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.
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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.
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.