Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
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?
Less code is more readable. But absolute minimal amount of code can be unreadable.
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.
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.
Bravo.
(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).
... 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.
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.
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.
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
You will always have bugs. The best engineers can solve the hardest bugs
Which is a damn shame for our industry, fixing bugs should be a good career path.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Depends on the size and age of the company. In a startup, approximately never since the job is to build something out of nothing.
In a large enterprise with decades of codebase history to be optimized, very frequently.
I did say I wrote 30 lines of code, which was reusing other code instead of copy-pasting and changing a few things
It's not because the ratio is bad - if you wrote 300 and removed 19500 that might be fine. It's just that 30 is, in an absolute sense, too low.
The number of lines removed I don't remember and it changes nothing about the effort to read and understand the whole codebase
That's more lines of code than https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/
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.
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.
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's mostly an organisation failure.
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.
If you're also the one responsible for writing tests, you can easily churn out even more unmaintainable crap.
In my experience it's not enough to just have them do TDD, because writing a good test suite is hard.
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.
*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.
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.
I fully understand that there are circumstances where true tactical changes do make sense, but the tradeoffs should be considered up front.
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.
Sometimes people aren't being tactical; they really don't understand the system fully to know that some obvious solution will hit a snag.
I have some very basic scripts at work that I never bothered cleaning up, but maybe I can, let me look tomorrow.
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.
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".
;)
Yes, let's treat those tasks as less honourable than developers and enjoy the results
I think most people would put these in the same category as developers.
> capacity planning, monitoring and alerting, honing their troubleshooting skills
This is veering into made-up-job world. These people are getting fired. All these tasks can be done by developers.
> 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.
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.
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.
But if someone’s entire job is “capacity planning”, they’re getting fired.
>I think most people would put these in the same category as developers.
Yet they won't have much code to speak of, and for the bit that they do write, it probably won't be very much in the last 60 days.
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.
“IM A PEOPLE PERSON, IM GOOD WITH PEOPLE!”
Funny, since the key job description at oracle is lawyer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=3a8...
This goes against a decade of developer best practices, as enforcing code ownership promotes code silos.
I'm not saying I disagree, only that it seems contrary to recommendations.
The truth is probably somewhere in between.
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.
I'd be a little surprised if most twitter devs (and anyone else) who can leave, and aren't personally invested in Twitter, are not already doing this.
We've got a student of history
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-stein...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Currently when I load up twitter it's a stream of gloating jerks.
I think an internal model in Twitter has concluded the best way to drive engagement in my demographic is enrage me.
Correct I guess?
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.
0: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11370729/Elon-Musk-...
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.
Where are they going to go? I don’t see journalists like Nikole Hannah-Jones moving their personal brands to Facebook.
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.
Looking at my mute list, the conspiracy theories already run wild here, it just happens in the comments rather than at the top level.
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.
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.
You are extremely lucky and privileged to be able to make that choice while your skills are in high-demand.
"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."
Huh
An "L"? Are you 17?
>“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.
So, yes, I believe that makes it relevant.
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.
A meaningful audit at Twitter would take months. This is but a stunt.
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.
In one case my judgement was that the customer list was all that there was of value. They opted to not buy that company.
It’s worth mentioning that Musk waived his right to do so.
remember you have to tell us if you’re elon musk.
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?
Huh? Then how did he end up purchasing it?
“Code” is most likely “architecture” and “architecture” is code for “management”.
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.
Of the engineers I've met, I'd put the Tesla ones as 'smarter'.
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.
I get twitter has some issues of scale to solve, but its tweets, even netflix would be far more challenging imo.
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 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.
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.
FWIW, also I'd add to your list telemetry such as asserts, and concision and documentation.
There’s a balance here - but it’s not at all obvious what the balance should be in every business.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So essentially there is still vesting, and no acceleration for regular employees.
Curious to hear if anyone knows otherwise.
https://www.teamblind.com/post/Twitter-Accelerated-Vesting-L...
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.
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.
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.
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.
How would one go about doing that? Is there a way to have influence on that?
Layoff = severance (to avoid the lawsuit)
Quit = neither
It's obvious which one Musk would prefer.
