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?
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.