[HN Gopher] Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter...
___________________________________________________________________
Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff's code,
workers said
Author : perihelions
Score : 560 points
Date : 2022-10-29 20:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| praptak wrote:
| I can only imagine how bad this is for morale. Out of the blue
| code review conducted by an external company means total lack of
| trust.
| concordDance wrote:
| Isn't this kind of thing standard for takeovers?
| guax wrote:
| Not like this. Mostly what happens is a constant barrage of
| meetings where you present projects, roadmaps, timelines to a
| variety of people/teams. This seems like its focused on
| individual "evaluation" so its likely a layoff effort.
|
| 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.
| uwuemu wrote:
| Oh this is all so glorious. The lefties clutching their pearls,
| the silicon valley "elites" crapping themselves because someone
| expects them to work at work and not pretend to work at home.
| And the best part are all these normies like this ^ guy here
| that thinks this code review is something about performance.
| Lol. There absolutely 100% is a total lack of trust. Elon is
| going in with his people and is now evaluating "the algorithm",
| i.e. ban lists, ban rules, shadowbanning code, searchbanning
| code, bot banning code etc. and all the processes related to
| content moderation and bots. There is surely also going to be
| someone making sure Twitter employees did not and are not
| hiding shit and destroying evidence to cover their ass (and the
| asses of the former managers). He is now deciding who is going
| to get fired and who is not.
|
| All the activists who brought their filthy ideas to Twitter and
| forced them on their colleagues and the platform itself need to
| get fired immediately if Twitter is to be a neutral platform.
|
| So yea, this isn't about somebody's performance, this is a
| chemotherapy .
| theduder99 wrote:
| well said. I also think this is about getting rid of all
| people who worked on those items.
| johneth wrote:
| An impressively buzzword-laden, almost unhinged comment.
| poorlyknit wrote:
| GP is a great example of how HN is left-leaning and woke.
| /s
| dmingod666 wrote:
| I don't they're doing code reviews to understand the quality of
| the code. I think he's getting a few people he can trust to know
| their way around the architecture, so tomorrow if some employee
| decides it's a righteous cause to down the service, they still
| have some semblance of control and are better prepared to
| troubleshoot.
| Havoc wrote:
| Surprised how sceptical all the comments here are. Dick or not
| the guy has a talent for building companies
| lawgimenez wrote:
| Or Twitter was run incompetently since its founding. We
| wouldn't be in this shit show if Twitter wasn't a disaster to
| begin with.
|
| Edit: Grammar
| jeffbee wrote:
| Twitter just took itself private for 42 billion dollars. I'd
| say it was run very, very competently. Hall-of-fame
| leadership, really.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| Plus, how many times were they hacked? Lately by a child.
| davewritescode wrote:
| I totally agree, Twitter's old management pulled off one of
| the greatest moves in the history of corporate America.
|
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Their strategy was to piss really rich people off enough
| that they'd just buy the company outright?
|
| I dunno, that seems like a pie in the sky.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| What a ridiculous take. Twitter was run so competently that
| it has managed to grow to a company with hundreds of
| millions of daily active users and can't figure out how to
| make a profit.
| govg wrote:
| How does profit help the shareholders in a way that an
| inflated stock price to exit at doesn't?
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| And they successfully baited a complete loon to buy it
| for 10X what it was worth.
| scaramanga wrote:
| Or, you know, just buying them...
| frozencell wrote:
| All those hackers could better spend their time teaching
| children code or something if that not already the case...
| oska wrote:
| Very broadly speaking, HN is the forum of choice for the 'Web
| 2.0' and VC backed startup culture that went along with it,
| i.e. what is commonly perceived now as Silicon Valley culture.
| This culture is becoming increasingly reactionary now that
| their power is threatened/fading. Musk, while part of the early
| rise of that culture in the late 90s is now well outside it
| (represented by his move from California to Texas) and is a
| favourite target of the cohort described above. See also HN's
| noted long-term antipathy towards Bitcoin.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| As someone well outside that circle, has it ever occurred to
| you that some people just don't like Elon "Pedo Guy" Musk?
|
| 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?
|
| -
|
| 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.
| oska wrote:
| Why are you assuming I am an Elon Musk supporter, or that I
| even like him? And it's fine if you don't like him; it's
| fine for anyone to not like him.
|
| 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.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I'm not assuming you're a supporter, you're actively
| being a supporter of his right now.
|
| 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)
| CloudRecondite wrote:
| It doesn't seem very hard to build a space ship if you
| are a motivated billionaire
| jayd16 wrote:
| Weird policy is weird no matter who you are.
| rtp4me wrote:
| Yeah, the Musk haters are out in full force. Perhaps he simply
| paid them from his own pocket (eg consulting rate) when they
| were "off the clock" from their day-time job? Seems very
| logical to me.
| chasd00 wrote:
| It's interesting to see technical people melt down and froth
| at the mouth like political hobbyists when some new piece of
| meat/news lands in their feed trough.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Well possibly, but you're honestly just making things up.
| rtp4me wrote:
| Making up what - the very plausible idea one company hired
| a team of experts from another company to come in and do an
| audit? Is that so unreasonable?
|
| Again, the Musk haters are out in force.
| lupire wrote:
| There is someone at a company who could articulate the
| big-picture idea behind bizarre-looking activity, to
| maintain orderly calm among the employees, customers, and
| shareholders, and prevent wild speculation and panic.
| That person is the owner or CEO. Musk is both. Employees
| who don't trust their bosses don't do good work.
| CloudRecondite wrote:
| And so are the fan boys!
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Particularly interesting argument they're making too, that
| Twitter is a bunch of write-only code, unreadable by any other
| engineers.
| Havoc wrote:
| I guess their point about it being more distributed is valid
| to some extent but yeah struck me as a little strange too.
|
| Then again starlink is quite uhm distributed too...
| closeparen wrote:
| With time, reading, discussion, reflection, practice, and
| experimentation you can integrate into a team and grow to
| understand how things are, then why they are, then how that's
| working out, and finally how they can be improved. This
| process takes months, even years.
|
| 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.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| I've been coding for 39 years. I know how the process
| works. And yes, it does take time to get the deep
| understanding of any system. But it is not on the scale of
| impossible for a squad of 10x engineers to answer and/or
| develop some basic questions in a short time frame. And
| much more reliable than trusting the existing crew who has
| been quite publicly represented by persons hostile to their
| new boss. I do not in any way mean to cast ALL engineers at
| Twitter in this light. But it is quite clear the bullies
| there have grown quite accustomed to their pulpit.
| closeparen wrote:
| Which parts are unnecessary and which people should be
| fired, is not one of the basic questions for which you're
| going to get a good answer in a short timeframe. Now it's
| clear that there's a lot of animosity for Twitter in this
| thread - maybe people don't particularly care of the
| decisions made in this process are correct or just
| because they all had it coming anyway - but imagine
| someone doing this to your shop. Come on. It's
| ridiculous. You'd be pissed.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Your scope of investigation is much larger than the one I
| stated. One thing neither you or I know at this point,
| was it a 2 hour visit or is it one of Musk's marathon
| "pull up the couches cuz we ain't going home till we
| figure this out" sessions.
| matai_kolila wrote:
| Can you elaborate on this argument? I don't really understand
| his companies as "well built" in any reasonable sense that I
| can identify.
|
| "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.
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| Well for one, they actually achieve meaningful change in the
| world.
|
| 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
| Aeolun wrote:
| I think it's just nice that they're all large successful
| companies _without_ an ad model.
| CloudRecondite wrote:
| You don't think these companies have produced meaningful
| change? They've meaningfully changed the world far far more
| than Musk companies. Clearly you are a fan of the Musk
| companies more, but who cares?
| squokko wrote:
| Yes, his companies are completely sloppy and grossly
| incompetent. They only delivered 343,000 vehicles last
| quarter, which is way less than they should have, and the
| wait on a Model Y is close to a year, indicating extremely
| poor planning. Total joke of a company.
| Havoc wrote:
| >I don't really understand his companies as "well built" in
| any reasonable sense that I can identify.
|
| 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
| [deleted]
| viburnum wrote:
| The software in Tesla cars is terrible. Twitter actually works
| pretty well in comparison.
| sidibe wrote:
| I think the goal here is to get people to quit voluntarily by
| doing the most ridiculous things possible.
| XorNot wrote:
| With the obvious problem that all the valuable people know
| their worth, and are just sending CVs to
| Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Meta right now.
| scaramanga wrote:
| And they're heading towards companies which run a wage-fixing
| conspiracy during a fire sale... without a union... Unlucky
| 7e wrote:
| Tesla code is pretty bad. If anything, a Twitter engineers should
| be evaluating Tesla staff.