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.
This is Yahoo's core competency though: not understanding what their product actually is.
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.
Anyway, just a thought experiment.
* 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
“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 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"?
Isn’t this a self-contradiction?
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.
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 …
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Making a viable business out of it is hard.
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.
Maybe it was more complicated in 20 years ago.
However there's orders of magnitude more effort that goes into:
* Usability
* Performance
* Stability
* Security
* Localisation/internationalisation and accounting for cultural differences
* Monetisation - ads, payment platform integration, fighting fraud
* Fighting abuse, both automated and not
* ... 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.
I’ll put it another way. Which job would you rather have? Build a scalable Twitter clone? Or operate the business and make money?
How do you make sure it’s not an epic cesspool? It’s not an engineering problem.
Even Twitter wasn’t able to figure that part out
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Generally yes, the leftists like to control individuals and consider the state more important than individuals and their freedom.
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.
A whole bunch of genius investors just bought a company worth $11 billion for $44 billion...
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.
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.
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.)
Would they be fun to hang out on the Internet with?
None, and no. I appreciate the chuckle though.
A code review? TL;DR; LGTM, straight to prod!
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.
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.
Got a source for that? Sounds like you expanded that personal anecdote a bit too much.
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.
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.
And by most measures, twitter employees did that successfully.
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.
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.
You don’t swap honor like a pair of gloves depending on who you’re dealing with or what they think of you.
You’re either honorable or not.
If one stops being honorable because of minor changes in external circumstances, I don’t believe they were honorable to begin with.
“I’m honest, fair, and worthy of respect only when it’s comfortable or suits me” is not honorable.
When winds start blowing the other way, that’s when one’s true character is tested.
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.
If they thing they ever made the world a better place, they're delusional. This seems common in silicon valley though.
If you're being paid to do a job, do it. If you no longer want to do it, quit. It's pretty simple.
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.
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".
People forgot about dialogue and compromise.
So why would you work really super-duper hard for Mr. Musk while he waits to finish the code review to fire you??
At this moment the onus is on Musk to win the loyalty of his new workers.
[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
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.
> Passively destroying Twitter from within by not trying
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
wew lad
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The company doesn’t care about you. I don’t understand this loyalty to companies and billionaires.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Not ethical, not rational.
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.
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.
Take a step back and think about perspective.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's about identifying the most extreme offenders and pushing out people like the GP who will rage quit without severance.
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)
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)
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.
If I was given these instructions I’m out.
(I don’t have a horse in this race. I don’t work there. So not sure why you think I’m taking this personally)
That's your threshold for asking employees to summarize what they've been doing recently?
Management must have some profound interest in the feature being delivered and how it was implemented?
Question: have you ever managed people? And if so, how many?
I won’t go into your ad hominem.
While you're entitled to your opinion, it doesn't seem particularly relevant in discussions about whether or not this process is effective.
no one wants your code just for fun of it or it beying extra nice and smart. code is neded becauae it creates value.
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!"
No, thanks.
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?
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)
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.
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?
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.
I don't and have never worked at Twitter :)
> As to the question of whether this makes sense, it would seem we all agree that it does, then.
My comments are mostly about the likely future of Twitter, which is almost certainly atrophy and death.
> "My comments are mostly about the likely future of Twitter, which is almost certainly atrophy and death. "
This was already their future, so I guess we can see if they improve at all.
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.
Just shut the company down and start over, don't turn people's lives into a living hell for weeks or months
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?
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.
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
Doing that seems like an improvement.
Is this something that literally is happening? Where can we read about it?
edit: Apparently referring to this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-27/tesla-eng...
Imagine if Elon bought an airline and asked them to line up all the planes on the tarmac for review.
I could unironically imagine Elon doing this
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?
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.
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.”
Def not unreasonable.
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.
Edited: technical review isn’t code review.
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 :)
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?
To say you got everything you needed in 8 hours is disrespectful at best (even for way smaller code bases)
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.
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.
Of course, those things are absolutely vital, and must be long and tedious work, and I give you kudos for having these skills :-)
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.
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.
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.
I've worked on due diligence from both sides of the table in the past and this is not how it works.
