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 that was the result of eight hours of debugging and analyzing how to best fix the bug without disturbing the stuff that is working. Is that more or less productive than someone who cut & pasted a 100 line routine they found via google?
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 are doing is fixing bugs, you are doing yourself a disservice and so is the org in the way they are treating you. Unless you are the original author of that code. When people don't fix their own bugs, they tend to repeat it in other places. When people tend to fix code they didn't write nor have the proper context on why the code was written like that, they tend to turn it into a mess. IMHO, Developers should be writing new code and maintaining their own code. Never reward developers by giving them more new code and stopping them from maintenance.
> 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 years) that would produce large amount of almost purposefully unmaintainable code. Yes, they were “productive”, and no, the stuff they produced made no difference and was a waste (both features wise and code wise since). 100% of these codebases turned out to be unsalvageable and were rewritten. It just would usually take orgs many months, usually after such developers leave to realize the complete and utter waste they left.
Not saying there are no slackers, it’s just productive devs are not necessarily those that produce the most of code.
“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
I remember reading somewhere people can be broken down into 3 types. It applies in programming as well as in a restaurant kitchen or your family's garage cleanup.
*I'm probably remembering everything wrong but it was something like:
Cowboy: move fast and break things style. Sorta what you mentioned above.
Duct tape: most people are a form of this. Work on something just long enough to get it working but it's not beautiful and not prepared for the future or edge cases.
Professor: these get very little done because of the amount of planning put in and tend to over think most things. But almost never have to come back to a job since it's done properly and to completion.
Any team without a blend or with too many cowboys or professors is going to have a tough time.
That's why I refuse to touch code made by these tactical tornado. It's simple, you'll get all the blame, and none of the recognition. Anyone who is in that situation: Don't it even if it means you'll get fired. You'll get fired anyway.
The only exception is, if management come to understand what went wrong there and how it should be done. The chances of that are very slim, however.
Peer reviews catch tactical changes that are strategically poor. There are times when it won't get sign-off from reviews. In other times, when it gets merged, at least it is documented that the solution is tactical, people know it, and it was rationalized by the team. A plan may even be put in place to revisit the subject and do a proper job; there could be concrete ticket for that.
Reviews also slow things down. You can't move quite as fast and break as many things if everything goes through a review pipeline.
Test-oriented development helps. Sometimes people find it easier to develop a tactical solution that somehow gets certain tests working and then refactor for strategy. They don't have to feel they have wasted time on the tactical solution because they get to reuse parts of it, and use it as a jig to guide the improved solution.
Ron Garret's space debugging story from NASA has an element of this. They had a custom language in Lisp which made certain guarantees, like deadlocks being impossible. But some coder went around it, possibly due to a tactical reason, using some lower level code outside of that paradigm.
Sometimes people aren't being tactical; they really don't understand the system fully to know that some obvious solution will hit a snag.
This lines up with my experience. The person making constant "tactical" changes looks super productive. But they just deferred the productivity cost. You end up continuing to deal with their fragile mess for the rest of the lifetime of the product.
I fully understand that there are circumstances where true tactical changes do make sense, but the tradeoffs should be considered up front.
The way to handle this, I believe, is to make sure that the bug reports resulting from the "tornado"'s work end up back in their own lap. Don't let someone else fix them, especially not someone on another team. It has to be done non-antagonistically, of course. But it's the only way to make it clear to both management and (more importantly) the dev themself that there is a tradeoff for speed.
LOC produced is a good example of what I call "negative" metric: high value does not mean much, but low value is a good indication that something is up.
As a manager, I won't care that dev A produces 2k vs dev B produced 4k. But if I see dev C would produced only 30 loc over say a quarter, something is most likely off.
At some point, the curve definitely bends negative. I used to work on a team adjacent to one of the most "productive" programmers at G by that metric.
My team, and at least 4 other surrounding teams, had one full-time SWE cleaning up after him. He would go around making changes assuming things that he thought were safe and breaking tests, then his manager would argue with you that because you didn't make a promise that what he did wasn't safe, you have to fix the test breakage.
Yes, there are large negative externalities to a certain type of engineers who write a lot of code of dubious quality. Even after ignoring all the trivial cases of "artificial code stuffing", etc.
I used to work in a very dysfunctional org where the main "architect" was writing lots of broken code that kinda works, and the 20+ people in the team around it would basically be full time in fire fighting mode. The architect was a very smart guy but ironically enough without any sense of architecture: his level of abstraction for network was pushing bytes through a pipe, and for loops for calculations.
That was similar to this guy - he was a good IC who ended up being over-promoted to an "architecture" role (L7). He didn't really know how to architect things, so he went for creating externalities while resurrecting old, dead projects that past people had designed for him.
In your career, how often have you seen good software engineers whose main contribution was deleting code ?
Please take my argument in good faith: I am not looking at evaluating people based on their added LOC. The context is at orgs where I have reason to believe some people are slacking off, and looking for people who do next to nothing.
That's much more common than people who magically make everyone more effective by only deleting code.
I've seen a few projects across different organizations where an old dev was bad at copying and pasting code and ignored DRY principles. The projects had almost no refactoring, and the primary goal of a new dev was cleaning up the redundancy to better map things out for better organization of the codebase.
I don't think anyone (sensible) thinks 'if someone only writes 30 lines of code per quarter, they should be immediately fired'. I think the point is more that if you have someone who's only written 30 lines of code, it's worth taking a look to see what they've been doing instead.
For sure there may be a thousand good reasons for it, but as a quick heuristic for 'who is worth having a quick check to see if we're getting the value out of them that we're paying them for?', I don't think it's irrational.
No, this ratio is unrealistic. Either you're making numbers up rather than describing a real situation, or yes you're far too slow for me to want to hire you.
There was a funny story I don't remember where... A manager was doing LOC as a metric, and they were required to count it. But an engineer refactored and put -1000. That was the last time they asked for it.
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.
I am curious. Does your organization not use TDD ? How would the code be allowed to marge without running your test suite ?
In my experience, I have found it is more productive to coach and mentor developers to adapt TDD and DevOps practices than to vet their code. Instead of vetting their code, I would incorporate statistical code analysis and vulnerability analysis into the build system.
Mutation testing can help evaluate the quality of a test suite. The application code is automatically tweaked and tests run. If a mutant is not "killed," then additional tests may be needed.
> coach and mentor developers [rather than] vet their code.
How do you teach these things concretely without discussing specific code? How do you tell if the lessons are sticking without checking their future work?
Aside from that, neither TDD nor DevOps practices will get you idiomatic (relative to internally and externally) code, documentation, non-requirement performance worth a damn, test suites that are any good to begin with, etc. etc.. If you're running through a backlog of CRUD-ish features or whatever maybe those don't matter, though then I also wonder why the need for TDD instead of just a good CI pipeline.
Not enough. I'm trying to do this with our new code base, but it's difficult when I need to get everyone else on board. I'm trying to lead by example, but I feel like I'm also racing against other devs to get good feature work in before bad code gets in. The rest of the devs will simply copy what the existing code does instead of figuring how how to do something properly. Doubly frustrating that I don't have a senior title or pay, but am hiring and cleaning up after senior devs.
This is also a sign that code reviews are not working properly (either missing due to a team too small; or not enough time invested to do them properly; or people are not "free" enough to tell their coworker that their code is bad; or it was done too late, once there isn't enough time to fix it; etc).
Or code reviews are working fine but there are no long-term consequence for people whose code consistently takes 10x more revision after reviewing. (This is also a kind of organizational failure, but one where reprimanding the IC in question can still be the right response. But I also doubt a drive-by ad hoc external review of every person in the company is going to be the best approach to find this!)
> 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".
And yet we have people whose job is to help software getting deployed, infrastructures getting the timely upgrades, capacity planning, monitoring and alerting, honing their troubleshooting skills so when time comes to save your business they know how to do it and have the right tools not break in their face.
Yes, let's treat those tasks as less honourable than developers and enjoy the results
>> capacity planning, monitoring and alerting, honing their troubleshooting skills
> This is veering into made-up-job world.
Maybe if you're running a CRUD app on a single server in your basement.
But these are definitely core engineering competencies for any system large enough to experience regular and non-preventable failure. Hardware fails. Technician error happens. A litany of natural disasters from heats wave to flooding can impact a DC or the infrastructure within hundreds of miles of a DC. Load assumptions are violated. Etc. With a large enough footprint, these sorts of things happen often enough that robust monitoring, alerting, and planning are necessary. (Hell, just building a DC requires significant capacity planning, to say nothing of keeping the thing humming along happily.)
Either you're doing this work internally or you're paying AWS/GCP/Azure to do that work for you. In many cases a mix of both. But if you're large enough to need even a small data center, this work is being done by someone.
If you don't know about it, you're either small enough to run your business from a few servers or you're paying someone else a very nice premium to abstract away the details. (Or, most commonly, both.) But if you have any amount of scale, the work is being done by someone.
Anyways, this attitude is probably spot on and is why I expect Twitter to go from "stable if unexceptional business" to "can't even stay online" to "MySpace 2.0" within 10 years.
Twitter was not profitable last quarter. It rarely has turned a profit. How does an unprofitable business qualify as “stable if unexceptional?” I should think an unprofitable cash burn as long as Twitter’s should count as highly exceptional.
Twitters revenue been growing quite well though it’s clearly spiky. Spending isn’t really a question of what developers are doing that’s all about management.
These functions are mission critical, but if you can’t show how you’ve automated / created programmatic solutions in these domains then you are probably part of the problem.
> I’m saying that “ capacity planning” shouldn’t be someone’s entire job.
Capacity planning is everywhere in the real economy. In most sectors, any reasonably sized company will have entire departments and sometimes even divisions (eg, approximately everything in management of a large construction project is capacity planning of some sort or another). One of my first consulting gigs was with a small/small-medium sized resource extraction company, which had several people whose job was essentially 100% capacity planning/forecasting for various components of solid wood product supply chain. Basically anyone who wasn't either in the executive team, in the field, or selling was spending most of their time on capacity planning.
My very first job was with the corporate office at a regional supermarket chain where demand forecasting and figuring out warehousing/storage constraints (aka capacity planning) were their entire job.
In both cases, the profitability of the entire business relied on good capacity planning, full stop. Everything else was either par or total commodity.
Taking the economy as an aggregate, it's actually a fairly rare thing for capacity planning to be totally commodified in the way that hyper-scalars have done in software. Software shops that outsource anything non-soft to the massive army of operations folks at AWS/GCP/Azure are extreme outliers, not the norm, in terms of the real economy a a whole.
Yes DevOps and shift-left and whatnot. All those things do make sense (to some extent) but:
1. When developers own these aspects of the software operation lifecycle they do not produce the same amount of "code" and "features" that an old-school developer would be expected to have.
2. Even in the most utopic DevOps heaven scenario, there are still some people who will be drawn to do more "systemy" things and some developers who will actively resist at investing time at getting good and doing operations stuff. Getting rid of these people is an option of course; good luck.
Yeah sorry. The story here is how people at Twitter must prove their worth by printing the lines of code they wrote, so I erred on the side of that angle also for the Ellison quote even if I had no reason to do so.
> This is veering into made-up-job world. These people are getting fired. All these tasks can be done by developers.
Ah, the good old Google playbook. If you read their paper about how SRE came to be, it basically says: “we noticed there was friction between developers and system administrators so we fired all our system administrators and hired developers to do their job instead.” It doesn’t really make the job disappear however. It’s just a different way of approaching it.
You’re misunderstanding me slightly. I’d put systems administrators in the same category as developers, and I think so would Elon Musk and Larry Ellison.
But if someone’s entire job is “capacity planning”, they’re getting fired.
This is just the prelude to an apocryphal story. At the end of that story, Oracle stops innovating and becomes a legal and license auditing firm with sales and engineering departments bolted onto the side, slowing atrophying into the sunset.
That works for, say, trademark infringement lawsuits, where even the businesspeople doing the suing say it makes them feel dirty.
It does not work so well for someone who bought a company that made an open sourced language, and then sued another company that wrote its own version of that language, arguing that even the APIs were under copyright.
People leave jobs. If you're working at a company that's decades old, the people who did create the bug might have left the company 20 years ago.
I don't know for your job, but at mine code is supposed to stick to teams rather than people, so even if the people didn't leave the company, they probably changed teams and don't own the code anymore.
Hard agree. The only case where "You fix all your own bugs" makes sense is a small company or start-up... but it's also a bad idea. Every engineer should get up to speed on every feature until it is no longer feasible/reasonable to do so.
We intentionally cross-train and work bugs in "others code" (we do not assign code ownership, after I review and it is merged, it's is my code now, for as long as I work here lol).
I don't care about the products I work on. I don't own the product, I don't work for an NGO willing to change the world and the product would probably won't revolutionize the industry.
The product's only purpose is to make some people rich. And I don't care for it.
What I care about is being paid, learning, advancing my career and not being bored to death while I work.
So I do quality work because of that. I don't enjoy fixing bugs (some people do), so if I can avoid fixing bugs, I'm happier. I also try to ship as least bugs as possible and I test my code before pushing it. The code has to pass an QA cycle so I will fix my bugs if any. But if some bug is coming from production I'd rather pass on it and take on a feature instead.
Sure. But also if all you do is fix bugs, unless they are really hard and complex ones in occasionally new domains it's probably not the best career path.
As an example fixing trivial styling, dead links, documentation, flaky tests. Work that is important and has to be done, but not
something to drown yourself in. Sometimes it's also better to try to solve the root causes, like use css variables, introduce swagger or a more reliable test framework. You want the engineer who codes themselves out of the job of trivial tickets.
I agree with it. There a rare subspecies of developers who enjoy fixing bugs. The more rare and obscure, the better. Maybe they derive the same kind of pleasure as a police detective solving a hard case.
I do believe they should be princely rewarded and I would hope there would be more of these people as this will allow us the people who enjoy building concentrate on it.
I believe there was a thread on HN two days ago of a guy who enjoys fixing bugs asking how he can make a business out of it. Chapeau to him!
I agree, but I do think that's kind of an imaginary enemy. I don't know that anyone said "All I do exclusively all year is fix trivial bugs in hacky or minimal ways". Probably what anyone does is a bit of this, a bit of new code writing, and a bit of new feature stuff.
That's essentially what I do. Sometimes bugs are quite mentally demanding to resolve, but a couple weeks of that begins to get really draining, so I try and move onto something more on the implementation side for a bit.
But isn't having no bugs to begin with better then fixing them later?
The argument was that you'll have less bugs if you use these technologies after all.
And I have to agree wrt styling inconsistencies and css variables at least.
They're extremely good at standardizing design without getting in the way of the developer
Honest question - have you ever worked on a codebase with 0 bugs? I don't think that's feasibly. What you're asking for is an infallible god-like programmer.
You will always have bugs. The best engineers can solve the hardest bugs
It's feasible to create no bugs with formal specification and formal verification. For example, with Lean 4, one can add a proof for each array-access-by-index that the index is within the bound of the associated array. Every aspect of the codebase can be subject to formal proofs that are verified by the compiler. See also CompCert and Sel4.
CSS variables, test frameworks, are good tools for catching bugs -- but at the end of the day the goal is that the code should work and be easily maintainable. Best practices help you do that, but theres many instances of a code base full of bugs that has to be maintained and improved over time. Developers who turn up their nose at "fixing bugs" are of no use to a business. These ideas are great when starting a new codebase but thats not the situation a developer is going to be in most of the time in practice. And if you follow every best practice there will still be bugs that need to get fixed.
You're arguing with a straw man then. Their argument was that only solving bugs is an issue, because you should be taking preventative measures so they're occurring less frequently.
If the bugs are all your doing, I agree. But many times the developers working on a project are maintaining code that was written years ago before they even joined the company, by other devs that had totally different incentives.
＞ There were 7 developers and in 2 months only one was writing code.
I would suppose you were looking at many more signs and metric, but then you say it only took you a few hours, so perhaps not ?
I’d assume that dev wasn’t actually writing alone, and people had to discuss the design, talk with the PO/stakeholder, review the code, eventually QA it, manage the deployments etc. Perhaps that poor soul was doing everything alone…but really ?
I can readily think of a few people in my current company that are absolutely drowned by merge request reviews and technical design work, even as their title is just “developper”. I wouldn’t be surprised if they haven’t written a line in weeks, and perhaps one or two fixes in months. They are absolutely critical and I would laugh so hard if someone buying us just fired them because they couldn’t bother looking at other stuff than code written.
This is probably an extreme example, but it is no secret that the majority of people employed in an organization actually does barely anything of value. Price's law comes to mind.
I’d argue that’s a separate and more deeply rooted issue.
At some level of abstraction, most of the currently prosperous IT companies could be seen as barely producing anything of value, and our startup culture kinda goes in the same way (purely looking at the rate of success vs failures gives a grim picture regarding the amount of time dedicated to these failures).
We have many justifications for that, but at no point I’d see our field as being hyperfocused on only solely bringing actual value to the world.
PS: that’s not just our field of course, ad business comes right to my mind, but we probably have many other work field with very little ‘value’ when looked from a high enough perspective.
The way I see it, the current ridiculously high salaries of SWE, the easiness of it, how little so many seem to do valuable work, is in a big part due to inefficiencies in the system, due to novelty of SWE and how invisible it is.
In my field, mechanical engineering, we've had centuries of machine making. Margins are usually razor thin.
In software that's not the case. Subscriptions that should cost the customer cents per month or year, are costing 10-100x that. Margins are ridiculously high. But it's all so new and not intuitive, like a physical part, we just pay whatever.
Then the invisibility of code and difficulty of distinguishing from the outside what is well made and what isn't, enables.
In all my years working as MechE I've never seen anyone just slacking off. We're all always being pushed, working. I look some of the stories of SWE and it's ridiculous.
I think many SWE just rationalize their high salary as bringing more value to the world, which imo is not really true.
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 code. A number of ifdefs removed in the test code. Literally hours of wracking my brains as to the problem in unfamiliar code on a relatively unfamiliar platform.
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.
Assuming that whoever wrote it in the first place is (1) Still employed, (2) Capable of fixing the bug and (3) Would never be told about the bug fixes you may be right.
That said, I think it does make sense if the goal is to (somewhat superficially) sort the employees into "probably keep", "review", "probably terminate" piles. And maybe with a good enough accuracy that that information can be directly acted on.
This is a inaccurate in my opinion. Obviously all developers should be writing code but in my experience there's usually about half new feature work and half maintenance. A lot of the maintenance is of projects written by people no longer at the company. I guess you're advocating for a policy of complete silo-ing where devs only ever work on what they wrote in the first place and no one can jump in and help other teams under any circumstance, but at least the companies I've worked at have not advocated for that policy
> When people tend to fix code they didn't write nor have the proper context on why the code was written like that, they tend to turn it into a mess
Try fixing your own code 3 months after you wrote it. You end up turning it into a mess too. To think code is something that stays in long term memory somehow is a flawed assumption. We should think of it as language, you say something to someone and a few hours later have 0 memory of how you phrased, the words you used and why you phrased it the way you did. Taking code so seriously ends up sucking the enjoyment out of programming and turns it into a boring office job that you clock in and out so just that you get a paycheck. Let's not create random rules that benefit no one in the long term.
To become a better programmer is a choice people have to make for themselves not dictated by a manager who probably became one because of their mundane prior coding role.
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
why do you need a code review for this ? It is easily scriptable w/ GH, and I would expect whatever system used by twitter to support this kind of basic functionalities.
While I wouldn't go chasing after programmers asking why they contribute so little I still think being able to quickly produce some sort of an insights dashboard can help decision making.
And if you indeed make "more lines!" the guiding metric for developer performance, you're setting yourself up for a world of pain because they will sure as hell find out and start gaming the metric. This will lead to a feedback loop of rising expenses and tech debt.
I think this is true and an big problem when artificially separating the top 10% from the top 20%, or top 1% from top 5%...
... but in practice, I think you will find 0 overlap in raw lines of code produced between the top 10% developers and the bottom 10% developers. Especially at a notoriously unproductive organization like Twitter, the bottom tier simply does nothing.
If Musk is trying to cut 60% of the org, he's going to have a problem doing it this way. If he's trying to cut 20%, I honestly don't think it's going to misfire much of the time.
Pretty crazy this is the first comment stating the obvious in a forum full of programmers with friends at Twitter.
Truly the most bonkers underemployed place. Engineers with debilitating levels of ADHD not taking their meds, doing 2 hours of meetings a week and then spacing out on internal tools no one uses. People who come and complain about harassment and abuse, relentlessly campaigning against their bosses’s priorities from day one, and like hardly making a single commit a week.
It’s CRAZY. I have never heard from people paid so much who do bonafide so little. And they’re OBVIOUSLY dysfunctional. You can talk to these employees for 1 minute and realize they need to be fired, it wasn’t necessary to do an analysis.
Personally I would close down the non SF offices first. Then I would move the best ads people from NY to SF where they can be bettered monitored. Then it will be fine.
I don't think the code review involves counting the lines. A reviewer can distinguish hundreds of lines of boilerplate from a non-trivial few lines change.
My advice to someone earlier in their career would not be to quit, but to make them pay you while you look for your next job if the writing is already on the wall.
Nope. Less code is not always better. Collapsing a loop into a single line lambda with single char variables doing 5 times is not elegant or better. It’s orders of magnitude worse.
Less code is more readable. But absolute minimal amount of code can be unreadable.
"Less" doesn't mean "fewer bytes", it means "less complexity". If two ASTs do exactly the same thing, but one is easier to understand and has less structure, that one is probably better.
Less complex in lots of situations means being explicit, not being too template'y, not being too generic, abstract and writing code that is supposed to be a kind of meta that takes in a config and does several things for several inputs.
Writing less complex code in lots of situations just means writing lots of code. Which is diametrically opposite to the original statement of less code being better.
Being kind of meta, taking config, and doing several things for several inputs are good examples of ways to reduce the amount of code--when used appropriately. Being explicit reduces code too. Over abstracting and premature optimization can result in bloated spaghetti code.
By less code I mean less logic, not less characters. Less code generally means less work for the CPU (faster), less surface area for attacks, a smaller codebase that is easier to pick up and work on. When working with sets of numerical data, there are often two or more ways to come up with the desired result. A dumb imperative way, that may involve several loops and stages, or a simple and intelligent way that requires a deeper understanding of the math to implement properly. I've seen pages of slow code reduced to a few simple lines that are performant and easy to grok.
At a nonprofit I work with, there was a series of web forms that volunteers had to go through in order to enter a bunch of data.
Volunteers have never liked this form, but it was at one point necessary to collect all this data. A decade after those forms were built, it was decided to finally spend some of our (all volunteer) engineering capacity to help streamline the process associate with those forms. So, a junior volunteer comes in, hears the groans about this form, and found out a bunch of this data was already stored in other tables (in the interim smartphones became a thing and customer intake went from completely free form to a self-service signup process). The volunteer writes a bunch of selenium code to pull data out of a few tables and use it to population about 80% of the form fields, leaving volunteers with only 20% of the original work!
Some time later the whole thing gets reviewed by an (again, volunteer) old hat staff who were around when the original form sequences was developed. Turns out we no longer needed those 20% of fields, and ofc we already had the data in the other 80%... so all the original form code was deleted,
So the forms were retired completely, the selenium code was deleted, and the original problem was solved in a strictly superior way with 0 LOC by understanding the business need and historical context.
> So the forms were retired completely, the selenium code was deleted, and the original problem was solved in a strictly superior way with 0 LOC by understanding the business need and historical context.
Quite. Code is a liability. LOC is an utterly idiotic metric of programmer contribution, as it incentivizes increasing liability, over all sorts of other better contributions like good design, more automation, mentoring, customer obsession, etc.
(And for those arguing that “but the least amount of lines is not necessarily best”, yes, of course, that can obscure logic; the point isn’t to flip the value of LOC as a metric, the point is to not treat it as a good metric).
The hardest bugs to find are often the ones that can be fixed with a one line change. If you figure out a bug quickly, then you are usually in trouble and have to refactor your codebase to resolve it or introduce an awful hack to fix it.
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.
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”.
They're different... Twitter software engineers get very high pay to do dull work, whereas Tesla engineers get actually impactful work, but very demanding working hours and low pay.
Of the engineers I've met, I'd put the Tesla ones as 'smarter'.
This is strictly re: software engineers but I don't think that's true IMO. Put another way, I think the average recruiter/co-founder/EM would be more interested in hiring an ex-Twitter engineer vs an ex-Tesla engineer.
but I have inspected plenty of organisations where strong engineering teams are drowned by management bullshit. even found places where most of the individuals, engineering and management both, are arguably competent but the overall organisational decreptitude kills any and all effective work, no matter how heroic or skilled the individual and collective effort gets.
Honestly, it's mostly because they pay more. They're more selective and thus have better engineering talent meaning Twitter engineers on the average are going to have a better engineering skills than Tesla software engineers
Tesla engineers likely are drinking the Kool-aid or were not talented enough to get offers at better companies.
Lastly, it's not "just tweets" at their scale. That's like saying Netflix is just storing some video files in CDNs.
I think it’s less about strictly better talent and more about trust and familiarity. Musk trusts Tesla software engineers to tell him what is good, what is better than Tesla, and what is concerning.
I’m not a software engineer (data scientist) and I’ve only managed up to 15 people, but if a friend who worked in a factory asks me to review a CTO of a team of 50, I feel confident I can say “Asking people to write their own unit tests isn’t abuse of power” and “Asking people to be behind their desk at 9 am or risk pay cut would not fly anywhere else” — things that he might not have the context to know.
Sure, there might be a new paradigm that I’m not familiar with where devs don’t write unit tests, but I’m fairly confident if I hear about that, I can ask questions and see why it’s more efficient.
A really good (reverse) example of that is James Douma. Several Tesla commentators rely on him to comment on Tesla’s AI announcements. He doesn’t work at Tesla and confesses that he might not be able to lead the AI team there, but he’s personable, clear, and familiar enough with ML to offer some judgment on why things are done in a certain way. He’s usually very positive but he could easily be asked which teams don’t seem to be executing as well, and what questions to prod them.
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.
... got the money, then found out the previous owner was a chainsmoker and a cadaver is decomposing in the trunk, then for some mysterious reason didn't want to buy it.
He did want to buy the car, signed a contract to buy the car that decided that he didn't want to buy it because it had a head gasket leak. Even though that was the whole reason he was buying the car, and he doesn't have any evidence for said leak anyway.
That’s precisely how acquisitions at my current and past company worked. Everyone signs NDAs, there’s a fee paid by the purchaser for the time should they decline the deal, and the audit commences.
I’ve been asked to do the evaluation a few times and it’s pretty straightforward. Even if you think the code is of poor quality, it may still make sense to complete the purchase because of the business case.
Not necessarily. It depends on the company acquiring. I've seen M&As focus solely on the relationships (ex, customers), so the tech DD was just checkboxes without deep dives.
Not necessarily… what? This is my actual professional experience. I’m sure people just buy things without any due diligence somewhere but I have never seen it.
In one case my judgement was that the customer list was all that there was of value. They opted to not buy that company.
Getting/giving access to the actual code/backend (especially as a competitor!) is a heavily negotiated diligence request.
The seller can simply refuse without even giving a reason.
ITT:
People are throwing around the phrase "audit" liberally. Audit will have a defined (and likely limited) scope and is typically more about compliance, e.g., Do you have the correct number of Microsoft Office licenses per accounting records?
Inspecting the source code is a condition of all deals I've been involved with. Most sensible people want to see what they buying, unless they are under pressure to close fast due to competition. It's a lot like buying a house.
I once read about an acquisition attempt by Google which eventually failed because Google found codebase less than impressive. So I guess this is normal to review codebase before a buyout.
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.
Why? One of the production goals of software is to minimize inventory time. Software that is written and not shipped incurs capex without revenue, unlike tech debt - I can put an explicit number on this cost. Similarly, software that goes unshipped also does not get customer feedback. It may be worthless.
There’s a balance here - but it’s not at all obvious what the balance should be in every business.
You're right, every business is different, and that goes for software businesses, too. I'm thinking that Twitter's central position re the dissemination of information, and its international scope make it a fairly high security operation, in this day and age, whether it wants to be or not.
Yes, software is typically more complex than a laymen would expect once all of the edge cases and layers of legacy code or “guano” are implemented. However, I doubt that these outside developers are expected to understand everything in a single day.
There are legitimate questions regarding how certain sections of the Twitter code operate as it relates to censorship, which is a primary reason Elon purchased Twitter. Given the activist mentality (and possibly hostile to new ownership) of a certain number of developers, it seems perhaps prudent to analyze the code and evaluate the existing developers immediately upon purchase of the company.
In a typical acquisition this would have taken place under NDA during due diligence, before closing the deal. But Elon waived it.
Now he’s apparently trying to find this shadowy “fifth column” of engineering over the weekend so they could be fired before RSUs vest on Tuesday. It sounds completely ridiculous but isn’t entirely implausible since, after all, we’re talking about the same person who committed $44 billion without due diligence.
The “censorship” aspect is pretty interesting because nobody seems to care about retaining existing users. HN has much stricter moderation than Twitter. Imagine someone buys this site tomorrow, fires dang and lets conspiracy theories run wild. Would you stay? I wouldn’t. And a social site is only as valuable as its users. If the new owner of HN promised he’s going to make this site into a “super-app”, it wouldn’t make any difference — I wouldn’t come back, just as I’m not going back to MySpace or Twitter.
Nobody in Elon-space seems to be bothered that there’s no undo on alienating a social network’s user base. I guess they expect to get a billion new users somehow (who also want to pay for the service since that’s floated as a business model for Twitter). But to me, this whole deal feels like Tumblr joining Yahoo.
If Musk would have announced the details of the layoffs within 24 hours of closing the twitter deal, commentators would have said, “So soon after taking over it is be impossible to make an informed decision about how to restructure and who to keep and who to layoff.
If he uses the best means of making an informed decision (use capable engineers he trusts and that are outsiders to twitter) and takes some time to properly consult, commentators say, “It is complete chaos and an information vacuum. He is just driving fear.”
It is right to closely watch people in power. But it doesn’t absolve each of us of the responsibility to hold us to similar standards when commenting. Most commentators come across as being in a hysterical, and not in a judicious frame of mind.
What you outlined were not the only viablw options: Musk had months to do a proper transition after signing the agreement. He chose not to do that, for reasons best known to him.
It should be expected that when you force yourself into a bad situation, and can only make bad decisions, people will observe that you made a bad decision when you inevitably do.
It sounds like your not a fan of Elon and nothing he’ll do can change your opinion. Why not hold back the strong judgements and conclusions for at least a few months? Maybe he will surprise you?
See, this is where a car and a social network are fundamentally different.
I own a Tesla. It’s a good car (although I’m unhappy about how much I paid for the FSD package which was nothing of the sort — borderline advertising fraud). Next year I’m probably buying another car, and if Tesla is still the best for the money, I’ll get one regardless of my personal feelings.
But with Twitter it’s not an objective decision. The app doesn’t deliver quantifiable day-to-day value like a car does. Now that I’ve removed Twitter from my life, it’s very unlikely that I’d ever go back.
MySpace did a lot of product changes in 2008 to bring back the users who had defected to FB. Nothing moved the needle. That’s just how it is with these products. I’m surprised Elon pretends to be oblivious to this dynamic.
My 10-year experience with Twitter was one of frustration. I had almost 1,000 followers, I tweeted regularly, tried to be nice and occasionally witty, replied and retweeted mostly useful stuff. Yet I never got any engagement. A few likes on a tweet was the upper limit of interest. Every other social media platform is much better at rewarding regular users like me. But Musk doesn’t seem to want to address this; instead he wants to bring back Trump. Why should I stay?
Hard for me to say. What type of reward are you expecting to get out of Twitter or social media in general? Maybe you are expecting too much or the wrong types of rewards?
Why not avoid the algorithmic feed from Twitter and only look at what your chosen followed users are posting? Relying on a third party to provide both breadth of information and inoffensive posts is asking too much.
Just as in real life, not every person you cross paths with is worth your time. Wading into public spaces like Twitter requires some work on the users part to find gems of useful information … relying on the platform to do it for you is likely to never work perfectly.
> I notice that Musk is spending his time tweeting that it is possible Paul Pelosi was attacked by his gay lover, so it's not looking good.
I don't have twitter, and this narrative seems like the work of 4chan (4 the lulz), but it's true he really was hinting at this [0] being the case.
I just hope this cesspool dies already, it seems liek an echo chmaber for the most feeble minded. I was catching up on the all in podcasts (missed 3 weeks worth) and the amount of servile rhetoric for Elon from those 4 is absurdly out of touch with reality given his actions--it's clear he was forced to overpay for something that has little utility in the grand-scheme of things--henc why Dorsey walked away. If this is to be successful, perhaps this tech apocalypse will start the demise of these platform's and will have less relevance from this point onward.
But, I feel that he is doing what he is best at: Marketing. His tactics to bring in ad revenue are the same that cable news has with polemic based click-bait but that sad reality is that he has a legion of simps to dog-whistle to keep it afloat.
Other publishers, substack, etc. Why would anyone actually need to be on twitter? so they can break up their insight into 280 character bites and post them in 30 post-long threads that only other twitter users will read and eventually be re-digested into something most people will consume? Vine users didn't go anywhere for the longest time, most of them outgrew it by the time TikTok came around. Twitter was a fun experiment but it seems like it's been on its way out. Seems like just about anything that Elon is going to want to do it will result in deflating whatever is left.
> the same person who committed $44 billion without due diligence.
Honestly, I'm not sure what due diligence you think he should have, or could have, negotiated. The code obviously works. The userbase is there. They are public, so a lot of information is known.
> Given the activist mentality (and possibly hostile to new ownership) of a certain number of developers, it seems perhaps prudent to analyze the code and evaluate the existing developers immediately upon purchase of the company.
