Oh please, that's a ridiculous assessment of what was said. Coding giant distributed web apps is a very different domain than coding for cars. I wouldn't put much stock in Twitter engineers assessing self driving car code either.
-- 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.
You don't need to be a part of any particular domain to effectively audit code.
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.
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.