Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said • Hacker News Board

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

#881

Post by yonaguska » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 1:14 PM UTC

sheeshkebab wrote: post #705

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. 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…

I'm finally working directly with one of these developers. Thankfully he is leaving next week on his own volition. My work load has doubled over the past several weeks due to rewriting most of his code. And needing to extensively vet code that he's still submitting. The worst part is that he's reasonably productive at producing lines and lines of code that barely function.

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

#882

Post by bumby » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 1:14 PM UTC

pbronez wrote: post #571

bumby wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tesla was a place with low engineering quality SpaceX has had a somewhat similar reputation (at least early, it may have changed for the better). For example, they had a spectacular failure related to bad material quality in a strut.[1] It's common practice in aerospace quality to have "coupons" kept, tested, and traceable for these types of critical components. Apparently, SpaceX wasn't follow this procedure and t…

Interesting. My impression is that SpaceX has delivered some extraordinary results by throwing out a lot of conventional wisdom and starting over from first principles. This anecdote suggests they’re humble enough to re-adopt standard practices when experience shows their value. Seems like a good approach… if the cost of failure is manageable.

What, in that example, do you think is the first principle they were working from?

It seems to me that they were missing the principle of quality of “trust but verify.”

This is a risk to SpaceX that I don’t think gets talked about much. They are able to take risks and throw out conventional wisdom to streamline, but sometimes it’s easy to conflate being lucky with being good. But each time their luck goes bad, they lose a little bit of that edge by having to layer on bureaucratic process (like additional quality checks) to mitigate that previously unrecognized risk. Do that enough times and you start to look just like the dinosaurs they’re replacing. If the lose a human life, it may come even faster.

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

#883

Post by cad1 » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 1:22 PM UTC

sheeshkebab wrote: post #705

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. 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…

“Almost every software development organization has at least one developer who takes tactical programming to the extreme: a tactical tornado. The tactical tornado is a prolific programmer who pumps out code far faster than others but works in a totally tactical fashion. When it comes to implementing a quick feature, nobody gets it done faster than the tactical tornado. In some organizations, management treats tactical tornadoes as heroes. However, tactical tornadoes leave behind a wake of destruction. They are rarely considered heroes by the engineers who must work with their code in the future. Typically, other engineers must clean up the messes left behind by the tactical tornado, which makes it appear that those engineers (who are the real heroes) are making slower progress than the tactical tornado.” ― John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design

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

#884

Post by julianlam » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 1:23 PM UTC

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…

> Developers should be writing new code and maintaining their own code.

This goes against a decade of developer best practices, as enforcing code ownership promotes code silos.

I'm not saying I disagree, only that it seems contrary to recommendations.

The truth is probably somewhere in between.

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

#885

Post by simonswords82 » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 1:23 PM UTC

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…

The last thing we all need is another Twitter clone...no matter how well intentioned.

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

#886

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 1:23 PM UTC

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]

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

#887

Post by simonswords82 » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 1:26 PM UTC

mritchie712 wrote: post #834

lexandstuff wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems almost inevitable it will go the way of Tumblr, Friendster, Hi5, Bebo, MySpace, Orkut, Google+ and soon Facebook. Social networks don't have a particularly long life expectancy.

inevitable? there are some pretty simple things they could do to double revenue: 1. allow people to pay for a blue check to be verified 2. make "twitter blue" actually valuable (e.g. detailed analytics on your followers, tools for composing threads, actually monetizing revue) 3. payments and clearly by this article, they are looking to reduce costs. Double revenue and halve costs and you have something pretty valuabl…

1. allow people to pay for a blue check to be verified

> Nobody is going to pay for something that is no longer a status symbol because it can simply be bought

2. make "twitter blue" actually valuable (e.g. detailed analytics on your followers, tools for composing threads, actually monetizing revue)

> Or just give people these metrics because if they care about them they probably care about creating quality and engaging content and seeing how well it performs.

3. payments

> Perhaps - but for what? I don't see myself going to Twitter, let alone to find something to buy and then pay for it using Twitter-dollars or whatever they dream up.

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

#888

Post by kamaal » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 1:27 PM UTC

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…

>>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

I think that is because he doesn't outsource management to other people, and just coast around on the ownership of stocks he already has.

To a large extent Steve Jobs was like that as well. May be Henry Ford too. They might not be great at making things themselves. But they are so deeply involved in managing that whole enterprise, they know very deeply how to control and make those processes more effective. While people like Steve Ballmer and Sundar Pichai are themselves great general managers of all time, they are what they are. They are career managers, not mission managers.

Intentions do make hell lot of difference in outcomes.

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

#889

Post by jen20 » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 1:28 PM UTC

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #570

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.

Nah paper is still more efficient than computers in quick meetings. You can imagine many seconds being wasted if they were on a laptop and the engineer needs to find his files. Paper the UX is perfect and instant.

Unclear to me why this is being downvoted. I always read code on paper, it’s easier to annotate.

If jumping around a codebase is hard on paper, it’s a good indication that the code does not consist of cohesive modules.

Sadly these days most people no longer adhere to 80 column limits, so it has to be printed in landscape. In the worst cases, landscape on legal paper…

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

#890

Post by simonswords82 » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 1:34 PM UTC

glitchc wrote: post #364

Musk sounds like a nightmare to work for. Why would any self-respecting developer stick around under these conditions? I expect an exodus of talent from Twitter in short order.

For there to be an exodus of talent there must be first be talent.

From what I can make out Twitter's workforce are predominantly average at best and I suspect we'll see at least 2,000 or so people cut in the next 6 months.