I wouldn't be quick to dismiss the idea that this is a show.
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."
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.
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.
https://engineering.fb.com/2022/10/24/android/android-java-k...
Regardless it’s a bit concerning that it takes 10M loc for a messaging app.
"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."
:P
It’s certainly true that it helped I was
familiar with the domain
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.
Everything seems so incredibly trivial until you reach something that isn't.
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.
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.
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 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).
The codebase often isn't the issue, it's the use cases and the reasons why it evolved into the form it did.
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?
[1] https://sourcenav.sourceforge.net/
(I’d be curious if people have a favorite more modern version of a tool like Source Navigator)
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.
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".
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.
This appears to be the only comment this account has ever made
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".
> Or, this person read hackernews for 3 years and never commented (ignoring deleted comments) until just now and only to basically say "no".
Yes, comparing tumblr to twitter was so idiotic I just had to say no.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
I remember when the only social network was MySpace and then it wasn’t.
And Friendster.
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.
I was thinking about this a bit and I think the real value is Twitter is the random chance that $FAMOUS_PERSON might notice one of your tweets etc (Eg “Elon retweeted my hot take”)
If you take that away does that remove the essence of the site?
Instead of banning accounts he will just make them second class citizens.
Social networks don't have a particularly long life expectancy.
1. allow people to pay for a blue check to be verified
2. make "twitter blue" actually valuable (e.g. detailed analytics on your followers, tools for composing threads, actually monetizing revue)
3. payments
and clearly by this article, they are looking to reduce costs. Double revenue and halve costs and you have something pretty valuable.
> Nobody is going to pay for something that is no longer a status symbol because it can simply be bought
2. make "twitter blue" actually valuable (e.g. detailed analytics on your followers, tools for composing threads, actually monetizing revue)
> Or just give people these metrics because if they care about them they probably care about creating quality and engaging content and seeing how well it performs.
3. payments
> Perhaps - but for what? I don't see myself going to Twitter, let alone to find something to buy and then pay for it using Twitter-dollars or whatever they dream up.
> Nobody is going to pay for something that is no longer a status symbol because it can simply be bought
Tell that to all the luxury brands that make low-end products for everyone now. This is extremely naive. There is a price point where the blue checkmark will sell like wildfire, and then it's basically free money because there's no operational cost associated to it.
Let's say 5$/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...
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.
‘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.
it is obviously worth testing and requiring a small payment is a good way of verifying they are a real person (not a bot).
all the more reason that everyone else will just leave, except for the bots
Sounds a lot like Ark Fleet Ship B.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
> 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.
https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939642243309569/...
Some of the described pearl-clutching issues are garden variety big enterprise data management stories.
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.
[1]
Seems like a good approach… if the cost of failure is manageable.
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.
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.
Paper the UX is perfect and instant.
(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 don't think it's really relevant, though. The entire situation is cruel and silly.
If jumping around a codebase is hard on paper, it’s a good indication that the code does not consist of cohesive modules.
Sadly these days most people no longer adhere to 80 column limits, so it has to be printed in landscape. In the worst cases, landscape on legal paper…
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.
Commute to work = hours lost every day with drastic lifestyle change. Some people even move further away from the office during pandemic.
Printing code on paper = 1 minute of work. Paper and ink are paid by company. It is not really that much of a problem.
Actually, this is a punishment on the reviewer. No jump to definition and etc.
The printing story is fake. I call it now.
Just a thought nothing to back up this claim
Also, if you print code, it will contain other people's code because it is likely not only you who code on those files...
This story is really too stupid for everyone involved.
It is not even good nor efficient for the reviewers. It is like the reviewers are also punished.
Too stupid to be true.
I could pump those numbers up easily but my coworkers would hate me for it.
I would copy/paste some hundreds pages from GitHub so Musk would give me a raise. :)
Is there a correlation between employees who like to avoid the office and employees you don’t really want on the team any more?
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 :')
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.
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.
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 truly bizarre.
Or simply Elon is more unstable than Dogecoin and wanted to show new employees who is the boss, it was a really pathetic power move.
Or maybe this was to set the expectation that only those who care enough to bend to the whimsies of the new management should stay?