| jzl wrote:
| Ah yes, you see it's really quite simple. You start with the file
| "twitter.rb" and just start following the function calls from
| there.
| throwaway728274 wrote:
| For a variety of performance car nerd related reasons, I've not
| paid too much attention to Tesla. But iirc, there have been a
| couple threads here and elsewhere about Tesla making "expedient"
| choices in Eng, with a lot of horrible bodges around critical
| components. It definitely left me with an impression that Tesla
| was a place with low engineering quality -- though again, I have
| no source at hand here, and don't feel bothered to do the
| searching.
|
| 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.
| bumby wrote:
| > _Tesla was a place with low engineering quality_
|
| 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]
| pbronez wrote:
| Interesting. My impression is that SpaceX has delivered some
| extraordinary results by throwing out a lot of conventional
| wisdom and starting over from first principles. This anecdote
| suggests they're humble enough to re-adopt standard practices
| when experience shows their value.
|
| Seems like a good approach... if the cost of failure is
| manageable.
| bumby wrote:
| What, in that example, do you think is the first principle
| they were working from?
|
| 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.
| gwilikers wrote:
| I know of this Twitter thread, but not sure of the
| authenticity.
|
| https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376
| jsrcout wrote:
| I don't know if it's authentic either, but this bit from the
| thread sure is interesting:
|
| > 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/.
| ..
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| Take a random sample of Tesla vehicles, more than four but
| fewer than 10, and the panel gaps are obscene for the vehicle
| price and mystique- it's clear proof they have low standards.
| cbeach wrote:
| Tesla Model S owner here. The software on iOS and car is
| several years ahead of the competition. It embarrasses luxury
| German automakers. It's made with the user in mind, it is
| elegant, and it is innovative in many surprising ways.
|
| 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 :-)
| jjfoooo6 wrote:
| I also own a Tesla and I'd rate their user facing software at
| a C+ at best. It's better than the competition, sure, but the
| competition is legacy auto manufacturers with no tradition of
| expertise in software.
|
| 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.
| jquery wrote:
| I drive a Mercedes and Apple CarPlay works fantastic (Tesla's
| driving OS would probably be a sidegrade at best). And I get
| all the fit and finish of a Mercedes instead of Tesla..
| slaw wrote:
| Not a Tesla owner. I sat in a demo Tesla. Infotainment UI
| looked clumsy. There was no Apple CarPlay. The most basic
| things didn't have knobs and required touch screen to use.
| Usability was years behind everyone else.
| moooo99 wrote:
| This was my impression as well (although I just sat on the
| passenger seat for 150km).
|
| 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.
| black_13 wrote:
| ctvo wrote:
| What a fabulous time for security researchers.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ttyprintk wrote:
| "Oh, your boss is on the way out. Something about
| insubordination when Mr. Musk asked the VPN to be opened. Now,
| I'll need an account to reserve conference rooms for transition
| meetings."
| cube00 wrote:
| I wonder if the typical executive tyrant who weaponizes fear to
| get their bonuses is more likely to have their staff caught by
| social engineering attacks like these.
| steele wrote:
| Oddly enough Twitter employees can work from home forever. Guess
| Tesla employees just raided the snacks.
| seu wrote:
| Consciously or not, this is meant to humiliate people at Twitter,
| make them live in fear of their new boss, and either flee, or
| stay and bow to their supreme leader.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| All hail the great Khan. Elon Musk is singlehandedly saving
| democracy.
| armatav wrote:
| Thread is insane; he's checking to see who's doing actual work.
| nxm wrote:
| Exactly... it was published that many engineers at Twitter
| haven't been doing anything useful/sitting around for a long
| time now. Time to cut the fat. Moreover, seems like a bash Elon
| thread
| TMWNN wrote:
| The weirdest of the many, many crazy takes is that using TSLA
| people to review TWTR code is a "conflict of interest". As
| obviously stupid and blatantly "I'm going to us a phrase that
| I've heard but don't understand" as that is, I've seen
| _multiple_ people make this claim.
| mancerayder wrote:
| Will the new bots be fully self-driving?
| antipaul wrote:
| Working as a coder in a non-tech industry for a multinational, I
| appreciate that someone so high up cares about something as
| "rudimentary" as code.
| Nathanba wrote:
| I think so too, I'm impressed that he wants to personally look
| at code at all. His ability to evaluate it deeply is not
| relevant, one thing is for sure: he can ask deeper questions
| than if he had no code to talk about. That alone is a big bonus
| when you need to do an evaluation of a person, having something
| concrete to talk about.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Why would the code be relevant to generating more profit? It
| doesn't seem like the domain of a CEO.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Famously, Bill Gates would review both code and low-level
| technical architecture decisions of flagship products.
|
| 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.
| braingenious wrote:
| All of this is so funny in general. It seems possible that
| Twitter might go the way of Tumblr in that goofy policy changes
| alienate the core userbase. I couldn't imagine betting billions
| of dollars on a property that could basically just become a
| valuable-ish domain in the future.
| ym555 wrote:
| Comparing Twitter to Tumblr is laughable. The same thing that
| happened to tumblr _cannot_ happen to twitter.
| borski wrote:
| Why?
| braingenious wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ym555
|
| This appears to be the only comment this account has ever
| made
| tsol wrote:
| This doesn't really mean much. I know people like to use
| this as 'see they're a shill'-- but does Elon really need
| to pay people in order to get into petty fights about
| him? This literally is completely inconsequential. He's a
| billionaire, he owns twitter and can do what he wants.
| People can complain all day and it has literally no
| effect. He says things that piss people off literally
| every single day. The best thing to do is just ignore him
| instead of feeding him more attention
| themitigating wrote:
| Now that's odd right? Account created in 2019 and not a
| single comment until now. The comment is also just a
| quick rebuttal with no substance, the type of comment
| made by someone who you'd think would comment often.
|
| 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".
| 65a wrote:
| Even better, no response to this as of the time I write
| this comment (1667104702).
| regpertom wrote:
| "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing,
| shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like.
| It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're
| worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll
| look at the data."
|
| 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.
| ym555 wrote:
| Ever heard of lurkers?
|
| > 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.
| themitigating wrote:
| I have heard of lurkers, that was the second option I
| offered
| Thorrez wrote:
| So? That seems off topic.
| braingenious wrote:
| Can you elaborate on that? How do you establish the
| impossibility of future events?
| ym555 wrote:
| Tumblr was very North America/Europe centric platform, with
| most users often posting about very niche topics that most
| people aren't interested in.
|
| 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.
| braingenious wrote:
| > the part of twitter that hates elon and his policies
|
| 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.
| bumbledraven wrote:
| Elon has expressed support for free speech and treating
| both left and right equally.
| mirkules wrote:
| The absolute nerve of that guy.
| acdha wrote:
| He says a lot of things, however, and the fact that he's
| describing that as something other than the status quo it
| is means we shouldn't take this at face value.
| concordDance wrote:
| I think this reveals more about what you think the
| current split is... A large proportion of the right
| believe things like misgendering and wanting to kick
| Muslims out of the country is fine. These kinds of things
| aren't allowed on twitter.
| acdha wrote:
| Understanding why the last part isn't correct is key to
| understanding the issue: Republicans aren't getting
| kicked off of Twitter for saying they want to reform
| immigration law. Twitter's rules very specifically have a
| "targeted harassment" clause, as you can see from the
| many accounts which never have problems despite
| expressing both sentiments on a regular basis. Even the
| guys posting about how Jews run the world and should be
| killed are rarely banned unless they mention a specific
| person.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| What has Elon done that makes you think everything that
| he says is reliable?
| bumbledraven wrote:
| "Objection, Your Honor. The question assumes facts not in
| evidence."
|
| 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.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Your Honor, the witness clearly stated in response to a
| question regarding Elon Musk's policies an opinion which
| clearly implied that Musk's statements in regards to free
| speech meant that he would have a free speech policy. Can
| we have the court reporter read it back?
|
| "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?
| mikkergp wrote:
| > 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,
|
| 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.
| JasserInicide wrote:
| Tumblr died because they banned all NSFW content. Many of
| them went to Twitter. If Elon decides to do the same
| (doubt he will), Twitter would absolutely fade away quite
| fast.