Checking the code doesn't make sense, unless you think Twitter is some rinky-dink outfit[1]. If they want to inspect foe activism, they should check the configurations - not code. The engineers only add the knobs and dashboards[1], an entirely different team takes care of operations.
1. Based on what I've gleaned from similar-sized tech companies, or even those 2 orders of magnitude smaller.
My guess is this would be a very high level look at their architecture and maybe a closer look as some specific portions. Like you said these systems are so complex that you wouldn't be able to figure out what is even happening in a day.
I don't agree that it's to drive feat at Twitter, as just about any engineer will know what I just said. What I think it's about is driving the headlines, "Tesla engineers are doing a code review at twitter" sounds very important to the lay person.
Twitter has been publishing about their architecture and all the updates to it for years and years, and given countless presentations on it. https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/
My guess is that at least part of the reason to bring in these devs, is to make sure none of the code or git histories (or their backups) are tampered with.
Many twitter staffers seem willing and motivated to sabatouge the new owner over purely political issues. A few have even suggested it on their own twitter accounts. Elon is polarizing and that leads to both more challenges and more opprotunities.
There's a big difference in this case between a position of authority and an authoritarian leader.
Typically most people would regard good leaders as people you follow because they inspire confidence, you feel like you can trust them, and that your efforts will be rewarded. Authoritarian leaders on the other hand are typically those who use their ability to punish people to force compliance.
While the owner of a private company doesn't need the approval of their employees to make decisions I would never work for someone who uses threats and doesn't explain the rationale behind their decisions.
Perhaps a better analogy is that the CEO is captain of the ship. You get credit for things going well but if things go wrong you are responsible. It does not matter who screwed up. There's a wide range of ways to implement that model ranging from despots like Chainsaw Al to consensus builders like Jim Whitehurst. [0, 1]
"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."
>“Fifth column” paranoia is a hallmark of authoritarian leadership.
Is it paranoia when within this very same thread people are making posts about ways to see the company fail? By omission or direct action, if the ideas are expressed here then they are held by workers at Twitter.
Do you fail to see how this is relevant?
They comment I replied to is making a rather poorly founded insinuation of authoritarian leadership, ie Musk, despite having 'lead' over the enterprise for days, at best.
Presently this jibe, 'authoritarian' is being levied at conservatives & most absurdly at free speech advocates. The idiocy of such an assessment is, in fact, the operation of an authoritarian ideology.
A great attempt to dodge vesting schedules and escape doling out severance. Even if they convince many engineers to quit willingly, one presumes that the next step is rounds of layoffs with cause.
California is at-will, but notoriously anal regarding mass-layoffs. My serious question is, regardless of with or without cause, surely some employment attorneys are licking their lips at the stack of prospective cases they're about to have, right?
If I was a Twitter engineer, I'd be trying to figure out how to maximize my severance package right about now.
> If I was a Twitter engineer, I'd be trying to figure out how to maximize my severance package right about now.
Absolutely. This is how I would spend every minute of my workdays until the eventual layoff. It’s a degrading experience for sure, but it could pay off big.
Get everything in writing. If someone wants an in-person meeting with no notes taken send an e-mail to them afterwards confirming what was said in the meeting. That way you have a paper trail of what was said/known and when.
This is advice if you think your employer is going to try firing you for cause so they don't need to pay a severance. When they're trying to do that your manager will try to have more face to face meetings so none of the discussions are recorded. Then they will send some e-mails to their manager with some colored description of what took place. For instance they'll say your productivity dropped or you're mismanaging your time because you didn't work on project A but in your one-on-one they explicitly told you to stop working on project A and instead focus on B. When it comes time to drop the hammer they'll have one-sided documentation of your performance.
If they're start talking about your performance definitely follow up with an e-mail about what metrics they are using to measure performance and pressure them to give you a path for correction.
If you don't have any documentation it will be easier for them to fire you and offer you nothing. If you have a bunch of documentation, especially if they know you have it, they'll be more likely to offer a severance. A wrongful termination suit will likely cost them more than your severance, especially if you have a lot of documentation of your work and performance.
Also remember HR exists to protect the company, they don't give a shit about you beyond whatever the legal requirement is for giving a shit. Don't sign anything without reading it carefully.
If your employer is trying to fire you "with cause" then they will be producing a paper trail of their own, to justify their decision. Their paper trail will be very one-sided, of course.
You will need your own paper trail to demonstrate your side of things, either as part of the severance meeting - if you even get the opportunity - or after you get fired if you choose to make a claim against it.
yes, though not exactly sure how is it beneficial to company, maybe then they are not obliged to follow stricter rules for mass layoffs, if they can lower the threshold of leaving people
This reeks of the arrogance someone who has never gone through recession layoffs. Sometimes your division gets slashed for no reason other then your vp wasn’t slightly more persuasive. When investors want to see cuts, lots of good people end up fired for no reason other than bad luck.
Trying to time a parachute into a not super terrible market isn’t the worst idea. Plus usually the first and second round are the most generous. As belt tightening gets worse and the PR isn’t as bad expect worse benefits.
I've never been laid off but my productivity would definitely tank if I knew half of us were getting cut. I think I'm pretty good, but not above getting the axe. Which is also why I choose my teams/projects wisely because a lot of them disappear
Yeah lol, it definitely has the same vibes I see from people that are like:
"Corporations aren't people, they're capitalistic entities. They don't owe you anything" while also turning around and saying "how greedy of you to act in your own self interest and not to the benefit of your company!!"
What’s your point? It’s an organizational failure for over-hiring and/or not having enough work, not the employees fault. Good for them for making the money with minimal effort.
So when the organization makes attempts to correct what amounts to a failure and cleans house the people getting a free ride should also get a handout on their way to the door?
Freeloaders have always existed, getting their position thanks to their connections and not their effort. It isn't something new and other work is being done that could be shared. A few people are working hard while a bunch of others pray on them for a paycheck. Haha, and my other post got flagged, ha, that's the pettiness in action.
If this is you, then I don't think you want to view it from the other perspective. Somebody is working really hard to get things done and a bunch of others jump in at the last minute to grab some credit, then go back to doing nothing. Or worse still, back to undermining the hardest workers out of promotions and recognition for not being "a team player"
They have everything to lose if they don't defend this attitude, but you have everything to gain if you start realizing your worth
Why do you care? And why do you focus on people who have it ok like they took it from poor people? There’s a whole layer of people who are used and abused by rich, but hey, fvck datacenter sob, how dare he not work up to your standards?
Twitter is a private company now. There are no more stocks to vest, so the idea that this is to dodge vesting schedules doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
The employees are vesting the cashed out value (at $54.20/share) of whatever stock they were vesting as of when the deal closed.
Although SpaceX apparently has vesting stock in a way that keeps the company private. Some of the text messages Elon sent that were published alluded to that.
I didn't mean to imply that. I think you can keep the shares.
But there are limits to how many non-insider (e.g. former employees), non-accredited investors a company can have before it is required to go public. For this reason a lot of companies do try to make it mandatory and/or offer sweet deals to buy the shares back upon leaving the company.
> there are limits to how many non-insider (e.g. former employees), non-accredited investors a company can have before it is required to go public.
I thought that limit was some trivial number. I thought the much larger number (2,000 IIRC) was made up of investors who were either insiders or accredited investors.
500. Although I thought the JOBS act increased that number to 2500, but my google-fu is failing me. In any case, once you have that many shareholders on record, you HAVE to go public. This is what forced Google and Facebook to eventually go public.
Companies often get around this by not doing everything possible to prevent an employee from becoming a shareholder on record. E.g. settling option contracts for cash.
Not Twitter. They all got bought on Friday by Elon. There's no way they would have time to create the necessary legal structure by Tuesday to be able to allocate shares and even to give them to employees.
This doesn't make sense. There are certainly options and stock to vest; every pre-IPO startup employee in the world knows about the four-year vesting schedule.
It makes total sense. Twitter was just bought on Friday. All existing shares are now owned by Elon. There are no private shares of Twitter yet, and it won't be ready to distribute by Nov 1, which is Tuesday.
Completely irrelevant. Twitter just got bought. There are no shares anymore and Twitter hasn't had time to go through the process to create and distribute them.
That’s true. Maybe I misread your comment, but it sounded like you were saying that the reason there cannot be stock grants is because Twitter is private. The reason that there cannot be stock grants is because Elon happens to own all the shares, not because Twitter is private.
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 better person even if I'm in a room of degenerates.
> 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.
I'm an old beard too and this seems (sorry) borderline delusional to me. Even in normal circumstances that kind of devotion to an employer never pays off - financially or emotionally. Companies the size of Twitter do not "care" and the product certainly doesn't. Caring back just sets you up for an inevitable, brusing collision with reality.
In twitter's present situation, and given the well-known personality traits of its new owner, I'd argue that exit planning is the only sane thing for an employee to be doing with their time right now.
I don't think TheChaplain is saying you should be devoted to your employer, but rather to respect your work, your colleagues, your customers, and your company. That is not even incompatible with planning an exit. The best people I've worked with put in an effort to the end, even when they are on the way out, because they are professionals.
I was commenting on @TheChaplain saying they'd do their "absolute best up to the minute I have to leave" and offering an opinion asymetric loyalty in tech businesses. Thats all I was commenting on. I think thats pretty clear.
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 hospital, but for Twitter I personally really couldn't care less.
Blind devotion to your employer or country is not a virtue, but a naive idealism. Honor is just a general heuristic for doing good, it's not the good itself. Doing good is done on a case by case basis, ideals are just a guide. We have to evaluate all our actions with an ethical criticality.
"I'm just doing my job" is a classic deflection of responsibility. If you do not believe your job is ethical or moral or compatible with your beliefs, then to continue to do it is indeed blind devotion. Just because you are paid to do it has nothing to do with what's right.
Is it honorable to die on your sword for a casino or a big pharma price gouging department? Or an adtech company?
Twitter employees are rightfully questioning their career choices right now, and if their continued help will give Twitter a chance of making the world a better place under current leadership objectives.
> When winds start blowing the other way, that’s when one’s true character is tested.
But that depends on who you feel you are working for. If King Charming is replaced by Gorr the Butcher, you may need to decide whether you are truly loyal to the king or the people. Butchering the people that the previous king saved would not strike me as honorable, even if you sworn loyalty to "the crown".
I'm not saying Musk will be bad, I truly have no idea. But if he decided (say) that fake news are good for engagement, it would be indeed wise to question whether loyalty to Twitter Inc. is a good idea. Recognizing when things have changed for the worse is a sign of maturity and not a failure of character.
Values are multiple. You have to consider professional responsibility and weigh it against responsibility to yourself and your family as well, and most people would place those above all others.
This change is not "minor". Twitter employees have just had massive risk and uncertainty added to their short term career. There was some risk and uncertainty prior, because the company would probably have been doing layoffs, but a clearly impulsive, mercurial, uncaring and overstretched person is now in charge of decisions that affect all employees income, health insurance, etc.)
You also have to consider your political values and alignment with the company's goals. I think a lot of people at Twitter also believe in the value of the "public square" which Musk purports to care about. But if you look at Musk's always hyper deferential statements in China, or one of his large investors now being the Saudi government, or his "solution" to the war in Ukraine, it seems that he has a much more favorable outlook on authoritarianism than the previous leadership. Twitter's not about to be a voice for the powerless but a megaphone for the rich and powerful. That has to weigh in on one's thinking about work.
If I strongly disagree with the new CEO's opinion or company values, I can move on.
None of these things you mention would suddenly make me:
- receive joy from other people's misfortunes
- make others lose money on purpose
- sabotage and attempt to destroy a company
For me, someone who does these things (that OP originally mentioned), is someone very far away from being ethical.
Hence my original point, if you think it's ok to go behind behind people's back because suddenly there's a new CEO at some company, you were never honorable.
What you really have done is just made yourself an excuse to act who you truly are. Someone who'd say everything's ok and fake a smile in front of your colleagues while lurking behind the backs destroy people’s work.
I very much dislike this loud, ego-centric, self-righteous "I know better" political individualism, where a person thinks it's suddenly OK to "have fun and destroy".
"I very much dislike this loud, ego-centric, self-righteous "I know better" political individualism, where a person thinks it's suddenly OK to "have fun and destroy"."
So why would you work really super-duper hard for Mr. Musk while he waits to finish the code review to fire you??
That's, IMO, an absurd contradiction. If you value honesty and ethics, you don't work at twitter. It's detrimental to mental health and society, possibly more so than facebook, just for the money.
And now Musk might try to use it for his own political and financial agenda. If that risk is serious, running twitter into the ground might be the most ethical thing an employee could do.
> And now Musk might try to use it for his own political and financial agenda. If that risk is serious, running twitter into the ground might be the most ethical thing an employee could do.
I try not to flame here, but that viewpoint may actually be insane.
It's a job. You're not changing the world. If you don't like the politics of the CEO, leave.
You're not a freedom fighter. Real people in the world are actually fighting for their lives, their freedoms and the right to eat and live in dignity. Literally hundreds of millions. None of those people are based in Silicon Valley.
> ... running twitter into the ground might be the most ethical thing an employee could do.
Is this what you said during your hypothetical interview with Twitter? If yes, be my guest. If not, you should abide by the promises you made to your employers.
It's got nothing to do with "self-imposed honor code" or whatever terms people come up with to belittle people with integrity. You made a promise when you accepted that offer. You either stand by that or quit.
It's not the navy. You're not under orders. They can fire you if they want. But if that's not enough for you: promises and loyalty works boths ways. Suppose you're a veteran at twitter. The company (you thought) joined is not what it is today. You're not bound to any original promises.
Furthermore, you didn't make any promises. You signed a contract, which is only partly binding (check your jurisdiction for details; e.g., where I live, a non-compete clause is frequently overruled by a judge). You didn't promise to increase shareholder value on your mother's life.
Finally, when the interests are substantial enough, ethics trump loyalty and honor. I don't think I have to substantiate that.
Of course, this doesn't hold when you adhere to some kind of "corporatism", where the state and/or corporations decide what's good for you.
I don't think we disagree. You don't like the company you work for? You Quit. You think it's not the company you joined some time ago? You Quit. I can go on and on like this. You didn't promise to increase shareholder value, but you did promise you would try in good faith.
None of this justifies willfully harming your employer.
Edit: One of the things that is an exception I believe is whistle blowing. You may expose stuff you deem unacceptable or harmful to the general public. But I guess that's about it. Of course this all depends on your jurisdiction.
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.
Curious about this as well. I could understand being a little peeved as a shareholder if this is purely coming out of Tesla's pockets, but I realize a lot of people have bought into Tesla and think of Elon Musk's distractions as part of the bad that comes with the good.
This is a laudable position. But consider that, depending on your level and immediate boss, you might not be in a position to survive the layoffs no matter how personally productive and impactful you are.
There will be a lot of snap judgements made by Musks engineers on who is to be spared and there are two major terms. One is how engaged and interested your current boss is at staying, and the other is what Musk’s technical staff think. Their judgements will be quick and driven by outcomes like broad attrition targets and what is absolutely necessary.
If your on an unnecessary team, but are a rockstar, you might not survive if nobody communicates your value. And it is very likely that entire divisions are on the chopping block. Without an ally on a surviving division that says “I need this guy moved to my team yesterday” it’s unlikely to happen.
Not saying you shouldn’t do the right thing, but try to understand the interests of and see what makes sense for you.
The site has been flooded with 4chan users saying the n-word, and there are no attempts to stop this. This is the new Twitter. This means it’s trashed. It’s like trying to save a piece of raw meat left out in the sun. Why put a single shred of effort into this?
> 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.
> 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 better person even if I'm in a room of degenerates.
To be blunt: you're making yourself sound like a sucker who will let people exploit you.
Spend as much energy doing right by your employer as they will spend doing right by you.
> To be blunt: you're making yourself sound like a sucker who will let people exploit you.
That's not really what it sounds like at all to me. A more apt analogy might be OP wanting to help all the passengers off the sinking ship before jumping off themselves. While you could just abandon the ship and assume everyone else knows how to get off without assistance, reality shows that many people still need that helping hand.
I don't think OP is letting anyone exploit them. OP just wants to help people, which I think is quite admirable.
> A more apt analogy might be OP wanting to help all the passengers off the sinking ship before jumping off themselves.
That's not an apt analogy. No one's going to die or even be harmed if Twitter crashes and burns tomorrow. Twitter is a frivolous discretionary product that exists only for its owners' profit, nothing more.
> OP just wants to help people, which I think is quite admirable.
Yes, but it's also not a good thing to be tricked into thinking you're helping people, when you're really being exploited.
If you're going to keep working on a sinking ship, you better have a pretty good reason to think you're actually helping people that doesn't amount to a regurgitation of a corporate mission statement or a foolish one-sided loyalty to an unloyal organization.
Ok that's fair, I don't think anyone is going to die. But calling Twitter a "frivolous discretionary product" feels very dismissive of the real impact that it has on society. For instance: the Capitol Insurrection
To be entirely honest, I have no idea what Elon Musk's management will bring to Twitter--whether it'll get better or worse, and what might happen as a result. I don't personally think anything will crash and burn, but that's not to say that the transition won't be rocky and influence _some_ people at least.
Elon Musk wants to make verified statuses purchasable. Would fake news outlets abuse this to further spread misinformation? I don't know, but I do hope that there is someone in the company who will consider these issues more deeply than I have the time for.
So no, I don't think anyone is a sucker for acting in the best interest of their customers and colleagues. Yes, the new executives might not value their employees the same way anymore, but I don't believe it's right to abandon those you care about in the face of a new enemy. OP sounds to me more like they're loyal to the users, rather than to the organization.
> Yes, but it's also not a good thing to be tricked into thinking you're helping people, when you're really being exploited.
Why can't it be both? For you, you probably think that "avoiding being exploited by your employer" is more important than helping people (eg. your users). Which is probably fine if people just left it at that.
In a sense it becomes an ethical problem with the general sentiment that hurting Elon Musk as much as possible is more important than not harming your users, to the extent that some people call out on people who don't subscribe to those views.
Personally, IMHO, if one doesn't like a company they can quit. I don't see how people can claim moral high ground by advocating staying onboard for the purpose of sabotaging the company.
I think being "honest and ethical" is at its heart a useful strategy for organizing the collective work of individuals. It's part of the ethos required for building high-trust groups.
Individuals within a group want to understand the terms under which a group operates, and in particular, how to extract their share of value from the group and how to maintain or enhance their extractable share of value.
The more the rules of a group are perceived to be fair, reciprocal and consistently applied, the more members can trust the group and each other. This relieves the participants of significant cognitive and emotional burden, allows longer-term collective action, and reduces transaction costs dramatically.
But I can intellectually understand the value of opportunistic defection strategies that "cheat" the group, extracting both an unfair share of value (as well as some of the "embodied trust value" resulting in an incremental loss of trust across the group).
I have a personal commitment to honest behavior and I actively avoid low-trust friends, groups and choices. Possibly because I find low-trust situations too stressful and too much work, as well as morally horrifying (whatever that means!) I'd like to believe that I'm fundamentally a "good person" but I acknowledge that it might just be that I'm unwilling to leave the local maximum high-trust situation I've self-selected for throughout my life, or I'm afraid of the risks of defector strategies (or I'm just cognitively and emotionally unsuited to them).
Here's where it gets complicated, because organizations change, trust levels change, the signifiers of trustability change, organizations lie, sometimes organizations are specifically operated to trap and exploit high-honor people, and people have very different ideas about what constitutes "fairness" or "exploitation". I find it hard to criticize someone who chooses to use low-trust tactics against a low-trust or deceptive group.
It seems, looking around different cultures and organizations in the world that there is a huge variation in the principles under which groups function. Apparently "low-trust" is a viable option, although I'm supportive of the idea that high-trust brings a competitive advantage both for groups and individuals, and is worth building and sustaining.
I'm horrified that we seem to have reached some kind of tipping point in the west where a critical mass of elites (who already extract enormous value!) have decided they can extract even more value through high-order defection than by building modern and durable foundations of trust.
what kind of information is in twitter that does not exist elsewhere? i never remember searching for something and ending up to find the answer in twitter
One could argue that centralized surveillance capitalism companies are unethical to start with. In the hands of a billionaire seeking to make them more profitable at all costs, they can become dangerous weapons.
The ethical thing for Twitter engineers to do is sit back and watch Twitter burn and potentially think about how to help someone like Jack build the open source decentralized alternative he has been musing about.
Comments like this make me wonder just how divergent peoples outlook on life are.
I’m with the guy you responded too, making a billionaire lose money is way funnier and interesting.
But even in a normal company, I never really understood this loyalty/ethics thing.
To me, it makes sense to do the very, very bear minimum and “steal” as much time as possible. So you can use it for your self.
A job is you selling time to someone else. It’s simply incomprehensible to me someone would willingly give extra of their time. Equally not attempted to claw back as much as their time as possible.
I suppose there’s an element of game theory, there are points in time where it’s worth to go that extra mile to achieve something that will put you in a better position, but those are the exceptions not the rule.
Not judging you, I’m glad people like you are out there. My life is better due to people like you and I am thankful for that. But, yeah, I guess I’m just fascinated at the differences in outlook.
When you ask you accountant to do your accounts so you don't get hugely screwed by the tax man then you expect/hope that they will do their best work in your interest.
When you go to the dentist and need a broken tooth fixed you hope the dentist will take an extra 15 minutes if it means your fixed tooth will look as straight and nice as possible, even if they could have fixed the core issue in a much faster way and leave you with an aesthetically unpleasant looking tooth.
When you send your children to school you hope that teachers would sacrifice time from their own lunch break if your kid has one more question just before the break so they don't fail the next exam.
If you live in America you probably hope that the person who guards the gate to your child's school would wait an extra 20 minutes if the new guard is slightly late so no crazy gunman could just walk in unchallenged and gun down your child.
When your parents end up frail and end up requiring social care you'd hope that the people looking after them would not just do the "bare minimum and steal as much time as possible for their own benefit" and rather take pride and care when looking after them.
All those people also hope that if you work on a product that serves a public interest that you will do your utmost best to return the favour so everyone can live in a nice society.
People do their utmost because of mutual respect, and because of the expectation of conducting repeat business - not because of honor.
Try telling your elderly parents' social worker you want to gauge their performance, because you're shopping around for someone new, and only A-players are acceptable. Then watch how much care and kindness your parents receive out of honor alone.
Going above the call of duty for "honor" is not a virtue. It's being a doormat.
That's why people consider those real jobs and think people who work at Twitter should not complain about anything. I'm not saying they are right, but I don't think you made your point at all.
But you must understand taking pride in your work. I don't know if I'd have called it honorable, but there is certainly no honor in sneakily doing shitty work on purpose. I wouldn't write software if it didn't give me satisfaction, and doing a shitty job is never satisfying.
Poster didn't even talk about giving additional time, just faithfully fulfilling their end of the employment contract. It's bare minimum respect to your coworkers and clients/users to care about your work and make it as polished as you can.
A mentality of doing as little as possible makes life harder for the people around you as well. Twitter is low-stakes; no one will die due to some developer slacking off, but if you don't want to participate, then the least you can do is leave.
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 we should do" moments that are too expensive or deviate too far from the core business that don't get developed in most enterprises that could be pursued when starting from a blank slate.
The success of most* social media platforms was largely unconnected with the developers who built it or the underlying software. You can't just hire a few hundred retrenched developers and expect to come up with a successful social media platform after some number of months. Timing, marketing, and user psychology are much more important.
* I'd say TikTok is the exception, because delivering (a) instantaneous video and (b) useful algorithmic recommendations is a technically difficult proposition. But at the same time, I'd argue their success was driven largely by the music licensing deals they initially cut (and their insane marketing spend), which is what caused their early growth.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but in this hypothetical I'm envisioning this a bit differently then a completely new social network so much as Twitter 2.0 with a very direct focus on getting a large "Lift and Shift" of users directly from Twitter. I should also be clear that I'm assuming a relatively proportional level of talent across Product, Design etc too not just retrenched engineers.
>getting a large "Lift and Shift" of users directly from Twitter
Why would someone switch from Twitter? If anything, you might expect more freedom of speech and less bots on Twitter. On the parallel Twitter the maximum you can expect is the old Twitter minus some functionality, plus some offline time and some bugs.
It's not hard to have a free speech platform. It's hard to have a useful speech platform. Useful speech probably requires editing and moderation and so far it's pretty clear algorithms and upvote/downvote systems aren't terribly good at it.
It seems to me that the last decade or so provides ample evidence that allowing everyone to say everything they want is almost certainly anti-correlated with substantial and meaningful debate.
It seems to me that the last decade or so provides ample evidence that not allowing everyone to say everything they want is almost certainly anti-correlated with substantial and meaningful debate.
I have a fairly plausible mechanism behind my observation: Getting your thoughts published and disseminated used to require buy in from a wide range of people, the publishers essentially.
Publishers edited and moderated what they published so they could gain a reputation as trustworthy or sensationalist. Maintaining that reputation was essential for the business. Who would buy a newspaper with a reputation for false reporting?
Removing the publishers at replacing them with algorithms designed to maximize engagement removed this intermediate layer of reputation checks. Further as the infrastructure is paid for exclusively by ads and those can be targeted fairly well, engagement is far more important than platform reputation. This has reduced the level of public discourse markedly and wrong and discredited opinions can gain substantial audiences and establish strong societal narratives with no "human editor in the loop".
This we are seeing an influence of conspiracy theoretical thinking on advanced democracies that would have been unthinkable even in the 90s.
“as the infrastructure is paid for exclusively by ads and those can be targeted fairly well, engagement is far more important than platform reputation”
This is the key problem for sure, but it applies to all content providers from the largest publishers to tiny “publishers” like you and I when we post a comment on a site that is ad-supported. To take away people’s freedom of expression due to the revenue model is arbitrary and inconsistent with a free, advanced society.
You suggest that there should be gatekeepers to verify the reputation and veracity of content and the individual posting the content, but these gatekeepers are themselves biased and unable to know the “truth” in most situations as there is a debate about what is the truth. Stifling debate through this filter is detrimental to discourse and results in group-think and a general lack of creative thought. It is generally unscientific and authoritarian, which history (very recent history at that) has proven quite clearly.
> To take away people’s freedom of expression due to the revenue model is arbitrary and inconsistent with a free, advanced society.
This is the rhetorical slight of hand due to which any meaningful discussion of this topic is impossible on Hacker News. I talk about a lack of moderation and editorial work and you reply about "taking away peoples freedom of expression".
Put another way, 30 years ago it was not considered a limit on your freedom of expression if you couldn't get your conspiracy theory published in any news paper. Today you argue/feel like it is a limit on your freedom of expression if you can't publish it on social media.
> these gatekeepers are themselves biased and unable to know the “truth” in most situations as there is a debate about what is the truth.
First, it is not always true that there is a debate about what is the truth. Secondly, if there is only one gatekeeper (e.g. the state) this is obviously detrimental to discourse. But if there is a multitude of gatekeepers, and if there is a strong culture of accepting high quality divergent opinions, it is not.
> Stifling debate through this filter is detrimental to discourse
Non sequitur! You assume that the gatekeepers will control by alignment with their own opinion, rather than by quality. That's a danger, but there are mechanisms against it. If there is a healthy landscape of publishers this is something that can be demonstrated and will become known because competing publishers have an interest in exposing this.
(If all your media is owned by Murdoch you have a problem anyway).
> It is generally unscientific and authoritarian, which history (very recent history at that) has proven quite clearly.
What historical precedence are you thinking about with this?
I think science is an excellent example, and as a scientist I am well familiar with scientific discourse, and how it functions. It does absolutely _not_ function as a free for all. First of all, if you can't get your stuff published in a reputable journal nobody will take you serious. Generally to be part of the scientific discourse you are expected to demonstrate solid understanding of the underlying material. You will not get to speak at a conference unless you have demonstrated this to a number of reputable scientists who will vouch for you in the program committee.
What this comes down to is simply this: A healthy discourse in which the best ideas win and new ideas can be tried out requires structure. In a free for all, there is no guarantee that the best idea wins, in fact you would expect the most easily amplified and persuasive idea to win. Ease of amplification will depend on the medium and humans can be persuaded of any number of things that are blatantly untrue rather easily.
We require so much structure in the scientific enterprise to guard against our own individual vanity and fallibility.
---
As an aside, something I have been meaning to read into more deeply but haven't looked at yet very much:
[Jürgen Habermas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas) has written extensively about the prerequisites for a discourse to work well, long before social media blew things wide open. I am sure there are plenty of thinkers that have tried to develop these ideas further into the contemporary setting.
> His most known work to date, the Theory of Communicative Action (1981), is based on an adaptation of Talcott Parsons AGIL Paradigm. In this work, Habermas voiced criticism of the process of modernization, which he saw as inflexible direction forced through by economic and administrative rationalization.[24] Habermas outlined how our everyday lives are penetrated by formal systems as parallel to development of the welfare state, corporate capitalism and mass consumption.[24] These reinforcing trends rationalize public life.[24] Disfranchisement of citizens occurs as political parties and interest groups become rationalized and representative democracy replaces participatory one.[24] In consequence, boundaries between public and private, the individual and society, the system and the lifeworld are deteriorating.[24] Democratic public life cannot develop where matters of public importance are not discussed by citizens.[25] An "ideal speech situation"[26] requires participants to have the same capacities of discourse, social equality and their words are not confused by ideology or other errors.[25] In this version of the consensus theory of truth Habermas maintains that truth is what would be agreed upon in an ideal speech situation.
For a scientist, you sure do ignore the facts of fallible human nature and basic mathematical set logic theory. These platforms are not newspapers and magazines printed by individual companies with a cultivated set of content creators; they are platforms that are open to all people in the world. Applying the same principal to these platforms is inconsistent and arbitrary.
“This is the rhetorical slight of hand due to which any meaningful discussion of this topic is impossible on Hacker News. I talk about a lack of moderation and editorial work and you reply about "taking away peoples freedom of expression".”
You fail to see that we are saying the same exact thing and your attempt to equivocate by avoiding stating the obvious that moderation and editorializing is restricting expression doesn’t pass muster with me. We will have to disagree on this.
“We require so much structure in the scientific enterprise to guard against our own individual vanity and fallibility.”
Yet vanity and fallibility still reign amongst scientists, especially given the way science is funded. I refuse to accept such a naive notion and blindly apply that principal to discourse amongst people.
I nowhere claimed that platforms are like newspapers. I claimed that newspapers provided a function that improved discourse and that has been lost.
I also claim that discussion of this function is made difficult by a blanket appeal to freedom of expression.
I don't claim that we already know how to replicate the function that the publishers played in the new world. But moderation is not censorship and freedom of expression is not entitlement to access to a platformn either.
Your last paragraph almost wilfully seems to miss my point. Scientific consensus works in the presence of fallibility and vanity. If it only would work in their absence it wouldn't work because it is a consensus among humans and humans are prone to both.
High quality discourse requires norms, moderation and rules. I challenge you to show any counter example. Most obviously, we are on a website that is actively moderated and has a long section of guidelines that are somewhat between norms and rules. Do you think the discourse here would be improved without these "limits on expression"?
Yes but this is good timing. A lot of people are pretty unsatisfied with Musk as a human lately and it seems like if there was an alternative available, people would go there quickly.
I've seen him say and do a lot of controversial and in my opinion very immoral things in the last year.
Maybe I'm just talking for myself but if I used Twitter, and a decent modern alternative existed, I'd at least make an account and hope other came along so I didn't have to be part of his "town square" or his "everything app" (which sounds like a nightmare).
I think Musk has done some good things in the past, but honestly, he seems like an asshole and increasingly willing to do questionable things for money and to protect his interests.
I don't use any of his products and I'd been more than happy if it stays that way.
Interesting. What technologies do you use that you are fully aware that no assholes were involved in its creation? How does one go about ensuring they follow this no-asshole rule?
Many considered Steve Jobs to be an asshole. Do you use an apple product? How about Bill Gates and Microsoft? Or Linus and Linux? Or Amazon and Jeff Bezos? Or Oracle and Larry Ellison? Or Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg? Or …
Funny because I use Linux as my primary OS, while I think Linus can be abrasive, I don't think he is an asshole in the same way, because with Linus, it's not about money, in the same way that money is a thing for Musk or Gates. Woz built a lot of Apple and I feel his presence in a lot of their earlier stuff. He wasn't a money guy.
So I actually think I have a point.
I don't use FB because I don't like MZ, I try use Amazon as little as possible although sometimes, it's hard to avoid in some cases. I use an iPhone because I think Androids are less secure. I think Windows is a pathetic product and I've never liked it, I've never been a fan of Bill Gates and his ethos anyway. I'd actually avoid buying a Tesla because of false claims around self-driving and I'm also starting to feel like Tesla is synonymous with poor quality and issues.
So with all due respect, I'm not sure you have a great argument.
Life is (thankfully for me) about choices, and I'm making them.
Overall I personally agree with most all of those decisions. However, my decisions are made based on the product or business practices not my perception of the personality or political beliefs of their founders or significant contributors based on social media or news accounts.
Just because someone has an abrasive personality or differing political views doesn’t mean they are a worse person than someone who has a nice personality or similar political beliefs.
> What technologies do you use that you are fully aware that no assholes were involved in its creation?
Asshole or not asshole, the role of a CEO of a public company is to sign off quality of life for the public.
Musk is not signing off anything. At best you could say that he's aspirationally signing off quality of life for people who are not even alive yet and would benefit from a less warm Earth. But that is contentious given that solving transportation alone won't solve climate change and Tesla for sure won't be the sole player in transportation. As a matter of fact it will be a small player and the electrification will be provided by the legacy OEM.
Character flaws pale compared to the big question: "What is this guy doing for me?" . There were no such questions with the other people you mentioned.