Or both?
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.
Tesla shareholders are also free to fire Musk if they don’t like the way he runs the company.
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.
Who negotiates that payment? Elon Musk?
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'.
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.
However winter is coming.
Mike is his handler for SpaceX, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
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.
And it's a big difference between writing software for a car company and a social media service.
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.
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 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.
"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!"
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.
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.
The autopilot team didn’t like being quizzed on basic c/c++ questions and that was the first time almost all of AutoPilot quit.
Or so I heard.
Airline pilots don’t quit in a huff because they have to demonstrate basic competency annually.
Yes: https://www.reuters.com/legal/exclusive-tesla-faces-us-crimi...
> failure to deliver on a very difficult AI problem
It's the combination of claims that the feature could be delivered and a failure to deliver.
Failure is never illegal. Lying about failure often is.
Probably I will get tons of downvotes, but there is this strange myth here (and on reddit) that there are no incompetent programmers.
When in reality there are tons of incompetent programmers, just like there are incompetent people in any other job.
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.
Of course, somehow according to sentiment here this updated process is still considered an insult...
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.
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.
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'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?
More likely just a power trip.
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.
Paper may be old school but it's fast.
I'll call it... after talking to a few twitter engineers who said they didn't hear anything about that.
"Printing it out" is fake news. "Reviewing code in the last 60 days" is probably real.
It seems fake news is okay as long as it fits our narrative.
[1] https://twitter.com/leahculver/status/1586145696163373056
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.
Your source is absolute bonker.
Casey Newton is reliable and says the same: https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-takes-over-twitter
The article is paywalled.
Journalists were pranked just yesterday about twitter engs being laid off.
Is there a better source? Casey talking to some engs is so vague. Where is the details? Screenshots of emails maybe?
Why is our standard so low when the narrative fits what we like?
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.
Have some standard lmao.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Please do have some standard for verifying news.
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.
How many? Hundreds or thousands or 10?
Twitter has 5000 engineers.
I have a few friends there.
> 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
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..
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensiv...
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.
(and let's be honest, Twitter hasn't solved the concurrency issues, so I'm not sure there's much to review)
but also yes it probably is just shitty overuse of worthless js
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.
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 ?
Quiet quitters are probably shitting themselves
But anyway, it's good you see yourself as ultra-resilient.
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.
I'd be far more annoyed if they came in and removed the coffee machine from the kitchen.
(I get to talk about my code? Sweet!)
> 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?"
And then just hope it isn't quid pro quo sexual harassment.
Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates etc. were all a nightmare to work when they were younger.
[1] https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1513301310434529288?s=20&t=Q...
Elon makes his equity-compensated employees rich. You don't need complex psychology to explain the appeal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Source: Seen a couple management changes before.
In my experience, outside tech bro circles he is unanimously regarded as an idiot and not someone to emulate.
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.
Well, they should, he is their boss now.
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.
If only Elon Musk knew as much as you do about managing engineers!
Disclaimer: Self-employed so I don't have to deal with that.
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.
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.
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!)
Still needs corroboration.
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.
Mike is the ringleader but he's only useful when Republicans are in power.
So not as foolish as he seems, but it's unclear his ploys will pay off. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
> 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?
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.
You say “successful” but I assume you mean wealthy.
There are other forms of success that Musk falls woefully short of, such as “not being an asshole”…
Just about no one took Musk seriously with his vision of reusable rockets or electric cars. And yet, here we are.
…with armchair internet warriors saying he’s a joke and sure to run Twitter into the ground.
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 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.
Hopefully it's not you who is the mediocre developer?
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++.
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 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.
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.
Again, I would set clear expectations first.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Raising money is just a con man thing, the boring company has achieved nothing new at all, like, nothing.
We're still waiting on all the other promises that just keep not coming, so no, I don't think we'll be surprised.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
Ultimately what matters in tunneling is the cost.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/30/elon-musk...
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.
The thing is that they are not just honest failures, they are outright lies.
https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/elon-musk-is-pathologically...
https://insideevs.com/news/580787/elon-musk-tesla-private-tw...
https://usishield.com/36376/news/steve-wozniak-accuses-elon-...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/elon-musk-twitter-te...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-11-12/carson-bloc...