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| Twitter doesn't depend nearly as much on NSFW content as
| Tumblr did. The majority of people use twitter and never
| or rarely come across NSFW content.
| trident5000 wrote:
| xg15 wrote:
| Slight difference: Tumblr's core userbase were edgy teenagers
| and porn consumers, Twitter's core userbase appears to be press
| people, marketing professionals, celebrities and politicians. I
| think this userbase will be less inclined to just move on to
| Mastodon and more to make demands to Musk instead.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > Twitter's core userbase appears to be press people,
| marketing professionals, celebrities and politicians.
|
| Sounds a lot like Ark Fleet Ship B.
| itronitron wrote:
| >> Twitter's core userbase appears to be press people,
| marketing professionals, celebrities and politicians
|
| all the more reason that everyone else will just leave,
| except for the bots
| colechristensen wrote:
| Nah, there's nowhere else for cable news to pull hot takes from
| social media.
| braingenious wrote:
| Facebook? The world wide web? Another website we haven't seen
| yet?
|
| I remember when the only social network was MySpace and then
| it wasn't.
| dboreham wrote:
| You're forgetting 6-apart.
|
| And Friendster.
| permo-w wrote:
| facebook doesn't work in the same way
| rejectfinite wrote:
| This. Most of what I use twitter for is news. Some cyber/IT
| people and then our news orgs taking screencaps of it for
| news.
| sbf501 wrote:
| This is the true lifeblood of Twitter.
|
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| Twitter isn't just for journos, it's more importantly for
| all their sources too.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Yeah, they use Twitter instead of booking someone to
| talk. Much easier to find a few tweets from someone
| recognizable than to get them in studio. Reporting on
| tweeting gives the 24 hour cycle something to do that
| gets attention. A journalist echo chamber would be less
| effective at this.
| pydry wrote:
| He will probably cleave twitter in two - something for
| journalists and celebrities and then an equivalent of the
| demonetized youtube space for the people advertisers dont
| want to associate with.
|
| Instead of banning accounts he will just make them second
| class citizens.
| pragmatic wrote:
| Interesting idea.
|
| 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?
| sbf501 wrote:
| What is the benefit of someone famous retweeting a
| nonfamous person? Bragging rights? Is that value? It
| seems to me more like a sign that someone needs to work
| on their internal self-validation mechanisms. Of course,
| most of the consumers of vapid social media are K=1
| thinkers, so maybe that IS the value of twitter and I'm
| just an out of touch elitist. All are possible.
| lexandstuff wrote:
| It seems almost inevitable it will go the way of Tumblr,
| Friendster, Hi5, Bebo, MySpace, Orkut, Google+ and soon
| Facebook.
|
| Social networks don't have a particularly long life expectancy.
| golemiprague wrote:
| mritchie712 wrote:
| inevitable? there are some pretty simple things they could do
| to double revenue:
|
| 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.
| dralley wrote:
| I'm so pissed that Scroll died for "Twitter Blue"
| simonswords82 wrote:
| 1. allow people to pay for a blue check to be verified
|
| > 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.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| "nobody"? I'd pay, so it's not nobody.
|
| it is obviously worth testing and requiring a small
| payment is a good way of verifying they are a real person
| (not a bot).
| simonswords82 wrote:
| Curious - why would you pay for it?
| mritchie712 wrote:
| I think there's value in having a verified online
| identity. A place someone could find out a good bit about
| how you think. Twitter seems like a pretty good place to
| do that.
| sbarre wrote:
| 1. allow people to pay for a blue check to be verified
|
| > 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...
| simonswords82 wrote:
| But what is the point of the blue checkmark? How does
| having it benefit a luxury brand? Am I missing something
| here?
| sbarre wrote:
| I was arguing the point that "exclusivity that anyone can
| buy has less value" made by OP..
|
| 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.
| w0de0 wrote:
| Luxury brands have always made low end products for the
| petite bourgeoisie. Their products offerings are
| deliberate pyramids of increasing artificial scarcity
| which many clever people have wasted lives designing.
|
| '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.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| 4chan is doing good
| Etheryte wrote:
| 4Chan might be doing well, but most of the time they're
| definitely not doing good.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Are Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr?
| jstx1 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| > 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.
| the_doctah wrote:
| What hubris to think that your system is so complex that other
| engineers couldn't understand it.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| Nicksil wrote:
| >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.
|
| You don't need to be a part of any particular domain to
| effectively audit code.
| eternalban wrote:
| This is true to an extent. At the extremities, a software
| system can be audited without any previous domain
| exposure: architecture, and implementation means
| (language, deployment, etc.)
|
| 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 wrote:
| kernal wrote:
| > Bullshit. I'm a web engineer
|
| Did you graduate with an engineering degree or do you
| just like calling yourself a "web engineer"?
| Jach wrote:
| It's more polite than "webshit", but the overall comment
| isn't making the case that the more polite term should be
| used... I'd like it if people calling themselves web
| engineers held themselves to a higher standard. And were
| able to see that even if someone is a webshit now, they
| might have been something else in the past, and something
| else again in the future, tech is such a great career
| space in that it's not incredibly difficult to change
| what domains you're working on. Even apart from general
| expertise that allows an engineer to go and review
| arbitrary code (with full understanding, and immediately?
| No, but you can get started, and find common areas and
| boundaries, and find who the main contributors are and
| who isn't so important, and draw big black boxes over
| areas that really need a specific expert's look, and
| there's tons of automated tools that can help too e.g.
| security audit consulting firms can find issues in huge
| codebases quite fast), it would be surprising if Tesla
| didn't already have some former Twitter employees already
| who could contribute to this review if it makes sense to
| use them. Let alone former employees from other companies
| that have systems similar to Twitter's. It'd be
| surprising if all the engineers selected were just people
| who have never worked for another company besides Tesla.
| Aeolun wrote:
| If I see the SpaceX code, and it's full of thousand line
| functions with a cognitive complexity of 200 I can
| confidently say it's going to be hard to maintain.
|
| Clearly it gets rockets into the sky, but something
| similar is true for all code that hasn't failed
| catastrophically yet.
| arrow7000 wrote:
| Is there any reason to suspect that Twitter's code will
| be of this terrible quality? If not, then again: what's
| the point of bringing random engineers in to take a look
| at code from an entirely unfamiliar domain?
| Aeolun wrote:
| Since it's a huge enterprise with hundreds of engineers,
| I don't have to guess. It's just a matter of magnitude.
| XorNot wrote:
| Except you would be wrong. Or at least not obviously
| right: safety critical code does all sorts of weird
| things in the interests of verifiability because it must
| be exactly right: it doesn't get "maintained", because
| once it's flight proven _you do not change it_ without an
| entirely new verification process.
|
| This also leads to interesting practices at times like
| favouring repeating code over writing separate functions
| to ensure the flow of reading doesn't jump around and
| instead always moves forward.
| georgeg23 wrote:
| It's mostly Linux, written in C, a bit of math for GNC,
| quaternions etc.. nothing too crazy if you have a math +
| good C background.
|
| They put the flight software through a lot of hardware in
| the loop tests, simulating launch. That's probably the
| main novel thing.
| saagarjha wrote:
| You can probably read the code. Whether you can
| accurately assess it for the right set of tradeoffs is
| generally far harder.
| Nicksil wrote:
| >Bullshit. I'm a web engineer, and I wouldn't be
| competent to audit code that runs Space X's rockets, nor
| would anyone I know in my career space.
|
| You're still missing the point. It isn't about knowing
| how rockets work or anything in particular. It's about
| being able to search for and recognize issues.
| uoaei wrote:
| I implore you to consider that auditing code is more than
| just big-O analyses.
| Nicksil wrote:
| >I implore you to consider that auditing code is more
| than just big-O analyses.
|
| That isn't at all what I said nor implied.
| uoaei wrote:
| You seem to have fooled literally every person replying
| to your post, then. Perhaps consider that your
| reactionary post was not quite as "rational" as you'd
| like to believe, or at least that you haven't yet said
| what you mean.
| Nicksil wrote:
| >You seem to have fooled literally every person replying
| to your post, then.
|
| Fooled? No.
|
| >Perhaps consider that your reactionary post was not
| quite as "rational" as you'd like to believe, or at least
| that you haven't yet said what you mean.
|
| What part of any of my comments are reactionary? What
| have I said that I don't mean? I genuinely don't
| understand.
| inerte wrote:
| At Twitter's scale the issues are far less about "this
| code smells funny" but how dozens of systems interact
| together. Ain't nobody gonna figure out problems by
| simply checking out a handful of repositories, and
| specially in a few hours / days.
| Nicksil wrote:
| >At Twitter's scale the issues are far less about "this
| code smells funny" but how dozens of systems interact
| together. Ain't nobody gonna figure out problems by
| simply checking out a repository, and specially in a few
| hours / days.
|
| I don't know why you think someone would have to know
| about Twitter's specific implementation of distributed
| systems in order to inspect those systems for non-
| twitter-specfifc issues.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Issues such as what?
