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

871–880 of 1001 posts

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

#871

Post by bertil »

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…

I suspect it’s less a complete review and more an interview of the senior technical manager, to get a sense of whether they are up to par. Do they think about observability, alerting, refactoring, service architecture, etc. reasonably well? Are there issues with how they motivate their teams or when they give them responsibilities? Are timelines challenging but doable?

“Code” is most likely “architecture” and “architecture” is code for “management”.

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

#872

Post by [deleted] »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #869
aliqot wrote: post #868

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> drive fear at Twitter Auditing what you just bought is about as smart as taking the used car you just bought to the shop to get everything checked over and tightened and lubricated.

Right. But smart people would take a mechanic with them before buying the car. A meaningful audit at Twitter would take months. This is but a stunt.

[deleted]

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

#873

Post by Tronno »

rvba wrote: post #792
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.

Competence is not measured by one's ability to drop a leetcode solution on command.

It is tempting to think otherwise if you have spent effort cultivating that ability. But anyone with better things to do would be justified to read it as an insult.

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

#874

Post by aliswe »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #869
aliqot wrote: post #868

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> drive fear at Twitter Auditing what you just bought is about as smart as taking the used car you just bought to the shop to get everything checked over and tightened and lubricated.

Right. But smart people would take a mechanic with them before buying the car. A meaningful audit at Twitter would take months. This is but a stunt.

Would you really show your source code before purchase?

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

#875

Post by qualudeheart »

seu wrote: post #758

Consciously or not, this is meant to humiliate people at Twitter, make them live in fear of their new boss, and either flee, or stay and bow to their supreme leader.

All hail the great Khan. Elon Musk is singlehandedly saving democracy.

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

#876

Post by yrgulation »

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…

> who value being honest and ethical, to be the better person even if I'm in a room of degenerates

I am the first to poop on corporates and their power games but i agree with you on this. Honesty and ethics are not something you simply throw out the window just because.

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

#877

Post by JasserInicide »

vore wrote: post #790
TheChaplain wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What is the point of this self-imposed honor when the person at the top is more than happy to play you as the fool? Musk certainly didn’t act with much honesty or ethics in this deal, do you think he’s done an abrupt about face to suddenly be upstanding? And knowing that, being willingly taken advantage of only enables this poor behavior. I can see your point if it was some kind of critical infrastructure like a hosp…

Let's be honest here: you wouldn't be seeing people saying they should sabotage the code base if a left-leaning CEO bought the company.

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

#878

Post by vishnumohandas »

kweingar wrote: post #567

The most bizarre aspect of this was when Twitter engineers were told to print out their code on paper. There is literally no good reason to do that. At best it is staggering incompetence. At worst it is an intentionally pointless and expensive exercise that serves purely as a loyalty test.

Maybe this is a way of asking engineers who have zero pages to print to walk out?

Or maybe this was to set the expectation that only those who care enough to bend to the whimsies of the new management should stay?

Or both?

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

#879

Post by theduder99 »

uwuemu wrote: post #770
praptak wrote: post #755

I can only imagine how bad this is for morale. Out of the blue code review conducted by an external company means total lack of trust.

Quoted post unavailable.

well said. I also think this is about getting rid of all people who worked on those items.

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

#880

Post by diceduckmonk »

therouwboat wrote: post #846
TheChaplain wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You joined Tesla to build cars of the future and bring self driving to the masses and then they ask you to review some other companys codebase, so that the boss can fire bunch of people. Yay, I will do my absolute best.

Do we know if those Tesla engineers were forced into it or it was an opt-in?
Post reply on HN