Mark Spiegel: Elon Musk is ‘a pathological liar’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msxq2OkCXnE
The Fake Futurism of Elon Musk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OtKEetGy2Y
DEBUNKING ELON MUSK Pt1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-FGwDDc-s8
The HYPERLOOP Will Never Work, And Here's Why https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQJgFh_e01g
- Electric cars only will build a more valuable company.
- I can launch more rockets then everyone else combined.
Were also lies at the time.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/30/elon-musk...
It matters if you care about evaluating whether or not you should believe what Elon says.
Do I believe that Tesla will get to full self driving eventually? Yes.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/30/elon-musk...
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?
Only because Telsa stock is insanely overvalued. Due in large part to Musk's overhype of FSD.
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
Yet Elon's the only person/company who put those privileges to good use
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/30/elon-musk...
Which interview specifically? from https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Everyday+Astron...
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/30/elon-musk...
Is there maybe a source that substantiates a perspective of "theft"?
Or am I just missing that a rhetorical discussion is being had here?
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.
I prefer eccentric, which may be an advantage for him.
Given the PE, seems to me the shareholders have created the shareholder value.
It’s not hard to envision a potential business case
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!".
Self tweeting coming soon - self driving by the end of next year.
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.
But he almost certainly acted against the interests of the company he was hired to shepard and committed a civil offense against the shareholders.
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.
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.
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.
Nobody on here knows the details, this is just a rorschach test.
Sometimes I wonder if people genuinely stop and listen to themselves before they hit the reply button.
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.
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.
That is a great idea, running ads in Tesla cars. They can introduce a monthly subscription to opt out of the ads.
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.)
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...)
We don't have really any visibility into what short- and long-term obligations Musk owes the various financing parties.
Edit: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/saudis-kingdom-holding... says Saud is keeping their ownership stake post-merger (they just love free speech!), so I do not think Musk is a 100% shareholder.
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.
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.
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.
Self driving has a well defined, static problem space, with inputs that don't change often (how often do they come out with a new street sign?).
Twitter is combatting distributed adversaries who are constantly adjusting their approach in evading detection.
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.
Oh, that'll come.
They problem is so ill defined that it sometimes has to be modeled as random events instead of a deterministic physical process.
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.
How would you feel if he had Tesla assembly line workers renovate his house?
What a weird timeline we are living in..
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.
You can only lose by trying to have a conversation with them.
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.
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.
It may be poor options or even poor management but it isn't theft.
Unless Twitter is paying handsomely for the consultation?
or he just winged it and grabbed some engineers and said “come with me”…
Which is more in character for him?
Right? Tesla hasn't had General Counsel since 2019, and is not looking for one.
And... you approve of this? Or what? What exactly is your message here?
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"
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.
Do we have any reason to believe it was Tesla’s AI engineers?
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?
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.
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.
Even if Twitter is paying much more than their salary costs, you still need to value the damage to the business by taking the crew away from the ship.
You can't just assume zero impact unless this was just a one-day workshop.
If anything it seems more concerning for Twitter, morale there must be just the best right now.
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.
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.
We will have self twetting twitters by next year.
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.
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.
Maybe they're Tesla engineers, but they're moonlighting on Twitters dime?
Eh, there are marketing synergies between Twitter and Tesla.
Tesla hasn't had General Counsel since 2019.
> 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.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-questions-over-elon-mu...
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company#History
Basically he tried embezzlement.
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?
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.
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.
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].
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/27/elon-musk-wins-shareholder-l...
[2]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-many-failures-of-elon-...
Been there, done that.
- new materials from SpaceX make it into Tesla cars
- productions techniques from Tesla goes into SpaceX rockets
- Semiconductor teams from Starlink probably connected to Tesla
It mean the best engineers get even more opportunities. win-win
Less red tape, more work get done. I think we should all embrace that.
Our goal should be to make things better first and then to make money second to help us out make things even better at larger scale.
It was my understanding they use pretty standard steel alloys.
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.
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.