| Nicksil wrote:
| >Issues such as what?
|
| Such as those which do not meet the standards defined for
| the particular audit.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I mean, you can do a very general audit of things like
| "is there CI" or "do they use horribly unsafe
| serialization everywhere" but I don't see anything beyond
| this without a huge amount of effort.
| Nicksil wrote:
| >I mean, you can do a very general audit of things like
| "is there CI" or "do they use horribly unsafe
| serialization everywhere" but I don't see anything beyond
| this without a huge amount of effort.
|
| Do we know what is or isn't being reviewed? Do we know
| how much effort is being applied in this process or if
| there's a defined upper and/or lower bound?
| saagarjha wrote:
| The upper limit is the point where it makes sense to
| bring in experts rather than random Tesla engineers.
| inerte wrote:
| Ack, and thanks for your comment. I am choosing to
| disengage from this conversation, have fun!
| Nicksil wrote:
| >Ack, and thanks for your comment. I am choosing to
| disengage from this conversation, have fun!
|
| Sorry, what was it about my comment you vehemently
| disagree with?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I'm not missing the point. "Searching for and recognizing
| issues" is not somehow completely independent from the
| domain of the code in question. More importantly,
| different domains often have completely different primary
| concerns. E.g. web app engineering is often concerned
| with reducing cycle time because the technology means
| that you can instantly release updates. That's obviously
| _very_ different from the concerns of launching a rocket,
| and I would expect them to have very different
| engineering practices.
|
| In short, experience matters.
| Nicksil wrote:
| >I'm not missing the point. "Searching for and
| recognizing issues" is not somehow completely independent
| from the domain of the code in question. More
| importantly, different domains often have completely
| different primary concerns. E.g. web app engineering is
| often concerned with reducing cycle time because the
| technology means that you can instantly release updates.
| That's obviously very different from the concerns of
| launching a rocket, and I would expect them to have very
| different engineering practices.
|
| >In short, experience matters.
|
| Is this based off real experience in the field of
| auditing?
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't think Musk is looking for an itemized bug list.
| He's probably more interested in overall code quality,
| estimates on the level of technical debt, and a
| qualitative feel about the state of things. While a
| distributed systems person would have an easier go of
| that, I think most decently-well-rounded software
| developers would provide value there.
|
| Also remember that Telsa runs their own distributed
| systems to support the connected features of their cars.
| Certainly that's not the same as Twitter, but it's
| definitely in the same ballpark.
| moooo99 wrote:
| > You're still missing the point. It isn't about knowing
| how rockets work or anything in particular. It's about
| being able to search for and recognize issues.
|
| Still, the issues you'll likely encounter inside a car
| are very very different from the ones you'll see inside a
| historically grown distributed system serving millions of
| web, app and API requests. Auditing code is more than
| analyzing runtime/memory complexity.
|
| Thats not to say it's impossible for Tesla engineers to
| audit. But I'd imagine it would take quite a bit of time
| to gather meaningful insight into the landscape and would
| hardly be an efficient use of the time of senior Tesla
| engineers.
| Nicksil wrote:
| >Still, the issues you'll likely encounter inside a car
| are very very different from the ones you'll see inside
| [...]
|
| There are many systems involved in those cars, there's
| also many people working for those kind of companies who
| do not solely "work on cars."
|
| >Auditing code is more than analyzing runtime/memory
| complexity.
|
| I agree.
|
| >Thats not to say it's impossible for Tesla engineers to
| audit. But I'd imagine it would take quite a bit of time
| to gather meaningful insight into the landscape and would
| hardly be an efficient use of the time of senior Tesla
| engineers.
|
| Take longer than if the team were comprised of Twitter
| staff or who are already familiar with Twitter's
| infrastructure and code base? Sure. But that's the case
| with just about any audit conducted by an outside entity.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Really the only way I've been able to make sense of it is
| if he brought people in to produce an audit of changes
| made in the last couple months. IE he knows he doesn't
| know how to get that information, but he knows he has
| people at Tesla who do.
|
| 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.
| bdowling wrote:
| "Tesla engineers don't just work on in-vehicle code though.
| The servers and systems needed to implement Tesla's
| telemetry and software updates would be in the same
| ballpark of expertise, albeit with much less scale and
| different requirements than Twitter."
|
| -- hn_throwaway_99
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33389128
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Yes, both were me. I'll respond since you seem to be
| implying my responses are incongruent.
|
| 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.
| sidibe wrote:
| The hubris is thinking Tesla engineers (who are offered worse
| pay and wlb relative to Twitter) are coding masters of every
| domain. I won't even snipe at their own software here.
|
| 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.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| On one hand, you can usually safely ignore 99% of code in a
| system that does the plumbing in a system and focus on the
| few key algorithms. It wouldn't be a stretch at all to take
| one of the self driving AI guys and have them evaluate say,
| an ML classifier used to flag spam/abuse content. That
| would be well inside their domain.
| johnbcoughlin wrote:
| > That would be well inside their domain.
|
| Would it?
| Nicksil wrote:
| >Would it?
|
| Would it not?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > It wouldn't be a stretch at all to take one of the self
| driving AI guys and have them evaluate say, an ML
| classifier used to flag spam/abuse content.
|
| 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.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Key algorithms to do...what, exactly? Why not just read
| the documentation on that instead of having people bring
| you a random sample of their code on paper?
| naasking wrote:
| Who said they're evaluating the code? Maybe they're
| evaluating the people by asking them questions about the
| code they've just written. That's a great way to find out
| who's full of shit.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| You don't need to be a "coding master of every domain" to
| recognize shit code.
| arrow7000 wrote:
| Is there any reason to suspect that there is shit code at
| Twitter? Or that that is in any way related to the
| problems that Twitter has or the "problems" that Elon
| said he wanted to fix?
| saagarjha wrote:
| Pay and work life benefits are generally independent of
| technical competence. But I agree with the rest of your
| comment.
| Nicksil wrote:
| >The hubris is thinking Tesla engineers (who are offered
| worse pay and wlb relative to Twitter) are coding masters
| of every domain. I won't even snipe at their own software
| here.
|
| Who is thinking that?
| onethought wrote:
| Knowing enough to call bullshit is way lower than knowing
| enough to contribute meaningfully to a codebase.
|
| 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.
| closeparen wrote:
| What hubris to think you can wander into a system as complex
| as a $44bn tech company and draw any meaningful conclusions
| about it at all in a weekend. I mean, in my world we have
| some regular "tech reviews" with our Sr. Directors/VPs at a
| pretty abstract slides-and-diagrams level, and even that
| takes weeks of prep leading up like 4+ hour presentations.
| For something with only a glancing relationship to code level
| reality. I have occasionally seen my work reflected in these
| reviews, and the game of telephone that produces them is
| quite lossy.
|
| 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.
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| Also what hubris of the Twitter engineers, who seem to be in
| this thread, thinking anything they built was that special.
|
| 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
| spoils19 wrote:
| Video player works fine for me, and I'm on 20 gig
| symmetrical fiber with 8ms to my local Azure hub. Maybe
| check your firewall settings?
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Not to mention "something went wrong" again and again,
| maybe by the 4th reload would a linked tweet actually show
| up for me.
|
| 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.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| No, that happens on the Twitter app too.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Tesla engineers don't just work on in-vehicle code though. The
| servers and systems needed to implement Tesla's telemetry and
| software updates would be in the same ballpark of expertise,
| albeit with much less scale and different requirements than
| Twitter.
|
| 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.
| adrr wrote:
| What telemetry do cars send Tesla? The EDR system which
| stores all telemetry data is not suppose to leave the car.
|
| https://edr.tesla.com/
| cloudking wrote:
| They definitely send data for evaluating safety score and
| training FSD.
| jjfoooo6 wrote:
| We've gotten quite a few public comments from Musk on what he
| plans to do with Twitter, and they indicate total
| cluelessness from a product and engineering point of view.
| There's nothing to indicate an appreciation for the unique
| challenges Twitter has in balancing free expression with
| appeal for advertisers (or even that these needs might be in
| conflict), or even on the subtleties in what free speech even
| means for Twitter. The acquisition seems motivated by
| politics and impulsiveness rather than any coherent vision
| for the product.
|
| 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.
| naasking wrote:
| > and they indicate total cluelessness from a product and
| engineering point of view
|
| Gotta say, this sounds exactly what they said about Tesla,
| and SpaceX, and Starlink.
