seeing the cracks at the edges of this lack of feedback for awhile. This deal being the largest one to date financially.

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

#858

Post by Kwpolska »

chris_wot wrote: post #818
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 why colors were off in the MacOS version of LibreOffice. Not being all that familiar with the code, I spent days reading through the code. Then I idly looked up the kCGColorSpaceGenericGray and kCGColorSpaceGenericRGB in Apple's documentation, and realized they had been deprecated. Switched to the correct color space and suddenly all the tests passed. Several dozen characters changed in the actual cod…

Spending a few days to produce a short bugfix is normal. But in a full-time employment scenario, you might have a bug hunt like this every once in a while, but definitely not all the time, you’re also usually working on new features, so you do have some output to show.

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

#859

Post by [deleted] »

pavlov wrote: post #853

I worked at Facebook and remember what it was like to first face the total complexity of the system. It’s really hard for me to imagine myself working at a company that deals almost exclusively with machine-generated data (as Tesla does) and being assigned to judge a social platform’s engineering qualify in one day . Cars and spaceships on a closed network are fundamentally “clean” compared to having hundreds of mill…

[deleted]
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