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 should have been more specific. My response regarding "plain wrong" is in response to this:
> They might be called superalloys, but there is nothing particularly sophisticated about them
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)
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.
The true American dream!
Expert in data centers help Tesla build its cluster.
Experts on internet security help Tesla, SpaceX with their information security.
Seems like a drop of water. For something to be legally relevant it has to be significant.
I don't know how you could possibly know that, that's an unfalsifiable claim.
I could make the opposite claim (that with a different CEO, Tesla would be worth ten times as much as it is now) and you couldn't disprove it.
That is unfalsifiable.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
Elon is a mixed bag. He’s reminds me of a living Steve Jobs, in a way. People sometimes forget he’s human like the rest of us.
Counterpoint: what other CEO would be involved in low level stuff like
looking at code or personally interviewing newly acquired employees?
I made 400 last year. It was two fixes across many files owned by many different teams.
Ideally it would have been two. Sometimes playing the politics game is required.
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.
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.
There are many reasons PRs can be large.
Often it's indicative of broader issues e.g. lack of automated testing, inadequate CI/CD processes, incomplete business requirements etc.
Can anyone verify this story?
"Later, people inside the company reported that Tesla engineers were in fact reviewing the code."
really?
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.
lets say you could. is your source = "people inside the company"?
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 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.
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)
How about outliers in the opposite quadrant?
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.
Galileo’s interview at SpaceX shows his thinking and way of working quite well.
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.
https://www.tesla.com/support/8gb-emmc-recall-frequently-ask...
We have this example as a "don't do this" example for excessive logging in our engineering guidelines.
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.
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! :)
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.
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.
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.
This shouldn’t be the exception, it should be the norm.
I can always tell which company sells products the CEO doesn’t use and has likely never even seen.
Can anyone verify this story?
we already have "Pranksters posing as laid-off Twitter employees trick media outlets: ‘Rahul Ligma’"
https://nypost.com/2022/10/28/pranksters-posing-as-laid-off-...
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.
Don't jokes have to be funny?
I genuinely don't get it. He's shockingly not funny considering how hip he is for his age.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Laughable that you think 10 people can rewrite all of this in a month. It would take longer to scope out the design docs alone.
[1] https://twitter.com/bhcarpenter/status/1585834343766773761
Is this satire?
These actions only make logical sense if the goal is to make life unpleasant for employees, and get a lot of them to quit.
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.
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 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.
That is valuable and is not going away.
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 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 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".
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
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…
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.
I would have expected they already did that prior to the acquisition.
It seems the acquisition was a blind buy.
FYI, I don't own a Tesla or own their stock or own any stock in Musk owned companies. I don't even follow his twitter account.
And a whole lot of people want to just overlook everything because “he makes a lot of money” or “I like this tech thing”
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.
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.
and what that would be , exactly? Come on, list the good.
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.
How many cars did Tesla sell on the day after his investment?
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.
Can totally understand how people say "it's lonely at the top"...
Edit: or perhaps more relevantly: "well, we tried to but you fired us."
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.
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.
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.
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?
What is "luck" exactly?
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.
The 'luck' there is that he got removed and replaced by someone far more successful, but retained a large share of stock.
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?
Edit: Interestingly, one thing that is more prevalent among the rich is "dark triad" traits[1]. Make of that what you will.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/dangerous-ideas/2019...
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.
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.
I will call it. This is fake.
Casey will not reveal the screenshots.
We will all have fun with this ridiculous fake situation. Reviewing code on paper is insanely inefficient. Who even does that?
Casey got his retweets and more followers. Also, he said "subscribe to read". Absolutely no reason to exaggerate or lie here.
Then, we will move on to other topics.
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.
Rich as fuck is the right word.
She is not cash poor by any mean. Having 3m after tax for renovation is kinda insane.
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)
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.
Elon is definitely not a luddite when it comes to code, it seems like a very uncharacteristic request.
It's interesting how much publicity this whole situation is getting. Musk must be loving it.
What could possibly go wrong.
> 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.
Maybe it’s less about code quality and more about eng quality.
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?
Please explain how it's possible to be chief engineer at SpaceX without even working there.
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.
Or don't because it will destroy your narrative and you would rather live in your own bubble of delusion.