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| I'm taking a "let's wait and see" approach to Elon's
| Twitter.
|
| It's much more comfortable than all the public kvetching
| zerohp wrote:
| All stories from the x.com/Paypal days say that he was
| entirely clueless during that time. The board removed him.
| apavlo wrote:
| > But Musk got started by confounding x.com/PayPal, which
| does have very similar engineering needs as Twitter.
|
| But PayPal was running Oracle on IBM bigiron machines even
| after Musk left them.
| abraae wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| tootie wrote:
| Did they bring the experts in autonomous vehicles?
| taf2 wrote:
| Isn't twitter a pretty simple thing... db with writes and
| reads... it was maybe still is rails? I don't know MySQL ,
| Pgsql have come a long way and most of the hard parts would be
| scaling these services.... Keeping good caches in memory with
| redis or memcached... not really sure I see twitter being all
| that crazy other then it being so many people and so many years
| of edge case handling they would be hard for an outsider to
| follow ... but it's not like it was handling a complex UI or
| enterprise style hacks for a handful of worth it customers...
|
| 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...
| ikiris wrote:
| "It's just a simple matter of programming"
| birken wrote:
| Tesla has millions of cars in service and Twitter has
| millions of users. Same level of complexity!
| x86x87 wrote:
| Hahaha. No. They switched to the JVM eons ago. Also, you are
| severely underestimating how difficult it is to build and run
| something like twitter at scale.
| jvm___ wrote:
| Twitter is just a ticket booth. Had over request, get tickets
| back.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| _vertigo wrote:
| I think you're massively underselling how complex it is to
| run something at scale. It's not a matter of just making the
| database go fast. Just using the database as an example (even
| though there's way more to it than just the database), you
| can scale a database a bit by sharding or running it as a
| cluster or what-have-you, but you can only shard so wide
| before you run into other problems which are much harder to
| solve. Running at a massive scale requires rearchitecting
| almost everything that came before.
| [deleted]
| jahewson wrote:
| In fairness there's plenty of Tesla engineers that used to work
| across the bay at Twitter.
| _vertigo wrote:
| From Musk's POV, a bunch of solid, well-rounded, and
| experienced engineers you trust might be enough to tell you
| "this guy is full of shit" when talking to new people.
|
| Maybe it's less about code quality and more about eng quality.
| tootie wrote:
| I think that's all besides the point. Does anyone think any
| of Twitter's problems are related to code quality? Literally
| go read the unit test suite and you'll what it does and if it
| works. If he just wants to cut heads, cut them from verticals
| you want to exit (whatever they might be). What the hell
| could he possibly achieve with this stunt? It feels more like
| the old cliche about your first day at prison where you
| should pick the toughest guy and beat him up to establish
| dominance.
| uni_rule wrote:
| whateveracct wrote:
| I guarantee Elon is surrounded by yes-men.
| generalizations wrote:
| That's not how you build a spaceship.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Eessh, I hope not.
| sroussey wrote:
| ryandrake wrote:
| I suspect that anyone who says No to Elon or outwardly
| disagrees with him doesn't last long in leadership at his
| companies.
| justinhj wrote:
| Then maybe he's always right. As chief engineer at Space X
| for example, if he was an idiot or surrounded by idiots do
| you really think he would be succeeding?
| giantrobot wrote:
| > As chief engineer at Space X
|
| 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?
| georgeg23 wrote:
| Mike Griffin was the real chief engineer at SpaceX...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
| kjksf wrote:
| They guy didn't even work at SpaceX.
|
| Please explain how it's possible to be chief engineer at
| SpaceX without even working there.
| georgeg23 wrote:
| Read his career history and do a little digging. Mike was
| the government side of Elon's circus.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Yes? Many, many people who don't work for musk or have a
| financial interest in him being competent have said in
| interviews that he has a deep engineering understanding
| of the rockets and especially their engines.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Most people have shit understanding of rockets. There's
| plenty of otherwise very intelligent people that do not
| have any grasp of rocketry. A competent amateur rocket
| enthusiast can easily sound like a "rocket scientist" to
| someone otherwise uninvolved with rocketry.
|
| 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.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| The is such a common thing people say, that there are
| lists of reasons why you are wrong: https://www.reddit.co
| m/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| SpaceX is successfully solving engineering problems. If
| Elon is surrounded by yes men, that means he's always
| right. That he probably isn't always right implies he
| doesn't surround himself solely with sycophants.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > SpaceX is successfully solving engineering problems. If
| Elon is surrounded by yes men, that means he's always
| right.
|
| 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.
| justinhj wrote:
| I'm glad somebody got my point, lol.
| planetsprite wrote:
| It's possible to be a sycophant who manages the politics
| of appeasing a narcissist while also solving problems on
| your own and letting said narcissist take the credit.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| If you're the kind of narcissist who can attract that
| kind of sycophant you'll have no problem getting
| investors. And no problem getting employees either.
| Nicksil wrote:
| >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?
|
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "Computer engineer" and "mechanical engineer" have very
| different meanings when it comes to liability,
| certifications, etc.
| justinhj wrote:
| May want to read this if you're interested in having your
| opinion changed by actual testimonials rather than just
| going with the tribal Spaceman bad line. https://www.redd
| it.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
| jahewson wrote:
| lol that's what Gwynne Shotwell is for
| xeromal wrote:
| who is a yes-man according the the post we're all
| replying to. lol
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Indeed, Elon knows how to hire good people, the kind who
| can assess others in their area of expertise.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| I guarantee you he isn't.
| Taniwha wrote:
| It makes sense because twitter is mostly written in scala and
| Tesla's engineers are scala experts right? ..... right?
| llamaLord wrote:
| 14 months ago a lot of people said it was "laughable" that
| Tesla thought they'd have a working prototype of a humanoid
| robot in under a year...
|
| I'll take Tesla engineer's over 95% of the industry any day.
| qeternity wrote:
| No, people said they'd never have a working prototype that
| was in any way useful or demonstrative.
|
| And those people were right.
| [deleted]
| dragontamer wrote:
| No. Most of us correctly noted that no matter how much effort
| Tesla puts into Optimus, it won't be as good as Honda's Asimo
| demo for years.
|
| 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.
| cbeach wrote:
| The differentiator with Tesla's bot is not in the way it
| walks, but the way it learns and "thinks" - Tesla engineers
| are building Artificial General Intelligence into their
| bot:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intellig
| e...
|
| 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.
| uni_rule wrote:
| I'll believe it when I see it. In the meantime his team
| still can't even deliver on Tesla's self driving
| promises.
| roywiggins wrote:
| If they actually have an AGI up their sleeve then
| spending time on hardware seems like a waste of time.
| Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote:
| Oh, I missed this. It now makes sense. Thank you!
| cochne wrote:
| That claim has about as much behind it as all of the full
| self driving claims.
| sroussey wrote:
| The self driving claims that the full released version
| would be in the 2010s.
| moooo99 wrote:
| "Full self-driving will come in n+1 one years - I
| promise"
| snotrockets wrote:
| The same way Musk's other effort make money: government
| subsidies.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| Is it as working as their FSD?
| recuter wrote:
| > Distributed systems, the large-scale and spread-out network
| that Twitter is composed of, are not the automaker's specialty,
| the person said.
|
| 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.
|
| Sounds like he knows exactly what he is doing. I'd do just
| that. For an unfathomable amount of the people working at
| twitter the answer will be zero lines of code.
| the_sleaze_ wrote:
| > the answer will be zero lines of code.
|
| Ugh, I bet you're exactly right..
| thepasswordis wrote:
| > For an unfathomable amount of the people working at twitter
| the answer will be zero lines of code.
|
| And what's the average salary of these people? $15k/mo?
| $20k/mo?
| throwup wrote:
| > For an unfathomable amount of the people working at twitter
| the answer will be zero lines of code.
|
| 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.
| recuter wrote:
| Heaven forbid the people who show up with blank printed
| pages be made to feel defensive. Relationship might suffer
| so much they might just have to break up permanently.
| throwup wrote:
| The problem of course is not annoying the
| underperformers, but you want to avoid annoying the
| valuable engineers who get things done and keep the
| company running. There's plenty of demand for engineers
| -- if they want, they could find another job in a week
| where they don't have to deal with hostile management.
| Treat people well. Assume the best and let them prove you
| right, rather than assuming the worst and making them
| prove you wrong.
| Nathanba wrote:
| Trust me, the absolute last thing a valuable engineer is
| annoyed about is to finally have some time to show off
| some of the things he did.
| adventured wrote:
| Musk clearly dislikes fragile corporate cultures. He's
| going to destroy and rebuild Twitter's culture, that is
| very clearly his intent. I don't know how much more obvious
| it could be. He'll rebuild it in a way that he prefers
| companies to operate, staffed with the kind of people he
| prefers (whether anyone else likes that or not).
| throwup wrote:
| I mean, you're not wrong, but I was more replying to the
| "I'd do just that" sentence which seems to imply the
| scorched earth approach is a good thing. We don't need
| people going around emulating Musk.
| recuter wrote:
| Of course you don't. ;)
| xeromal wrote:
| Exactly this.
| saagarjha wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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?
