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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

> Longtime Musk associates David Sacks and Jason Calacanis appeared in a company directory over the weekend, according to photos obtained by The Washington Post. Both had official company emails and their titles were "staff software engineer."

Do either of these guys even know how to program? Calacanis has been making tech content for decades, and I've never once heard him talk about writing code.

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Twitter probably didn't have a pre-existing title for "Member of the Musk Entourage" so they just found what they considered the next closest thing.

It's an obvious meaningless formality, not sure why it's news.

Because it's kind of odd for someone who makes such a big deal about high performing engineering orgs to hire his non-technical buddies into top tier engineering roles?

Why not hire them into "Chief of Staff" or "Chief of Fuck You Parag" roles?

Do you seriously think that these two advisors he brought in for a weekend are now their top engineers?

They both have plenty of experience running tech companies and are advising on structuring the team… I know everyone’s trying to jump on the hate bandwagon but this is a stretch.

Well, no, because if I thought that was the case then it wouldn't be silly that they have a top engineering title. I'm saying that it is silly. I agree this is a bottom-of-the-list issue, but it does strike me as weird even for Elon.

I don't work at Twitter, so I don't really care what they call themselves. That being said, at every company I've ever worked at the people who have responsibilities like "running tech companies and [...] advising on strutting the team" usually have manager, director, or VP titles. It is a little odd to give a staff software engineer title to someone who isn't able to write code.

Like I said though, I have no horse in this race, so whatever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Musk thinks everything is software engineering, including the universe.

Sacks knows his stuff. Calacanis is more of a henchman and acknowledged begrudgingly on the All-In Podcast that he's incapable of coding.

Sacks runs a VC firm with over $1 billion under management [1]…Staff Software Engineer is a big demotion for him, lol

1 - https://medium.com/craft-ventures/announcing-craft-iii-1-1-b...

Mahalo was such a success, I can see why getting put on as a staff engineer makes sense. Calacanis was already a twit long before twitter was around.

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