Fair question. Elon is definitely not the answer to all that ails the planet. Yes, electric cars are not a panacea: they require mining of nasty elements from the ground and (especially the batteries) must be disposed of properly; they still require electricity which is largely still created using fossil fuels.
For me, the big advantage is that electric cars can be charged from many root sources including solar, wind, and nuclear. These sources can be sourced locally to one’s home or at least within the country, which reduces the perpetual excuse for wars to secure access to fossil fuels. That’s a significant contribution and Elon Musk is largely credited with moving the auto industry in that direction.
Also, I like his Don Quixotic nature. Charging forth into areas despite the naysayers and avoiding analysis paralysis by taking action and accomplishing some amazing feats with a team of people of course. We have enough tepid “leaders” who just want to copy other money-making ideas with easy fed money distributed by simple-minded venture capitalists.
He’s doing some things right. I am personally getting a big bucket of popcorn to watch what he does with Twitter and how he’s going to deal with all of the attacks from the government and individuals that are frightened of human beings expressing themselves more freely on Twitter.
> That’s a significant contribution and Elon Musk is largely credited with moving the auto industry in that direction.
Which is a direction which doesn't benefit the quality of life of contemporaries in any way and it's contentious that it will benefit people living in the future.
When something benefits you, well you know because you use that stuff. Today is Sunday and I used dozens of different flavors of Microsoft. Same with Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, Exxon, BP, Fidelity, Wells Fargo, JPM...you get the gist. I don't suspect, I KNOW that Jobs was an asshole and so is Gates, not to mention Zuck and Dimon...but quality of life provided by company they direct, trumps assholery.
I can't say the same for any of Musk companies, and he's supposedly the GOAT and he's 51. Mind I am not a sub-saharan farmer , I am a well traveled person, but I never used one of his products or services, the closest I was when an Uber was supposed to come pick me up in a Tesla but canceled.
Interesting that you think he's done a lot of unethical things over the past year compared to previous ones... this is the year where a good half of starlink terminals in Ukraine are being SpaceX funded. Rather than the year he accused someone of being a pedophile or the year he refused to comply with covid regs.
He did also threaten to shut them down after receiving flack for suggesting that a sovereign country give up part of it's territory to a lunatic, so yeah, still not a great year.
Which he said not long after the comments were made, so maybe it's coincidental, but I mean, there was never any talk of having problems paying before the anti-musk comments were made.
Switching cost is 0 as long as your friends are on the other platform. Just get enough people pissed off at elon to "try" out the new service and enough might stick around.
The only value Twitter has is network effects, the old leadership clearly didn't show much capacity of adding value and as much as people hate Elon it's not like Twitter didn't come under critics before.
Starting a new social network with "it's not run by those dicks" has not been a particularly successful move, anecdotically.
America's Left and Right are in general both quite skewed to the right. Our right wing party here in Australia would be considered left in America. The American left wing party is still considered right wing through the Australian political lens.
I'm hesitating to say through the global lens, since I just don't know. But my inkling would be that the majority of the western world has a similar political outlook. America has perverted it's political compass I feel.
Arresting people for going into a local park is considered to be more left wing? Locking down people is considered to be more left wing? The draconian, authoritarian measures taken in Australia surrounding its covid response were truly shocking.
You can't gauge Australia's general policymaking from what was an unprecedented event in our history, we were in a state of emergency, it can be hard to get every decision right in such a situation. I'm not sure how informed you are on the matter, but it was also state lead not a federal response. Some states were barely affected, some states threw away the precautions pretty quickly. Victoria had it the hardest, and I don't agree with the level of lockdown there. But it was also the decisions of one guy, who we elected, Dan Andrews, on the advice of his health officials. This is why we have a democracy, we vote him out if his decisions were bad.
>You can't gauge Australia's general policymaking from what was an unprecedented event in our history, we were in a state of emergency, it can be hard to get every decision right in such a situation
That is the perfect time to judge people. If somebody is willing to abandon their principles when it is a challenging situation then you can't trust them. Anybody can stick to their principles when everything is going well.
I don't think we should just ignore the 99% of the rest of our political history, including the actual policies we have right now, and the politicians we have right now, in favour of painting our own commentary of Australian politics overall based on the pandemic response. We should call it what it was, which was neither left nor right, but a bout of authoritarianism. That is something Australia actually does have a trend towards.
I agree that might be when you judge a politician, hence why I brought up voting, but that isn't even what we are talking about.
Twitter isn’t some engineering marvel. Anyone could go build a scalable Twitter clone. There are a handful of competitors on the market and a few open source projects. All things considered, it’s easy.
Arguably Twitter wasn't trying even the most obvious things that were laying on the surface, e.g. account fees, or tweet promotion to one's existing followers, or fees for following, etc.
It's an excellent platform for dissiminating information to interested parties, and it doesn't have to be ads. We have a company's account and we'd paying if they's allow us.
Plus they are bloated as hell, which is also contributing to their business apathy.
Twitter gross profit for the twelve months ending June 30, 2022 was $3.181B, a 11.24% increase year-over-year. Twitter annual gross profit for 2021 was $3.28B, a 39.58% increase from 2020.
True but as with all tech companies at the moment Twitter is also going to feel the pinch and they don't have the business size to wear it as well as the others.
"Only someone with the raw talent and vision of Elon can make twitter profitable" has effectively said by many here.
That twitter is already profitable either means a) the current team are on the same giga-genius level as Elon or b) people are talking absolute nonsense.
Twitter might be better able to survive the pinch - or would have before being lumped with a massive pile of debt. They have 2 costs; servers and staff and one revenue stream; advertising. Simple model and easy to balance the two sides of the equation.
Before the Musk buyout they paid $51mil to service the small amount of debt they had, post the takeover they will be paying ~$1bil to service the debts he has added to their balance sheet.
Not really. Twitter is really a very simple messaging system with messages being public.
If you take some pub sub like Kafka, Nats or RabbitMQ and bolt some code into it, it really is trivial. You scale by using Kubernetes for services and by sharding and replicating the DBs. It's really easy these days.
This is pretty much like saying that Dropbox can be trivially replicated with rsync(1) or that one can code Uber in a weekend. Perhaps you can do so at small scale for yourself and your friends. The essence of Twitter (or Dropbox, or Uber) is indeed quite simple.
However there's orders of magnitude more effort that goes into:
* Usability
* Performance
* Stability
* Security
* Localisation/internationalisation and accounting for cultural differences
* ... and thousands of little things that will come up when building something big.
Think of this another way... Twitter would not employ literally thousands of employees if there was nothing for them to do. It is not a charity. I don't buy that building anything that can handle hundred of millions of users is simple.
One can say that aforementioned classes of problems are semantically, conceptually different from scalability, but they will inevitably come up when building something the scale of Twitter and will require mountains of technical work to deal with.
>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.
Twitter wasn't too far off profitability. I looked at the numbers and you could definitely get it to profitability by reducing staff numbers and relocating to much cheaper places (literally anywhere except SV).
I think their loss was around $200m/year and staff costs around $300m/year. Something like that. SV salaries are easily double or triple European salaries.
> 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
Is Parag a startup entrepreneur, or more of a going-concern executive? Startup seems more Dorsey’s thing—who made more money on the deal and took his new social media effort out of stealth as soon as the Twitter sale was finalized.
Didn't Kalanick raise that money for his "shitty ghost kitchen venture" after using Uber Eats to prove that the model would actually be more lucrative than the cab-service?
I've thought the same thing, while Twitter is hard to scale, it's pretty freaking simple product to build, if I had a bit of spare time, I'd be building a clone right now so as everyone leaves Musk's platform they have a place to go.
There are probably Twitter alternatives laying on GitHub. How much people would you expect leaving Musks platform for another one? Are you willing to bet your life savings on it? I hope not, at least not without solid market research.
> Didn't he just get a golden parachute of around 54 Million dollars?
I think he got some from stock in the sale, but Musk is characterizing his firing as “for cause” to deny (or at least stall pending legal action) Parag’s golden parachute (same with the other Twitter execs.)
Because they don't have a union so they were excluded from all the big-boy negotiations at the sale, and they've no way to resist the demands of their bosses. They can put up, or shut up. Or just complain pathetically.
Facebook is out of cash. And even if they were expanding, Facebook is orders of magnitude more complex, is not sure all ex Twitter employees would have been a good match for Facebook.
Oh come now. Tumblr didn’t fail due to engineers sabotaging it. It failed because the new owners decided that they were too squeamish for porn and it turned out that porn was what sustained Tumblr. This was Yahoo simply not understanding what the product actually was.
I mean there is still not porn on Tumblr and Automattic has been a good steward of it. Verizon lost a billion dollars because they bet on a growth play for a mature social network where their new owners are running it like a lifestyle business.
I would argue that when Yahoo decided to remove all the porn off Tumblr that it caused a major brain drain that took a long time to recover. It also soured the relationship between bloggers and Yahoo. There was no way for the same entity to pull out of that nose dive but a bit of time and new ownership helped pivot Tumblr to a slightly different crowd.
The crowd that isn’t happy with Musk probably wouldn’t be happy with Theil… Musk is asshat saying stupid things. While Theil is both further in the same political direction and much smarter.
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.
To your point, can’t they just poke around the recent activity across all of twitters repos? Surely these brilliant Tesla engineers can figure that out.
Respectfully, very little of this seems to be operating by standard procedure. Have you seen the incoming CEO ask people to bring printouts of their code, ever?
Musk is reportedly looking to cut deadweight before Nov 1st when equity vests -- with layoffs possibly happening over the weekend. He might already have a basic idea of key teams and for non-key teams he might be looking to cut very fast.
I absolutely have done things like this when acquiring companies - sat with people, asked them to basically interview for their own jobs while showing me the most important thing they wrote in the last quarter. I've done this at a much smaller scale, one on one at the employee's desk, because the companies I've done this with have been 1/10 or 1/100th the size of twitter.
I can see why it might make sense to just tell people to print stuff out to demonstrate competency, if you're otherwise planning to cut their entire department. Everyone gets a quick conversation with an engineer to talk about the code and gauge basic competency. If you don't suck, you stay. Seems not super crazy.
It especially makes sense if you've locked out everyone aside from previously identified key personnel to prevent sabotage.
What a ridiculous viewpoint. I spent two days last week to write a single line of code. It cuts the startup time of the app in half with no downsides. I had to make sure it works in all flavors, on all OS builds, benchmark it to show it works, cherry pick it into various release branches, talk to people about it, etc
If you ask me to print my code and defend it in a meeting, I will instead skip the meeting and respond to one of the dozens recruiters who reach out every week in my inbox. You can keep the engineers who wrote the slow code in the first place. I'm sure they'll have thousands of lines of code to print.
It's just a demeaning process meant to assert the dominance of the new owners.
“ If you ask me to print my code and defend it in a meeting”
Its not about “defending”, its about explaining. Even from your reply one can feel the instant defensive position you take when asked about (your) code. I think ability to disassociate from your code and just be able to discuss it (not defend) and explain what and why (tradeoffs) and how was done is very valuable in developer, and in anyone actually if you extend it beyond the code.
When take over a company ant talk with people and they take defensive position thats a red flag for me. (I take over companies in my head only so far)
That’s a ridiculous position. I would expect good engineers to laugh at the entire process and not see a future in that company. There is no way that engineers can be accurately assessed on code output.
It doesn’t matter if it’s about defending or explaining. Either one is an absolutely absurd situation to find yourself in where you have to explain stuff to people with zero context to save your job.
why do you think that explaining something is ridiculous? i have been to meetings multiple times with representatives of other departmens and openly asked them to explain to me things that i didnt knew and needed to get understanding to implement some functionality. why its ridiculous when its other way arround and someone asks to explain what and why is this code doing? again, it looks like ypure taking it personally.
On the contrary, I'm more than happy to discuss my code with my colleagues, because their intent is to understand the code. In the hypothetical scenario, the new owner's intent is to evaluate my worth, not my code.
is there something wrong to evaluate your worth? and explaining your worth through the things that you have done (recently) is in my opinion one of most direct ways to do so.
no one wants your code just for fun of it or it beying extra nice and smart. code is neded becauae it creates value.
In general? No, because I agreed to yearly evaluations. Randomly asking me to prove my worth like my time so far didnt matter? Yes, there is, and the company being sold is a random event from my point of view.
The question itself comes from a place of authority, and the employee has nothing to gain, only to lose. Best case - I keep my job. Worst case - I get fired. That introduces stress into my life unnecessarily.
The new owners can go and read past evaluations instead of boiling the ocean. But, of course they won't do that. It's much easier to assert your authority and stress everyone out, to make sure they know that they are just resources churning out code.
If you step out of the soulless business mindset for one second, I'm sure you'll understand why asking me to prove my worth out of the blue is insulting.
"Prove your worth to the new gods, employee #1337!"
Not sure from which perspective you're saying "No" from?
If you were a Twitter employee, that means quitting. But apparently from what you just said you don't want to lose your job. (There's no stress if getting fired is something that doesn't bother you)
Or from a management perspective? In which case I think vincnetas did a good job explaining why management might want to do this if they wanted to downsize.
Basically you're saying the concept of laying off people is a ridiculous viewpoint because it makes employees feel stressed. Sure this is just a discussion forum and we're all free to express opinions, but realistically, what makes you think an employee can say "No, thanks" to this?
"There's no stress if getting fired is something that doesn't bother you"
Sure there is, long painful meetings where you go over your work for the last 30 days sounds miserable regardless of if you care about the outcome.
You also might lose your severance package.
While you can't say no thanks, if put in that situation by my employer I'd do the bare minimum and start lining up interviews with the tens of recruiters that message me daily (as I'm sure is the case for anyone with twitter on their resume)
> If you ask me to print my code and defend it in a meeting, I will instead skip the meeting and respond to one of the dozens recruiters who reach out every week in my inbox.
Isn't that his goal? Reduce headcount before vesting bonuses on Nov. 1st? It seems like you would be just the sucker that Musk is trying to get rid of before one last milestone cash payment.
On top of which, why couldn't you defend that line in a meeting? "I changed this one line cutting the loading time in half for the program. It took 2 days of profiling to find where to change and another week to ensure that it works across all build targets and work on a deployment timeline."
> 's just a demeaning process meant to assert the dominance of the new owners.
It is in fact a bit of that. Employees who quit are cheaper than fired employees or continued-to-be-hired employees. doing something unreasonable to make them quit seems reasonable, even if that might skew more towards the better employees.
But it's also a rough attempt to identify deadweight who cannot explain why they did anything of value in 2 months.
Your comment basically sums up the entire goal and strategy of this exercise - it's surprising how many smart people here seem to have missed the point, gone down rabbit holes about how you can't traverse functions on printed paper, etc etc.
It's about identifying the most extreme offenders and pushing out people like the GP who will rage quit without severance.
Then bluntly but respectfully, join a startup (or a non profit like archive.org, Mozilla, Signal etc). Don't hang out at Twitter.
Not sure if you personally are a Twitter employee but Twitter fits a certain demographic of employee who wants to traverse that fine line between not wanting to risk an early startup for potential huge upside but also doesn't want a boring cushy job at Salesforce or Google or whatever.
If you value your time and not the money, there's better places to apply your talents and labor than Twitter (pre or post Elon)
> "What a ridiculous viewpoint. I spent two days last week to write a single line of code. "
Sure, I've done the exact same thing. What's stopping you from bringing that line of code to an interview and talking about it?
> "If you ask me to print my code and defend it in a meeting, I will instead skip the meeting and respond to one of the dozens recruiters who reach out every week in my inbox. "
When you interview with your new employer, won't you be discussing notable achievements such as the single line of code you wrote that cuts app startup time by half?
> "It's just a demeaning process meant to assert the dominance of the new owners."
Are interviews demeaning? In a sense, sure. Sounds like you're doing it one way or the other, though.
> Sure, I've done the exact same thing. What's stopping you from bringing that line of code to an interview and talking about it?
GP's answer is essentially "sure, but what stops me from not doing that instead?":
>> I will instead skip the meeting and respond to one of the dozens recruiters who reach out every week in my inbox.
I have to say, I agree. Why stay around for the circus when you can leave and make an honest living as a respected professional instead of playing post-acquisition hunger games as a pawn in a rich boy's ego trip gone awry?
> "GP's answer is essentially "sure, but what stops me from not doing that instead?":"
Nothing of course -- and this is always true, every second of every day.
> "I have to say, I agree. Why stay around for the circus when you can leave and make an honest living as a respected professional instead of playing post-acquisition hunger games as a pawn in a rich boy's ego trip gone awry? "
If you see it that way then it seems in everyone's best interest that you leave the company, which means the system worked exactly as intended.
As to the question of whether this makes sense, it would seem we all agree that it does, then.
Congratulations on your good work. ISTM if you could evangelize the improvement to all those different people, you could also evangelize it to one more person? Sure, your assigned Tesla auditor could be an idiot (although that seems less likely for a Tesla person than for a twitter person), but would it hurt to try?
>I can see why it might make sense to just tell people to print stuff out to demonstrate competency
Review of work based on your last 30 days of code that’s printed out on 8.5x11s is nonsensical. I’ve never heard of anything like it in my software development career and can’t think of any reason one would do it except to encourage people to quit.
> asked them to basically interview for their own jobs while showing me the most important thing they wrote in the last quarter
This is builds the same dysfunctional system's that causing so many problems for Google - the people maintaining the vital systems won't have anything cool to show, but they will be the ones that made sure the bills kept getting paid.
> I can see why it might make sense to just tell people to print stuff out to demonstrate competency
All they are demonstrating their is their ability to sell themselves.
You're assuming this is the only process they have in place -- and there's no rational basis for that assumption.
Look, we all should know how this works. We're viewing selective aspects of their process through the warped perspective of the national media. You're not hearing about any of the reasonable things they're doing because none of those things are interesting. You're only hearing about elements which can be presented as shocking, to get your eyeballs on news bites.
We can only discuss the information given to us. Sure, the other processes may work, but the process that I'm addressing, your claimed process (so you could give us more information if you wanted) seems DEEPLY dysfunctional.
Would you like to talk about my process? I'm happy to share details.
All kinds of information is exchanged in an acquisition. The acquirer probably has an idea about how the company functions, which departments are key, which employees are key, and so on. They'll also have an idea about which employees or departments have been problems.
I am thinking of a specific example where my large company acquired a small startup. It had a sysadmin team of three people. This team had been identified as a point of conflict within the company - holding up projects and refusing to adopt automated process. It was already decided that the manager would be fired. My job was to determine the extent to which the employees were contributing to the dynamic, to determine whether they were open to change, and to assess their general competency. We needed to know how much of the existing team could be kept on to help.
I flew onsite for a few days. The story was that the acquiring company was gifting me to help their team, because they had been long complaining about needing headcount. I asked to be shown what people did day to day. I asked why it was done that way and I suggested new ways of doing it (how it would probably be done, post acquisition) and listened to their answers. I participated in their daily work routine.
As I recall we decided to keep all the employees. They had been marginalized by a bad manager and they ended up doing quite well helping out with the transition. The information I gathered helped structure the layout of the new team. Their old (fired) manager had not done a good job of assessing their skillsets or giving them latitude to move their platform forward.
Other times, I have identified people that needed to be let go. Sometimes it is clear that someone doesn't have the necessary skillset, isn't making meaningful contributions, or has some kind of personality conflict. I think we have all encountered someone like this in our careers at times.
The twitter process sounds chaotic and driven by a crazy timeline for sure. The scale is far larger. But, the steps they're taking to attempt to achieve this goal don't seem inherently wrong. Asking someone to bring a real sample of their work to discuss in an interview is a great tactic. If you asked me to design a process to hold these kinds of interviews at scale I might do the exact same thing.
Or short term thinking. Maybe take... I dunno, a couple of weeks to assess people's value? Instead of potentially firing people you actually should have kept around and spending 35% more on salaries for replacements and God knows how much in lost domain knowledge.
I'm fine with the argument that its not rational and not a good process because the outcome will be bad (firing people that you should have kept). I'm only pushing back against the idea that a business should put protecting peoples feelings over the wellbeing of the company. Sure do it humanely. Give a nice severance. But if people aren't producing the company has no obligation to keep them.
I don't doubt this site is mostly libertarian types but it still strikes me how such people can say some of the shit they do with a straight face.
It's especially apparent how nuts some of them are when they are felating Elon Musk specifically.
You mean hackernews, the site for people who make ridiculous incomes for working on menial digital products like social media? It's strange when people walk into a room and assume everyone else must think like them.
No, but you're supposed to understand that most of the people on HN aren't going to be dedicated against capitalism. I don't make much myself but I can figure that much out. SV is a capitalists wet dream.
I believe the stock still exists (still has an active ticker/cusip) but trade volume is at 0. At some point it will be delisted and shareholders will just get cash. I assume grant vesting is still meaningful until that point.
They get a cash value at the same $54.20/share as current holders get. They may be allowed to instead vest shares, but that would be a new agreement. The merger document converts it to cash.
>I absolutely have done things like this when acquiring companies - sat with people, asked them to basically interview for their own jobs while showing me the most important thing they wrote in the last quarter.
That a pretty bad method finding the bad apples, more of the opposite.
Someone like Musk who claims to have Asperger's should know this.
Being asked to summarize your recent work is "a living hell"?
Have you ever done manual labor for a living? Or worked a service job? Or taken care of a relative who needs round-the-clock care?
Would you really characterize as "summarize the last few months of coding at my software engineering job" as a living hell as compared to those things?
Things like this are always context sensitive or it becomes a race to the bottom where only the people in the worst condition have the right to complain.
You think manual labor is hard, try living in a Ukraine war zone, you think a warzone is bad, try living as a forced prostitute etc.
And according to Dante there are seven circles of hell and if someone t plunges your future into uncertainty it's a valid kind of hell, just not the worst kind.
Have my boss' boss' boss' boss summarize what his teams are up to. Don't call everybody in and glare at them in a small room over the course of weeks like in "Office Space"
I have enough perspective, savings, and self confidence that there's nothing a little prick manager can do at a job that will ruin MY life. But there are a lot of honest, hard-working people out there who just want to do their best and make enough to keep on top of their $7500 mortgage payments and don't need someone putting a boot on their neck
That sounds awful. Interviewing sucks and is one of the main reasons I don't move elsewhere for a pay-rise if my employer wanted to nitpick my work and make me justify my existence at the company why would I not just move on to a place that isn't insane?
A Twitter engineer walks into a programming interview.
Interviewer: So this is just a quick question to warm up with. Imagine you have to write a program that is supplied a number n and prints out, for each number in order from 1 to n, the string Fizz if it is a multiple of 3, the str-
Engineer: Okay, so first I'll install cups. What model of printer am I using?
They were asked to print their code and typically this is done as part of diligence _before_ closing. This is not sop. It’s Elon making a show of things.
I've done 2 due diligence in the last 3 years. Both time I read a large part of the code base, and I read the code reviews of the engineers as well. Codebase to find issues with the code but also liabilities that we'd need to deal with. I read the code reviews to help level set for the engineers.
I've done on paper reviews as well where it was just easier than getting access to the code repos. Sure it's like 50 lbs of paper but whatever. The nice thing with paper is you're basically sorting, you toss the interesting pages to one side and the uninteresting to the other.
Both of these were 20 person companies so I could review the 200-500kloc codebases in around 8 hours. It's not the most fun day :)
> You need to write a book and/or explain how you can review 500kloc in 8 hours. That sounds ridiculous to me but I may be missing something
I feel like what you could do in 8 hours would be less "reviewing" and more "starting to get a basic sense of the codebase in the way a new hire would" but when you're the new CEO of the company maybe saying that doesn't sound cool enough?
What you're missing is that dilligence is NOT coming in as the new Super Senior Distinguished Principal Architect who's going to rebuild the whole system overnight.
If I'm doing dilligence, I'm looking to see if there IS ops, deployment, etc. I'm checking the coverage of the IAC compared to the infra (can spot check in console and ioc). You can ask for an overview of metrics code and how thye monitor their infra (walk through a dashboard). Diligence is NOT being able to re-write the codebase, or even work in it. It's to make sure that what people are saying is happening, is there, is with high confidence, actually there. You're also looking for "oh shit". Such as no IAC, no tests, no monitoring.
That's shifting the goalposts quite a bit. You're looking for process, you are also asking for pointers from the people working on the project. Throwing out numbers like 500kloc is completely unnecessary as you're not going to look at them unless in cases where you're spotchecking (and you won't know where to look without someone pointing it out to you)
I don't feel I'm moving the goal posts. I'm relating what I did with numbers. Others may have assumed my goals.
My goal was to reduce the risks that the acquiring company felt were the biggest. I did that in 8 hours. Then we focused on specific risks previously identified in the review. That usually took the form of asking the selling company to explain, not for me to read more code. Usually the answers clarify the concerns, or admit them.
That's not really code review though, I'd argue. The report was that they wanted their code printed on paper, and to review it. That seems very... specific to the code itself. Not the same as reviewing code coverage, documentation and Ops specific workflows.
Of course, those things are absolutely vital, and must be long and tedious work, and I give you kudos for having these skills :-)
That's fair as far as kicking the tires on the truth value of management's claims, but what Elon's doing here is performance management. Deciding someone's work is bad and they should be fired, does imply that you know how the work ought to have been done instead.
Does it tho? If you're cutting 70% of 1000-2000 coders is that what you're doing, fully understanding twitter, or are you just looking for dead weight or unimportant systems and axing those immediately?
This is IMHO a very naive take on software engineering and on keeping a complex system running.
There is no way we're going to see a 70% cut and twitter survives. There is also no way an outside party cam figure out what the "unimportant" systems are in days or even weeks.
Realistically if you want to cut you start by reviewing everything and pretend you just want to understand. You place key people in key positions and help them build an understanding. After 3-6 months of observing maybe you can do some cutting.
Oh I 100% agree with everything you said here. You do due diligence before. You don't just blindly cut 70%.
I was just saying if I had to (because I was being asked to) cut 70% or even 10% immediately that's what I would do. But I'm also not sure I'd take that job.
I'm just enjoying the popcorn cause no one seems to know what's going on.
This is an average rate. There are large parts of the code base that are configurations, mappings, or just glue code. Even if you're not familliar with the language you get a sense for it quickly, you can power through those at 10kloc or higher when you hit a run, you can also rule out directories quickly after you see an example. You can also ask the people you're reviewing "is this directory just all kube config? where's the security settings?". and go at a high rate for reviewing the code.
When you get to interesting code you then slow way down, maybe 10loc / minute.
Remember, for diligence, you're doing risk reduction, your job specifically is determine that there is in fact secret sauce, the product is there, not to understand it. In fact it's problematic if you 100% understand that secret sauce.
You aren't missing anything. This guy is absolutely, completely, without rival or parallel, beyond compare, unquestionably supreme, the God-King, the Emperor, the One True Big Kahuna, and the Head Motherfucker In Charge of being Full Of Shit. If this guy were the biggest fish in the ocean, he'd be stuffed to the gills with it.
I think what you’re saying is not untrue. But this isn’t that. There would be an entire process performed over many months (some of which should have happened during due diligence.)
Imagine if Elon bought an airline and asked them to line up all the planes on the tarmac for review.
Hey, excuse me for using you as an example but there’s a lot of this rough idea in this comment section and I’m rather confused by it. I don’t mean to single you out.
What would be wrong with that? In a search for low hanging fruit, the planes that can’t make it to the tarmac would be a group of their own. Of the ones that do, next to others some stand out as being noticeably different. Etc. Then patterns may emerge based on that, iterate iterate. Seems to depend on where you’ve set the bar.
If you were an office space Bob, depending on the bar placement, you may just be interviewing to see if someone loses their cool when asked “what is it you do here?”.
If you were a cop you might bring in every suspect just to see if someone stands out.
So what am I missing? Is it the scale of the operation?
If there is a reasonable suspicion that the airplanes are not of considerable quality beyond rumours online and there is an honest intent to fix the airplanes rather than dispose of the ones that are deemed unnecessary, such a plan could certainly be executed over several weeks or months.
In this case, there is a major scramble to test every employee as quickly as possible by outsiders who have no idea how the company operates, what their standards are like, or what the problem space is about.
Barely self driving cars controlled by touch screens are almost entirely disconnected from a social media network other than that both employ programmers. Everything from the data processing location to the user interaction model is vastly different. The standards of quality of different components vastly differ; a UI bug in Twitter is far from catastrophic unlike a UI bug in your car, but a backend bug in Twitter can sink the business whereas a backend bug with Tesla can be annoying at worst.
I'm sure Tesla's developers are competent but the environment they operate in is completely different from the environment the people they review operate in.
At worst, the entire review produces no usable results because the Tesla developers don't have time to study the code base and validate any of the claims the devs make. At worst, the rushed reports are used to bypass layoff laws by providing a "reason" to fire people.
Either way, the end result is that the entire process is no more than pointless busywork for Tesla's people and has no real benefit to the Twitter code base.
Knowing Elon's intentions to fire half of Twitter but his subsequent retraction (probably advice from his lawyers because of layoff laws) I think it's foolish not to be sceptical of this entire event.
Code review can be a great tool to improve a business when it's done well; however, the rate at which things are progressing now indicates to me that this isn't done well.
In every field there are ways that things are done. To review a fleet of airplanes I assume “the way it is done” would be based on trawling through inspection reports, not looking at the actual planes. Elon Musk has a complete disregard for “the way it is done” to the point of not even trying to do things that way as a sane default to iterate from, and that makes him the sort of person who would line up the airplanes on the tarmac instead of going through inspection reports. That attitude is why people who are deep into conventional wisdom dismiss him as an idiot.
That attitude is also why both his successes and his failures are spectacular. When you deviate from the beaten path and run as fast as you can in that new direction sometimes you reach a far better vantage point and sometimes you just get totally lost in the jungle. With Elon you never know which way things will go.
Russia has inspection reports on planes and tanks that don’t run. They say they are ready for use.
I’m with the GP - sometimes when you have a goal that you need to reach in a very short period of time, you do things that don’t scale and don’t follow standard best practices. I see zero issues with lining up all the planes on the tarmac and walking a pilot mechanic pair through each of them for a fifteen minute review per plane. Do they find every problem? Do they misdiagnose? Of course. Are they able to roughly say “this feels like the industry norm, I don’t see anything you wouldn’t see at another airline” or “I am surprised at the rough shape of many of the cockpits. Yes they fly but there might be other issues. Two planes stood out more than the others I’d start there for a deeper inspection.”
Definitely not one to trivialize things and pretend tech can solve everything, or that programmers are so smart. But I am not one to think everything has to be perfect and by the book. Lots of room for rough pragmatism in the world.
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."
agree, the reason he wants it "printed on paper" is strictly so he can gauge output by lines of code measured in pages. Basically the dumbest metric in the world for judging the effectiveness of a programmer.
If someone completely new to my codebase came along and tried to evaluate my code I'd laugh. You can't jump in and "evaluate" without knowing context and being familiar with the features.
What’s more funny is how people commonly believe like this their code is so special or different than everyone else’s. Reverse engineering a large code base is not anywhere as hard as most software engineers somehow believe. I was tasked with analyzing a large code base from a company that my employer had been an investor in and as part of their investment had been given IP rights, the company employees were floored when our team, lead by me had ripped apart their system into multiple components and reused them in way they hadn’t. Trust me if one is experienced enough they can understand your code perfectly fine, it’s definitely not as special as you think it is.
Really interesting story, approximately how many lines of code were in that codebase?
It's hard for me to imagine someone grokking a 10M+ line codebase without external help, but I've never tried it. I do agree with the assertion that most codebases are not as _special_ as they like to think.
This was just over 600k of mostly c++ code. It’s certainly true that it helped I was familiar with the domain and the various technologies they had used, like CORBA and xml, this was late 90s.
10M is a pretty massive codebase like the entire linux kernel with all drivers is somewhere in that size. Most corporate systems aren’t that big and even for Linux you wouldn’t need to understand all drivers to understand the core kernel, I suspect the core kernel is maybe max 1M.
That is interesting. I wondering how the 15 people that had created the ~600K c++ codebase I’m talking about compares to the FB headcount on android Messanger, does anyone know how big that team is? loc/head is a curious measure.
Regardless it’s a bit concerning that it takes 10M loc for a messaging app.
Not forgetting of course that Twitter almost certainly uses several languages on the backend, and has it entwined in their infrastructure. As TFA says:
"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."
I'm not doubting your story, but this is not the norm in my experience.
It’s certainly true that it helped I was
familiar with the domain
Technical prowess and domain knowledge are excellent assets, obviously, but in my experience they're often not enough.
The big tangled enterprise codebases I've dealt with (insurance companies, fintech, construction, etc) involved absolute metric tons of undocumented domain knowledge and lots of company-specific "tribal knowledge." Some tribal knowledge was embedded in the code in undocumented or semi-documented form, and much existed outside the codebase entirely... all kinds of custom infrastructure, etc.
I don't care how sharp and domain-familiar a team is. That sort of situation is not easily tameable.
I would say it's pretty "special" and well written code if outsiders can come in and quickly understand it. You should have commended them for their work.
I was coming here to say this. I have definitely found myself reading a codebase that is easy to read and easy to follow, and mistakenly concluding therefore that its developers were not solving complicated problems.
That is true. They were definitely a skilled team that had written the system. However I still think most large systems can be reverse “design” engineered fairly easily by someone who is experienced.
Agreed. Most code at the top tech companies isn't interesting or even necessarily good. The hardest part of jumping into a new code base is almost always understanding the problem it's solving rather than the technology used to solve it.
At my last employer before retiring (not tech but used a lot) has a very unique (and way larger than Twitter) complex set of businesses. They change at an insane pace and often involve things that in the end don't ship, resulting in crazy complex code base networks. We also had 100's of teams building every kind of software imaginable (server api's, web apps, mobile apps, internal apps, hardware with embedded code, etc). Anyone from the outside coming in cold to examine the code would have no idea where to even start, much less be able to evaluate anything. It's not that any individual thing was necessarily complex, but there were so many interconnected business practices and related businesses that understanding how they relate is very hard for anyone who has been there for years much less someone from an unrelated industry.