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| > What would he print out?
|
| Diffs.
| recuter wrote:
| Is the globally-distributed many-to-many messaging platform
| web scale?
|
| > 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?
| saagarjha wrote:
| Depends. I haven't written a line of code in a month
| either. That's because I'm planning what code needs to be
| written in the next five years. I've found a lot of good
| engineers spend more of their time in Google Docs than
| they might in their IDE.
| recuter wrote:
| The really bad ones spend all their time there.
| Gustomaximus wrote:
| The old and the new.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| > I imagine the Twitter codebase itself is a farcical Rube
| Goldberg machine.
|
| I'd presume Tesla's codebase is exactly the same.
| recuter wrote:
| Absolutely correct. :)
| [deleted]
| timcavel wrote:
| The primary reason enterprise distributed systems software are
| complicated is that most code is hidden behind teams of teams
| of teams of hundreds of mediocre people, not inherent
| complexity.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Heh, I'm still fairly confident that our 100 man software
| project would proceed much faster if the team was cut down to
| the best 6 people.
| Aeolun wrote:
| What a weird thing to say. I can evaluate any code. If it's
| code I'm unfamiliar with it takes longer, and the result is
| more variable, but it's far from impossible.
|
| It's certainly more reliable than the evaluation of the person
| whose job depends on it being evaluated as correct.
| xeromal wrote:
| Agreed. I had the opportunity to audit a FAANG codebase (many
| many repositories) a while back and while I'm a lowly
| engineer, I was able to start understanding quite a bit after
| a few weeks. Obviously there's no way I could contribute or
| make recommendations in that short time, but obvious smells
| start working their way out after exposure. The clarity only
| increases with the amount of time spent immersed in it.
| jensgk wrote:
| Off course you can have an opinion about any code. It will
| just not always be correct.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > If it's code I'm unfamiliar with it takes longer, and the
| result is more variable, but it's far from impossible.
|
| 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.
| ctvo wrote:
| Given 24-48 hours in a gigantic tech company's code base made
| up of dozens of teams and hundreds (thousands?) of logical
| services? No, I couldn't tell you the "quality" of the code.
|
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Given 24-48 hours in a gigantic tech company's code base
| made up of dozens of teams and hundreds (thousands?) of
| logical services? No, I couldn't tell you the "quality" of
| the code._
|
| You could probably call out the bullshitters, though. They
| aren't refactoring the code base.
| sidibe wrote:
| I would guess anyone calling someone out 48 hours into a
| huge codebase is themselves the bullshitter. Maybe if
| that 48 hours is work time and presentations/walkthroughs
| and the person catching up is a seasoned director (they
| tend to have to do this quick ramp of huge projects more
| often than an engineer). But no one is going to look at
| Twitter's code base and make any meaningful conclusions
| in 48 hours.
| uoaei wrote:
| dmak wrote:
| You don't have to evaluate other peoples code or something?
| tux3 wrote:
| I'd like your opinion on the MGLRU code they just merged in
| the kernel. It's a self contained piece of code, you can look
| at it and print it on paper.
|
| 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?
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| At the moment, my default position on all stories out of
| Twitter is that they didn't happen unless confirmed officially
| by Twitter. And the more nonsensical the story, the firmer that
| belief is for me.
| uni_rule wrote:
| Well it's not like Twitter will ever officially state: yeah
| they just walzted in here and did a bunch of moves that made
| absolutely zero sense, it was a shit show.
| oittaa wrote:
| lohii wrote:
| If someone completely new to my codebase came along and tried to
| evaluate my code I'd laugh. You can't jump in and "evaluate"
| without knowing context and being familiar with the features.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| What's more funny is how people commonly believe like this
| their code is so special or different than everyone else's.
| Reverse engineering a large code base is not anywhere as hard
| as most software engineers somehow believe. I was tasked with
| analyzing a large code base from a company that my employer had
| been an investor in and as part of their investment had been
| given IP rights, the company employees were floored when our
| team, lead by me had ripped apart their system into multiple
| components and reused them in way they hadn't. Trust me if one
| is experienced enough they can understand your code perfectly
| fine, it's definitely not as special as you think it is.
| bagacrap wrote:
| I would say it's pretty "special" and well written code if
| outsiders can come in and quickly understand it. You should
| have commended them for their work.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| That is true. They were definitely a skilled team that had
| written the system. However I still think most large
| systems can be reverse "design" engineered fairly easily by
| someone who is experienced.
| chris_wot wrote:
| I invite you to work on LibreOffice.
| rendall wrote:
| I was coming here to say this. I have definitely found
| myself reading a codebase that is easy to read and easy to
| follow, and mistakenly concluding therefore that its
| developers were not solving complicated problems.
| 8192kjshad09- wrote:
| Really interesting story, approximately how many lines of
| code were in that codebase?
|
| 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.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Why would anyone think Twitter has 10 million lines of
| code? Does it have some type of hidden features etc that I
| am not aware of?
| wiseowise wrote:
| Why would you think that it doesn't have 10 million lines
| of code?
| ilaksh wrote:
| Because that's a ludicrous amount of code for almost
| anything and Twitter has a relatively limited scope.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| This was just over 600k of mostly c++ code. It's certainly
| true that it helped I was familiar with the domain and the
| various technologies they had used, like CORBA and xml,
| this was late 90s.
|
| 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.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I'm not doubting your story, but this is not the norm in
| my experience. It's certainly true that
| it helped I was familiar with the domain
|
| Technical prowess and domain knowledge are excellent
| assets, obviously, but in my experience they're often not
| enough.
|
| 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.
| nogzio wrote:
| For reference, Facebook's android Messenger app is about
| 10M lines of code:
|
| https://engineering.fb.com/2022/10/24/android/android-
| java-k...
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| That is interesting. I wondering how the 15 people that
| had created the ~600K c++ codebase I'm talking about
| compares to the FB headcount on android Messanger, does
| anyone know how big that team is? loc/head is a curious
| measure.
|
| Regardless it's a bit concerning that it takes 10M loc
| for a messaging app.
| govg wrote:
| Does lines of code have any meaningful use as a statistic
| when I can simply include a bunch of libraries and
| headers to inflate it?
| chris_wot wrote:
| Not forgetting of course that Twitter almost certainly
| uses several languages on the backend, and has it
| entwined in their infrastructure. As TFA says:
|
| "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."
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| 9M of that is probably localization files, 500k licenses
|
| :P
| fooker wrote:
| A lot of the android code at Facebook is auto generated
| boiler plate.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| And how long exactly did that take? I'm going to cast doubt
| on your story because in my experience people that often
| claim to understand how a codebase works in a quick amount of
| time tend to be full of it and end up blowing things up when
| they try to change or modify things.
|
| The codebase often isn't the issue, it's the use cases and
| the reasons why it evolved into the form it did.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| I guess large is a relative question. For me ~600K lines of
| C++ is a pretty large code base. Apparently Facebook
| Messenger just on Android is 10M lines of Kotlin in another
| comment. To me that seems like they are probably doing
| something wrong.
|
| 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)
| mhh__ wrote:
| The code is almost never special, the business processes are.
|
| Everything seems so incredibly trivial until you reach
| something that isn't.
| coldcode wrote:
| At my last employer before retiring (not tech but used a
| lot) has a very unique (and way larger than Twitter)
| complex set of businesses. They change at an insane pace
| and often involve things that in the end don't ship,
| resulting in crazy complex code base networks. We also had
| 100's of teams building every kind of software imaginable
| (server api's, web apps, mobile apps, internal apps,
| hardware with embedded code, etc). Anyone from the outside
| coming in cold to examine the code would have no idea where
| to even start, much less be able to evaluate anything. It's
| not that any individual thing was necessarily complex, but
| there were so many interconnected business practices and
| related businesses that understanding how they relate is
| very hard for anyone who has been there for years much less
| someone from an unrelated industry.
|
| 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.
| mden wrote:
| Agreed. Most code at the top tech companies isn't
| interesting or even necessarily good. The hardest part of
| jumping into a new code base is almost always understanding
| the problem it's solving rather than the technology used to
| solve it.
| wiseowise wrote:
| ozim wrote:
| I think it is not about code being special.
|
| 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.
| voxl wrote:
| Depends on the codebase. Go read the source code for GHC and
| tell me how quickly you could add a new primitive type that
| consists of all twos-complement 7-bit numbers.
|
| 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.
| dorkwood wrote:
| > Trust me if one is experienced enough they can understand
| your code perfectly fine, it's definitely not as special as
| you think it is.
|
| 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?