Alternatively, it means the organization is resilient enough to handle it.
The US government has successfully accomplished all sorts of things while having various shitty people at the helm.
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.
I’ll take Tesla engineer’s over 95% of the industry any day.
Let alone Boston Dynamic's demos. Or Disney's stunt robot.
-------
So we're mostly laughing at the wasted effort. Of course it's possible, other companies made humanoid walking robots like 20 years ago.
The other questions, like how to actually make money from them, remain unanswered.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intellige...
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.
And those people were right.
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.
Who is thinking that?
Would it?
Would it not?
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.
If you spend $44 billion dollars on something, you're going to want to look it over extremely well.
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.
You don't need to be a part of any particular domain to effectively audit code.
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.
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.
-- hn_throwaway_99 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33389128
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.
Your video player somehow managed to be worse than Reddit, the perennial joke of web dev.
Not to mention “something went wrong” again and again, maybe by the 4th reload would a linked tweet actually show up for me.
I’m on 25 gig symmetrical fiber with <10ms to my local AWS hub, FWIW
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s much more comfortable than all the public kvetching
Gotta say, this sounds exactly what they said about Tesla, and SpaceX, and Starlink.
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.
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…
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.
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.
I'd presume Tesla's codebase is exactly the same.
Ugh, I bet you're exactly right..
And what’s the average salary of these people? $15k/mo? $20k/mo?
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.
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?
Diffs.
> 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?
It’s certainly more reliable than the evaluation of the person whose job depends on it being evaluated as correct.
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.
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.
You could probably call out the bullshitters, though. They aren't refactoring the code base.
Or the folio patchset. People had a variety of reactions to it, whole lot of energy was spent evaluating that code (which in the end also made it in)
The person whose job it was to make the patch and who has interest in it being correct is not necessarily less reliable than a random HN commenter
You would probably think otherwise if it was your code and some other random commenter with no domain knowledge evaluating it, wouldn't you?
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 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.
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.
oh that's based on my observation of comments whenever he comes up, like this one here right on this thread
From the context it seems very unlikely that the post you referred to literally thought Elon Musk is always right.
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.
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?
Sounds like you have it all figured out.
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.
No wonder you guys are all upset about this, the social gravy train is going away.
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.
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 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.
So dumb.
Do I print out the few lines I changed, or the entire file?? Do I mark what I changed??
So dumb.
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?
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.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2022/08/clark-stanley-first-sn...
Like those friends you had since high school and didn’t know they were wackos until they started posting anti-vaccine crap on their Facebook.
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.
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.
Edit: Grammar
They dumped a falling asset, at peak price and got Musk to sign terms that completely fucked him.
Honestly, it was completely brilliant and the only thing anyone learned is that Musk isn’t the business genius he claims to be.
He’s going to destroy that platform with utter stupidity and I’m looking forward to watching.
I dunno, that seems like a pie in the sky.
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.
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.
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)
Again, the Musk haters are out in force.
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.
Then again starlink is quite uhm distributed too...
"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.
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
I didn't say well built despite your quotation marks. But close enough...what I meant is that he has two big companies doing impressive things.
e.g. I don't see anyone else regularly flying to the ISS
Maybe the companies are a toxic chaotic shitshow on the inside, I don't know, but from afar he seems to have done well with both Tesla and spaceX
Having Tesla engineers over to review Twitter code is definitely that. It’s ridiculous.
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.
Note: not all smart behavior is programing, engineering, or even product design.
But doesn’t that imply that Elon knows he’s a fraud and is trying to trick others? I don’t think Elon realizes he’s a fraud.
It’s like the opposite of impostor syndrome. When someone speaks with total confidence and absolute garbage comes out of their mouth.
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.
Actually I’d suspect it’d be very likely if he’s high on the IQ / autism spectrum as he seems to be.
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.
"It's not a lie if you [the teller] believe it". -Seinfeld/David
> 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.
Generally, you can still trust the real news coming out of places like the Post and Times to at least be accurately fact checked.
The people rolling their eyes when they hear bullshit are not the people writing the checks.
Nailed it!
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/musk-celebrates-expansion...
This will be awesome.