For example you could look at my team's mobile codebases and probably figure out what was going on, but understanding all the services we consumed, and what they consumed, etc. (given the deep mix of micro services and macroservices) would make understanding the why of the entire system impossible.
Depends on the codebase. Go read the source code for GHC and tell me how quickly you could add a new primitive type that consists of all twos-complement 7-bit numbers.
A pretty trivial change for someone whose steeped in the codebase, likely impossible without a few weeks (or even months) of effort for anyone else. Of course, this all becomes exponentially easier if you have an author of the code to point you in the right direction.
And how long exactly did that take? I'm going to cast doubt on your story because in my experience people that often claim to understand how a codebase works in a quick amount of time tend to be full of it and end up blowing things up when they try to change or modify things.
The codebase often isn't the issue, it's the use cases and the reasons why it evolved into the form it did.
I guess large is a relative question. For me ~600K lines of C++ is a pretty large code base. Apparently Facebook Messenger just on Android is 10M lines of Kotlin in another comment. To me that seems like they are probably doing something wrong.
But to address your question here is my recollection of what happened, now more than 20 years ago fwiw. We were given the code and I spent maybe 6-7 days, all day, reading it and analyzing it with this tool I had, called Source Navigator [1]. Then we spent 1 full work week at the other companies HQ, mostly in meetings asking questions on different modules and classes. Then when we returned to our offices it took me another 2 weeks of work to get the system setup and deploy a few components inside our own middleware system. I was the primary c++ expert, there was another business analyst and I had a more junior developer who worked with me. So in comparison to Twitter certainly a much much smaller scale situation. The team that had written the system was around 15 people.
We definitely used the code and I don’t recall it being much a problem at all that other people had written it. Plenty of open source projects have random contributors show up and work fine in their code base.
I think a lot of SWEs have pretty big egos and tend to overestimate how special or unique their particular projects are based on my own professional experience. This particular situation was an example but there have been plenty others. When I fix or find bugs in other’s code sometimes they are surprised which for me is always surprising. Why are you so surprised I can debug your code?
> Trust me if one is experienced enough they can understand your code perfectly fine, it’s definitely not as special as you think it is.
What if a large portion of the codebase is, for example, shader code? I chose this example because coding for the GPU isn't the same as coding for the CPU. Do you think that's a scenario in which you'd require more study, or are you confident your experience would spill over into this new domain, no study required?
This I agree with. I was very familiar with the business domain and the technology they had been using. So yes I agree if either of those were radically different it would be much harder. Good point.
You're missing their point. They're using that as an example of how domain knowledge can be important. It's a really naive take to think all/most of the code written for a social media platform will be immediately accessible to people writing code for a machine learning+robotics platform or for people writing code for an entertainment console. In fact, it's entirely possible to have created these things without any overlap in technology.
Those people will have all the time they need to talk to as many engineers they need to understand the code base. Maybe a person hasn’t worked with shaders before, but then it’s a great time for the engineer who writes the shaders to teach him about how the GPU works with some code examples.
This operation is not just interviewing people, it’s a kind of knowledge transfer and finding the people who are the best at explaining how the code works and can answer deep technical questions. This is how Elon works generally (if you look at the SpaceX interview, you can see that he just goes to people and asks them questions about the parts of the rocket while he’s doing the interview).
Yea. I think that’s the opposite point that you’re trying to make. That’s what would make them less qualified as reviewers since the domain is very different.
It is about coming up with BS false positives, pointing them out and saying this code is crap.
Of course if someone is professional and understands there was different context and all you have is code and writes down false positives and discusses them it is OK.
Reusing code in unexpected ways seems like what would be predicted in this scenario, if you agree with the position Naur advances in Programming as Theory Building (which I mostly do).
> You can't jump in and "evaluate" without knowing context and being familiar with the features.
Yes you can, it's called an audit and there is nothing wrong with that. The company you work for should have regular security audits for instance, ideally done by a third party rather than internally to eliminate bias. This isn't a "code review".
New people regularly join our company and take a few weeks to become productive at making small changes to one or two modules out of 5,000+ in the enterprise.
About 6 months. That doesn’t mean they don’t instantly have a general idea of the quality of the codebase. The amount of WTF’s decreases significantly after the first 2 months (when they give up and accept that that is just how it is).
Eh, if you're competent, then sure. But some people have obvious code smells. You'd be surprised. A quick glance and it's obvious they're not competent. 6 layers of inheritance. Composition loops everywhere (A is in B, B is in A, A and B are in C, C are in A and b).
I don't think the goal here is code review. They're trying to gauge a few things: 1) are you competent? 2) are you coasting or genuinely contributing? 3) are you actually dedicated to improving the product or more concerned with office politics and inserting your ideology?
A quick interview and a little demonstration of contribution can help assess these things significantly, you don't have to understand the codebase that much to do it.
Of course I first read the documentation to understand a code base, but then just usually jump in to the part that I’m interested in. If it’s not spaghetti code base, it’s not that hard to do that.
In this case, it would be your new boss asking to make a short presentation of your work, and he has trusted software devs who can smell bs a mile away.
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.
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.
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
Tell that to all the luxury brands that make low-end products for everyone now. This is extremely naive. There is a price point where the blue checkmark will sell like wildfire, and then it's basically free money because there's no operational cost associated to it.
Let's say 5$/year for some kind of BS "verification" process that gives you a blue checkmark? Free money! Want to spend 20$/year for "extra-secure verification" to get a gold checkmark? FREE MONEY...
Luxury brands have always made low end products for the petite bourgeoisie. Their products offerings are deliberate pyramids of increasing artificial scarcity which many clever people have wasted lives designing.
‘Just charge for the check mark’ seems quite likely to fail in the ways your interlocutor alludes. Moreover, this particular status symbol is explicitly not a marker of wealth, but rather of a more nebulous type of status.
I was arguing the point that "exclusivity that anyone can buy has less value" made by OP..
It most definitely does not, in the eyes of enough people to still be valuable. They will purchase the appearance of exclusivity, even if it's not actually that exclusive.
Of course there will be a minority of people who understand (and deride) the fake-exclusivity, but not enough for the blue checkmark to lose enough value.
I think there's value in having a verified online identity. A place someone could find out a good bit about how you think. Twitter seems like a pretty good place to do that.
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.
I think if someone created Twitter for journalists, pundits, wonks, and politicians -ONLY- maybe it would be a place to go? Like something that requires a journalism credential, or a TV host, or an actually office holder title. Sure there'd be crazies, but at least there'd be a source for hot takes.
Twitter could still exist for "citizen journalism", but the two wouldn't mix as heavily.
Yeah, they use Twitter instead of booking someone to talk. Much easier to find a few tweets from someone recognizable than to get them in studio. Reporting on tweeting gives the 24 hour cycle something to do that gets attention. A journalist echo chamber would be less effective at this.
I was thinking about this a bit and I think the real value is Twitter is the random chance that $FAMOUS_PERSON might notice one of your tweets etc (Eg “Elon retweeted my hot take”)
If you take that away does that remove the essence of the site?
What is the benefit of someone famous retweeting a nonfamous person? Bragging rights? Is that value? It seems to me more like a sign that someone needs to work on their internal self-validation mechanisms. Of course, most of the consumers of vapid social media are K=1 thinkers, so maybe that IS the value of twitter and I'm just an out of touch elitist. All are possible.
He will probably cleave twitter in two - something for journalists and celebrities and then an equivalent of the demonetized youtube space for the people advertisers dont want to associate with.
Instead of banning accounts he will just make them second class citizens.
Tumblr was very North America/Europe centric platform, with most users often posting about very niche topics that most people aren't interested in.
On the other hand, twitter is a pretty global platform, yes a big share of its users is from the US, but japan, brazil, the middle east constitute a huge part of its userbase, so while I wouldn't say that losing the part of twitter that hates elon and his policies won't be a problem (if that ever happens), it's impact won't be as large as tumblr, because no one cares about elon in japan.
The topics discussed on twitter are also far less niche and more current, politicians, celebrities, artists, companies all use it, so it mostly can't experience meltdown by changing its policies, because what's keeping people on twitter is other people, not the policies.
Yes this does mean that if those people leave every one will with them, but there is simply no alternative to twitter to leave to right now, mastadon is a joke, discord and reddit are just a different form of social media that wouldn't satisfy twitter users
Maybe someone can make a new platform just like twitter? but I doubt that elon's decisions can be that bad.
He mostly has to keep it the same, and he won't lose a single user.
> The topics discussed on twitter are also far less niche and more current, politicians, celebrities, artists, companies all use it, so it mostly can't experience meltdown by changing its policies,
So this is actually a very interesting question to me, is this your gut or do you have data for this, I can certainly see why you say this, but based on all the people here who talk about how to “use twitter right” my gut was the opposite, certainly in terms of cultural relevance you are correct, but in terms of MDAU’s I assume twitter is mostly people following their “niche” (not as niche as tumblr” interests. Like for me that is music and software engineers/former coworkers, and decidedly not politicians and journalists. Twitter seems to have some exclusivity there but seems to compete heavily with Instagram in the artist/influencer space.
“Objection, Your Honor. The question assumes facts not in evidence.”
Neither my comment nor the comment to which I was replying made any claim about the reliability of Elon’s statements, my beliefs on that subject, or the effects of Elon’s actions on my beliefs.
Your Honor, the witness clearly stated in response to a question regarding Elon Musk's policies an opinion which clearly implied that Musk's statements in regards to free speech meant that he would have a free speech policy. Can we have the court reporter read it back?
"Question: Can you elaborate on his policies? I personally do not have first-hand knowledge of them. As far as I know, it’s currently a big question mark.
Witness: Elon has expressed support for free speech and treating both left and right equally."
Does the witness wish to clarify their statement or will they state the factors which lead to their belief that Elon Musk would do things in line with he says?
He says a lot of things, however, and the fact that he’s describing that as something other than the status quo it is means we shouldn’t take this at face value.
I think this reveals more about what you think the current split is... A large proportion of the right believe things like misgendering and wanting to kick Muslims out of the country is fine. These kinds of things aren't allowed on twitter.
Understanding why the last part isn’t correct is key to understanding the issue: Republicans aren’t getting kicked off of Twitter for saying they want to reform immigration law. Twitter’s rules very specifically have a “targeted harassment” clause, as you can see from the many accounts which never have problems despite expressing both sentiments on a regular basis. Even the guys posting about how Jews run the world and should be killed are rarely banned unless they mention a specific person.
Tumblr died because they banned all NSFW content. Many of them went to Twitter. If Elon decides to do the same (doubt he will), Twitter would absolutely fade away quite fast.
This doesn't really mean much. I know people like to use this as 'see they're a shill'-- but does Elon really need to pay people in order to get into petty fights about him? This literally is completely inconsequential. He's a billionaire, he owns twitter and can do what he wants. People can complain all day and it has literally no effect. He says things that piss people off literally every single day. The best thing to do is just ignore him instead of feeding him more attention
Now that's odd right? Account created in 2019 and not a single comment until now. The comment is also just a quick rebuttal with no substance, the type of comment made by someone who you'd think would comment often.
So either
People who manipulate opinions for some group, country, or company on social media keep accounts stored so when needed they can perform their job.
Or, this person read hackernews for 3 years and never commented (ignoring deleted comments) until just now and only to basically say "no".
“Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.”
Sometimes people lurk because they know they’re going to be scrutinised by self appointed gatekeepers and so try and wait until they have something perfect. Only to later just jump in the pool with something simple.
Your either is not complete, there are plenty of other possibilities.
For a variety of performance car nerd related reasons, I’ve not paid too much attention to Tesla. But iirc, there have been a couple threads here and elsewhere about Tesla making “expedient” choices in Eng, with a lot of horrible bodges around critical components. It definitely left me with an impression that Tesla was a place with low engineering quality — though again, I have no source at hand here, and don’t feel bothered to do the searching.
Anyone know the articles / blog posts I’m talking about?
FWIW, I don’t think the idea of Elon having his own folks do some internal reviews egregious. Id bet the comm and positioning around it was suboptimal though, atleast given Elon’s personality.
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 they changed their policies after the mishap to do so. There have been some other deviations from standard practices that may lead one to raise an eyebrow.
I've sometimes wondered if these are examples of an attitude of "move fast and break things" creeping into other (generally more conservative) safety critical domains.
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.
I don't know if it's authentic either, but this bit from the thread sure is interesting:
> autopilot had _really_ high turnover at one point before release because some guy from space x came in and gave the entire dept a C pointer/memory test because Elon said they were "late" to ship.
Take a random sample of Tesla vehicles, more than four but fewer than 10, and the panel gaps are obscene for the vehicle price and mystique- it’s clear proof they have low standards.
Tesla Model S owner here. The software on iOS and car is several years ahead of the competition. It embarrasses luxury German automakers. It’s made with the user in mind, it is elegant, and it is innovative in many surprising ways.
For balance, there have been bugs - the linking of key fobs to driver profiles has always been glitchy, and Tesla’s decision to use an inadequate eMMC chip was shortsighted given the volume of data logging. This caused issues for a few owners when the chips started to degrade over time. But to Tesla’s credit they later offered a free chip upgrade to all owners, and even covered the costs of those (like me) who got a third party replacement.
I rate Tesla’s software engineering. I’ve had years of issue-free OTA updates and sheer pleasure from driving the car. And having access to the car via an API is cool too :-)
I also own a Tesla and I'd rate their user facing software at a C+ at best. It's better than the competition, sure, but the competition is legacy auto manufacturers with no tradition of expertise in software.
Examples: the mobile app is very clunky and slow, the in-car dashboard devotes half of it's real estate to a visualization of the car's object detection, serving no purpose other than to distract the driver.
It's fine. But the problem domain of Twitter is dramatically different than anything Tesla engineers are working on.
Not a Tesla owner. I sat in a demo Tesla. Infotainment UI looked clumsy. There was no Apple CarPlay. The most basic things didn't have knobs and required touch screen to use. Usability was years behind everyone else.
This was my impression as well (although I just sat on the passenger seat for 150km).
The cockpit is all nice and shiny, but not having any haptic feedback for any kind of regular controls you'd use (switching media, A/C control, etc) is a very questionable choice and a worrying trend among automakers in General. The center screen in the Model 3 to get something as basic as your current traveling speed seems equally questionable from a safety perspective.
I've also seen my fair share of Tesla summon close calls on the neighboring parking lot.
When it comes to the app, Tesla owners seem to have a broad spectrum of opinions. Personally for a car as expensive as a Tesla, the quality of the app would be the last thing I'd care about as I would consider it absolutely unnecessary.
The main thing where I totally agree Tesla is absolutely ahead are OTA updates for car firmware. However, looking at it from a security standpoint, bad security practices could really backfire and from a privacy point of view I'm not a fan of permanently internet connected vehicles either.
I drive a Mercedes and Apple CarPlay works fantastic (Tesla’s driving OS would probably be a sidegrade at best). And I get all the fit and finish of a Mercedes instead of Tesla..
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.
The text messages that were published as part of the suit to close the acquisition showed Musk discussing "return to office" as a way to naturally trim some of the workforce by having the dissatisfied remote workers quit on their own.
My take on the paper printing is that it is a similar strategy to get people to quit by themselves, because they think it's stupid.
Good lord no, that’s the worst metric to measure someone by. The diffs one produces on a mature codebase are usually tiny but with a small novel in the ticket about what the change will affect.
I could pump those numbers up easily but my coworkers would hate me for it.
Yup, Jason Calacanis "back of napkin"ing a 30% reduction in workforce based on nothing more than some texts with Musk and an hour or two of bloviating.
Do you think the trimming will apply to all levels of performance? Will it push out the poor performers, the high performers, or just take out a random cross section?
Is there a correlation between employees who like to avoid the office and employees you don’t really want on the team any more?
> At worst it is an intentionally pointless and expensive exercise that serves purely as a loyalty test.
The engineers would have used company's resources. I wouldn't be bothered if I am forced to do this. It is a 1 minute of work to print something.
I don't think this part is true. It is likely fake. The source for the print out story is so shaky. Leah Culver tweeted obscurely which is hard to tell whether it is a joke. Casey claims to have screenshots but refuse to show the redacted version of them and end with "subscribe to read"....
The code review part might be true but it is not a spicy story.
There's a bunch of comments echoing this sentiment, and I'm wondering if something's wrong with me. I'm 27 and haven't printed anything in an office... maybe ever? I've only peripherally noticed HR and office managers constantly struggle with printers. At this point, I'd probably be the one asking my parents how to print something :')
At the office like twitter, printers are already set up on your work laptop for you.
You basically chooses a printer (there are 10s of them) and click print.
Literally a minute of work.
Also, you are lucky. Visa employees need to print stuff from time to time for h1b, green card, and citizenship. And you bet it. They print it at work because nobody has printer at home.
I am pretty confident that most developers would take significantly longer to gather and organize all of their code, make sure that everything is in the correct order for presentation, and print it out on paper.
It would probably take me several minutes (if not longer) just to figure out how to display all of my recent changes across several repos, let alone print it without long lines of code getting cut off at the margin.
There are several other considerations you’d need to think of as well. Am I just printing diffs? If so, how much context do I need? If not, do I print out whole source files, and do I need to tag the parts that were part of my commit? Should I print 100-page generated files that I technically checked in to source control?
I would be very interested in a workflow where all of this can be accomplished by a typical engineer in a minute.
> Am I just printing diffs? If so, how much context do I need? If not, do I print out whole source files, and do I need to tag the parts that were part of my commit? Should I print 100-page generated files that I technically checked in to source control?
These should be answered by the order from Musk.
I assume the news just reported on the high level details and skip the low level details.
The other theory is that this is straight up fake news. That is why there is no more details. I actually think it is fake news.
Now let's pretend it is real. Whatever the answers to these questions are. They don't sound difficult to do by any mean.
If they want the diff, we print pull requests.
If they want the whole file, we jump to the files we touch and print the files.
If they want 100 pages, we go through each file and print until we hit 100 pages.
If they don't want generated files, then we avoid them.
What is going on here? It is not that hard by any mean. I'm not sure why you act like you can't do this thing easily.
I'm not quite sure what your argument is.
I suppose if you click slowly, it may take you 5 minutes? Okay? Is that exponentially harder or what? Would you get insanely frustrated because the task requires 5 minutes of your time?
It's easier than giving source code access to all the outside staff that are coming in to actually read it. But it doesn't really sound like it's a meaningful review, since "last N days" of work isn't useful without context, and only people on the team can give them that.
Were they? The article said they were told to "stop printing". As in "stop the presses", perhaps. Still sounds weird, though - maybe the author of the invite is not a native English speaker?
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 is instant until you say “can you show me that part of the code that handles X” or “where is this function defined” and then it’s multiple orders of magnitudes slower.
(Editing to say, you could also just tell the engineers “hey make sure your code is pulled up and ready to go before the meeting starts”)
I very recently reacted the same copy/pasted code that was in in 7 files, each one had 6 touch points of 5 lines each, and the touch points were 50-300 lines as part. Would be a lot of paper for what had been a 30 minute exercise. I cantquite how to picture going over that diff on paper. The time wasted doing so seems sad, as do the natural resource waste (which tends to make me think the guy got into electric cars because it was cool and had an open market opportunity rather than ecological reasons - but that is a very random aside)
Musk is a seller above all else. Every day he finds a new way to draw attention to his projects. The news about Twitter give him even more distribution and by nature more sales towards Tesla and his other companies. Tesla engineers on site for interviews is a great idea for Twitter and for Tesla as both get more PR than before. A lot of people have lost interest in Twitter for more than political reasons and I’m excited to see what he does with the product, specifically introducing more alternatives to advertising and showing social products can monetize as agents of their users, not just parasites of attention.
I wonder if it would be legal for Elon to secretly boost his own tweets. And more broadly, uprank posts that support him and downrank those that disagree.
I don't see what the big deal here is. I feel like it's the obvious move. He wants a no nonsense review of the current state of things at Twitter, and isn't wasting time. I'm assuming these engineers he trusts and wants an objective review instead of some bs from folks too removed.
The big deal is that Tesla didnt buy Twitter, Musk did. Based on the Tesla engineers doing due dilligence on a non-Telsa acquisition seems like a conflict of interest.
Elon Musk has an obvious conflict of interest here. As CEO of a publicly traded company he has an obligation to act in the best interest of Tesla's shareholders. By using Tesla's engineers to look at his private company's source code he arguably doesn't act in their best interest, but in his own personal best interest.
I suppose there is a small conflict of interest as Tesla is paying some of its employees to do this work which doesn't benefit Tesla. As long as Twitter compensates them for this in some form however, I think this conflict is eliminated.
It's true though that a Tesla shareholder likely wouldn't want Tesla employee's focus to shift to Twitter too much I don't think.
Tesla shareholder here - in my opinion it's greasy, but realistically I know that most of Tesla's marketing happens on Twitter and having the platform running smoothly is in my best interest.
I suspect that kind of influence-peddling is how a lot of platforms like Twitter got a lot of sweetheart deals up to now anyway, so it being in the open is more interesting than annoying. The worst part is that it probably opens Tesla up to more lawsuits from 'activist investors'.
This story is very publicly pushing the narrative that Tesla’s software engineers are some elite Ninjas you can helicopter in to pass judgement on the spoiled SF “engineers.”
That image, combined with the image of Musk himself as the no-nonsense get-it-done boss who will call in those ninjas without asking for permission, is very good for $TSLA shareholders.
That place is full of folks who are truly of a "rest and vest" mindset. They are also very political (left leaning) and biased. Which really affects moderation and the so called "open" culture. That "open" propaganda they push on their career website is really based on incrowd psychology.
There are a few gems but the really good ones left already. Now it's just the last leafs waiting to fall off the trees which are still standing. The bird has been resting and vesting on leafless trees for a long time. I would be weary hiring a developer from there knowing their record.
It's full of people trying to justify their roles to themselves and their peers with unecessary rewrite schemes for a long time.
The bird needed to migrate for a long time. I am happy it has finally sought a better climate.
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. Twitter will see lots of layoffs, massive restructuring - some unknown people being promoted for top roles, but end result will be better financial.
I am not sure Twitter will remain the same as it is.
Lots of people think Elon is not good at dealing with public perspective or government, but if you see most of his businesses, his expertise is dealing with governments, contracts and policies makers. On PR, he really doesn't care. And it works for him
>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 without being exploited or putting in more than 8-10 hours a day. People spend a lot of time chatting online on the toilet, aimlessly surfing the web, etc at work
I'll say that I haven't been impressed at all with Tesla, FWIW. Tons of small annoyances with their cars that you'd never get with a comparably priced luxury vehicle elsewhere.
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.
>>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.
I could believe it. People on here and TeamBlind who work for him often love him and his style, even though you'd expect them to hate his guts for all the ridiculous BS he's constantly getting up to
"Let's see, what's on the docket this week.. crunch time again, the stock is way down in response to some snarky quip on Twitter, and he says if I take a few meetings from home tomorrow while watching my sick kid I'm 'pretending to work'. Great!"
Anyone capable of doing software engineering for TSLA isn’t being exploited. They can take home an upper class income working for their choice of the cream of the crop of tech companies. It’s like an outside observer complaining that MIT exploits students because it’s expensive and the students have to do hard work. Well, of course. That’s what you agree to when you go there.
> 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
I can see people working themselves to the bone after buying into the missions of SpaceX and Tesla ("fuck yeah, space!" and "AI-powered electric cars saving the world" respectively) - but not for Twitter. Musk may find himself with less eager employees than he's used to. If he cuts too deep, I suspect Twitter will enter a downward spiral on talent.
> Elon is not good at dealing with public perspective or government
Really? I thought opposite. Tesla growth was helped a lot by EV subsidy. SpeceX was made thanks to space industry privatization, and get launching tasks from govt. Boring Company is something like for public transport infrastructure.
To be fair, in the time he created a company that pushed electrical vehicles to be mainstream, and made reusable rockets a possibility and not just a dream which is helping push mankind to again explore space what exactly has Twitter accomplished?
The big difference between this and all of Musk's other ventures, is that this is performing a wheel change whilst you're still driving the car. Everything in Tesla and SpaceX has been more or less built from scratch, and involves the release of new products, which can slip. If Twitter's servers fall over, or some Nazis manage to co-ordinate assinating Nancy Pelosi whilst he's at the wheel, or he accidentally endorses an anti-free speech authoritarian regime that hack up journalists with bonesaws... he's going to be in trouble. Because anyone with any sense will leave, and network effects go both ways.
If people developing a system that controls two-ton death machines get their panties in a twist about having to demonstrate basic competency in a memory-unsafe language… it’s probably good that they quit.
Airline pilots don’t quit in a huff because they have to demonstrate basic competency annually.
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.
Right, so it seems (if the news are to be believed) that Elon Musk updated his strategy and asked his new underlings to bring their own code for review...
Of course, somehow according to sentiment here this updated process is still considered an insult...
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.
Any slightly competent software leader would know that you can track every character of code written by any dev using version control.
Printing it out as a mark of honor/shame is something a petty, arrogant tyrant would do. Musk has been around people who are afraid to say no to him for too long.
I've been in a few situations where we printed it out. It's just a lot faster than granting someone access to internal systems. It's also a firewall of access if you need that legally. Also you can sort paper into "to look at later" and "seems fine" (like huge chunks of json), it's annoying but not terrible for diligence.
> a lot faster than granting someone access to internal systems
Why? Musk could order access for Tesla engineers in minutes. Large companies have automated on-boarding and access control.
> a firewall of access if you need that legally
There is zero chance Musk would care about this. He breaks laws publicly and exuberantly. He has never shown a respect for red tape.
> Also you can sort paper into "to look at later" and "seems fine" (like huge chunks of json), it's annoying but not terrible for diligence.
I just can't imagine paper being useful to understand even a small project with 40-50 files in it. I'm not really buying there being any reason for it except a legal one, and this situation at Twitter wasn't a legal issue.
I wasn't defending their supposed use of paper, just pointing out reasons why you might find yourself doing so.
I've also been at quite large companies that need 3-5 days notice to onboard contractors, background checks, etc. Besides, he wants to fire 70% of them... you think people are rushing to help him fire everyone themselves included?
He fully understands VCS and is a pretty capable software engineer.
My guess is he is planning to fire ~50%+ of the engineering team and this is just his way of letting each person get their chance to show their worth in a quick interview.
The article says only some engineers received the invite to print code, and Washington Post's sourcing (some engineers at Twitter) is the same as yours.
You want me to post an evidence that Elon didn't ask for a print out. Like asking my friend to show all thousands of emails in his inbox and say "see? Elon didn't email me at all"?
You said it yourself that only some engineers were asked that. So, by your logic, most weren't even asked anything. Twitter has 5000 engineers. My friends are definitely likely within the thousands of engineers who aren't asked for anything. I don't think I need to dox my friends for this.
You or casey should be the one who provides a more reliable evidence, especially when you make a crazily ridiculous accusation that is borderline comical.
Casey said he had screenshots but not disclose them. Well, okay. We'll take his words for it? He could have easily redacted names and etc. But nah.
Well, he did say "subscribe to read" in his tweet. I'll call it. He will never disclose the screenshots or more detailed evidence. He got retweets and some subscribers out of it. Then, we will have fun with this story, forget, and move on
The fact that you even ask me to prove a negative means you don't have a better evidence and that you like this fake news so much that you don't want it to be false.
I wasn't asking you to 'prove a negative', I was specifically asking you to prove a positive. Which is that you have friends that work at Twitter that say otherwise.
Moreover; if you DID have friends that work at Twitter this thing would be very easy to disprove because they could very easily go through the corporate slack or whatever they use, see if people were asked or not and done. Mission accomplished. That doesn't even require doxxing your friends specifically.
But you're not going to do this. Just like Casey, you can easily take screenshots, redact names and done. I don't think you actually have friends at Twitter to be honest nor do I think you were ever willing to engage in good faith.
> I wasn't asking you to 'prove a negative', I was specifically asking you to prove a positive.
Yeah, you did ask for the negative. My friends weren't asked for anything at all. Not even code review.
This aligns with what you said earlier about "only some engineers were asked", but now you purposefully ignored what you yourself said.
How would they even prove that Elon didn't ask for a print out if they didn't get any message from Elon?
> But you're not going to do this
You are damn right I'm not.
1. My friends are likely in the thousands of engineers who aren't asked for this. You said it yourself some engineers are asked for this, and you think Elon asked for this kind of sensitive thing in a public slack channel that everyone could see? That is ridiculous. (Hint: nothing in slack either. My friends did search for it)
2. I'm not the one who makes this
ridiculously comical accusation. The more ridiculous accusation, the stronger evidence should be required. The onus is on you and Casey who insist that the story is true.
I know you like the story but damn please have some standard for verifying whether the news is fake.
> you think Elon asked for this in a public slack channel that anyone can see? That is ridiculous.
No, this is you misunderstanding Slack. We know they use Slack for internal communications and we know during times like these people are going to discuss anything controversial going on at the time. If people were told to do something ridiculous, there is a guarantee that they would also discuss this on the internal slack in some general channel. Either the news story itself or the fact that people were asked.
> I'm not the one who makes this ridiculously comical accusation. The more ridiculous accusation, the stronger evidence should be required. The onus is on you and Casey who insist that the story is true.
No, the onus is on you. You said you had friends at Twitter that disagree. There are multiple other points of evidence pointing in the direction of engineers being asked to print out code. They've substantiated their side of the conversation, you are refusing to do the same despite making a clear claim that can very easily be shown to be true. If you aren't going to throw down your own claimed evidence then there's no reason to believe anything you type. And now you're trying to avoid this by changing what I've said.
> We know they use Slack for internal communications
Yeah for non-sensitive things. Nobody discusses highly sensitive in a slack channel that can be seen by thousands of employees, especially something that is applicable to only some engineers.
> They've substantiated their side of the conversation
They have not. There is the obscure tweet from Leah Culver. Then, there is Casey saying he has screenshots with the ending of "subscribe to read more".
> You said you had friends at Twitter that disagree
Having friends at twitter is a common thing. There are 5000 engs there.
You said only some engineers are asked. Twitter has 5000 engs. It is not unbelievable that my friends are not asked anything.
Meanwhile reviewing code on paper is such a ridiculous thing to do. It is more painful for the reviewers themselves, meanwhile it takes an eng 1 minute to click print all. Why would they even ask for this? It doesn't even make sense.
Meanwhile you or Casey provides such a filmsy evidence and insist that this ridiculous story is absolutely true.
For one, I never said 'some engineers are asked', you made that up. The closest thing I said was 'multiple engineers were asked and shared that they were told to do so'. Which means we have anywhere from M confirmed to N unconfirmed.
Second, this is not a sensitive topic, given that we've seen someone an employee (according to you) make light of it. So either it's something that's fine to joke about (and therefore should be easy to disprove), or it's a 'sensitive matter' and Leah's tweet should probably be taken seriously.
And in either case, employees can and do talk about things like this in said Slack channels. All the time. Presumably it would be easy for your friends to ask their coworkers and their coworkers coworkers on Slack for confirmation. And for you to provide this evidence. That is my standard for verifying news, which you are not hitting.
> Second, this is not a sensitive topic, given that we've seen someone an employee (according to you) make light of it.
It is a sensitive topic.
Leah tweeted it obscurely that we can't tell whether it is a joke or the truth.
Leah Culver bought a house for 3m before the pandemic. The house is the iconic pink painted lady as her second house. She has a second house in SF. She doesn't need a job. She is rich as fuck. She wouldn't have endured this kind of brainless activity.
> Presumably it would be easy for your friends to ask their coworkers and their coworkers coworkers on Slack for confirmation
They did ask and didn't hear anything about it.
The caveat is that they aren't gonna ping execs or ask it in a public channel with thousands of employees in it. They gossip but in a tighter nit group.
The onus is on people who make ridiculous accusations. Having friends there is not ridiculous. My friends not hearing anything is also not ridiculous since twitter has 5000 engs. Reviewing code on paper is ridiculous. It is even bad for the reviewer
I only see Leah Culver tweeting obscurely. In the next tweet, she responded to Musk's tweet about "comedy is allowed on twitter" that she "just followed order".
Leah Culver is wealthy that she doesn't need a job. She bought the painted lady a few years back for $3m. This could easily be a gag from her.
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..
I see and the issue lies with the engineers? If thats the company’s policy the whats the problem? He should change the policy and only then review performance in that context.
right, they'll fire the gurus who know how everything works and barely write a line of code anymore, and things will be pretty hilarious when they have their next outage.
Twitter's core operation is running a massively distributed database, as I understand it, where concurrency issues are pretty important to get right. See Data-Intensive Applications (2017), Part II: Distributed Systems (Replication, Partitioning, Transactions, etc.) for an overview.
Just guessing, you'd think Starlink would be more experienced in that area than either Tesla or SpaceX? I suppose there are things like remote software updates and internal working databases to manage at SpaceX and Tesla, but it seems managing satellite traffic is a closer match.
Who knows, they might be, I really don't trust WaPo reporting anymore.
Tesla stores an absolutely silly amount of captured training data. They are very familiar with large distributed databases.
What makes Manhattan special (Twitters internal database) isn't it's scale (FB, Google, etc operate DBs which much higher scale) but it's multi-engine paradigm and other cool features.
The Tesla folk that are there probably aren't even DB specialists though, they are likely just there to evaluate the lay of the land and start the process of working out which teams are pulling their weight and which aren't.
Everyone thinks that these Tesla engineers are going there to “evaluate” but nobody is really considering them going there to “steal” code to bring to Tesla.
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.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the “Tesla engineers” brought in are former social media company engineers in the early days. It’s an incorrect assumption that all they’ve done is program for cars.