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| This I agree with. I was very familiar with the business
| domain and the technology they had been using. So yes I
| agree if either of those were radically different it would
| be much harder. Good point.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Tesla uses lots of GPUs for training autopilot, I would be
| surprised if they wouldn't have people writing optimized
| shaders for some of the tasks.
| govg wrote:
| You're missing their point. They're using that as an
| example of how domain knowledge can be important. It's a
| really naive take to think all/most of the code written
| for a social media platform will be immediately
| accessible to people writing code for a machine
| learning+robotics platform or for people writing code for
| an entertainment console. In fact, it's entirely possible
| to have created these things without any overlap in
| technology.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Those people will have all the time they need to talk to
| as many engineers they need to understand the code base.
| Maybe a person hasn't worked with shaders before, but
| then it's a great time for the engineer who writes the
| shaders to teach him about how the GPU works with some
| code examples.
|
| 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).
| lukeasrodgers wrote:
| Reusing code in unexpected ways seems like what would be
| predicted in this scenario, if you agree with the position
| Naur advances in Programming as Theory Building (which I
| mostly do).
| aiperson wrote:
| Eh, if you're competent, then sure. But some people have
| obvious code smells. You'd be surprised. A quick glance and
| it's obvious they're not competent. 6 layers of inheritance.
| Composition loops everywhere (A is in B, B is in A, A and B are
| in C, C are in A and b).
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| I don't think the goal here is code review. They're trying to
| gauge a few things: 1) are you competent? 2) are you coasting
| or genuinely contributing? 3) are you actually dedicated to
| improving the product or more concerned with office politics
| and inserting your ideology?
|
| 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.
| bagels wrote:
| I'd argue you've done a bad job if a new person reading the
| code can't follow it.
| ordu wrote:
| I don't think Elon is trying to evaluate the code. It seems to
| me he is trying to evaluate people.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| Yes you absolutely can. If there are obvious mistakes that
| would be caught by linting or review, you can know that the
| standard isn't high.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Do you not think you could sit down with somebody and explain
| it?
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Of course I first read the documentation to understand a code
| base, but then just usually jump in to the part that I'm
| interested in. If it's not spaghetti code base, it's not that
| hard to do that.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > You can't jump in and "evaluate" without knowing context and
| being familiar with the features.
|
| 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".
| Aeolun wrote:
| New people regularly join our company and evaluate our code.
| Why do you think you couldn't do that without joining?
| closeparen wrote:
| New people regularly join our company and take a few weeks to
| become productive at making small changes to one or two
| modules out of 5,000+ in the enterprise.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| How long does it take them to be fully productive in the
| systems?
| Aeolun wrote:
| About 6 months. That doesn't mean they don't instantly have
| a general idea of the quality of the codebase. The amount
| of WTF's decreases significantly after the first 2 months
| (when they give up and accept that that is just how it is).
| akomtu wrote:
| In this case, it would be your new boss asking to make a short
| presentation of your work, and he has trusted software devs who
| can smell bs a mile away.
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| Salgat wrote:
| SpaceX does the same thing with Tesla engineers, and they pay
| contracting fees to do this, which is completely above board
| legally speaking.
| abledon wrote:
| The MaterialsScience team works across SpaceX,Tesla,BoringCo
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| That doesn't strike me as being any better; in fact, it reeks
| of conflict-of-interest. Software consulting AFAIK is not one
| of Tesla's normal business verticals. The stockholders
| deserve an explanation for the following questions, at a
| minimum:
|
| 1. Why is engaging in said consulting the highest-and-best
| use of Tesla's resources, from a profit maximization
| perspective? The fact that there's a precedent set with
| SpaceX isn't a justification, since SpaceX is another toy in
| Musk's toy chest, so the conflict of interest remains.
|
| 2. What rate is Twitter / SpaceX paying Tesla for said
| services? Are those friend-prices or market-prices? If the
| rate is either too high or too low, Musk could be accused of
| self-dealing.
|
| 3. What kind of bidding process did Twitter put out on these
| consulting services before settling on Tesla? If I'm one of
| the investors funding this Twitter purchase, I'd want to
| know. I wouldn't be surprised if the SEC wants to know, as
| well. How do Twitter investors know that they're getting the
| best bang for their consulting buck with engineers whose
| industry focus so far has been automobile-specific?
|
| 4. Lastly, what work would these engineers otherwise be doing
| at Tesla, and what happens to the product roadmap of those
| teams now that they're working with fewer resources? Musk is
| already notorious for promising new features are just around
| the corner, and failing to deliver. Missing a launch date
| because supply chain issues is one thing; missing it because
| the CEO yanked key engineers off the team to go QA his new
| hobby horse is something else. Such a date miss could have
| financial implications for Tesla, which would negatively
| impact Tesla investors.
| dnissley wrote:
| I heard that what typically happens in this situation is that
| one company pays the other a consulting fee. In this case
| Twitter paying Tesla.
| labrador wrote:
| Twitter is going private Nov 8
| awinder wrote:
| Even something like that pay-for-pto plan seems so flirtatious
| with trouble. It's not a move that's in the fiduciary interest
| of Tesla shareholders, and mixing personal money into it might
| even make that more clear.
|
| Elons got a large bench of people who cheerled this thing, ask
| Larry Ellison for some people who can go audit this thing over
| multi-months.
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| Exactly. The more I thought about it, the more the pay-for-
| PTO thing strikes me as its own separate ethical quagmire.
| See my other comment in this thread for specific questions
| that both Tesla stockholders and Elon's Twitter co-investors
| should be asking now.
| rohan_ wrote:
| I wonder how much damage short-sellers & tech journalism have
| caused tesla through twitter? There might be some business
| justification here.
| Jach wrote:
| Are you a Tesla shareholder?
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| Do I need to be one for my points to be valid?
| Jach wrote:
| Not necessarily, but should-ing on behalf of other people
| is not often particularly useful unless you're already
| powerful. In the art of persuasion, it can also weaken your
| case considerably, in the same ways "I'm an atheist, but it
| seems like these Christians should really think..." style
| arguments don't tend to do anything to advance either
| atheism or "truer-to-Christ's teachings" behavior.
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| In that case, for the record a major part of my
| retirement fund is taken up by the Fidelity 500 Index
| Fund, and 2.34% of that portfolio's position is TSLA
| stock. So yes, you could say I'm a stockholder.
|
| EDIT:
|
| > should-ing on behalf of other people is not often
| particularly useful unless you're already powerful.
|
| Solidarity labor strikes, where one union strikes to show
| support for an unrelated striking union, would be a
| counter-example to this. As individuals, the striking
| workers are not powerful, but collectively they can have
| an effect.
| dub wrote:
| With TSLA in the S&P 500 it's difficult to avoid being a
| shareholder
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| This isn't an opinion/confidence issue, it is a legal one. If
| there is even one shareholder (i.e. anyone in the world with
| $228 to spare) who wants to push this issue, they can.
| Realistically it would take more than that to make it worth
| suing, but the point remains that even if 98% of shareholders
| think this is totally okay, it could still be a huge problem
| for them.
|
| Additionally, there are various institutional shareholders
| that don't operate based on their personal opinion of
| Musk/Tesla, but have specific legal duties to protect their
| investment in the company.
|
| The SEC could still act on the issue even if it was somehow
| proven than not a single shareholder actually cared.
| dzink wrote:
| Musk is a seller above all else. Every day he finds a new way to
| draw attention to his projects. The news about Twitter give him
| even more distribution and by nature more sales towards Tesla and
| his other companies. Tesla engineers on site for interviews is a
| great idea for Twitter and for Tesla as both get more PR than
| before. A lot of people have lost interest in Twitter for more
| than political reasons and I'm excited to see what he does with
| the product, specifically introducing more alternatives to
| advertising and showing social products can monetize as agents of
| their users, not just parasites of attention.
| dh2022 wrote:
| Maybe. But is all of this PR worth $44 billion?
| la64710 wrote:
| Yes it is (to spoiled toddlers).
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Musk's twitter presence have turned Tesla from a $100 billion
| cap company to a $700 billion one.
| throwaway0asd wrote:
| Yes, Twitter was the primary tool he used to inflate the
| market value of his properties and manipulate the market in
| his interest.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| But that was all possible without owning the company.
| Surely becoming its owner just invites added scrutiny and
| doubt?
