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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

#941

Post by SNosTrAnDbLe »

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…

There is quality, quantity and then there is common sense. I have seen an entire new dependency system invented because the author did not like open source ones. It worked great for 10 years and then they left. I also have seen a scenario where we killed a hundred thousand lines of code for concurrency by using standard libraries and a couple hundred lines for adapters

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

#942

Post by lumost »

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 utterly fail to understand how this would yield anything other than.

Ooh they use tabs here rather than spaces! And that experimental code over there contains an unused variable! This A/B testing pipeline has minimal test cases! They ship in a day without a Q/A pipeline.

All of the above would happen if any company were acquired by any other. The code style will be different, and the dev practices will be different. Companies optimized to ship quickly will appear low quality to those who optimize for quality, optimizing for quality will appear as a slow moving dinosaur to those who move fast.

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

#943

Post by shaburn »

bertil wrote: post #871
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 “archit…

Playing the players not the cards for sure. Silly to think they'd try to weight the code.

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

#944

Post by shaburn »

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.

This is systematic purge bringing in trusted, independent professionals. He just spared McKinsey ETC fees.

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

#945

Post by bpodgursky »

permo-w wrote: post #515
bpodgursky wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The suggestion algorithms are more of a technical challenge than concurrency, at Twitter scale. Tesla does a lot more ML than SpaceX. (and let's be honest, Twitter hasn't solved the concurrency issues, so I'm not sure there's much to review)

twitter is one of the slowest of all the big modern websites. half the time all it has to load is text and it still takes up to 30 seconds

My unread notifications always load 15-60 seconds after loading my timeline. Definitely does not seem like a pageload issue, it's some kind of BE processing latency.

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

#946

Post by [deleted] »

spamizbad wrote: post #192
nightski wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I get the impression you aren’t a software engineer. So to clarify: AI is not generalized enough to the point where there’d be much common expertise unless, say, this code review was very narrowly focused on computer vision. And even then this article specifically talks about code review, which, unless you have the context of the Twitter codebase isn’t going to be very meaningful. You might do this if you’re buying a…

[deleted]

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

#947

Post by apexalpha »

threatofrain wrote: post #147
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 say "the new owners" but Tesla is not the new owner. Is it really standard procedure for employees from another company of the same CEO to do labor on the CEO's new company? And is printing out code really standard? Like, if you have the prerogative to review company code, why wouldn't you rather just use code tools on a computer, such as Git? I wouldn't be quick to dismiss the idea that this is a show.

It's pretty common for a new CEO or leader to bring in his own people, too.

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

#948

Post by Ar-Curunir »

DeathArrow wrote: post #726
mikeryan wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>half of me wonders how much Parag could raise to build a new Twitter from scratch That would probably amount in $0. Twitter wasn't profitable and part of it was its CEO. Why would investors be willing to lose money, especially in the current economic situation? I would rather wait for Elon to stabilize Twitter and go public again.

Yet Elon bought Twitter for $44B, with $11B funded by a variety of external partners.

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

#949

Post by MrMan »

baxuz wrote: post #782
alfor wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of cross pollination between his companies, that’s is fine: - new materials from SpaceX make it into Tesla cars - productions techniques from Tesla goes into SpaceX rockets - Semiconductor teams from Starlink probably connected to Tesla It mean the best engineers get even more opportunities. win-win Less red tape, more work get done. I think we should all embrace that. Our goal should be to make things…

And how does Twitter fit into Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink?

marketing

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

#950

Post by 1270018080 »

alerighi wrote: post #393

This is a very stupid thing to do. First, code is not the issue. Code can be rewritten in not a lot of time, when you have clear what to write. Twitter is not something so complex, in principle, thus it shouldn't be that difficult (a team of 10 good programmers in a month can probably rewrite everything). The thing where is 99% of the complexity and you can't redesign in a month is the infrastructure, how data is sto…

> (a team of 10 good programmers in a month can probably rewrite everything).

Is this satire?

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