What code is he reviewing? And why is he reviewing it? There must be millions of lines of code. Also, why bring in Tesla employees? Twitter employees are also his own, they could do they review for him. Just shows how musk feels about Twitter and the people there. Such disrespect.
They are not reviewing code, they are reviewing people. And doing a terrible job at that if it really involves code printouts and short interviews. This is likely a fishing expedition to collect data to disguise layoffs as performance firings. He's not interested in accurately tell if they are capable or not, he's likely just trying to gauge who to "obviously" maintain and get rid of the rest since he already stated that in his view 75% of the company is redundant.
So you'd be ok if you come to work tomorrow and some dudes are there all of a sudden asking you to print off your code looking for flaws so you can be fired?
Even if that's not whats going on, you'd assume something similar ? Why else would people hardly familiar with a code base, lacking a lot of context want to randomly start scrutinizing your work ?
You'd be most likely the most stressed and hurt, because you've worked hard and invested yourself, I think you'd stand more to lose if you got laid off for stupid reasons, such as cost cutting.
But anyway, it's good you see yourself as ultra-resilient.
It would be irresponsible for Musk not to review code for the last 60 days given the dramatic circumstances.
Given the obvious anti-Musk sentiments around the Twitter deal, from outside and inside Twitter. How can you not appreciate that the last 60 days is the most likely time for, what we might describe as questionable or disruptive changes to the code to happen? One would want to be sure if one just spent billions buying that code.
> some engineers received a calendar invite Friday, telling them: “Stop printing, please be ready to show your recent code,” a reference to engineers being asked to show the code they had written in the last 30 to 60 days on their computers.
> The note continues, “Please come prepared with code as a backup to review on your own machines with Elon.”
It seems to me that some engineers are being evaluated for their suitability to being in those positions.
Maybe it's an engineer review, not a code review.
Reminiscent of the Elon message to the former CEO: "What have you got done this week?"
To which the reply would be "cut the bullshit, we both know you don't give a shit about code, so just show me which demeaning hoop you need me to jump through and what I'm going to get for doing it."
And then just hope it isn't quid pro quo sexual harassment.
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.
Yeah you can’t really turn this quote around like that because it drastically changes the meaning. Well-behaved means with respect to an establishment and not accepting one’s place as imposed by it. Being a dick makes you not well-behaved in the way you would describe a toddler.
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.
Large group tends toward the mean, news at 11. Average engineers keep the world running. Most code that needs to be written does not meaningfully benefit from talent.
Losing all your tribal knowledge in any business unit is a mess. That’s the prediction. The talent at Twitter is likely already gone to another company for a raise. I’ve never seen the best engineers stick around after any acquisition.
I think people are looking at this the wrong way. It's not so much about the code as it is about establishing an authority. Musk takeover is often regarded as banditry and I wouldn't be surprised if the employees didn't take him seriously in the beginning. This is his way of saying, "I don't trust you, I don't know what you have been up to but things are going to be different so better get used to it."
Using Tesla engineers is just to get everyone talking. I don't think they can get a clear picture by looking at last 30 days of code but they can use this as reason to lay a lot of people off. Not that Musk needs reasons, obviously.
In my mind I think Twitter is going to go on a very, very different direction than we all expect. You have to understand that Musk isn't after the big dollar here but rather he is experimenting which has a lot of chances to fail. Twitter could become extraordinary or it could become utter trash, we'll have to wait and see. Personally, I am quite excited to see where this goes.
Why would anyone take him seriously when he is making a massive embarrassment of himself on his first day on the job (after doing the same for months leading up to the takeover?)
Musk didn't know the bio of the CEO of the company he was buying (who was also former CTO, engineer, Stanford PhD (thesis topic: making decisions under uncertainty), IPhO gold medalist, top tier Indian tech student) and called him a non-technical "manager type" and refused to ask him any technical questions.
I am also excited, because I think Twitter needs to end and Musk is the perfect person to destroy it.
Why does Twitter need to end? Have you before and do you currently use Twitter? I've met and talked to a great deal of cool people on there, such as a lot of prominent people in the web dev space, as well as scientists in various fields.
Twitter is just a social network, it can be used for good or for bad, based on who one follows. That people think it needs to end for whatever reason (or maybe they're only used to the bad parts, or have even never used Twitter which is quite a many people in my experience who talk trash about Twitter) is misguided.
I agree it shouldn't end, but what I do wish would end is the new media reaching for tweets to pump drama for engagement on their platforms. The economy for attention is just exhausting as an end user, even if I agree with what's being said.
No, I do not need to be informed about X person who said Y thing on Twitter of all places, told to me from talking heads I've never heard of, that want me to be outraged for all the reasons they hate X person or Y statement.
Maybe it's not Twitter's fault, rather people using it as a tool to foment hate on principal. It's certainly not from being well informed via the platform or the news media. Thank God IRL people don't work that way.
I use Twitter and I think it needs to end - at least in its current form. It has a very low signal-to-noise ratio and doesn't offer the users adequate control over what they see. As an example, you may not want to see (re)tweets on Baseball from the prominent Web Dev space folk you follow, or the off-topic comments by trolls in replies.
> Twitter is just a social network, it can be used for good or for bad, based on who one follows.
...and the people that interact with them. There need to be more receiver-side controls. Blocking tweets by words is a first step, they should have opt-in filter by subject and raise the bar on replies that ride the coat-tails of authors authority.
Much of the toxicity and misinformation on twitter stem from the fact that there are no controls to filter out the garbage on the receiver's end, but there is a perverse incentive dir tweeter not to add these controls because the more tweets they see, the more ad slots Twitter can fill.
Well, maybe because he’s the richest man in the world? Or maybe because he’s the CEO of several of the most valuable public or private companies in the world? Maybe because he practically single handedly willed the electric car industry into existence? Or maybe because he’s revolutionized the rocket industry? Or…or…or…
Elon hasn’t whiffed on any business venture in decades. Nothing but net.
But you wouldn’t think that listening to all the “I am very smart” people on this forum. This guy, one of the most successful people in all of human history, is apparently an idiot and no one should take him seriously. He will surely run Twitter into the ground because… because… because reasons.
These takes are outright comedy. Fine if you don’t like the guy, I surely don’t, but good grief you’d think he was pissing into bottles like Howard Hughes.
I think respect is earned, not an entitlement due to someone's ability to buy a company. There are plenty of bad bosses who should not be taken seriously.
Technology is famous for inverting the classic boss vs lackey relationship. Without an engineer, the boss cannot build what they want. Engineers are your eyes and ears, they're the ones who can tell you if an idea can or can't work... and ultimately are the ones who will build the products.
Twitter engineers are the ones best positioned into knowing what is or isn't possible with Twitter's codebase, for whatever the heck Elon Musk wants to do with the code.
If Elon thinks he can just walk in with a bunch of Tesla engineers and have his trusted Tesla programmers figure things out, he's gonna be in for a surprise. Programming doesn't work like that, it often takes 6+ months for a set of engineers to reach competence with a codebase.
---------
There's a myriad of stories about how "bad bosses tell engineers what to do, instead of listening to them" around here. Why? Because we're largely a set of programmers / hackers on this discussion site. We all know how bad management can be.
What Musk is doing right now? Obviously and clearly bad management. Musk has no trust over the Twitter engineers at all.
Rights and obligations go hand in hand. Want to tell your boss what you really think about em? Sure, you can do it any day, just better have some savings and an alternate source of income :).
Disclaimer: Self-employed so I don't have to deal with that.
I have failed to source this claim after some searching:
> Musk didn't know the bio of the CEO of the company he was buying (who was also former CTO, engineer, Stanford PhD (thesis topic: making decisions under uncertainty), IPhO gold medalist, top tier Indian tech student) and called him a non-technical "manager type" and refused to ask him any technical questions.
Is there some news report you’re referencing or some non public information you’ve been privy to?
"funding secured"
"pedo guy"
and this total twitter fiasco where he was forced to pay premium to buy it.
These are few examples where he made fool of himself.
Though, people can be super smart and yet so stupid at the same time. It doesn't have to be binary. (Who am I to judge though!)
On the “Funding secured” part, I think he has proved in court (Musk vs SEC) that to the best of his knowledge, funding was indeed secured and the Arab sheikhs ditched him later. He shared text messages in the court.
And after the dust settled, it was just a couple of oddball blokes exchanging insults like children. The diver who started the fight, got greedy and wanted $190 million in damages over the pedo comment. Jury deliberated for less than an hour, and he got nothing.
In the end, the Thai Navy got a free mini sub they said could be used in future rescues. I don't see the Twitter incident with the diver as any final verdict about Musk in general, other than he can get emotional and doesn't hide behind corporate speak. The Diver-guy's initial attack really was the first foolish action in that whole saga.
Only incompetent managers (and executives) think that "authority" is interchangeable with "respect". Fortunately for Musk, incompetence rarely disqualifies billionaires from anything.
There's no way Elon would have any respect yet, there hasn't been nearly enough time (respect is earned).
There are going to be power games for a couple of months, until the new management identifies a subset of the old staff that they can trust (or, more cynically, exploit), and then that subset will be elevated above the rest. The losers will either back down, quit, or be fired.
I'm not sure you want to use "value of his companies due to things he says" as your marker for incompetence. Many of his companies are seriously overvalued precisely because the things he says drive up the value far beyond where it should be.
Someone can be incompetent at some things and not others. We know with 100% certainty that Elon Musk is incompetent at purchasing Twitter dot com in a way that is most financially optimized for himself. We know with 100% certainty that Elon Musk is exceptionally competent at procreation.
Every company I was with when it sold had lawyers come in and inform everyone that all processes are frozen, no equipment can move or be transferred while inventory is taken, everyone involved with computers surrender their passwords to their incoming engineers... etc, etc, etc. It is standard practice and there is nothing nefarious about it.
What you call entitlement sounds to me something more like self-respect. If I was asked to show the last 30 days of my code to a random engineer from another company to prove I deserved my job, I'm pretty sure I'd quit on the spot. (Though if I'd worked at Twitter I'd have gotten out months ago; I imagine the people staying through today have fewer options for whatever reason.) Luckily there's still plenty of work for programmers at companies that understand that impact isn't usefully measured in lines of code.
My comment was more about spending Tesla money on Musk's personal projects. I also think it pretty insulting to have to justify your job to some random engineer from Tesla.
> It's not so much about the code as it is about establishing an authority
I think there's a simpler explanation: he intends to fire people under the pretext of poor performance and play games with layoffs/severance and/or create a hostile environment to encourage employees to resign (no severance either).
> You have to understand that Musk isn't after the big dollar here but rather he is experimenting which has a lot of chances to fail
Musk wanted out of this purchase, but discovered the Delaware Court of Chancery far less malleable compared to other regulators he's dealt with before (looking at you, SEC). Tesla is going to be a learning experience for Elon.
> I think there's a simpler explanation: he intends to fire people under the pretext of poor performance and play games with layoffs/severance and/or create a hostile environment to encourage employees to resign (no severance either).
Based on the reports that came out after your comment that he doesn't want to pay the execs their severances, I think you're spot on.
> I don't think they can get a clear picture by looking at last 30 days of code
I can very quickly spot developers who are mediocre or worse by looking at their last 30 days off code. (As long as it's a language I have decent experience in.)
I suspect he's trying to access the team's technical competence.
No you can't because being a good developer isn't always about smashing out code, I've easily spent 30 days with great developers talking about planning and implementation before much code is written.
Hopefully it's not you who is the mediocre developer?
Err, there are very obvious "beginner" mistakes that don't have to do with "smashing" out code:
Things like: State in strings instead of properly defined enums / data structures. Magic numbers instead of constants. Dangerous error handling. Compiler warnings. Missing or incomplete input checking. Anything vulnerable to SQL injection, or similar. Significant copy and paste within the same codebase.
When a developer with more than a few years experience writes code like that, (except in throwaway situations,) then there's a clear problem.
More subjective signs of a poor coder are: Super long methods, (or too many sort methods.) Passing around a single value but always picking a new variable name. Inconsistent naming conventions. Sleep statements to fix race conditions. Unnecessary special cases. Incorrectly using an ORM. Code that is many orders of magnitude slower than need be. (IE, sucking the entire DB into ram for just one value.)
Some language specific warning signs: Lots of "unsafe" (pointers) in C#. Lots of unwarps in Rust. Bounds issues is c/c++.
This is all assuming that a coders job is to just code...and make code better, which IMO it rarely is.
Honestly, the most lucrative code bases I've worked on are generally considered terrible, annoying, incorrect, frustrating but they are functional.
The most recent example I can think of was a startup I worked which sold for billions of USD, it was considered by everyone as terrible.
A large part of our job was understanding complex requirements and integrating with other companies poorly implemented APIs, wrangling XML etc, so we didn't code a lot, we planned a lot.
Fundamentally I think we're just talking about different aspect of the job and we disagree that being a "coder" is about lines of code.
In my current job, I've been helping my team, especially new comers understand complex systems and business logic which we didn't have a lot of time to document because of the insane growth our company went through and the insane amount of stress we were under to deal with demand with only 2 engineers. I've not written more than 20 lines of code in 4 weeks, really just mentored and guided people, should I be fired?
I would probably say that your role isn't a "coder," but is more of a team lead or manager without the title. Other than that, I don't understand your situation well enough.
I also haven't reviewed your code!
But if you are specifically writing code that has the kind of errors that I describe, or are continuing to "add fuel to the fire," I would set very clear standards and expect that you meet them. I understand that you can't fix every problem overnight, and that you have to pick and choose the things you fix carefully.
But if you continued to, for example, write code that was vulnerable to SQL injection, after I made it clear that this was no longer acceptable, yes I would fire you.
Edit: Likewise, if you were reviewing someone else's code and allowed SQL injection, I would consider you "the source of the problem" and fire you. If your "20 lines of code this month" contained SQL injection, I would wonder why, after setting a clear expectation that SQL injection isn't allowed, you couldn't take the extra five minutes to write parameterized SQL, and then and fire you.
To add to my reply from a few hours ago: I'm currently fixing a bug like what you describe.
The code is C# and involves heavy reflection; but if the person who wrote it used a simple lambda, it would be fine and easier to maintain.
In such a situation I'd make it clear that reflection is inappropriate in this situation. If the developer continued to use reflection when simple lambda statements were appropriate, I would make moves to fire the developer.
I suspect that not much will change for users. The folks who want to continue tweeting will do so. The folks who do not want to tweet won't. Everything else is office politics.
Yeah, I don't see the problem. Tesla investors benefit from SpaceX material science expertise solely because Elon owns SpaceX and allocates the time and resources. I don't see Tesla investors complaining about that.
I would view it as a way for Tesla engineers getting paid to go to a software conference. It is definitely possible to learn something during the code review to take back to Tesla.
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.
You'd arguably have a case that Musk is not acting in the interest of Tesla and is using his Tesla position to enrich himself rather than the Tesla company. Exactly what the "CEO is supposed to serve shareholders" is all about.
Just being tangentially related to the company isn't enough to justify it imo. You could also buy a lot of twitter ads for the cost of having devs come over.
Doesn't USA have the tax concept of "transfer pricing"?
Musk (who is definitely the beneficial owner of Twitter and probably of Tesla too) is providing "free" consulting service of Tesla employees for Twitter -> without an invoice and without tax. (or maybe there will be an invoice?)
In EU that should be taxed (and also invoiced) - with similar prices as a consulting provided by a consulting company that does code reviews. The tax office is interested most in the missing tax of course.
> Later, people inside the company reported that Tesla engineers were in fact reviewing the code.
There’s very little here to make any kind of judgement from.
Perhaps they were being paid for some private work outside of their employment. Maybe there’s some kind of arrangement in place to cover the costs of their time. From the outside we simply don’t know.
Quite sure this is just false, as I've done this in some contexts before, would be great to hear from an eypert. - Consulting pro bono, even during hours on another company should generally be fine, it might just make it more likely to be tax audited.
The counter argument is that Tesla has created more shareholder value over the past few years than any other single company, and in fact more than a ton of whole market segments. I mean, investors know he's sort of a loon, this is hardly the weirdest thing he done[1], and they're still on board.
And FWIW: if you really want to structure this in a shareholder-friendly way, Twitter can just pay Tesla a consulting fee. Given that they're a private company now, that's almost literally as simple as just writing a check.
[1] I mean, seriously, if "I'll buy TWTR for $40B!" didn't spook the market, you think they're really going to freak out about a few hundred hours of engineering time?
Proven track record gives you a really, really long leash. Only Steve Jobs has attained the rarefied air of being able to do whatever the fuck you want that Musk has.
True. Watching him shoot rockets into space from my backyard 3-4x a month and seeing a half dozen Teslas on the road every time I drive a few miles isn’t very substantive at all.
What about FSD? Boring Company? Robo Taxies? Solar? Cybertruck? Neurolink? Mars colonies? Elon has had some amazing successes, that's just a fact, but judging what he will accomplish based on what he says is almost always a losing bet.
Boring Company is right up with Tesla and SpaceX on the success trajectory by lots of measures. This is a company that just started from nothing a few years ago, and it’s already building a massive transit project, and is in final bidding in several other major projects.
They’re already building their own tunnel boring equipment.
The company raised $675 million at a $5.65 billion valuation, putting it ahead of several S&P 500 stocks in market cap, closest to Alaska Airlines.
To say this is unusual is an understatement.
At this point in SpaceX history, the company had yet to launch Falcon 1.
I think a whole lot of people are going to be mightily shocked at how successful this company will turn out. In ten years, when it’s clear how successful it is, everyone will pretend the idea was stunningly obvious and was only successful through public financing, or something like that.
Boring Company is all hype, it's current trajectory is failure.
> it’s already building a massive transit project
It's only massive in terms of wasted taxpayer funds. The Vegas tunnel is a boondogle, and per Elon's signature style, completely unlike anything that he promised, their next tunnel will be the same.
> In ten years, when it’s clear how successful it is, everyone will pretend the idea was stunningly obvious and was only successful through public financing, or something like that.
I won't. If boring company has built any noteworthy tunnels within the next ten years, feel free to come back and have yourself a dropbox moment with my comment.
> It's only massive in terms of wasted taxpayer funds
I'm confused, because you called-out the Vegas tunnel, but are you claiming a 30-mile, 55-station tunnel is not a massive project? Or are you referring to the already-built 1.7 mile LVCC Loop?
Beyond that, there are no taxpayer dollars used in the project. It's entirely privately financed. In fact, the system pays a concession fee to Las Vegas.
> If boring company has built any noteworthy tunnels within the next ten years
Well, TBC is already constructing the 55-station Las Vegas Loop as we speak. It's scheduled to open in 2 years, at least partially by Super Bowl LVIII in Vegas in February 2024. The entire system will not be done, but enough of it will be to be noteworthy.
> feel free to come back and have yourself a dropbox moment with my comment.
I will try to remember to do that! Don't worry, you won't be the only one who got this wrong.
I would love to agree but it's simply not correct. They are buying existing tunneling machines and there is nothing yet to suggest a step change.
The radical proposals in terms of stripping out safety equipment for operational tunnels may prod some development, but ultimately any gains here are not going to be captive and will just result in revised client expectations (outside Boring funding & delivering projects worth $10bn+ individually themselves, with no public involvement).
> They are buying existing tunneling machines and there is nothing yet to suggest a step change.
That is incorrect. That is how they started, but they are now using Prufrock 2, which is both designed and built by The Boring Company, though I agree there has yet to be much of a step change in technology. Prufrock 2 is not the fastest tunnel boring machine in the world, and its porpoising feature has had some setbacks, needing to be dug out.
But all of this kind of misses the point. It ultimately doesn't matter if the tunnel boring machine is extraordinarily better. The Boring Company is applying the exact same philosophies that has made Tesla and SpaceX successful: extreme vertical integration and rapid iteration.
What matters is that TBC controls the boring machine. They control the design, they control the manufacturing process, and they have a willingness to experiment and iterate. The company is 5 years old and is now on its fourth tunnel boring machine.
And given the design of TBC transportation systems, there's no reason you can't have a dozen tunnel boring machines running simultaneously.
There was nothing remarkable about Falcon 9 when it launched. It was old tech, with a few good ideas, and one killer feature: extraordinary cost savings.
What about Sun King? Dig It? Don't Bother Me? Boys? Flying? (all terrible Beatles songs)
When you have successes like Tesla and SpaceX and PayPal it doesn't really matter how many failures you have. This isn't like being an airline pilot where you're judged by your worst outing.
Do I believe him when he says "Teslas will be full self driving in six months" like he has for the last 10 years? No. He's definitely a PT Barnumesque figure.
Do I believe that Tesla will get to full self driving eventually? Yes.
You want to make the accusation that the business failures of someone who has had legitimate successes on the scale of Elon Musk are con jobs then the burden of proof is on you. And I don't see an proof. Not from you, and not from anyone else who says it.
Hyperloop is very much a con job. "Full Self Driving is just a year away" is very much a con job. The cybertruck is a con job. The Tesla Semi is a con job. The tesla robot is a con job.
> but judging what he will accomplish based on what he says is almost always a losing bet.
He is literally the richest man in the world. Do you think he isn’t a successful gambler because of a few $1 bets that haven’t paid off (yet on many) vs the several $1000 bets that have?
The rocket landing stuff largely borrow from DC-X and the spinoff work at NASA (+Lars Blackmore), all originally Strategic Defense Initiative development.
He used all that money from Mike as collateral for loans to Tesla
Rome wasn't built in a day and were all standing on the shoulders of giants. However you need trailblazers to cut through and push the threshold. Elon is a hacker and disruptor and entrenched interests would like to just keep things they way they were, thereby pumping money into PR firms to talk down disruption and innovation. You're either a paid talk downer or a victim of that.
This is exactly what I mean. Musk had very little to do with actually designing rockets. Much like Thomas Edison his main skill is getting credited for the work of other people.
I keep seeing people say that Musk had little to do with SpaceX's technical side, and I wonder where this meme (in the original Dawkins sense of the word) is coming from.
If you watch the EverydayAstronaut interviews with Musk it shows that he has a deep understanding of the engineering tradeoffs and design reasons for many components of the rocket, and in fact is being quite careful with what he can share due to not wanting to leak company secrets. In fact, some of the questions that were asked in the earlier interview were re-referenced in a later interview as having been considered and leading to design changes.
I think Musk is a smart engineering type who sees finance, PR, politics etc as just another engineering problem, with all the pros and cons that creates. He's had a ton of success in hard-tech fields just by not being an idiotic pointy-haired-boss in a world where finance and political people are repeatedly being put in charge of projects and companies whose tech they don't understand. This doesn't mean he is likeable, or someone you'd want to have a beer with, or moral, or anything else. But it does mean he is capable of managing a tech company better than most, if we use the success of the company as our capable-of-managing-a-company metric.
I'm happy to see information to the contrary, but so far this is the closest I've seen to actual human/work style interactions with him. What would you suggest as alternative data sources which could be used to build a more accurate opinion?
No, his main skill is believing that big things are possible, and then being willing to commit resources and to be patient to let those possibilities come to reality when many others are will not.
Well I have seen the world, and I am not biased or frankly even a Musk fan, despite finding myself defending him as of late here on HN. I don’t own a Tesla (find them ugly vehicles), don’t use or care about Twitter, but I’ll admit that I think the SpaceX stuff is pretty exciting mainly because I can see it.
I said this on another thread but I will say it here too. Musk’s genius and value is not his engineering skill but his willingness to think about big possibilities and then be fearless and patient enough to make what many others think are risky (and stupid) bets on those possibilities.
We need folks like that. They move the needle far more than the random HN engineers who feel that the Musks and Edison’s of the world aren’t relevant because they “didn’t design or engineer” the technologies they made viable to the masses.
Musk and Edison’s roles—were not as the engineers of technology, but as the facilitators of the engineers.
You're not familiar with Henry Ford and his reputation? People whose personality solely consists of embarrassingly irrational hatred of Musk are as cringeworthy as those who worship him.
Hate is a very strong feeling. The threshold for hating a co-human should be quite high. Most people "hating" Musk have not met him and have not been assaulted, wronged or harmed by him, and he has only had minor impact on their lives (depending on how much credit you give him personally for products such as Tesla)
I find it difficult to understand the level of aggressiveness he awakes in some people. Are they actually feeling hate or just camouflaging some other feelings? Envy? Injustice? Are they hating him on the behalf of others?
It really is. There are thousands of more hateable public figures who have done far less good and far more bad who get only a tiny fraction of the hate I see on hackernews and reddit. Heck, pick a billionaire that's not Bill Gates...
Musk has an actual hatedom of people who try and downplay every good thing he's done and every good trait he has while spreading bad rumours about him, both well founded (impulsive, stubborn, optimistic to delusional levels and not good with peoples feelings) and not (Musk knows nothing about rockets, paypal money came entirely from superrich daddy's slave labour emerald mines and no one wanted the mini submarine).
I recall Steve Jobs was known to blow up at his staff, sometimes seemingly randomly. He arguably created a hostile work environment. He also denied and estranged his own daughter. Let's not put CEOs on a scale.
@kcplate
Site isn't allowing me to reply, but I guess I can edit here?
What I meant by scale was weighing CEOs or their behavior against each other. It sounded to me, and maybe I read it wrong, from the comment I replied to that Musk's issues were being levied against Musk with the implication (Their first sentence) Jobs didn't have issues like that. A better example of Jobs tanking Apple stock price was the partnership with Microsoft. At the time that was seen as Apple marrying the evil Jobs regularly criticized. So much for thinking different. But my point was the other things carried some form of risk and certainly didn't paint Jobs as not having character flaws.
So I'm in agreement with you, he's human, Musk is human, mistakes are allowed to be made without, I don't know, "cancelling" someone I guess. Maybe it's just fashionable to pick on Musk right now? I don't know some people are so judgmental. I mean honestly, what does the average HackerNews user know about the nature of the Tesla engineers reviewing Twitter code? While it could be a problem, it could also be legal and considered above board. No one here seems to know the contractual agreements and why would they? Companies don't publish every thing that runs across executives desks.
Exactly what is the point here? I’ve seen fast food shift supervisors blow up at their staff and know at least one person who is estranged from a child. Are CEOs (including famous ones) not allowed to be human. I have never met a human that wasn’t to some degree or another a shithead at various points of time.
I think personal flaws can taint professional accomplishments. And the worship of these strong/genius people only reinforces bad behavior.
Of course there should be some slack given for indiscretions of youth. No one is born perfect. For adults though, let's keep our eyes wide open and praise the good works--not the flawed people who do them.
Musk's, Gate's, Zuckerberg, other-tech-billionaires spawn point was about as good as any other upper middle class American kid's. If you exclude genes were they probably got a bit luckier than average.
I can sort of see how that may be the case with Musk and Zuckerberg, but Gates? Is it normal in US for upper middle class fathers to be partners at multi-national law corporations?
… and specifically to have a company-defining early deal go to someone who shared a board membership with their mother? Microsoft didn’t even have a product when the deal went through (they bought a CP/M knockoff from a smaller company). Gates certainly executed well but most people wouldn’t have had the opportunity to even attempt something like that.
> Making a bunch of money does not give you ethical credits you can spend later.
If this wasn't in the realm of how moral calculations work in society, then you wouldn't need to make this argument. People do accept funny moral trades and it's not clear how the calculus works. Tesla shareholders accept the fact that the guy in charge sometimes plays games like "FUNDING SECURED $420", so the fact that some Tesla engineers were borrowed/contracted/whatever is just a tiny detail in the big picture.
Given the timeframe, I think people are skeptical that 1. Elon arranged for twitter to contract with Tesla for code review and 2. Recused himself from the negotiations regarding scope of work and rate charged.
Who cares? The companies in his orbit benefit substantially from the cross pollination between them, and the PR opportunities that generates - much more than any arms-length negotiated rate would. Avoiding the type of fake work that you describe is very helpful for achieving the high iteration speeds his companies have.
Who says Jerome Powell is bad? Fighting inflation due to, well, inflated asset values is a good thing, not bad. Just because it makes numbers go down doesn't mean it should be considered a bad thing.
that announcement most certainly did spook the market and news about the Twitter acquisition has been a drag on TSLA all year. You may have noticed the stock trading for slightly more than half of its peak value.
There’s the presumption here that Tesla is footing the bill. For all you know Tesla hired out of these workers on contract and the Twitter is footing the bill.
If Twitter is paying under fair market rate, that's collusion to benefit Twitter at the expense of Tesla.
If Twitter is paying above fair market rate, that's collusion to benefit Tesla at the expense of Twitter.
If Twitter is paying exactly fair market rate, why does it need to be Tesla employees? That starts to look like self-dealing to make Musk's live easier.
You can't really win in this situation, which is why any sane executive avoids such a conflict of interest in the first place.
(I'm not claiming there will be any repercussions mind you - if Musk got away with SolarCity he'll surely get away with this.)
Yes, because it's not really public vs. private that matters, in both cases it's whether the shareholders care. (If it's public they complain to the SEC, if it's private they complain to their contract lawyers who hopefully included some accountability in the contracts.)
This is also why Musk can get away with it - he's got fanboys, albeit of slightly different types, dominating the shareholders in both cases. (In the case of Twitter he may even be personally the majority shareholder with no obligations beyond cash now, but who knows...)
I'm not really sure - I think that depends on the details of how X Holdings is set up, which I'm not going to bother looking into. I should've used a more general term like "creditor", but the point remains.
We don't have really any visibility into what short- and long-term obligations Musk owes the various financing parties.
I don’t know what this “collusion” is. Companies with common ownership often cross-bill and this is used as a vehicle (search “transfer pricing” if you want to know more) to move profits around and optimise tax. There are restrictions on transfer pricing, but there’s no concept of collusion here and in particular there really is no restriction related to fair market rate. There are lots of ways to do the billing part of this which would be perfectly normal.
It’s a terrible idea because it’s a nasty way to treat people at the acquired company and probably ineffective at getting any useful information, but Elon Musk has shown that he doesn’t have many scruples about that sort of thing.
But SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter don't really have common ownership in the normal sense. They're not owned by the same holding or parent company, they're not owned by the same single person, one is public and two are private, etc.
If Tesla engineers are spending time on something not beneficial to Tesla but instead to Musk personally or to X Holdings, that's absolutely something Tesla shareholders could sue for.
No they couldn’t. Fiduciary responsibility doesn’t mean you have to only do things that shareholders agree with. It means you have to act in good faith to represent their interests.
In this case Musk could easily say he had spare capacity, and if there’s crossbilling (which can happen retroactively if there was an objection) there’s really nothing to sue over. If he can get tesla engineers to try to build a cave rescue submarine to buff his public persona he can get them to do this.
As I said, I don't believe any significant TSLA holder will actually sue Musk. It's clear by now they're comfortable with Musk's view that his interests and any of his companies' interests are equivalent. But if they did, they'd have a good case unless Twitter overpaid (at which point the issue would be any Twitter shareholders).
You probably wouldn't since those engineers probably signed consulting agreements with Twitter, and are being paid by Twitter, not Tesla for this work.
Curious, why would you think that a person who has trouble finding a group of banks (what is a group of banks called, a flight?) to produce the cash that he owns on paper, is solely interested in chasing more cash? Is it not more believable that he has a social agenda? At this very moment, I find it believable that Musk is drawing a line in the sand to be seen by folks who would have others irreparably silenced if their views aren't fashionable.
Shareholders already know he’s part time and has multiple jobs. As for leveraging talent, I doubt it’s effecting their productivity in a significant way or deadlines are slipping due to this.
Your doubts will not stand up in court, even if they are grounded in reality, which *I* doubt. These engineers took time off work during work hours to go somewhere and do things that are not in service of the publicly traded company they’re employed at. That’s not something you can just hand wave away.
I used to work for a guy who was a shareholder in multiple companies, and I would do work for the other companies all the time. When I did the company I actually worked at would just bill the other company for my time. It’s hardly different from doing work for and billing it to a different department.
Same, for nearly 10 years, I got prostituted to nearly every company a major shareholder had a piece of, my fee was just billed to whoever I was doing work for at the time. No big deal. I really do not understand the surprise at this, this is pretty normal. I think it’s just media tossing shade trying to find something, anything.
He doesn’t own all of TSLA, so if there’s no contract, he’s appropriating TSLA to his private project. If it was done off the books, it’s syphoning money from something you don’t own to something you do.
You are taking as gospel a uncorroborated rumor from what is likely a single Twitter engineer who is salty that someone outside the org is reviewing their code.
You assume that money is not changing hands and that it’s off the books? Where is your evidence for that? You are making that assumption based off your own confirmation biases.
Same. I worked for a company owned by a group of friends that owned a few more businesses. We'd do work for all these companies and just log the hours in our human resource system - accountants figured out inter-company payments. Some employees were employed at multiple of these companies at the same time as well.
Leaving aside the maximum potential upside of a lawsuit (Musk writes a check to Tesla for... $100k?), it's entirely possible that Musk asked them to take a personal day, or that they had already worked 40 hours that week, or similar. After all, I can see a trusted TSLA engineer seeing a way to get a promotion being transferred to TWTR treating it as an "interview" half-day and going unpaid.
I said they would get promoted by moving to TWTR. It could be Musk inviting them to interview as managers as TWTR as much as he's using them to evaluate TWTR talent.
Yes, the whole pagelong discussion here about those little peanuts is one of the most disconnected and ridiculous one I have ever seen on HN, lol sorry. There must be many hearts broken or why all the fuss, I don't get it.
Heaven forbid Tesla engineers decide to feed the homeless during their work hours at the CEOs directive. That's not servicing the publically traded company.
Except that’s not what they’re doing, so I’ve no idea why you think that a relevant argument. They’re working for a different public company while being paid by Telsa.
> They’re working for a different public company while being paid by Telsa.
Actually, it's worse than that. They're working for a different, private company, one which happens to be owned by the CEO of TSLA, who has a legal and fiduciary duty to the TSLA shareholders.
