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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

#91

Post by jvm___ »

taf2 wrote: post #73
jstx1 wrote: post #3

> One former Tesla engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe the matter but was not involved, said Tesla engineers would have trouble capably assessing Twitter’s code. Distributed systems, the large-scale and spread-out network that Twitter is composed of, are not the automaker’s specialty, the person said. > The “idea of Elon being flanked by his Tesla engineers reviewing Twitter code is…

Isn’t twitter a pretty simple thing… db with writes and reads… it was maybe still is rails? I don’t know MySQL , Pgsql have come a long way and most of the hard parts would be scaling these services…. Keeping good caches in memory with redis or memcached… not really sure I see twitter being all that crazy other then it being so many people and so many years of edge case handling they would be hard for an outsider to…

Twitter is just a ticket booth. Had over request, get tickets back.

Except the ticket booth is in the middle of Times Square in New York and it needs to serve millions of people per second and be instantly accessible around the globe.

The complexity is in the infrastructure, not in the complexity of what they're serving.

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

#92

Post by oska »

Havoc wrote: post #57

Surprised how sceptical all the comments here are. Dick or not the guy has a talent for building companies

Very broadly speaking, HN is the forum of choice for the 'Web 2.0' and VC backed startup culture that went along with it, i.e. what is commonly perceived now as Silicon Valley culture. This culture is becoming increasingly reactionary now that their power is threatened/fading. Musk, while part of the early rise of that culture in the late 90s is now well outside it (represented by his move from California to Texas) and is a favourite target of the cohort described above. See also HN's noted long-term antipathy towards Bitcoin.

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

#93

Post by [deleted] »

taf2 wrote: post #73
jstx1 wrote: post #3

> One former Tesla engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe the matter but was not involved, said Tesla engineers would have trouble capably assessing Twitter’s code. Distributed systems, the large-scale and spread-out network that Twitter is composed of, are not the automaker’s specialty, the person said. > The “idea of Elon being flanked by his Tesla engineers reviewing Twitter code is…

Isn’t twitter a pretty simple thing… db with writes and reads… it was maybe still is rails? I don’t know MySQL , Pgsql have come a long way and most of the hard parts would be scaling these services…. Keeping good caches in memory with redis or memcached… not really sure I see twitter being all that crazy other then it being so many people and so many years of edge case handling they would be hard for an outsider to…

[deleted]

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

#94

Post by birken »

ikiris wrote: post #85
taf2 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t twitter a pretty simple thing… db with writes and reads… it was maybe still is rails? I don’t know MySQL , Pgsql have come a long way and most of the hard parts would be scaling these services…. Keeping good caches in memory with redis or memcached… not really sure I see twitter being all that crazy other then it being so many people and so many years of edge case handling they would be hard for an outsider to…

"It's just a simple matter of programming"

Tesla has millions of cars in service and Twitter has millions of users. Same level of complexity!

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

#95

Post by convery »

yrgulation wrote: post #56
marstall wrote: post #26

I was thinking the "30-60" day time window may be a somewhat subtle way of catching out engineers who haven't written a thing in that amount of time. that would be one way to identify low-performers. not unproblematic by a long shot, but quick, and probably somewhat effective. and it wouldn't require any deep knowledge of twitter's codebase on the part of the reviewers.

Are we back to measuring performance in klocs? I can get you a bunch of incompetent devs that change hundreds ofines of code a day. All you need to do is change indentation and eols or just rewrite basic stuff too lazy to understand.

According to the engineers in the undercover interviews, a large part of the staff only work "when they feel like it", which would result in some taking months of paid time off or just hanging out in the office all day.

kloc is not great as a general metric, but in this case it might make it obvious where you can trim a lot of fat..

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

#96

Post by LouisSayers »

PM_me_your_math wrote: post #27

Didn't Musk get rich solving complex problems? The ink isn't even dry yet and there is a rush to judgement, speculation, and wild assumptions that are simply shameful. How many cars did Tesla sell on the day after his investment?

People always do this with Elon... it doesn't matter if he's making cars, building rockets or taking on social media, the general consensus is that he doesn't know what he's doing and will fail.

But, who's the richest man in the room? Who was right and who was wrong?

People can hate on Elon all they want, but it's pure ignorance to think that we know any better.

Let the man work his magic, I'm curious to see what he comes up with.

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

#97

Post by zepppotemkin »

deltree7 wrote: post #81
ipqk wrote: post #65

I'd be pissed off if I were a TSLA stock owner. Is Twitter paying Tesla to contract out these employees for their work? Otherwise, it's tons of thousands of dollars Tesla is pissing away on behalf of the CEO's side-hustle.

Quoted post unavailable.

this cracks me up lol

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

#98

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

nightski wrote: post #78
ipqk wrote: post #65

I'd be pissed off if I were a TSLA stock owner. Is Twitter paying Tesla to contract out these employees for their work? Otherwise, it's tons of thousands of dollars Tesla is pissing away on behalf of the CEO's side-hustle.

I'm not pissed and I am a stockholder. To me it makes a lot of sense. I doubt they are reviewing the entire code base. It seems like Elon is particularly interested in the automated systems that control content and detect bots. To that end, Tesla has a lot of expertise in AI systems.

No post body was provided.

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

#99

Post by jjfoooo6 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #71
jstx1 wrote: post #3

> One former Tesla engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe the matter but was not involved, said Tesla engineers would have trouble capably assessing Twitter’s code. Distributed systems, the large-scale and spread-out network that Twitter is composed of, are not the automaker’s specialty, the person said. > The “idea of Elon being flanked by his Tesla engineers reviewing Twitter code is…

Tesla engineers don't just work on in-vehicle code though. The servers and systems needed to implement Tesla's telemetry and software updates would be in the same ballpark of expertise, albeit with much less scale and different requirements than Twitter. But Musk got started by confounding x.com/PayPal, which does have very similar engineering needs as Twitter. It's not like Musk is a newbie to this stuff, people pre…

We've gotten quite a few public comments from Musk on what he plans to do with Twitter, and they indicate total cluelessness from a product and engineering point of view. There's nothing to indicate an appreciation for the unique challenges Twitter has in balancing free expression with appeal for advertisers (or even that these needs might be in conflict), or even on the subtleties in what free speech even means for Twitter. The acquisition seems motivated by politics and impulsiveness rather than any coherent vision for the product.

A rocketing share heals a lot of wounds. His abusive management practices might fly at Tesla, or his vision oriented startups. There's ample room for doubt his tactics will get results on a turnaround job like Twitter.

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

#100

Post by justinhj »

whateveracct wrote: post #40
_vertigo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Musk’s POV, a bunch of solid, well-rounded, and experienced engineers you trust might be enough to tell you “this guy is full of shit” when talking to new people. Maybe it’s less about code quality and more about eng quality.

I guarantee Elon is surrounded by yes-men.

Then maybe he’s always right. As chief engineer at Space X for example, if he was an idiot or surrounded by idiots do you really think he would be succeeding?
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