Obviously musk doesn't have time to review it all... But saying 'print out a couple of pages of your recent code you are proud of and bring it to a review with your tech lead' is a good way to discuss coding style.
The 'you are proud of' is key to this working though - all your code is visible in the VCS anyway, but asking you to pick a good bit to discuss seems valuable.
Maybe with a bit of back and forth with team mates it might help people like me as well who struggle with imposter syndrome on a daily basis feel like they can be proud of things they do.
Is scheduling every single person in the company to have a discussion about... coding style solve any particular problem Twitter has?
This reeks of 'I am the new owner, I need to do something, this is something, everyone will now be doing it.'
Yeah bring code so we can talk about it is fine at the bottom level. Dumb for owner in first week. The good programmers know nothing will ultimately come of this codiscovery process thus making a bad impression on the good employees
Not saying his intentions are noble, but the act of these mettings, in and of themselves, does not signal anything in either direction.
And even if were not of zero value, it's not what they were told to do anyways. Printing out your code of the past 30 days is a demeaning power play to test your loyalty. They could just look at your pull requests or commits themselves.
Strong arming Elon's intentions, may be he is used to perhaps how code reviews work in Space industry? Sometimes old school ways are fine, under the hood it is just code.
It is simply much quicker and much more efficient to do something like a proper code share in an office with one person driving the code and being able to jump between areas of the code.
To say it bluntly: Anyone that uses printed code for code reviews is wrong. It assumes all functionality is colocated and nearby. It wastes time by forcing people to index through multiple pages of paper. Anyone that demands it should see prompt pushback.
We did have very thorough design documents and manuals and all of them have been printed (including documented function headers) as the contract dictated, but we only used the original word documents and the version control system to review our code.
If I'm forced to print code, I would probably do it. It is essentially a few clicks taking a few minutes of my time.
On the other hand, your tech lead reviewing code on paper is going to be extremely painful. The tech lead who is forced to review code on paper would probably quit first.
And sure, if I was getting judged by LoC I'd just paste in a library versus including it, which would generally be worse.
Do I bring shredded paper to demonstrate that?