Why would a TSLA shareholder make a fuss? It is likely that Tesla will bill Twitter for the use of staff resources. Other than that, being on good terms with the owner of Twitter is a possible advertising opportunity/tie-in in the future.
Your example generates company pr value, employee morale, etc. Meanwhile there is no value being generated to Tesla by moving these engineers to some side project for another company.
Musk’s job as CEO is to work in the best interests of the company. Using the company's resources to buy/build a completely unrelated entity for his personal gain is most definitely not ok.
If he wanted to do what you’re saying (enrich Tesla with those features), Tesla should be buying Twitter. The scenario you're presenting, by the way, is exactly how Facebook/Meta acquired Instagram. However Facebook acquired Instagram, not Zuckerberg personally.
Unless the Tesla engineers also can learn a thing or two from the internals of Twitter and bring back to benefit Tesla. Or they are planning to do things that will benefit both parties in the long run
I don't see your "Period" here. Perhaps it is in best interest of both Tesla and Twitter to cooperate on some topics, but not to the degree of acquisition of one by another.
Remember that SpaceX and Tesla do have a common VP for material engineering, Charles Kuehmann? It makes sense for them to share knowledge on materials.
In the same way, there may be a cause for sharing software engineering resources/know-how between Tesla and Twitter without actually merging the entire companies into one behemoth.
That’s not “unless” - it’s a translate post hoc rationalization. It’s a stretch that they’d be working on that feature - considering the distracted driving problem it’s something of a liability - but even if they were, that might mean that you send a couple of people from that specific team to talk APIs or something. Pulling random engineers over to review things outside of their specialty doesn’t make any sense.
Yes, and people use them while driving because the vehicle doesn’t prevent it. You can get away with that kind of legal attempt to dodge responsibility but at some point public awareness catches up with you, similar to how telling people to drive safely wasn’t enough to avoid generations of safety technology becoming legally required.
Great, next my car will be Tweeting all the real time telemetry (I405 North, by exit 18, lane #1, 81mph, throttle at 61%, 4 hands-off-steering-wheel events detected in the last hour, and 2 eye tracking sync failures due to checking out the sports car in lane #2".
Musk, being Musk, will find this amusing and start auto-tweeting "Kill" videos of Tesla's racing with other cars on the freeway."104 Z06 kills on the West Coast Today!".
I’m not sure if they developed them themselves, but the alloys SpaceX uses in the pre burners in the raptor engines are really advanced and likely have not been known (in the US) before. They have to be able to withstand pure (nearly) oxygen gas at very high temperatures and pressures. I wouldn’t be surprised if these super specialize alloys were developed by spacex.
The Soviets figured it out during the end of the space race and US engineers basically assumed they were lying bc they thought the metallurgy was impossible.
SX 300 & soon SX 500. Kind of a modern version of Inconel superalloys
Inconel is known in the US as it was invented there in the 1930s - well before Musk was born. They might be called superalloys, but there is nothing particularly sophisticated about them from a scientific perspective. SX300 / SX500 are minor revisions which take some R&D but technologically it is 1930's stuff.
This is plain wrong. In the US it was assumed that Oxygen-rich preburners would erode any manufacturable material - metal, ceramic, or exotic. When the RD-170 (If I remember correctly) was found to have an oxygen-rich preburner, very knowledgeable people called it a lie, misrepresentation, or proclaimed that is was severely wearing (possibly ablating) and thus had to be very heavy.
The Raptors are reusable (even air-ignitable, with centisecond timing precision to achieve a specific thrust) engines with an oxygen-rich preburner, and to boot they have the highest chamber pressure of any rocket engine ever. Thus, they also have a very high (possibly highest, we don't know) pump pressure (the preburner _is_ the pump), and they're doing that with oxygen-rich combustion.
There is some crazy material making up that preburner chamber, and the pipes down to the pintles. Materials that until recently were though to be beyond manufacturing capability. And this is in a reusable engine that costs less than an RD-68. Frankly, it looks like magic.
I heard that the advanced materials team of SpaceX went to help design the alloys used for the castings.
They needed a castable aluminum resistant to corrosion, rigid enough that didn’t need heat treatment.
From what I heard at Munroe they had to design a new alloy to meet all requirement and that is unheard of in the automotive market (off the shelf components culture)
It make sense that SpaceX had expert in that field (for turbine components)
It's great for customer like me, and there are hundreds of millions of us, so that's quite a lot of benefit to society. And the things that Amazon is criticized for, like treatment of its employees, are not unique to Amazon itself, but standard in the industries that they operate in. It's just that journalists don't report on it when other less successful companies do it. The case against Amazon, and other billionaires, is driven by envy much more than anything else.
The thing about Amazon is that they have proven that they are willing to operate at a loss for as long as it takes to destroy their competition and take a monopoly on the market (diapers.com, etc.)
I think this is an example of the differences in image that Bezos and Musk have made, Musk creating an impression (and perhaps even being) more of an idealist
> Our goal should be to make things better first and then to make money second
While I would rather live in that world, you don't seem to have described America, corporate laws or capitalism. In fact, TSLA should be listed as a public benefit company if that's the case.
Imagine the possibilities of Twitter to help improve SpaceX. No, I mean really, if you have that broad an imagination then I consider you to be the next Edward de Bono.
It would be reasonable for Twitter to pay Tesla for the audit work, because otherwise it would be a misuse of Tesla resources to only benefit the Tesla CEO.
Plenty of companies with the same owner contract with one another. It's extremely common. When they're in the same industry, we call it 'vertical integration'
This happens all the time between SpaceX and Tesla. SpaceX is a private company just like Twitter and Elon owns a lower percentage of SpaceX than he does Twitter. There are even people who are on payroll for both companies. For example Charles Kuehmann is VP of Materials Engineering for both Tesla and SpaceX[1].
I think the point here is that it's not Elon's resources to pool. Since TSLA is a public company and shareholders don't benefit from their resources going to the CEO's other company for free.
Companies sell to each other all the time, and this is just the beginning. Tesla is a leader in AI, and Twitter needs a lot of AI to help counter bots, etc, etc. Humans will be in the mix, but AI coming from Tesla is no doubt a huge part of the plan, too. So a look at what code's there now is just a start. Good business for Tesla, good business for Twitter. If one isn't being sacrificed for the sake of the other, there's no conflict of interest.
Tesla’s AI expertise is narrow and has no applicability to Twitter’s situation.
In reality, the world leader in the application of machine learning and other AI tools to social media content right now is Twitter. They’re also probably the best at international policy and privacy law monitoring and litigation.
Twitter is flawed in many ways, as I think might be inevitable for any large social media platform, but the myth that has developed about them being wholly incompetent at all this is a bizarre one that’s unsupported by the evidence.
It's the hardware, even more than the software, that Tesla can contribute. Identifying patterns is the task. Gathering and in effect indexing enormous amounts of data is necessary, to say, identify a bot.
I don't doubt that Twitter is on the case, but I also don't doubt that better hardware and a different perspective on the software can help - plus I'm talking about a hybrid approach. The inflexibility of much modern software is stunning to us old folks, but this rather goes double with twitter, for me.
It also has to be said, as the whistleblower has said, that Twitter had a very large financial incentive for tolerating, not even detecting, large numbers of fake accounts and posts; and seems to have succummed to that. Hardly the first company that's happened to - I'd say it's closer to the norm.
Pattern recognition is the game, and that's downstream of NLP, although NLP is a (narrow) variety of pattern recognition. Also, Transformer, and again, it's the hardware that may be Tesla's biggest contribution.
You’ve said this a couple times, it is incorrect. Pattern recognition is simultaneously a terrible way to attack bots, and a great way to kill lots of interesting uses of twitter. This field is much, much more complex than you are making it sound.
NLP is also absolutely not pattern recognition. Perhaps back in the day with expert systems, but that era is far behind us now.
Pattern recognition is our best way to express what neural nets do, though no words fully suffice. It's a phrase that goes back to the time when AI was based more on propositional logic, and was used to point to the largest portion of what that approach obviously couldn't do at all well. You could use "sorting by complex characteristics" if you prefer, but I'm not sure what the advantage of that equally vague phrase is. "Pattern recognition" is a way of pointing to complex calculations that chug a lot of data, and don't analyse (literally "break apart") well, but spit out good sorts.
Paypal hit the similar barriers for a fraud-sorting task, and even in that day they found that a hybrid approach, part AI part human solved the problem well enough for that company to surive.
It is entirely possible that a couple decades from now we'll have a range of words to cover this whole territory. I certainly hope we do! However, I don't think we do now (or you'd have used 'em and cited 'em, or I'd have encountered them, too.) That we don't - yet - is understandable, it's early days. Right now if we have a better word or phrase (goal is kinda self-referential) I don't know it - even if I'm talking about the pattern of balance, compostion, color choice and line that makes art, "art": "the pattern that can be called 'artistic'" is pretty much the best I can do. Moving to "characteristic" isn't much of an advance. Ditto Pirsig's "Quality." Feel free to put forward a better word than pattern or these suggestions if you would. DALLE-E and Stable Diffusion do seem to be able to recognize and spit out artistic results (rather than ugly, inartistic results) to a surprisingly large extent.
There are a billion ways AI moderation could be done. Many will be worse than useless as you say. One thing I notice a lot is that bad recognition systems merely sort out whatever is odd; if you are eccentric (perhaps because you are ridiculously well-educated) or highly creative you may get sorted out and punished by crap "algorithms." They're cheap-like-borscht systems, they don't give a damn about recognizing or addressing edge cases. I sense you've run into a lot of that too, and been equally frustrated.
That's one reason why one wants both far better (more computationally expensive) nets/associated logic and at least one human in the loop. But as well, as stated, spending more and getting a more complex net that is actively looking for patterns of language that suggest mere (safe) eccentricity or over-education is a case in which more and more detailed pattern-recognition is called for, not less recognition of patterns. You should have AI systems that are actively looking for at least the most common edge cases. Probably that's already starting to happen.
It's absolutely true that in the past companies (looking at you Google, Facebook) have been primarily motivated to reduce the expense of moderation no matter how crude the results. Just to take expensive humans out of the loop, no matter what breaks. That gives exactly the crap results you cite.
Twitter seems to have doubled down on that rigidity by having a lawyer in charge of final moderation decisions who (so far as I can judge from a distance) wanted simple clear incontroverible rules that also refused to address "edge cases." Sad, since we have judges and juries for a reason, to mitigate the crudity of our rules, and you'd think maybe a lawyer would get that.
But I think Elon is betting that much better AI hardware (from Tesla) and more sophisticed, expensive nets (fed much more data) can, together with humans, do a far better job at a big but affordable price. Part of that bet is, I think, that computing power will decline in price steeply over the next decade and more, so it's worth spending far more (in the short run) on the moderation task, to get it right, than has been spent by social media companies to date.
He wants a lot fewer posts killed, but also wants nearly all the bot and fake nation-state-actor posts killed, etc. Hard task. I doubt he thinks that's a dead-easy or cheap task.
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 teeny tiny startup with no real engineering culture - not (formerly) publicly traded company.
I’be been a software engineer for nearly 2 decades and have been involved in multiple technical due-diligence endeavors. At best, you’re just grokking the big-picture and looking for any major red flags. Getting involved in individual code reviews is not a useful exercise outside of understanding a team’s SDLC and various coding practices - for an org the size of Twitter all of that stuff should have been documented and shared during due diligence (which Musk waved) - injecting outside engineers into the code review process is just an expensive and sloppy way to uncover what could otherwise be gleaned in an easier fashion.
I do see one big red flag for Twitter: it now has leadership that doesn’t trust the engineering organization. For a technology company that can be fatal if not resolved quickly.
Both the vision systems at Tesla and the bot-detection at Twitter are classifiers. Both would have trained on large datasets. Both would have domain specific feature detection sitting below a more general algorithm. Both would have a similar basis for evaluation. Both have real-time constraints on the classification problem. An engineer (who is probably an ML specialist) familiar with one would not be starting from scratch in understanding and evaluating the other system.
> Counter-point: Tesla is rumored to be working on a phone.
How is this a counter point? How exactly doing superficial review of code they've never seen of a social network will help them with developing a phone?
Who has a better notification / messaging system at scale, that isn’t already a phone maker? I suspect the Tesla phone team would be thrilled to review that code.
> Who has a better notification / messaging system at scale
1. Apple. Facebook. TikTok. It's a somewhat simple problem that at scale is often solved by simply spinning a PubSub channel per user because you no longer care.
2. To review that code you don't just grab people to spend an afternoon doing superficial reviews of code they've never seen.
That's absolutely insane.
Tesla employees are paid by Tesla to do work for Tesla.
Freelancing during the workday at Twitter, SpaceX, or any of the other company just because Musk is the owner or CEO is basically wage theft by Musk.
How would you feel if he had Tesla assembly line workers renovate his house?
Ah yea I’m sure Musk ran it by HR, compliance and legal.. had all the paperwork squared away on both sides and is making sure time tracking is done carefully.
or he just winged it and grabbed some engineers and said “come with me”…
It is still ethically a no-go. Tesla isn't a consultation firm and they haven't done this type of work ever except for personal interests of the CEO. It doesn't take a particularly skilled lawyer to establish a conflict of interest there.
Happens all the time and the only reason anyone cares about this time is because Musk. If Twitter pays a FMV to Tesla for any resources, and as long as the Tesla board doesn’t care (which they won’t), this is a non-issue. Doesn’t matter what kind of “firm” Tesla is.
If the CEO of Ford used Ford resources to purchase a rental property for themselves, people would definitely be talking about it. I would even flip your claim and say the only reason people are dismissing this is because it's Musk.
Of course GP realizes this which is why they were able to recognize and characterize the pattern. Objecting to something isn’t failure to recognize its existence.
I’m chastising an alleged shareholder who pronounces this as good.
You are chastising me for pronouncing it bad?
This is literally a wint tweet lol
6/1/14
the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you f*%#% moron"
It's not about the employees liking the work or not. It's about whether or not Tesla is paying them to do work that does not benefit Tesla.
This is basic, basic, basic corporate law. It's not a "weird timeline" and it is in no way specific to the tech industry.
Managers, directors, CEOs, etc. cannot have the corporation do services for them for free because this deprives the non-management shareholders of value. Using their position as manager to assign employees to work on their house is in effect causing the corporation to provide them with renovation services for free. This self-dealing would be grounds for a derivative suit.
Also, it only takes one shareholder (in principle) to make this an issue. Even if you and most Tesla longs think Musk earned the right to do a little self-dealing here and there, it is an open invitation for legal action by SEC and other shareholders.
If you owned 100% of the company then all of that wouldn't be an issue, but it's still not something any legal department would OK.
The comment above you is wrong to call it wage theft--that would refer to workers not being paid the higher of minimum or promised wage for the time worked.
I feel like there is a lot of misinformation here and am compelled to comment, I’ve started and administered two corporations.
What you’re describing as self dealing isn’t illegal, thousands of corporations are run this way every day as long as taxes are paid correctly on the fair value of any transactions between the companies in question. It doesn’t even have to be profitable, Tesla could categorize the work they are doing for Twitter 100 different ways; marketing, R&D, team building, training, whatever.
As for minority shareholders, they have completely arbitrary rights depending on the bylaws, articles of incorporation, etc. If they are lucky, they might be able to periodically vote for board members given the right class of shares. Otherwise they have pretty much 0 input into how a company is run.
> Managers, directors, CEOs, etc. cannot have the corporation do services for them for free
Sure, but do you know this to be the case here? There are a whole lot of assumptions flying out here that Elon just went and poached a bunch of engineers from Tesla to work on Twitter on Tesla’s dime. Pretty sure no one commenting her on HN as any idea of what the deal and detail actually is, all we apparently know for sure from this article is that one or more Twitter folk think that one or more Tesla folks are looking at their code. Beyond that…no details are really known.
Point taken, but it's not wage theft so long as he's paying them. He's stealing from Tesla stockholders. Though I imagine the engineers he borrowed have existing priorities and deadlines, so the experience for them and their teams probably isn't great.
Hey now, it would be perfectly cromulent for Unilever and Exxon chemists see real value in a collaboration around, say, a higher-efficiency fracking solution.
The key is whether or not Twitter is compensating Tesla (and therefore its shareholders) at a fair market value for the time and resources used by Tesla employees for the benefit of Twitter (and therefore Musk as its owner). Not whether or not it makes sense to do so.
If its a dumb idea on Twitter/Musk's part but Tesla is fully compensated for their engineers' time, all is OK.
If its a great idea but Musk just assigned Tesla employees to do work that does not benefit Tesla and does benefit another company that he owns, that is an issue.
The scale of this is irrelevant. Absent fair compensation to Tesla, even one employee doing a day's work for Twitter is prohibited self-dealing. No one would bother filing a derivative suit over such a small amount, but SEC penalties could absolutely apply afaik.
Unless Twitter is paying the Tesla for Tesla’s employees time to Tesla, whether you care or not, doesn’t matter. A part time CEO of a public company is using the public company’s resources on one of his private project. If I owned a business with someone and found out the other owner was using our company’s funds but told our employees to go mow his house’s lawn, I would consider that misappropriation, embezzlement even. We don’t know the details here but I would hope it’s above board.
Maybe they're the ones responsible for making the door handles work when the car is on fire. Or the ones that wrote the AI that runs over children or in front of trains.
The obvious solution is to have the tesla tweet at the child to get out of the way, or at the local fire department that there's a bbq'd customer who needs assistance.
They are certainly different domains, but can you justify the claim "Self driving has a well defined, static problem space"?
One of the things that makes safety critical applications like self driving so hard is they have such an abundance of low probability, high severity cases that it is very difficult to define/test them all.
I think it's static inasmuch as it isn't an inherently adversarial problem. The world isn't bent on thwarting self-driving cars. Bot authors are bent on subverting detection.
What I mean to convey by "well defined" is that even though the problem space of self driving cars is enormous, the success criteria of teaching a car to self drive is probably going to look pretty similar in 10 years to what it looks like now.
Bots on the other hand changes constantly - what is the definition of an abusive bot? What is the definition of spam? The adversaries on Twitter adapt not only their tactics but also their goals.
TSLA is down 43% ytd, yes truly evolving before our very eyes. The DOJ criminal probe into the bogus self-driving claims three days ago bodes well also.
Based on Tesla's PE the only people responsible for the increased share price of Tesla are investors gambling on hype. There's nothing about Tesla's fundamentals that justifies even their current valuation. It's all irrational exuberance of gamblers. The only thing Musk has contributed to the stock price has been hype and vapor ware.
Elon bought Twitter, he didn't take Tesla private. TSLA is listed on the NASDAQ, check it if you don't believe. Please stop asserting things as true that are demonstrably wrong.
Why do you keep posting that? I count 3 copies of the same comment. You're confused, please re-read the thread and note the difference between TSLA and TWTR.
edit: in retrospect, I see that you're a new user. FYI: I've flagged this comment, but not the original, because you're spamming. Spam isn't cool.
Given that Tesla, not Twitter, is public, and the conversation was about Tesla stockholders, don't you think it would be better to assume that the comment above was written by a Tesla stockholder?
Um, no. The discussion here is about Tesla engineers at Twitter. Your commitment to your misreading of the situation, despite numerous indicators that you're mistaken, is perplexing. Good luck.
No. It’s not. Musk bought Twitter and took it private. Tesla is still a publicly traded company that Musk (as I understand it) actually had to sell a non-trivially portion of his stock in in order to finance part of the deal.
Once Tesla bought Solar City, Musk's cousin's company, it became clear that he's prone to this sort of misuse of resources. I agree that he shouldn't use Tesla resources like this, but it's not out-of-character, either.
Totally valid opinion. Tesla needs to be focused on delivering cars and software. They can't be distracted. This also hurts the banks who are looking at Tesla stock as collateral. By lumping their activities, both companies are now at risk.
You’d only be pissed off if you had a predisposition to dislike elon and then why would you be a TSLA shareholder?
This is a tiny amount of money compared to the daily cost of running TSLA and would have zero actual impact to shareholder value. If it isn’t being accounted for correctly, there will be a tiny investor lawsuit and a tiny amount of money changing hands.
This is latching on to just anything to complain about and really detracts from the ability of elon critics to be taken seriously because it’s just complaining about a few pennies worth of shareholder value.
As a shareholder? No. Tiny losses are not of concern to me. I am concerned with large scale long term outcomes not obsessing over not losing hundredths of a percent of revenue.
> This is a tiny amount of money compared to the daily cost of running TSLA
Software isn’t the same as making floor mats. Your major production factors are having people with the right skills, knowledge, and time to focus — while their salaries are a drop in Tesla’s daily operational cost, the real question should be how much it disrupts their development schedule. Given how far behind they are on features which they’ve already sold, to the point of having government investigations, I’d tend to think that the disruption of pulling them away from their planned work is a lot more expensive than just the time billed.
I am surprised this is the top comment. Yes, I am sure they have done the paperwork for these "tons of thousands of dollars." I think it is unlikely that many shareholders are concerned about this exercise
Exactly! Just like I said in my comment down below. Most commenters in this thread just assume Musk told a bunch of guys just to show up on TLSA time to do some code review. My suspicion is he helped setup some sort of consulting arrangement between the two companies to make it legal. Why is that so hard to believe?
He signed a contract waiving due diligence, agreeing to buy a company at a frankly ludicrous valuation compared to their stock price and then tried to back out saying they wouldn’t let him do due diligence.
Musk has in the last been officially sanctioned by the government for disobeying a direct order to...run things by Legal before putting them on Twitter.
He did it with SpaceX too and had to reach a settlement:
> The arrangement alarmed some longtime investors in SpaceX, including its largest outside backer, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, some of the people said. The investors learned in recent months that despite the diversion of SpaceX resources and staffing to the fledgling Boring startup, it was Musk who was in line to receive almost all of any future profits, these people said.
> In early 2018, The Boring Company was spun out from SpaceX and into a separate corporate entity.[27] Somewhat less than 10% of equity was given to early employees, and over 90% to Elon Musk. Subsequent concerns by SpaceX shareholders resulted in a December 2018 reallocation of 6% of The Boring Company's equity to SpaceX.
This is a little aggressive. The boring company is unproven technology in a perpetually capex heavy delivery model. If I was a spacex shareholder I’d probably value it at $0 in 2018, and strongly prefer it to be not associated with spacex at all.
Yes but on t-1 your 1% of spacex also represented 1% of boring company - which you were paying to devlop. At t+1 you owned 1% of spacex and 0% of boring company.
If you want to sell your shares for 0$ that is up to you. On the flip side, I am happy to look through your personal holdings, and anything I think is worth $0, take for myself. You wouldnt mind now would you?
Fair. I’ve worked on divesting on unprofitable unit for $0 that ended up being worth $XXM and the distraction elimination it caused for management way more than outweighed the multi year ROI on the process. But your point stands. The counter argument to your point is taken to the absurd extreme you should be like those people on TV buying entire abandoned storage lockers full of junk in the hope of finding _something_. The fact that the boring company seems to partially be working (and many people on HN would likely disagree) is rear view mirror luck. Look at Facebook and oculus now, for an analogy.
As an actual TSLA stock owner, I'm ok with this. It's a pretty trivial amount of work in the grand schema of things and it will probably be compensated to Tesla in some way.
Love him or hate him, without Musk Tesla would have been dead in the water as a company and its shares would have been worthless by now. Those stock owners knew what they did when they got into TSLA.
I don't think there's any doubt that Musk has grown Tesla significantly and had a very positive impact on the share price, but that's something he did in the past. You can't just accept everything he does in the future because of past wins. Tesla shareholders don't owe him anything. He's there to do a job, and if he's not doing it well then they should complain.
There's a lesson here for all of us. If you think you're safe in your role because of some good work you did in the past you are wrong. You were paid for that work. It's gone now. Hopefully your employer recognises your ability and talent and believes you'll do good work again, but of they believe it was luck, or that you're now too old and stuck in your ways then your previous victories won't help you at all.
What happened in the past is a sunk cost. Using it as a basis for future decisions while ignoring the present is a terrible, terrible way to move forwards.
Huh? Free national press time for tesla for a few thousand bucks of dev time send like a good deal, no? The fact we’re sitting here talking snot it pretty much proves that….
A day off improves an engineer's work-life balance in a small way. A day at a different company is different - it's a day that's neither productive to the original company nor restful to the engineer.
This is true, yet Musk has proven to be asynchronous. It could have second order consequences that actually benefit Tesla in the long term. Of course that's hypothetical but there could be some game theory here the truth is we don't know.
I’m sure it’s not reported (because it lessens the impact of the story), but I guarantee Twitter will compensate Tesla if Tesla resources are used. However, I bet it it’s contractor engineers that are used who might have also worked at Tesla.
When you invest in a company like Tesla, you're investing your money and your trust that ultimately there will be a return.
Would you be angry if he gave everyone a 2 week vacation as recognition for doing something good? Part of what motivates engineers is recognition, and being asked to work on some project outside the company for a few weeks is recognizing that your input as an engineer is that valued.
Can’t tell if you’re serious or not. Allegedly, Tesla engineers were sent to evaluate Twitter code. Why would Tesla investors want employees to work on their CEOs side investment.
Tesla is not privately owned. And if their employees are working to review twitter code, then Tesla stockholders should rightfully be mad that Tesla is paying employees to benefit Elon Musk's private ventures.
What is the Venn diagram of engineers who are aware of who is auditing Twitter, but not aware of Tesla? Or is the idea that people would want to join Tesla because they'll be asked to do code reviews of companies whose code bases they don't know?
They should be happy. Get your engineers out and about for a bit, dump on some disposable soon to be ex Twitter developers to boost their morale while at it. Genius.
If this sort of thing concerns you, you should already be pissed because it's not the first time it's happened.
Remember SolarCity? SolarCity was one of Elon's companies. SpaceX had bought a large number of solar bonds. One interpretation of this was to keep the company afloat. A court disagreed [1]. When SolarCity became insolvent it was bought out by Tesla.
So one of Elon's companies bought out another of Elon's companies to save the third Elon company.
There is this myth that exists of Elon being some kind of tech deity but there's a much better case to be made that he's simply a highly privileged technocrat who has quite successfully failed upwards his entire career [2].
I think most are missing that this is a code review + loyalty review.
For sure a software engineer from Tesla, or even a manager, can get an idea of how valuable/productive a coder is without fully understanding the code in detail. How many PRs? What does the code do? How was it reviewed? What value does it bring to stakeholders (users, business revenue)? Sure enough this way you can get a rough idea of how much work somebody does and if it is of any importance.
The loyalty part is in the timing: 30-60 days. A period with a lot of uncertainty for Twitter employees. The Musk takeover in the air but even if that would not follow through, there were already severe job cuts in the pipeline by Twitter's board.
If under those conditions you kept your head down and kept coding like a stoic, then you're a keeper.
I think that is actually a terrible way to measure the qualities of an engineer.
The most valuable engineers to me are the ones that can bring a thoughtful, elegant, well-implemented solution to a business problem. And typically that doesn't translate to lots of PRs, often is not appreciable from non-engineers and can not be easily judged in a few days. But their work almost always stands the test of time.
Before hiring/firing people it would seem prudent to me to at least spend some time getting to know the dynamics in the team, the challenges facing them and then evaluate who deserves to be there or not. I really don't understand what the big rush is here.
If I look at my company's gitlab statistics, the best engineers correlate with the top third of number of PRs not only in quality (perceived) but also in volume (number of open/merged PRs). I hear this a lot of the mythical top level engineer that thinks for 3 days and then bursts a small PR that changes the world, but I haven't seen it.
Mostly because for good things to get pushed out in the real world, they are broken apart in several iterations, they will have extra PRs for terraform changes, new tests, new monitors, etc. And those engineers will not only do their core work but also clean up a bug here and there during the week, while mostly never getting stuck on any single change. Curious if you have actually seen the top engineers in your organizations somehow being on the bottom by volume of PRs, because in my experience the differences sometimes are easily 3-5x the volume of PRs.
We do value small PRs and incremental changes that shouldn't take more than a day or less to develop before getting merged, so your mileage may vary if you let people create huge changes in one go (it has some disadvantages I personally don't like in terms of reliability)
I have seen it, but it really depends on the type of problems being solved and the overall team.
The most valuable team member generally fills in for whatever the team struggles with. Sometimes that’s making thousands of minor UI changes, other times it’s spending months writing 4kb of highly optimized code to avoid spending 10’s of millions replacing existing hardware.
The difficult bit when looking for people who will adjust to the needs of a team is by definition they aren’t working on the same things in different environments.
The best engineers I see farm out the easier issues and even some of the hard work. But they supervise and mentor. Counting lines of code disincentivizes mentoring.
We have several criteria that we look at, including impact on the team and outside the team, expertise, etc, which includes feedback from peers. But after a few years (been here over 6), with the output of that process and correlating to the statistics I came to the conclusion it was significant enough to casually look at. I never found an outlier in the direction of very little PRs but also very good impact on the team/company. For the performance criteria that affects promotions etc we don't actually look at it, this is something I do because I like to see my own statistics and after a while you remember who is usually where in the sorted list.
Thanks for sharing. I was legitimately curious. This is very interesting. I still have a healthy dose of skepticism, but it’s not like you’re stack ranking based on PR frequency or size, and the fact it’s not an input to your function might be why it has the signal you see. Kind of a catch-22 for lazy managers.
Yeah, we've tried to be reeeeeaaally careful in not letting this become important for evaluating performance due to all the pitfalls it has and how it can be gamed. End of the day nothing beats actually reviewing the PRs themselves and trusting the feedback from peers in my opinion.
It's only useful in debugging a bad situation. Larger PRs are associated with slower development velocity. However, it's not clear if that's because larger PR tend to come from inexperienced developers or experienced developers are making significantly more complex changes.
Anecdata: It took me 4 weeks to write a 250 net new lines of code line PR. Normally, I'll write about 1k lines of code per week. I ended up having a tasks that significantly changed security models and required a lot of small, distributed changes.
I haven’t seen much info regarding their setup, aside from the bits about Pants and Bazel.
Are those actually the upstream repositories, though? And is it known how they interact with them?
Google has Copybara [1], which allows portions of a monorepo to live outside as an entirely separate repository without the need for things like Git submodules. It supports synchronization of histories, pull requests, path and file transformations, etc.
In that sense, something like Copybara would allow them to, relatively, easily open source those bits, receive outside commits, and then sync the changes back to the monorepo.
I think most are missing that this is a code review + loyalty review.
I think most people realize that it's more than a code review, in fact I suspect that it's such a transparent loyalty review is exactly why so many people's feathers got ruffled.
For sure a software engineer from Tesla, or even a manager, can get an idea of
how valuable/productive a coder is without fully understanding the code in
detail.
Yeah, maybe. But Musk is asking SWEs to print 50 pages of their code so he can personally can review it. Any halfway competent manager or exec should be able to see this is not a good way of reviewing performance in earnest.
Counterpoint: what other CEO would be involved in low level stuff like looking at code or personally interviewing newly acquired employees?
Things like that are beneath most CEOs.
This is exactly what makes Musk a different (and better) CEO. When needed he'll sleep on the factory floor and help fix manufacturing issues and when needed he'll look at the code.
Plus, I assume the code is not the biggest part of the interview but provides context for something to talk about.
Musk interviewed ALL of the early SpaceX employees (not exclusively, but he was one of the interviewers).
Those who were interviewed by him say that he's very good at figuring out if someone is good or a bulshitter.
So I assume he's doing the interviewers at Twitter for the same reason: to separate chaff from the wheat
For a junior engineer sure this is probably a reasonable gauge of your productivity. As you become more and more senior number of PRs and LOCs becomes a worse and worse measurement. This is basic software engineeting.
> What does the code do? How was it reviewed? What value does it bring to the stakeholders
These things are impossible to accurately assess without a lot of context. Context which outside engineers are entirely lacking.
If the accounts of what Musk is doing are an accurate reflection of his leadership -- and based on accounts we have heard from Tesla and Space X in the past it sounds like they are -- he is a terrible leader and his companies are successful despite that deficiency.
The other part of it is Musk probably has good rapport with his engineers from Tesla. There's that trust vs. twitter engineers at the moment may be seen in the eyes of Musk as an unknown, undoubtedly everyone has their guard up because of all the uncertainty.
"The note continues, “Please come prepared with code as a backup to review on your own machines with Elon.” Later, people inside the company reported that Tesla engineers were in fact reviewing the code."
Actually, I will stick up for the use of anonymous sources, even by a partisan rag like WaPo.
That's the only way the truth can get out, sometimes. When the official sources are all corp speak BS, then unnamed "people inside the company" are what's left.
Inescapably, you have to trust that the paper is not just making it up. The more they use the news to push their politics, the less people will trust them, unfortunately.
There’s one more thing: Elon uses interviews of people to learn about the code base / product. He surrounds himself with people who can answer the technical details, that’s why he knows so much.
Galileo’s interview at SpaceX shows his thinking and way of working quite well.
Tesla is a hardware company not known for stellar software. Both its self-driving/driver assist capabilities are suspect, and the functionality of the giant tablet UI could be better. You hear a lot of requests to be able to use Apple CarPlay in Teslas.
Teslas are probably better than the vast majority of car companies, particularly the UI of the touch controls and system, but it still seems weird to me to have engineers from a company perform a review in an area that they aren't known for. Honestly, I would assume Twitter has better software engineers.
For those who don't remember, one example of just how badly they can fuck up their software, the operating system on Teslas for a number of years was based on a default Ubuntu that wrote logs which destroyed the SSD. Exceeded the total write wear leveling endurance after just 1-2 years of use of the car. Required total motherboard replacement on a great number of cars, because of course the ssd was permanently soldered down.
Yeah, this did happen to my S. It was covered out-of-warranty because the TSA said it would be a good idea if Tesla covered it out-of-warranty. Tesla concurred.
This was such a basic, newbie mistake that everyone I knew who had ever worked even minimally in embedded couldn't believe they were that incompetent and inexperienced.
Telecom systems and ISP people were also astonished, as it is quite normal for core switching and routing equipment to have a very limited write endurance solid state boot and OS storage device. For a long time very serious $300,000+ routers booted off compact flash cards, back in the day.
Yep. I worked on those myself and participated in the usual pre-DVT destructive testing of our embedded flash devices specifically to count core dumps and config commits that the device could survive..
“Better software engineers” to anyone who does software engineering is a joke. It’s an totally unquantifiable measure, and some people use dumb metrics like leetcode capabilities as some IQ test.
There absolutely _are_ better and worse software engineers.
There may not be an objective metric to discern a difference between two people of similar skill, but for sure it is easy to tell John Carmack from a junior developer with two years of experience.
Some Tesla engineers will be better than Twitter engineers and vice versa, but the Tesla engineers aren't there as a bastion of better software engineering.
They're a "trusted" external party that Elon can use to get an unbiased assessment of what's going on internally at twitter and get a better picture of what's valuable and what's not. If you ask a senior engineer at Twitter the same questions you'll get a very different set of answers, not necessarily wrong answers but a different perspective. Unless Elon's an idiot he'll be doing both.
I think they are there to figure out "the lay of the land". I don't think they'd be assessing code line by line. Just there to figure out how everything is connected, what the ongoing projects are, what is on fire etc. done by people Musk personally knows and presumably trusts.
This seems ridiculous to me. Self driving cars are cutting edge tech. Social media algos are not for the most part, certainly not Twitters. Top talent goes to wherever cutting edge developments are. If I wanted to participate in developing the future I would choose Tesla over Twitter any day.
That said, if you can't solve a random leetcode hard problem on a whiteboard in 40 mins, and you don't mind working 60+ hours a week, and you are still not a doofus, Tesla will probably hire you! :)
Twitter does some cutting edge ai research, they are unique (just like meta and google and some other firms) in that the challenges they face at the scale they do are unique, and need unique solutions. If you think "social media algos" are a) not cutting edge or b)all Twitter does technically, then you are incredibly misinformed. It's not just Twitter, Google and Meta are also doing incredible research in AI and are among the biggest contributers at any platform you choose (conference papers, libraries, datasets, architectures)
What self-driving car are you talking about? I’d bet Twitter has had more success in computational neuroscience with their structured tweets than Tesla has had with broken roads.
Not like this. Mostly what happens is a constant barrage of meetings where you present projects, roadmaps, timelines to a variety of people/teams. This seems like its focused on individual "evaluation" so its likely a layoff effort.
This was not a takeover by another company tho, which makes the Tesla participation super shady considering is a publicly trading company. Even if they're not participating in this as Tesla employees it would normally be a firing offense and compliance violation for a normal CEO to take people from one company to work on his other private company and allow the name to be publicized.
what a waste of everyone's time. as a manager, I can tell you that even my smartest engineers go through highs and lows in their career and there are days when they push out code like there's no tomorrow and days when they don't push out anything because you know there's life outside of work that affects them (their dog passed away or their wife filed for divorce or their daughter is sick and was taken to ER etc). An arbitrary 60 days look back makes no sense.
It's especially dumb _after_ buying a company to be acting like the developers are so incompetent across the board that they could be judged on this criteria. Elon just bought all this IP -- now he's going to make extremely rash decisions about who is contributing and who is not based on this very flawed methodology?
I once reviewed code written by an outsourcing place in India. That is when I realized the difference in quality between the hemispheres. It was riddled with hard coded unescaped SQL strings. Old habits die hard for many of us. Especially if we are here on H1B's.
The client then hired an American .NET shop to recode their flailing PHP code to feel trust and safety with respect to their products offering.
Let's just say I am not surprised at this code check. It is the right thing to do, especially with Twitters performance. They all just got complacent. Happens to all the big and stuffy companies.
Meta also needs a shake up. Bezos should come out of retirement and take the helm from that child who is running it now. Before he sinks the total ship.
I don’t think it’s about the hemispheres, but about outsourcing. The developers I know who work for outsourcing companies are the less skilled devs I know. Also the pay is lower and the conditions are worse. Zero incentives to become better at your job. Working for a product company is a game changer.
I think so too, I'm impressed that he wants to personally look at code at all. His ability to evaluate it deeply is not relevant, one thing is for sure: he can ask deeper questions than if he had no code to talk about. That alone is a big bonus when you need to do an evaluation of a person, having something concrete to talk about.
Isn't there some violation of fiduciary duty here? IIRC, Musk personally bought Twitter, but he only owns 17% of Telsa. Isn't having Tesla engineers work on his personal project a lot like a middle manager assigning his subordinates to work on a personal side-gig project of his?
"The note continues, “Please come prepared with code as a backup to review on your own machines with Elon.” Later, people inside the company reported that Tesla engineers were in fact reviewing the code."
Can anyone verify this story?
we already have "Pranksters posing as laid-off Twitter employees trick media outlets: ‘Rahul Ligma’"
What makes me smile is the idea that Google searches related to "How do I print the code I committed in the last 60 days" must be shooting up on Google Trends.
What makes me chuckle is my memory of spending 2/3s of my time on a coding project in college to find a syntax colorizer I liked for the printed submission of an assignment... and I spent $1.50 printing the code out on a color laser printer with some pretty fancy paper.
Don't forget `how do I hide the code I've deleted in the last 60 days`.
As another pointed out, I would expect Musk's crew to be looking for ways in which TWTR people put their thumbs on the scale to benefit the "correct" viewpoints/ideologies/mindsets over others.
Exactly… it was published that many engineers at Twitter haven’t been doing anything useful/sitting around for a long time now. Time to cut the fat.
Moreover, seems like a bash Elon thread
The weirdest of the many, many crazy takes is that using TSLA people to review TWTR code is a "conflict of interest". As obviously stupid and blatantly "I'm going to us a phrase that I've heard but don't understand" as that is, I've seen multiple people make this claim.
It's a style of humour unto itself. The lack of humour is itself humorous. The real question is whether or not he thinks he is being directly humorous or ironically humorous. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the former. Plus he's rich so people probably laugh at his jokes regardless.
It is a stupid action. We do the code review all the time, but we do review the commits on Github. It is unreasonable to print it on the paper. I believe it is just a marketing tactic of Elon.
You don't just look at the code, you do a "git blame" and see who wrote it and then discuss the code with them. The Twitter engineers are likely being interviewed to see if they should keep their job. Evaluating engineering staff first hand is an important step to evaluating a company's portfolio of products upon taking it over.
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 stored, how the various components communicate together, how everything scales globally, and all the related components. Things like Twitter are not complex for the application (that is trivial to implement) but for what it takes to run that trivial applications with that kind of numbers.
Looking only at the code is stupid, since code is fairly trivial to rewrite, while doing infrastructure changes is something difficult, costly and in some cases even impossible.
> a team of 10 good programmers in a month can probably rewrite everything
unless you scope-down "everything" to the point of triviality, that is ludicrously underestimating the intrinsic complexity of twitter's product surface, and all the plumbing and necessary tools that lie beneath
Probably not as hard as it seems, Amazon does this regularly with the concept of 2 pizza team. The real challenge is figuring out what is the 20% of Twitter that drives 80% of revenue. Probably basic Twitter posting and ads, and whatever fraud/bot prevention is needed to keep running smoothly.
why would you throw away 20% of your revenue? Obviously a lot of functionality is there to chase marginal percentages of revenue, but it's still worthwhile at Twitter scale.
Its not stupid because he knows and trusts his engineers at Tesla. He knows nobody at Twitter. Hes probably trying to get an understanding of whats going on without relying on a bunch of employees who might not like him. It takes a while to build an employee base you trust, certainly in his situation.
I believe you’re missing the point. Random code reviews performed by people in a whole different sector aren’t the best way to find out “what’s going on”.
In my career I did a few rescue operations when I as external expert was asked to come in and understand why project was failing. Random code review is amazing tool to understand quality of engineering talent and process maturity.
My process was to schedule 2h block and then start with pulling random diff. I checked if engineer can explain diff purpose from both technical and business perspective. Then dive in and assess understanding of code base by asking about random functions/lines. Follow up if I do not understand something. Why was it done this way? Did you consider other options? What are pro cons? How long did it take you to write this? Who reviews it? Any approvals were needed? What was process to ship it?
You will be surprised how often sr/principal engineers are clueless and dev process is full clusterfuck when people copy/paste without understanding what they are doing.
You very quickly understand what’s going on. You do not need to talk to every engineer - random representative sample is good enough. You do not need to have domain understanding too - though it’s obviously very helpful.
Those who think this is a code review for the sake of looking for bugs or architecture issues are missing the point.
It's an intimidation factor on Musk's part. Are you willing to play along and show your work? Or are you going to huff and puff and complain about it? Maybe you're hiding something, or maybe you're not going to be a cooperative resource going forward. Now you're on the cut list.
Maybe the code will get glanced at for a moment. Most of us can tell well written code from spaghetti without running it through a compiler. But still, that's not the prime objective here.
We don't know who they people he brought over are. It's doubtful that they are people who've never done anything but write code for Tesla. Were I in Elon's shoes, I could easily imagine digging up some employees with prior relevant experience and asking them to just browse through the codebase and give a rough appraisal of how tight it is. You can tell a lot by looking at basic things like coding standards, state of source control, development environment, testing strategies, what kind of code reviews are happening, how modular the code base is, what the service architecture looks like, etc. I've worked in a number of industries and good code and tight systems look different from bad code and sloppy systems. He's probably not looking for anything specific, but rather to get some understanding of the state of engineering there.
They don't really need to find out anything meaningful. They are basically just putting Twitter employees on notice that they may be going deep into the details when assessing where the company is at and what changes they might want to make.
It may not be the best way, but I could certainly see it having some value.
Twitter has a ton of home grown tooling that a company it size wouldn't have if it was started today.
Is the team of people maintaining their custom stream processing engine really going to say "You could probably just replace this whole team by using Flink"? Repeat for their custom NoSql DB, their batch processing engine, their RPC framework etc.
I never said it was the best way, but it may be the most viable option. And you dont have Tesla engineers personally go through the code, you have them sit down with twitter engineers and have them walk through how it works. Its probably a general understanding exercise.
It's the job of an incoming CEO to (1) gather information from the existing staff, (2) build relationships (and trust) with them, (3) use that information to help inform/tailor strategy, and (4) identify key individuals that can help execute said strategy.
If he needed an outside consult to confirm or refute suspected problems, that's ok, but that's not what happened here. He started off this relationship adversarially, and first impressions matter. This one is going to take some effort to repair. And if it isn't actively repaired, it's going to be a bumpy ride before he starts seeing good progress on his vision.
As someone who has always thought Twitter is stupid, I'm glad Musk bought it and is shaking things up. Both possible outcomes are interesting - either Twitter finally becomes not stupid, or even the worlds richest man and greatest tech entrepreneur couldn't make Twitter not stupid.
I'm curious as to how existing Twitter employees get compensated after the sale. Do they have to stay for some amount of time to collect payouts on their shares?
These actions only make logical sense if the goal is to make life unpleasant for employees, and get a lot of them to quit.
Anyone holding stock just got a massive bump above the market value(3-4x?) after Elon overpaid for it. If an employee already sold all their RSUs, well, they probably got nothing.
Probably just a third party that Elon would trust to corroborate answers to questions. He probably hasn't made many friends in the Twitter building, and may not take what he's told at face value.
Does Twitter have a large, observable quality problem. If there is one, I never noticed it myself but I’m not a particularly active user.
I think their main problem is they thought their role was thought shaping via sneaky algorithms. I think the main thing Elon should be looking to remove is those that fundamentally do not believe in free speech, since the culture of the company has changed so materially.
Ex: With all the Kanye meltdown stuff going on, which is "general interest", Twitter has been amplifying the tiny % of antisemitic voices in the black community and mixing them into my feed. That is quite distracting for a site I use for various tech industries' news during breaks. (Common use case of Twitter, and big $ for them.) In contrast, a site like LI will only rarely allow, and more importantly, freely & widely amplify that sort of garbage - I can list the exceptions I've seen.
Jack Dorsey believes in injecting both sides to a conv even when one is fringe intolerant nonsense on something far from the topics a user primarily cares about.
See his NPR interview on boosting both sides over in-network moderation in these cases.. which some not so mysterious reason correlates with engagement-boosting algorithms. (Double speak for: trolls drive clicks.) Listening to racist diatribes and being algorithmically nudged to 'engage' with it is ridiculous
I'm hopeful there is a "HN" like mode which is actually heavily moderated where only constructive, non-inflammatory discussion is allowed. I wouldn't use this all the time, but having one button to tune out all of the noise would be cool.
Twitter has reportedly got the opposite problem to Facebook. Facebook was move fast and break stuff, at Twitter they've got such a beleif that Twitter is amazing that they're incredibly resistant to change anything. So it's not that the stuff they do is bad, it's just that where other companies try lots of new stuff, Twitter didn't. That has actually changed a bit since Jack was forced out, but still, they move very slowly.
I think people are really overthinking this free speech thing with Musk, the vast majority of the engineers don't really get input into the moderation policy, and the level of cuts that Musk is rumoured to make are far beyond just removing any anti-free speech people.
Sounds fun on both ends, and I don't mean that sarcastically, assuming as a Twitter dev I get the chance to defend my code. But in the end I think this will just point to the same thing devs always holler about which is technical debt.
I'd be more interested to see the difference between the code and the engineers signaling technical debt in areas via email or chat. No idea how to quantify that though.
I have no insight into the Twitter codebase, but I presume it is vast.
I would think so just based on how many programmers they employ.
I wonder if their auto moderation system has a larger code base than the
main product.
I dont see how programmers can audit / evaluate / review the code in what
the article seems to me to state it was done / will be done fast.
It doesn't seem like a review, and certainly not an audit. My guess would be that it's to get a sense of what is being worked on. If the Tesla engineers have been brief of the plan for Twitter in the future, then they could mostly just sit back and assess if the projects and code presented is relevant to that future.
It is a little weird to not just use the version control, if the plan is to fire the least productive members of the staff, so it's my guess that the plan slightly different. Those who are on their way out are the least talented and those working on project that Elon Musk deems irrelevant. That also explains not using version control, maybe those project still only exist on the developers laptops.
Musk may have the exact same questions that many on HN have had: What are Twitter doing with 7500 employees? Still I don't see them reviewing every single developer, that would be a vast of time. Part of it is most likely just a power move, staged to show that "Musk is taking charge of Twitter".
I don't they're doing code reviews to understand the quality of the code. I think he's getting a few people he can trust to know their way around the architecture, so tomorrow if some employee decides it's a righteous cause to down the service, they still have some semblance of control and are better prepared to troubleshoot.
tech stacks, especially of this magnitude run on processes, some machine some human some rube goldberg taped together combination of the two. Code is simply an artifact. 'Evaluating the code', sounds like a rather strange way to appraise the state of twitter's tech.
Maybe Musk is planning something completely different with the Twitter tech.
Intercar / Interplanetary communication?
https://app.finclout.io/t/A3lkgnE
So the developers from Tesla are engineers, but the devs from Twitter are just "workers". So is also "on-site code evaluation". Interesting word choice from the Post, whose owner is a known critic/competitor of Musk.
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.
I wonder if the main goal of doing this isn't to judge people by "who has the most PRs" or "who's contributed the highest number of LOC", but to see who can explain what they work on vs who can't
That's probably what it is, just bc someone who's new to a codebase probably won't figure it out overnight, but the clarity of an IC's explanation could indicate their involvement
I don’t quite understand why everyone here is so defensive about what seems like a pretty common practice in a takeover.
Do all developers have equal skill and productivity?
Should developers pulling down FAANG-like salaries be given infinite slack? “Oh I see you’ve only attended meetings and haven’t written a line of code for a month. I’m so glad the company I invested $44B into is paying you $50K a month!”
It’s not uncommon in the wider industry to have to re-apply for your own job.
People fail and aren’t rehired because all too often they weren’t actually that productive.
That could be their own fault, or the organisation’s fault for over hiring.
Either way, they’re dead weight and the only way to profitability is to make them redundant.
It’s tough, but this is what capitalism is all about! Work is not a charity…
The “idea of Elon being flanked by his Tesla engineers reviewing Twitter code is laughable,”
Laughable indeed. I suspect they're more valuable judging the skills of the developers because if they were actually evaluating the code that would be the most absurd part of this while affair.
>Inside Twitter, in a highly unusual arrangement, engineers from Musk-led Tesla were examining the company’s code as the tech executive sought the input of his technical experts he trusted.
I would have expected they already did that prior to the acquisition.
Obviously this isn't a technology acquisition. This was clearly for the platform and buying the existing eye balls on it. Technology can be secondary and improved a lot more easily than trying to capture the cultural relevance that Twitter has.
Or buy it off someone else after they start it, and then use them for non-consensual buggery (in the metaphorical sense, since only one of them is blonde enough for Musk's tastes).
I would make these kinds of comments about any CEO who comes into a large tech company and makes the engineers print out diffs on paper.
It is ridiculous, and frankly I would be willing to wager that fewer people would defend this practice if this were a different CEO at a different company.
>Ha, there's at least as many fanboys here. It's not a lopsided discussion.
In this particular discussion? Do you see the amount of vitriol? I am genuinely surprised to see the behavior in this thread. As if Elon Musk were some sort of rationality time-bomb implanted in the majority of those commenting.
Musk isn't an average Joe and not dumb, unexperienced or something like that.
The point to accept here is:
He is outstanding in what he's doing. In everything. He is a business man and doing everything for getting the most out of that.
No matter if it's his "who pay for Ukraine/Starlink" -> he didn't get the 20th of millions from the government, but he tried it and in the end getting more funds from others.
Or his "lay of 75 percent" - he try to save some money which Twitter is burning ever since. He tries, with the help of his engineers, to find out whether it's possible to lay of so much and still having the company running..
So, the best would be here to ask why this way and not another? All the guys and gals are knowing what's happening. They are the best what could happen to Musk. So, this will be profitable in 6 weeks.
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.
Being rich has almost nothing to do with your ability, talent, or intelligence. It the single most important factor is luck. This is why you often find CEOs looking down on those with PhDs, because they have an inflated sense of self-worth for being "more rich." When in reality a PhD is a very difficult test of your work ethic and creativity, and being a successful CEO is a matter of luck and connections.
Was it lucky that he happened to start what became PayPal with some others? Was it lucky that he took on an Electric car company and turned it into what it is today? Was it luck that he happened to stumble into launching reusable rockets into space?
Are you going to go further on the whole Paypal situation? The fact that he was running the company into the ground, had to be ousted and replaced all of which occurred before Paypal saw any success?
The 'luck' there is that he got removed and replaced by someone far more successful, but retained a large share of stock.
> Was it lucky that he happened to start what became PayPal with some others?
Yes, it was luck. You could say it was 95% luck, because of course the product has to exist to get lucky so it's not entirely luck. If you made a copy of PayPal tomorrow, would you be rich? What if 100 people did? A thousand? You will misattribute this to idea that there must have been _something_ special about PayPal, but the reality is it was luck.
> Was it lucky that he took on an Electric car company and turned it into what it is today?
This one has less to do with luck, because Elon is already very,very rich by the time he is working with Tesla, same thing for SpaceX. However, remember that prior example about your starting up a copy of PayPal? Tesla is not the only electronic car company, and I would personally never recommend someone buy a Tesla, there are simply better electric cars.
So at this point, it is, in my opinion, hero worship, marketing, and giant coffers.
>Being rich has almost nothing to do with your ability, talent, or intelligence.
So we should imagine that most self made rich people's IQ distribution is completely matching the general populations, and similarly for their work ethic, no?
Musk is not "self made rich", his family was already quite wealthy. But I'd guess the distribution is pretty close for rich people in general. Consider some of the outstandingly stupid rich people out there like the "MyPillow" guy or Donald Trump.
Edit: Interestingly, one thing that is more prevalent among the rich is "dark triad" traits[1]. Make of that what you will.
His family wasn’t wealthy, unless you mean well off in the upper middle class sense. His father gave him something like 15k to start his first company.
So his dad gave him $250,000,000,000? Is that really what you're saying?
As you seems to view them as such, I'll say that only a fool under-estimates their enemy. The wise man loves and respects his enemy, and gives credit where credit is due.
Lindell built a large consumer enterprise worth almost 1/4 of a billion dollars. He's had a rough life, struggling with addiction (not unlike Hunter Biden) but got clean and built massively successful business.
Trump built a global brand worth billions on the back of a real estate company worth but a fraction.
Musk is the richest man on planet earth for very clear reasons.
None of those successes were accidents or even luck. It takes vision, foresight, ability, talent, persistence, and hard work to get there. None of the aforementioned traits are traits of stupid people. And none of those three men can be considered stupid. The virtue of their accomplishments are obvious.
Ergo, if they are stupid while being hyper-successful, what does that say about those who are abject failures?
A fool is a genius in his own mind, seeking superiority by bringing other down, yet a genius builds something of value while lifting others up.
Trump, Lindell, and Musk are successful precisely because they are NOT stupid and have built something of value.
What have you built?
You do realize that the three traits in the "dark triad" are also present in people who live on the streets, right? It is almost like every human being is different.
We could use his coffin/capsule for it. A sad, but poignantly dignified monument that shall serve as a warning to others. I suggest the epitaph: "We repeatedly told you that Mars was uninhabitable."
Edit: or perhaps more relevantly: "well, we tried to but you fired us."
It's not a matter of never try, it's more of a matter of what's even practical. Inhabiting Mars is not as simple as just landing a rocket on there with a bunch of people and materials. Space travel requires immense physical training, enormous costs just to get into space, plus there's the issue of handling emergencies if anything goes wrong while on Mars.
It's an idea that's so far off in terms of the technology that we'd need, and there's so many more useful things that are closer to within reach that are still similar pursuits that would be more valuable investments (i.e. asteroid mining, advanced satellite technology, etc.). Making incremental progress is great, but there's still the question of "what would we even gain from going to Mars?". There's no ore that'd make sense to mine, making/terraforming a civilization there when we can't even make one in Death Valley (which already has oxygen) is preposterous, and tourism would be impossible due to the physical limitations of space travel.
It's not that we should "never try", it's that there's no practical reason (right now at least) _to_ try.
You could go back in time before other countries were discovered and make a lot the same arguments about heading out into the ocean on a boat.
Technology will never get to the stage it needs to in order to say live on Mars (or anywhere beyond earth) unless we actively venture out and try to do so.
I think that's the point. It actually doesn't matter if Elon fails in getting anyone to step foot on Mars - by believing it to be possible, he's creating a kind of self-fulfilled prophecy.
Without anyone trying there's 100% chance it'll never happen, and by the time you need it to happen it'll be too late.
Here's a difference: you or I could get on a boat with little difficulty besides sea sickness and wobbly legs. On a rocket, you or I would die or suffer from other physical ailments caused by simply being in space and in different gravitational environments for extended periods of time. This isn't an unknown, it's a known.
On the ocean, you could land on a island, fish at sea, or be lucky and have rain provide water. In space, you have nothing, and guaranteed nothing for weeks, months at a time. Again, this is not an unknown, this is a known.
We're just simply a large number of significant innovations behind where going to Mars is unfeasible, physically and monetarily (namely, human physical/mental limits in space travel, time, supplies/oxygen, emergency response, funding (think of how expensive a single un-manned mission is), etc.)
It would be akin to telling the vikings to make an airplane. They would first need to discover engines, improved metallurgy, electricity, and a thousand other things before it would be possible and practical. The idea of a flying machine has been around for thousands of years, but only in the last hundred or so was it actually possible, and only the last 75 or so practical for an average commercial person. And even then, airplanes can always get more oxygen because they're within Earth's atmosphere.
To make one thing clear, I'm excited about the prospect of interspace travel (how could anyone not be?!) But, Mars as a goal is _so_ far off that it obscures and hides the reality of the steps and innovations that we'd need to make along the way before we can seriously make an effort to do anything productive on Mars that wouldn't be easier, cheaper, safer, and more effective closer to Earth.
She later tweeted "Just following orders" on the Musk's tweet "comedy is now legal on Twitter".
Are we sure this news is even real? I have several friends at Twitter who said they didn't hear anything about that.
Leah Culver is also the one who bought the pinked painted lady for $3m. She has the fuck you money and doesn't really need any job.
This is not the first time for journalists to fall for pranks either. Just yesterday there were pranksters who pretend to be fired from twitter, and the journalists ate it up big time.
Anyone who can buy a 3m house has a fuck you money.
This is 600k downpayment with 20k-30k payment per month for the next 30 years.
She put the house back on the market 3 YEARS LATER because she decided not to go ahead with renovation. She originally planned to spend 3m more on renovation but pandemic hit.
So, she had to pay mortgage for 3 years just to put it back on the market at the same price.
Oh that house she bought is her second house... because she planned to spend 3m more on renovation but apparently pandemic hit and the plan failed, so she is selling it 3 years later.
She is not cash poor by any mean. Having 3m after tax for renovation is kinda insane.
I would guess it is not so much an indepth architecture review as it is a review on specific topics such as business rules implemented for content moderation and bot detection algorithms.
If those engineers worked on the distributed services that Tesla uses, this makes sense. But if Elmo just picked a handful of rando engineers to flank him, it makes no sense at all.
I don't see anyone discussing what seems, to me, the most likely explanation.
Printing off the code and reviewing code are complete side-shows to construct a narrative in the media. You know, his forte as a full-time twitterer (in between smoking dope, playing computer games, jerking off, and impregnating women with whom he is at the other end of a power gradient).
Then he's going to purge all the disloyal people and people who are doing stuff he's not interested in, so he can lower the payroll and establish political control of the corporate structure. His other forte as Mr Sociopath McMoneybags... (although in fairness he had no chance, when his parents christened him with that name, nominative determinism and all)
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.
Tesla has very mediocre computer vision AI. I am not an ML engineer, but how does that skill set translate to probably a series of ML programs optimized for very specific problems - for account take overs, for spam, for hate speech, for bots, for profanity, payment frauds, identity frauds. It’s not like computer vision suddenly makes you an expert on what features will maximize precision and recall for a spam detector
From the company that gave you "cars that crash themselves and hit kids on bikes" comes a review of software from a company that gave you "disinformation that can topple governments".
This is really a drama a publicity stunt , what it really is a deal bankrolled by the right wing / ultra conservative class that is ok with and even desires to put down other human beings based on their race or religion and do it freely without getting banned.Twitter is the battleground where this played out.
> 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 laughable,” the person said.
It is laughable, and it's just another signal that Elon has no clue what he's doing. Imagine how farcical the whole thing felt to anyone involved who isn't him.
> Distributed systems, the large-scale and spread-out network that Twitter is composed of, are not the automaker’s specialty, the person said.
You can giggle along with the anonymous source who wasn't involved if you wish but Tesla collects a rather large amount of telemetry and has all manner of micro services crap internally just like Twitter.
I imagine the Twitter codebase itself is a farcical
Rube Goldberg machine. Insert your own how many engineers does it take to change lightbulb jokes.
As part of that process, some engineers received a calendar invite Friday, telling them: “Stop printing, please be ready to show your recent code,” a reference to engineers being asked to show the code they had written in the last 30 to 60 days on their computers.
Sounds like he knows exactly what he is doing. I'd do just that. For an unfathomable amount of the people working at twitter the answer will be zero lines of code.
> For an unfathomable amount of the people working at twitter the answer will be zero lines of code.
True, but an accusatory calendar invite still isn't a good way to do this. He could find out himself from the commit history/JIRA tickets, with the additional benefit of not putting people on the defensive and making a poor first impression. Then again, relationship building isn't really his style, so this doesn't surprise me.
Heaven forbid the people who show up with blank printed pages be made to feel defensive. Relationship might suffer so much they might just have to break up permanently.
The problem of course is not annoying the underperformers, but you want to avoid annoying the valuable engineers who get things done and keep the company running. There's plenty of demand for engineers -- if they want, they could find another job in a week where they don't have to deal with hostile management. Treat people well. Assume the best and let them prove you right, rather than assuming the worst and making them prove you wrong.
Musk clearly dislikes fragile corporate cultures. He's going to destroy and rebuild Twitter's culture, that is very clearly his intent. I don't know how much more obvious it could be. He'll rebuild it in a way that he prefers companies to operate, staffed with the kind of people he prefers (whether anyone else likes that or not).
I mean, you're not wrong, but I was more replying to the "I'd do just that" sentence which seems to imply the scorched earth approach is a good thing. We don't need people going around emulating Musk.
> You can giggle along with the anonymous source who wasn't involved if you wish but Tesla collects a rather large amount of telemetry and has all manner of micro services crap internally just like Twitter.
Yes, collecting telemetry is quite equivalent to making a globally-distributed, many-to-many messaging platform available to everyone in real time.
> For an unfathomable amount of the people working at twitter the answer will be zero lines of code.
One of our most productive engineers left the company with negative several hundred thousand lines of code impact over his career. What would he print out?
Is the globally-distributed many-to-many messaging platform web scale?
> One of our most productive engineers left the company with negative several hundred thousand lines of code impact over his career. What would he print out?
Certainly deleting twitter code is even better than writing twitter code. Zen like nothingness is really neither here nor there, now is it?
Depends. I haven’t written a line of code in a month either. That’s because I’m planning what code needs to be written in the next five years. I’ve found a lot of good engineers spend more of their time in Google Docs than they might in their IDE.
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 pretending that he's clueless in this domain just want to feel schadenfreude.
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.
> But PayPal was running Oracle on IBM bigiron machines even after Musk left them.
Oracle on IBM big iron is a pragmatic (but expensive) way to achieve a highly vertically scalable database platform. Not trendy at all but also not a bad technology position to be in, even now.
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 think that's all besides the point. Does anyone think any of Twitter's problems are related to code quality? Literally go read the unit test suite and you'll what it does and if it works. If he just wants to cut heads, cut them from verticals you want to exit (whatever they might be). What the hell could he possibly achieve with this stunt? It feels more like the old cliche about your first day at prison where you should pick the toughest guy and beat him up to establish dominance.
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?
If that line itself isn't enough to tell you he's full of shit you have hopelessly fallen for the myth of his Tony Stark-like brilliance. Do you honestly think he contributes any meaningful engineering work at SpaceX? If he didn't own SpaceX, what about his history suggests he could even be an engineering intern there?
SpaceX is successfully solving engineering problems. If Elon is surrounded by yes men, that means he's always right. That he probably isn't always right implies he doesn't surround himself solely with sycophants.
It's possible to be a sycophant who manages the politics of appeasing a narcissist while also solving problems on your own and letting said narcissist take the credit.
If you’re the kind of narcissist who can attract that kind of sycophant you’ll have no problem getting investors. And no problem getting employees either.
>If that line itself isn't enough to tell you he's full of shit you have hopelessly fallen for the myth of his Tony Stark-like brilliance. Do you honestly think he contributes any meaningful engineering work at SpaceX? If he didn't own SpaceX, what about his history suggests he could even be an engineering intern there?
Every day there are a lot of software developers on this very website (in this very thread) and elsewhere, with no professional engineering background, nor uphold similar standards and professionalism, who refer to themself as engineer.
Yes? Many, many people who don’t work for musk or have a financial interest in him being competent have said in interviews that he has a deep engineering understanding of the rockets and especially their engines.
Most people have shit understanding of rockets. There's plenty of otherwise very intelligent people that do not have any grasp of rocketry. A competent amateur rocket enthusiast can easily sound like a "rocket scientist" to someone otherwise uninvolved with rocketry.
Additionally, anyone being interviewed about Musk can't be said not to have a financial interest in him. Musk doesn't hang out with nerdy rocket scientists in his spare time. He rubs elbows with fellow rich people.
It doesn't take much actual knowledge of rocketry to sound super knowledgeable about rocketry to someone with no knowledge of rocketry. Musk isn't a nincompoop but I've yet to hear anything out of his mouth about rocketry that suggests he could intern at his own company, let alone be seriously considered their chief engineer.
Watch elons multiple hour long interviews with The Everyday Astronaut about rocket design and tell me with a straight face that he has little knowledge about rockets.
Or don't because it will destroy your narrative and you would rather live in your own bubble of delusion.
What a weird thing to say. I can evaluate any code. If it’s code I’m unfamiliar with it takes longer, and the result is more variable, but it’s far from impossible.
It’s certainly more reliable than the evaluation of the person whose job depends on it being evaluated as correct.
Given 24-48 hours in a gigantic tech company’s code base made up of dozens of teams and hundreds (thousands?) of logical services? No, I couldn’t tell you the “quality” of the code.
Someone who doesn’t understand engineering at that scale would presume it’s the structure of the if statements. And sure, if that’s what you’re looking for, print out some lines and let a person lacking all context take a look.
> Given 24-48 hours in a gigantic tech company’s code base made up of dozens of teams and hundreds (thousands?) of logical services? No, I couldn’t tell you the “quality” of the code.
You could probably call out the bullshitters, though. They aren't refactoring the code base.
I would guess anyone calling someone out 48 hours into a huge codebase is themselves the bullshitter. Maybe if that 48 hours is work time and presentations/walkthroughs and the person catching up is a seasoned director (they tend to have to do this quick ramp of huge projects more often than an engineer). But no one is going to look at Twitter's code base and make any meaningful conclusions in 48 hours.
Agreed. I had the opportunity to audit a FAANG codebase (many many repositories) a while back and while I'm a lowly engineer, I was able to start understanding quite a bit after a few weeks. Obviously there's no way I could contribute or make recommendations in that short time, but obvious smells start working their way out after exposure. The clarity only increases with the amount of time spent immersed in it.
> If it’s code I’m unfamiliar with it takes longer, and the result is more variable, but it’s far from impossible.
Yeah, I'm sure it's of value to have Tesla engineers come in and spend the 3 months to a year getting enough context with the code base to be be able to produce useful and informed critiques.
> Not to mention “something went wrong” again and again, maybe by the 4th reload would a linked tweet actually show up for me.
That seems like a purpose-built feature to punish non-Twitter users to induce them to sign up for Twitter and/or use the Twitter app instead of the web UI. It's not a bug but a misfeature.
Oh please, that's a ridiculous assessment of what was said. Coding giant distributed web apps is a very different domain than coding for cars. I wouldn't put much stock in Twitter engineers assessing self driving car code either.
"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."
Yes, both were me. I'll respond since you seem to be implying my responses are incongruent.
Here I was responding to a comment "What hubris to think that your system is so complex that other engineers couldn't understand it." Which is still a bullshit assessment of the argument (which the original comment was about) that you need expertise in specific domains to be able to evaluate code, which I agree with.
My comment you quoted above is that I think that there would be a subset of Tesla engineers (just not the ones that, for example, solely focus on driver systems) that would overlap with Twitter's domain.
>Oh please, that's a ridiculous assessment of what was said. Coding giant distributed web apps is a very different domain than coding for cars. I wouldn't put much stock in Twitter engineers assessing self driving car code either.
You don't need to be a part of any particular domain to effectively audit code.
This is true to an extent. At the extremities, a software system can be audited without any previous domain exposure: architecture, and implementation means (language, deployment, etc.)
It can be difficult to critique choices, specially in system architecture, when domain requirements are presented or falsely asserted as 'dictating the choice', but this can be addressed by directing conversations with stakeholders to nail down the conceptual model that has been implemented in architecture style x, and then the conversation is on more equal footing.
Auditing language usage, libraries, development process, etc. are much less domain specific.
Really the only way I've been able to make sense of it is if he brought people in to produce an audit of changes made in the last couple months. IE he knows he doesn't know how to get that information, but he knows he has people at Tesla who do.
They wouldn't have to understand any of it, just be able to identify where and when changes occurred, for later review for any last minute shenanigans.
I'm not personally convinced this whole incident even happened, but if it did, this is what I think would make sense.
If I see the SpaceX code, and it’s full of thousand line functions with a cognitive complexity of 200 I can confidently say it’s going to be hard to maintain.
Clearly it gets rockets into the sky, but something similar is true for all code that hasn’t failed catastrophically yet.
Except you would be wrong. Or at least not obviously right: safety critical code does all sorts of weird things in the interests of verifiability because it must be exactly right: it doesn't get "maintained", because once it's flight proven you do not change it without an entirely new verification process.
This also leads to interesting practices at times like favouring repeating code over writing separate functions to ensure the flow of reading doesn't jump around and instead always moves forward.
Is there any reason to suspect that Twitter's code will be of this terrible quality? If not, then again: what's the point of bringing random engineers in to take a look at code from an entirely unfamiliar domain?
>Bullshit. I'm a web engineer, and I wouldn't be competent to audit code that runs Space X's rockets, nor would anyone I know in my career space.
You're still missing the point. It isn't about knowing how rockets work or anything in particular. It's about being able to search for and recognize issues.
At Twitter's scale the issues are far less about "this code smells funny" but how dozens of systems interact together. Ain't nobody gonna figure out problems by simply checking out a handful of repositories, and specially in a few hours / days.
>At Twitter's scale the issues are far less about "this code smells funny" but how dozens of systems interact together. Ain't nobody gonna figure out problems by simply checking out a repository, and specially in a few hours / days.
I don't know why you think someone would have to know about Twitter's specific implementation of distributed systems in order to inspect those systems for non-twitter-specfifc issues.
I mean, you can do a very general audit of things like “is there CI” or “do they use horribly unsafe serialization everywhere” but I don’t see anything beyond this without a huge amount of effort.
>I mean, you can do a very general audit of things like “is there CI” or “do they use horribly unsafe serialization everywhere” but I don’t see anything beyond this without a huge amount of effort.
Do we know what is or isn't being reviewed? Do we know how much effort is being applied in this process or if there's a defined upper and/or lower bound?
> You're still missing the point. It isn't about knowing how rockets work or anything in particular. It's about being able to search for and recognize issues.
Still, the issues you'll likely encounter inside a car are very very different from the ones you'll see inside a historically grown distributed system serving millions of web, app and API requests. Auditing code is more than analyzing runtime/memory complexity.
Thats not to say it's impossible for Tesla engineers to audit. But I'd imagine it would take quite a bit of time to gather meaningful insight into the landscape and would hardly be an efficient use of the time of senior Tesla engineers.
>Still, the issues you'll likely encounter inside a car are very very different from the ones you'll see inside [...]
There are many systems involved in those cars, there's also many people working for those kind of companies who do not solely "work on cars."
>Auditing code is more than analyzing runtime/memory complexity.
I agree.
>Thats not to say it's impossible for Tesla engineers to audit. But I'd imagine it would take quite a bit of time to gather meaningful insight into the landscape and would hardly be an efficient use of the time of senior Tesla engineers.
Take longer than if the team were comprised of Twitter staff or who are already familiar with Twitter's infrastructure and code base? Sure. But that's the case with just about any audit conducted by an outside entity.
I'm not missing the point. "Searching for and recognizing issues" is not somehow completely independent from the domain of the code in question. More importantly, different domains often have completely different primary concerns. E.g. web app engineering is often concerned with reducing cycle time because the technology means that you can instantly release updates. That's obviously very different from the concerns of launching a rocket, and I would expect them to have very different engineering practices.
>I'm not missing the point. "Searching for and recognizing issues" is not somehow completely independent from the domain of the code in question. More importantly, different domains often have completely different primary concerns. E.g. web app engineering is often concerned with reducing cycle time because the technology means that you can instantly release updates. That's obviously very different from the concerns of launching a rocket, and I would expect them to have very different engineering practices.
>In short, experience matters.
Is this based off real experience in the field of auditing?
I don't think Musk is looking for an itemized bug list. He's probably more interested in overall code quality, estimates on the level of technical debt, and a qualitative feel about the state of things. While a distributed systems person would have an easier go of that, I think most decently-well-rounded software developers would provide value there.
Also remember that Telsa runs their own distributed systems to support the connected features of their cars. Certainly that's not the same as Twitter, but it's definitely in the same ballpark.
You seem to have fooled literally every person replying to your post, then. Perhaps consider that your reactionary post was not quite as "rational" as you'd like to believe, or at least that you haven't yet said what you mean.
>You seem to have fooled literally every person replying to your post, then.
Fooled? No.
>Perhaps consider that your reactionary post was not quite as "rational" as you'd like to believe, or at least that you haven't yet said what you mean.
What part of any of my comments are reactionary? What have I said that I don't mean? I genuinely don't understand.
It's more polite than "webshit", but the overall comment isn't making the case that the more polite term should be used... I'd like it if people calling themselves web engineers held themselves to a higher standard. And were able to see that even if someone is a webshit now, they might have been something else in the past, and something else again in the future, tech is such a great career space in that it's not incredibly difficult to change what domains you're working on. Even apart from general expertise that allows an engineer to go and review arbitrary code (with full understanding, and immediately? No, but you can get started, and find common areas and boundaries, and find who the main contributors are and who isn't so important, and draw big black boxes over areas that really need a specific expert's look, and there's tons of automated tools that can help too e.g. security audit consulting firms can find issues in huge codebases quite fast), it would be surprising if Tesla didn't already have some former Twitter employees already who could contribute to this review if it makes sense to use them. Let alone former employees from other companies that have systems similar to Twitter's. It'd be surprising if all the engineers selected were just people who have never worked for another company besides Tesla.
What hubris to think you can wander into a system as complex as a $44bn tech company and draw any meaningful conclusions about it at all in a weekend. I mean, in my world we have some regular "tech reviews" with our Sr. Directors/VPs at a pretty abstract slides-and-diagrams level, and even that takes weeks of prep leading up like 4+ hour presentations. For something with only a glancing relationship to code level reality. I have occasionally seen my work reflected in these reviews, and the game of telephone that produces them is quite lossy.
Any competent engineer can come to understand most any part of the system, but it's going to take minimum several weeks to understand at a level where you can seriously challenge the domain experts about what's really going on in a little 0.01% corner of the engineering shop.
The hubris is thinking Tesla engineers (who are offered worse pay and wlb relative to Twitter) are coding masters of every domain. I won't even snipe at their own software here.
It takes a long time to onboard to a big mature infrastructure that is serving hundreds of millions of users for people moving from a similar company, even longer if your day job is whatever Tesla engineers are doing.
And that's onboarding, not pretending to be an expert which seems to be the role they're taking on.
>The hubris is thinking Tesla engineers (who are offered worse pay and wlb relative to Twitter) are coding masters of every domain. I won't even snipe at their own software here.
On one hand, you can usually safely ignore 99% of code in a system that does the plumbing in a system and focus on the few key algorithms. It wouldn't be a stretch at all to take one of the self driving AI guys and have them evaluate say, an ML classifier used to flag spam/abuse content. That would be well inside their domain.
> It wouldn't be a stretch at all to take one of the self driving AI guys and have them evaluate say, an ML classifier used to flag spam/abuse content.
Facebook has a years-old bug with their ML classifier used to flag spam/abuse content in Facebook Groups. Its exact behavior has morphed over time as they flailingly attempt to fix it, but for several straight months that behavior was "posting to a Group via the Graph API fails with 'unknown error' if it includes a dollar sign". This in an API used by tens of thousands of apps and many millions of users, at one of the richest (in both money and programmers) companies on the planet.
ML is often a black box "computer says no" scenario with little meaningful ability to debug.
Key algorithms to do…what, exactly? Why not just read the documentation on that instead of having people bring you a random sample of their code on paper?
Who said they're evaluating the code? Maybe they're evaluating the people by asking them questions about the code they've just written. That's a great way to find out who's full of shit.
So they can have the code on hand while interviewing them, ask about the code, why they made a certain choice, what other options were available, etc. Have you never had an interview with code printed out or otherwise provided for discussion?
Knowing enough to call bullshit is way lower than knowing enough to contribute meaningfully to a codebase.
Even just having access to code while someone talks I can prove with much higher value questions on what they are saying… because even if I’m asking something dumb it prompts a deeper explanation.
Is there any reason to suspect that there is shit code at Twitter? Or that that is in any way related to the problems that Twitter has or the "problems" that Elon said he wanted to fix?
At the moment, my default position on all stories out of Twitter is that they didn't happen unless confirmed officially by Twitter. And the more nonsensical the story, the firmer that belief is for me.
Well it's not like Twitter will ever officially state:
yeah they just walzted in here and did a bunch of moves that made absolutely zero sense, it was a shit show.
The primary reason enterprise distributed systems software are complicated is that most code is hidden behind teams of teams of teams of hundreds of mediocre people, not inherent complexity.
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 follow … but it’s not like it was handling a complex UI or enterprise style hacks for a handful of worth it customers…
Would be really interesting to see the code base for sure and definitely exciting to modify a code base handling so much traffic… not sure I can recall a fail whale in many years so maybe they did something right or maybe fearing the whale set the large organization into stone code fear
Contrast that with Tesla and ever car is requesting data from Tesla servers and many many different complex interactions with much more complex engineering to accomplish a task and id imagine the Tesla engineering to be pretty impressive… but who knows it probably does not handle the same amount of read or write traffic…
I think you're massively underselling how complex it is to run something at scale. It's not a matter of just making the database go fast. Just using the database as an example (even though there's way more to it than just the database), you can scale a database a bit by sharding or running it as a cluster or what-have-you, but you can only shard so wide before you run into other problems which are much harder to solve. Running at a massive scale requires rearchitecting almost everything that came before.
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.
Hahaha. No.
They switched to the JVM eons ago. Also, you are severely underestimating how difficult it is to build and run something like twitter at scale.
The differentiator with Tesla’s bot is not in the way it walks, but the way it learns and “thinks” - Tesla engineers are building Artificial General Intelligence into their bot:
In a few years I think even the general public will be able to understand the difference between Asimo and Optimus. It will be remarkable to see Optimus performing tasks independently.
Update: it’s fair to be skeptical, but bear in mind the concept of a desirable EV was an “I’ll believe it when I see it” until Musk’s sheer force of willpower made it happen. He delivers later than he promises, but he does tend to deliver.
I went in assuming that this was going to be a hit piece. It's not quite that bad, but there's elements like that. I have no idea who this "former Tesla engineer" is or what their biases and motivations are, or how the article authors found them.
It seems perfectly reasonable for Elon to bring in some people he knows he can trust to help evaluate how Twitter actually works. I presume he's competent enough to do any necessary i-dotting and t-crossing to make it legal. I don't see anything wrong with printing out code either - IMO sometimes it's a handy way to be able to explore lots of code with complex interactions, since you can have a bunch of pages at once and arrange them however you like.
It's pretty clear to me that there are elements of the elite media-political complex that are terrified of Elon purchasing Twitter because he's not part of their crowd and they won't be able to control him and through him what is and isn't allowed on Twitter. IMO all articles about this should be read with that in mind.
> It's pretty clear to me that there are elements of the elite media-political complex that are terrified of Elon purchasing Twitter because he's not part of their crowd and they won't be able to control him and through him what is and isn't allowed on Twitter. IMO all articles about this should be read with that in mind.
It's pretty clear there are elements of the Hacker News community who are obsessed with "cancel culture" and think Elon is some kind of billionaire, infallible savior who will "stick it" to all those terrible wokes who are ruining the tech industry as the protected bro-space it's been for decades. IMO all hacker news comments should be read with this in mind.
If "cancel culture" is no big deal, then why is everybody so terrified of Elon taking over Twitter? What is so bad about this that you feel the need to make weak-man arguments accusing everybody who is moderately pro-Elon of being a mindless shill?
Elon taking over Twitter given his promises to dismantle what meager content moderation policies it has, means it becomes a more amplified platform for political misinformation and hate speech, further radicalizing large portions of the population to partake in even more violent acts, such as the recent assassination attempt on the speaker of the house, armed vigilantes stalking voting locations as we have seen in Arizona looking for supposed "mules", things like that. Lax content and moderation policies will enhance the platform's capability to be used as a tool for online stalking, harassment, death threats, etc. so that non-right-wing voices will probably need to abandon the platform ( a "cancel culture" of sorts indeed, where people who don't silence themselves will be in danger of being literally cancelled).
Beyond that, there is then his massive conflicts of interest and his personal political opinions such as those involving Ukraine, which he would be able to amplify in the same way as any nation-state seeks to spread propaganda regarding their political agendas. The Pentagon literally had to negotiate with him, as though he were his own nation state, regarding his maintanance of the Starlink system that Ukraine depends upon in their current war with Russia. If Musk is essentially rich and powerful enough to be treated as a diplomatic entity, it's pretty scary he'd have full privatized control over the most influential social network in history, not any less frightening than if Twitter were a state controlled entity by the US government, the Saudi government, etc.
Yes, you have been carefully programmed to regurgitate the state's position on free speech and congratulations for doing a good job of repeating the correct party speaking points!
Do you mean the violent political act from a GREEN PARTY registered crazy person? Were you this concerned about political violence in 2017 when a liberal shot and wounded 5 people at a Republican baseball game in Virginia?
Do you mean the Pentagon had to pay for his critical service instead of assuming it was a free service while they pay Lockheed, Ratheon, etc.. billions of dollars for their boom-boom machines? Do you think the Pentagon does not negotiate with Lockheed and those F35s are free?
Are you talking about the war in Ukraine that is at least partially the fault of NATO and the US involvement in that region? Are you another blood thirsty neo-liberal who desires that NATO defeats Russia and is willing to fight to the last Ukrainian? You're especially concerned about map borders in Eastern Europe while simultaneously hating borders in North America?
and your points would be fully regurgitated from Russian state media, congrats to you as well. as far as "shooting", liberals would prefer there were no guns, so yes, any "shooting" by anyone at anyone is of great concern to us. The "liberal" NYT had a full above-the-fold headline for the Scalise shooting, it was taken entirely seriously by the "media elites": https://mobile.twitter.com/BFriedmanDC/status/15864711740114... . The Pelosi attacker was also right-wing radicalized after originally being a left-wing radical, as you are most likely aware so the GREEN PARTY registration is a strawman. The reductionist implication that the political landscape is nothing more than "both sides are trying to radicalize and kill each other" has no basis in fact and only serves to change the subject from the issue that right wing terrorism is the greatest US terrorist threat right now.
Lockheed last I checked was not trying to corner a huge portion of the social media market and they aren't run unilaterally by a narcissistic shitposter with dumb opinions, so while the military industrial complex is not entirely fun, the comparison is pretty nonexistent.
popular OSS authors, who are in the business of giving their work away for free and helping others use it for free, tend to not be fascists. The core decision one makes, typically early in life, that leads them down the "liberal" or "conservative" path is the decision as to whether or not other people matter.
also I have no clue what this "gravy train" you refer towards means. Liberal and left-leaning voices who are too outspoken live under a constant regime of death threats, stalking, and harassment. Right wing extremists pretty much have the microphone already, as I walk in my suburban neighborhood, every TV screen I see through a window is pegged onto FOX all day long. So not really sure what you're talking about.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
your strawman is that having a generally pro-elon disposition = thinking elon is some kind of infallible savior
The reality is that the current moderation of major forums like Twitter, HN, etc is so one-sided that it produces whatever passive-aggressive posturing that we are engaged in with this very conversation.
I am not going to make a defense of elon or his actions, but I will say that I believe there are two good outcomes:
* Elon behaves rationally and makes twitter usable for civil discussion.
* Elon behaves irrationally and destroys twitter, creating space for competitors like mastodon, etc.
If you agree with this premise, then it should be clear that most any change elon makes to twitter is beneficial in the long run, good or bad. This is why I am not so quick to criticize.
Coming from someone in the camp you rail against, and judging by the ups and down votes I've done in this thread, I'd say it's 50-50. But judging by how many grey and downvoted posts I've seen that I agree with or think are reasonable comments, I'd say it's much more skewed and one sided.
His combination of technology and capitalism while cutting out all human elements is everything that demographic wants.
It’s devoid of empathy and of the understanding of complex human interactions , or understanding other demographics.
It’s also one of the prime group that come to this site. Technology as an answer to all of societies needs and trying to make a buck off of it at the same time.
The same Ukraine that he then said should cede their land to an aggressor ?
the same Ukraine that he overcharged for services and then tried to pull out of?
It’s much easier to see it as a cheap investment in optics for future contracts than any form of empathy when you look at the full picture and not just singular events on the timeline.
That’s not to say that it wasn’t also philanthropic. The two aren’t mutually exclusive but I don’t buy that he feels empathy for the people of Ukraine.
I once read that you can understand the duality of Elon by his desire to have a legacy of his own, and I think it very much applies here, and to the Thai cave rescue that he derided for not being the saviour and the supposed ventilators he claimed they donated for Covid and didn’t actually do.
> It seems perfectly reasonable for Elon to bring in some people he knows he can trust to help evaluate how Twitter actually works.
But the first step wouldn’t be looking at code. With a system this complex, you’d never make meaningful progress with a bottom-up approach.
> I don't see anything wrong with printing out code either
Firstly, this isn’t a competitive programming contest. It is trivial and much more effective to use a code browsing tool. There is no universe where printing code would be the right decision.
Secondly, how does asking engineers to print their “recent code” help with understanding how Twitter works?
Using Tesla engineers to review code is a pretty solid idea considering he can trust them. Musk companies like to run lean so I'm sure this initial review is to find people who are "coasting" and trim them. I'll say that I'm one of those coasters though not for twitter. I live my life and happen to write software for work. I don't think it's wrong for companies to run either as a coasting company or as a lean startup as long as they don't break any laws.
I'm curious to see what comes out of twitter. I honestly don't see how Elon can make his money back. lol
Hello IT? This is Bob from Tesla here. I require full access to audit data and source code per Mr. Musk’s request. You hadn’t heard? That’s because Mr. Musk fired your boss this morning now add my personal email to the system.
“Oh, your boss is on the way out. Something about insubordination when Mr. Musk asked the VPN to be opened. Now, I’ll need an account to reserve conference rooms for transition meetings.”
I wonder if the typical executive tyrant who weaponizes fear to get their bonuses is more likely to have their staff caught by social engineering attacks like these.
I’m honestly baffled with the obsession with Musk. Many folks here seem to despise him. But we can’t stop obsessing with the guy. At this point, to me it feels like envy. Musk, despite however he is as a person, is wildly successfully across several verticals. Rather than being a suit and tie corporate person, he literally posts memes, and has a IDGAF attitude. Does he owe this crowd anything? Twitter and its board moved forward with this deal, no? Are we surprised Musk is being Mush?
I'm confused because you said you were baffled about why people are obsessed then explained why people are obsessed.
I hate him because he emboldens the worst of the right wing in the US and he's probably doing it for attention. I've seen many comments elsewhere where people are celebrating this as a political win.
I was hoping for more legitimate discussion on something tangible, but the majority of this thread is righteous indignation. Which, no one is saying you can't feel that way, but generally on HN things have a bit more substance. Seems like just a lot of wasted energy, as none of it is of any real consequence.
Not at all. There’s a Musk post just about every day or every other day. Much of it is either flaming the guy or praising him. I’m raising the question - why the obsession with this person? If you don’t like him, don’t do business with his companies. It feels like the people against him give him a shocking amount energy focusing on him, as opposed to themselves.
And your post is part of the problem. Because I’m not Musk bashing, you assume I’m on the other “side” and must be his fan. You’ve condensed the world into a binary operation. I’m more annoyed that he gets all the attention he gets. That’s all.
If you don’t like him, the best thing you could probably do is not let him live rent free in your head.
What a ridiculous take. Twitter was run so competently that it has managed to grow to a company with hundreds of millions of daily active users and can’t figure out how to make a profit.
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.
As someone well outside that circle, has it ever occurred to you that some people just don't like Elon "Pedo Guy" Musk?
And same people double down on the dislike because his supporters are the kind of people to paint not liking him must actually be a sign that you're just upset that you're losing your non-existent grip on non-existent power?
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Elon went from cool eccentric paypal/electric car/taking us to mars genius to arrogant "Great Value Joe Rogan without the social skills" very quickly with the general public.
Why are you assuming I am an Elon Musk supporter, or that I even like him? And it's fine if you don't like him; it's fine for anyone to not like him.
What I am commenting on is the reactionary attacks frequently made in this forum against Musk's business efforts, in this case his taking over of Twitter, with many ppl forecasting doom, despite his business success already across a wide range of domains. An objective observer would say that given his track record (truly extraordinary and historic in the case of SpaceX), he's probably got a decent chance of making a success of this twitter acquisition too. A decent chance, note, I'm not saying his success is guaranteed. (And obviously the way he pursued the acquisition of twitter showed impulsivity and some lack of strategic planning; that criticism is fine.)
There's a number of comments in this thread suggesting that Musk only surrounds himself with 'yes men'. I, like others, have noticed how he does favour a cohort of sycophants on twitter, so perhaps there is some truth in this direction. But it's a nonsense to think he would fully do this in business and succeed with extraordinarily difficult technological challenges like developing a re-usable rocket. This point was made in one of the few rebuttals to this nonsense in this thread:
> I guarantee Elon is surrounded by yes-men.
>> That's not how you build a spaceship.
So, to repeat, intelligent criticism of Musk's business decisions is fine; personal dislike towards him is fine (although I would suggest that people take care of how much they are being influenced by the highly hostile presentation of him in the corporate press). What is not fine is reactionary, frankly idiotic attacks on him, which is what we frequently and not at all usefully see in so many HN threads. And why these attacks? Again, I would suggest that it's because Elon has quite frequently stood up to Silicon Valley power or more specifically its celebrated causes (deplatforming for 'hate speech', work from home, lockdowns, 'pronouns', etc) and that is greatly resented.
I'm not assuming you're a supporter, you're actively being a supporter of his right now.
You made the logical leap that people only dislike him because they're part of some landed gentry that feels their power is waning, then you followed up with a one page treatise on how people dislike him for the wrong reasons and clearly he's quite brilliant and also yeah they're just upset because he's getting so powerful.
You may be in denial about it, but you're supporting him.
And therefore it might be hard to see how easy it is to dislike the billionaire trying to play UN security council on twitter is disliked.
(and case you still didn't make the connection, the attacks on his business acumen stem from the same dislike. You're calling them idiotic for not thinking he's as brilliant as you think he is. You can't pay for supporters that loyal (or well, you can but it costs approx. 54 dollars a share)
Yeah, the Musk haters are out in full force. Perhaps he simply paid them from his own pocket (eg consulting rate) when they were "off the clock" from their day-time job? Seems very logical to me.
There is someone at a company who could articulate the big-picture idea behind bizarre-looking activity, to maintain orderly calm among the employees, customers, and shareholders, and prevent wild speculation and panic. That person is the owner or CEO. Musk is both. Employees who don't trust their bosses don't do good work.
It’s interesting to see technical people melt down and froth at the mouth like political hobbyists when some new piece of meat/news lands in their feed trough.
Can you elaborate on this argument? I don't really understand his companies as "well built" in any reasonable sense that I can identify.
"His companies make him and many of his investors wealthy" sure, no disagreement from me. But "well built" is a different metric, and I think that's highly arguable.
Well for one, they actually achieve meaningful change in the world.
Half the people here work for companies that do nothing but steal my latest PII from my grandma’s contact list “yes share contacts with recipe app” to sell me ads.
I have 3 cars in my garages right now that only exist because he pushed EVs. I have a boat with starlink.
The dude has done more to improve my life than any of the FAANG jerkoffs, and I’m thankful for that
You don’t think these companies have produced meaningful change? They’ve meaningfully changed the world far far more than Musk companies. Clearly you are a fan of the Musk companies more, but who cares?
Yes, his companies are completely sloppy and grossly incompetent. They only delivered 343,000 vehicles last quarter, which is way less than they should have, and the wait on a Model Y is close to a year, indicating extremely poor planning. Total joke of a company.
With time, reading, discussion, reflection, practice, and experimentation you can integrate into a team and grow to understand how things are, then why they are, then how that's working out, and finally how they can be improved. This process takes months, even years.
It's very unlikely that an outsider could be shown a random diff on a random component in a Twitter-sized architecture & even know what it's doing or why, let alone make a reasonable judgement on whether it's a good idea or the best way.
I’ve been coding for 39 years. I know how the process works. And yes, it does take time to get the deep understanding of any system. But it is not on the scale of impossible for a squad of 10x engineers to answer and/or develop some basic questions in a short time frame. And much more reliable than trusting the existing crew who has been quite publicly represented by persons hostile to their new boss. I do not in any way mean to cast ALL engineers at Twitter in this light. But it is quite clear the bullies there have grown quite accustomed to their pulpit.
Which parts are unnecessary and which people should be fired, is not one of the basic questions for which you're going to get a good answer in a short timeframe. Now it's clear that there's a lot of animosity for Twitter in this thread - maybe people don't particularly care of the decisions made in this process are correct or just because they all had it coming anyway - but imagine someone doing this to your shop. Come on. It's ridiculous. You'd be pissed.
Your scope of investigation is much larger than the one I stated. One thing neither you or I know at this point, was it a 2 hour visit or is it one of Musk’s marathon “pull up the couches cuz we ain’t going home till we figure this out” sessions.
I’m still looking for a concise term for “someone who claims to be an expert but immediately reveals beyond any doubt that they have no clue what they’re saying, simply by opening their mouth on the subject.”
Having Tesla engineers over to review Twitter code is definitely that. It’s ridiculous.
A lot of senior execs, CxOs and founders have built multi-million dollar careers around their ability to speak at length with complete confidence about topics of which they are clueless. This works because the people who actually know what they are talking about tend to be powerless worker-bees and the people who are fooled by confidence projection tend to be investors and powerful career kingmakers.
The people rolling their eyes when they hear bullshit are not the people writing the checks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has referred to this concept as "epistemic arrogance". In "The Black Swan", Taleb defines it the following way:
> Epistemic arrogance: Measure the difference between what someone actually knows and how much he thinks he knows. An excess will imply arrogance, a deficit humility. An epistemocrat is someone of epistemic humility, who holds his own knowledge in greatest suspicion.
It's just another thing to add to the pile that should make anybody question why on earth people think he is a genius.
The mythos he has created around himself is comical and it's mind-blowing that anyone actually believes it. He literally spends his entire day trolling on social media, yet people think he's out there solving the world's greatest engineering problems.
The things SpaceX and Tesla have done under his direction speak for themselves. Of course you can find silly exaggerations of his contributions, but it is likewise ridiculous to deny his influence on their success.
If nothing else house trolling on social media helps to hype up a dedicated fanbase which drives up the multiple on the stock value and allows to hire people to work on moonshot projects. Several of those projects of his would have never gotten funded in more conventional companies and even if they had, the funding would likely have gotten cut when no immediate, monetary success was visible. All this is only possible because of Musk's confidence/arrogance and his ability to take others with him.
We can only dream of such a world where those projects hadn't been funded. Along with the immeasurable wastage of resources, diversion of human talent, and theft of tax revenue.
I'm not a big Musk fanboy (anymore), but the work SpaceX has done is clearly ground breaking. I also wonder where electric cars would be without Tesla. They were all but dead after GM killed theirs.
Yes, but there's no doubt any and all of that could have been done in a way that's less harmful to society at large. Which isn't a specific criticism of Musk, rather of our corporate culture in general.
Does it matter if it's 5D chess or his behavior just happens to create the environment needed to create rockets that can land and revitalize the electric car market after GM had killed it? I don't like the guy much, but his companies are creating great results and innovation. Do they live up to the hype? Does her understand himself why? I'm not sure how much it matters.
Might you think that they're not actually reviewing code and that the journalists are idiots? Because all evidence I've seen about journalism is that it's completely skin deep and often blatantly wrong. It's likely the engineers are reviewing architecture and looking at how the whole system works.
No smoking guns I suppose, but there's a fair amount of suggestion at trying to trick others.
Elon's biographer for example is on the record saying he's convinced that Elon disingenuously proposed Hyperloop and created Boring Company to spread FUD and try to weaken California's high speed rail project and other public transit proposals.
Relating to criticisms of the Boring Company and his theories around transportation, Musk is on the record himself of asserting that Induced Demand doesn't exist which is a pretty remarkable statement considering that it's effectively an uncontroversial proven fact in transportation planning circles.
So at the very least, in asserting that the entire profession is dumb and wrong he is suffering from delusions of grandeur that he is smarter than he actually is.
That doesn't strike me as being any better; in fact, it reeks of conflict-of-interest. Software consulting AFAIK is not one of Tesla's normal business verticals. The stockholders deserve an explanation for the following questions, at a minimum:
1. Why is engaging in said consulting the highest-and-best use of Tesla's resources, from a profit maximization perspective? The fact that there's a precedent set with SpaceX isn't a justification, since SpaceX is another toy in Musk's toy chest, so the conflict of interest remains.
2. What rate is Twitter / SpaceX paying Tesla for said services? Are those friend-prices or market-prices? If the rate is either too high or too low, Musk could be accused of self-dealing.
3. What kind of bidding process did Twitter put out on these consulting services before settling on Tesla? If I'm one of the investors funding this Twitter purchase, I'd want to know. I wouldn't be surprised if the SEC wants to know, as well. How do Twitter investors know that they're getting the best bang for their consulting buck with engineers whose industry focus so far has been automobile-specific?
4. Lastly, what work would these engineers otherwise be doing at Tesla, and what happens to the product roadmap of those teams now that they're working with fewer resources? Musk is already notorious for promising new features are just around the corner, and failing to deliver. Missing a launch date because supply chain issues is one thing; missing it because the CEO yanked key engineers off the team to go QA his new hobby horse is something else. Such a date miss could have financial implications for Tesla, which would negatively impact Tesla investors.
Even something like that pay-for-pto plan seems so flirtatious with trouble. It’s not a move that’s in the fiduciary interest of Tesla shareholders, and mixing personal money into it might even make that more clear.
Elons got a large bench of people who cheerled this thing, ask Larry Ellison for some people who can go audit this thing over multi-months.
Exactly. The more I thought about it, the more the pay-for-PTO thing strikes me as its own separate ethical quagmire. See my other comment in this thread for specific questions that both Tesla stockholders and Elon's Twitter co-investors should be asking now.
This isn't an opinion/confidence issue, it is a legal one. If there is even one shareholder (i.e. anyone in the world with $228 to spare) who wants to push this issue, they can. Realistically it would take more than that to make it worth suing, but the point remains that even if 98% of shareholders think this is totally okay, it could still be a huge problem for them.
Additionally, there are various institutional shareholders that don't operate based on their personal opinion of Musk/Tesla, but have specific legal duties to protect their investment in the company.
The SEC could still act on the issue even if it was somehow proven than not a single shareholder actually cared.
Not necessarily, but should-ing on behalf of other people is not often particularly useful unless you're already powerful. In the art of persuasion, it can also weaken your case considerably, in the same ways "I'm an atheist, but it seems like these Christians should really think..." style arguments don't tend to do anything to advance either atheism or "truer-to-Christ's teachings" behavior.
In that case, for the record a major part of my retirement fund is taken up by the Fidelity 500 Index Fund, and 2.34% of that portfolio's position is TSLA stock. So yes, you could say I'm a stockholder.
EDIT:
> should-ing on behalf of other people is not often particularly useful unless you're already powerful.
Solidarity labor strikes, where one union strikes to show support for an unrelated striking union, would be a counter-example to this. As individuals, the striking workers are not powerful, but collectively they can have an effect.
Lol musk is overemployed and actively stealing from Tesla.
I don't think anyone will blink an eye as its a cult at this point.
Both employees and shareholders are part of it and given the track record noone will complain.