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| I wonder if it would be legal for Elon to secretly boost
| his own tweets. And more broadly, uprank posts that support
| him and downrank those that disagree.
| ufmace wrote:
| I went in assuming that this was going to be a hit piece. It's
| not quite that bad, but there's elements like that. I have no
| idea who this "former Tesla engineer" is or what their biases and
| motivations are, or how the article authors found them.
|
| 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.
| xeromal wrote:
| Using Tesla engineers to review code is a pretty solid idea
| considering he can trust them. Musk companies like to run lean
| so I'm sure this initial review is to find people who are
| "coasting" and trim them. I'll say that I'm one of those
| coasters though not for twitter. I live my life and happen to
| write software for work. I don't think it's wrong for companies
| to run either as a coasting company or as a lean startup as
| long as they don't break any laws.
|
| I'm curious to see what comes out of twitter. I honestly don't
| see how Elon can make his money back. lol
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| zzzeek wrote:
| > 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.
| ufmace wrote:
| If "cancel culture" is no big deal, then why is everybody so
| terrified of Elon taking over Twitter? What is so bad about
| this that you feel the need to make weak-man arguments
| accusing everybody who is moderately pro-Elon of being a
| mindless shill?
| zzzeek wrote:
| Elon taking over Twitter given his promises to dismantle
| what meager content moderation policies it has, means it
| becomes a more amplified platform for political
| misinformation and hate speech, further radicalizing large
| portions of the population to partake in even more violent
| acts, such as the recent assassination attempt on the
| speaker of the house, armed vigilantes stalking voting
| locations as we have seen in Arizona looking for supposed
| "mules", things like that. Lax content and moderation
| policies will enhance the platform's capability to be used
| as a tool for online stalking, harassment, death threats,
| etc. so that non-right-wing voices will probably need to
| abandon the platform ( a "cancel culture" of sorts indeed,
| where people who don't silence themselves will be in danger
| of being _literally_ cancelled).
|
| 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.
| skellington wrote:
| Yes, you have been carefully programmed to regurgitate
| the state's position on free speech and congratulations
| for doing a good job of repeating the correct party
| speaking points!
|
| 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.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation;
| don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't
| sneer, including at the rest of the community.
| zzzeek wrote:
| and your points would be fully regurgitated from Russian
| state media, congrats to you as well. as far as
| "shooting", liberals would prefer there were no guns, so
| yes, any "shooting" by anyone at anyone is of great
| concern to us. The "liberal" NYT had a full above-the-
| fold headline for the Scalise shooting, it was taken
| entirely seriously by the "media elites": https://mobile.
| twitter.com/BFriedmanDC/status/15864711740114... . The
| Pelosi attacker was also right-wing radicalized after
| originally being a left-wing radical, as you are most
| likely aware so the GREEN PARTY registration is a
| strawman. The reductionist implication that the political
| landscape is nothing more than "both sides are trying to
| radicalize and kill each other" has no basis in fact and
| only serves to change the subject from the issue that
| right wing terrorism is the greatest US terrorist threat
| right now.
|
| 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.
| zo1 wrote:
| Wow. Imagine a popular OSS author having the opposite
| viewpoints as you and publicly espousing it on HN. I
| can't think of one, wonder why.
|
| No wonder you guys are all upset about this, the social
| gravy train is going away.
| zzzeek wrote:
| popular OSS authors, who are in the business of giving
| their work away for free and helping others use it for
| free, tend to not be fascists. The core decision one
| makes, typically early in life, that leads them down the
| "liberal" or "conservative" path is the decision as to
| whether or not other people matter.
|
| 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.
| cowtools wrote:
| your strawman is that having a generally pro-elon disposition
| = thinking elon is some kind of infallible savior
|
| 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.
| zzzeek wrote:
| > thinking elon is some kind of infallible savior
|
| oh that's based on my observation of comments whenever he
| comes up, like this one here right on this thread
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33389206
| zo1 wrote:
| Coming from someone in the camp you rail against, and judging
| by the ups and down votes I've done in this thread, I'd say
| it's 50-50. But judging by how many grey and downvoted posts
| I've seen that I agree with or think are reasonable comments,
| I'd say it's much more skewed and one sided.
| dagmx wrote:
| Elon appeals to technocrat libertarians.
|
| 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.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| If Musk was completely devoid of empathy, he wouldn't have
| spent so much money on Starlink services for Ukraine.
| dagmx wrote:
| The same Ukraine that he then said should cede their land
| to an aggressor ?
|
| 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.
| megablast wrote:
| > legal. I don't see anything wrong with printing out code
| either
|
| So dumb.
|
| Do I print out the few lines I changed, or the entire file?? Do
| I mark what I changed??
|
| So dumb.
| [deleted]
| Cyph0n wrote:
| > It seems perfectly reasonable for Elon to bring in some
| people he knows he can trust to help evaluate how Twitter
| actually works.
|
| 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?
| ipqk wrote:
| I'd be pissed off if I were a TSLA stock owner. Is Twitter paying
| Tesla to contract out these employees for their work? Otherwise,
| it's tons of thousands of dollars Tesla is pissing away on behalf
| of the CEO's side-hustle.
| sfmike wrote:
| This is true, yet Musk has proven to be asynchronous. It could
| have second order consequences that actually benefit Tesla in
| the long term. Of course that's hypothetical but there could be
| some game theory here the truth is we don't know.
| kcplate wrote:
| I'm sure it's not reported (because it lessens the impact of
| the story), but I guarantee Twitter will compensate Tesla if
| Tesla resources are used. However, I bet it it's contractor
| engineers that are used who might have also worked at Tesla.
|
| Been there, done that.
| googlryas wrote:
| It would be better to find out more details before having an
| emotional reaction.
|
| Maybe they're Tesla engineers, but they're moonlighting on
| Twitters dime?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Are these the engineers that are dancing with the devil in
| the pale moonlight?
| dmak wrote:
| Um... free PR for TSLA which helps with recruiting for both
| organizations?
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| What is the Venn diagram of engineers who are aware of who is
| auditing Twitter, but not aware of Tesla? Or is the idea that
| people would want to join Tesla because they'll be asked to
| do code reviews of companies whose code bases they don't
| know?
| ManWith2Plans wrote:
| It's perfectly plausible to believe that Elon Musk paid them to
| take vacation days off for this purpose. I wouldn't jump to any
| conclusions.
| kmbfjr wrote:
| Normally this sort of thing can be reported through the ethics
| hotline.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Is Twitter paying Tesla to contract out these employees for
| their work?_
|
| Eh, there are marketing synergies between Twitter and Tesla.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| throw_nbvc1234 wrote:
| Would you also be outraged if those engineers were given an
| extra day off instead?
| everfree wrote:
| A day off improves an engineer's work-life balance in a small
| way. A day at a different company is different - it's a day
| that's neither productive to the original company nor restful
| to the engineer.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| You'd arguably have a case that Musk is not acting in the
| interest of Tesla and is using his Tesla position to enrich
| himself rather than the Tesla company. Exactly what the "CEO is
| supposed to serve shareholders" is all about.
| conductr wrote:
| Shareholders already know he's part time and has multiple
| jobs. As for leveraging talent, I doubt it's effecting their
| productivity in a significant way or deadlines are slipping
| due to this.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Your doubts will not stand up in court, even if they are
| grounded in reality, which *I* doubt. These engineers took
| time off work during work hours to go somewhere and do
| things that are not in service of the publicly traded
| company they're employed at. That's not something you can
| just hand wave away.
| SpelingBeeChamp wrote:
| What law do you think is being broken?
| Kranar wrote:
| Stand up in court?
|
| Sometimes I wonder if people genuinely stop and listen to
| themselves before they hit the reply button.
| throw827474737 wrote:
| Yes, the whole pagelong discussion here about those
| little peanuts is one of the most disconnected and
| ridiculous one I have ever seen on HN, lol sorry. There
| must be many hearts broken or why all the fuss, I don't
| get it.
| jaxn wrote:
| Unless Tesla is interested in adding social networking /
| messaging features to the car interface.
|
| It's not hard to envision a potential business case
| devnulll wrote:
| Great, next my car will be Tweeting all the real time
| telemetry (I405 North, by exit 18, lane #1, 81mph,
| throttle at 61%, 4 hands-off-steering-wheel events
| detected in the last hour, and 2 eye tracking sync
| failures due to checking out the sports car in lane #2".
|
| 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!".
| shapefrog wrote:
| _I405 North, by exit 18, lane #1, 81mph, throttle at 61%
| - by the end of the year this car will be able to take
| drive using self driving_
|
| Self tweeting coming soon - self driving by the end of
| next year.
| deaddodo wrote:
| It doesn't work that way. Period.
|
| 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.
| meany wrote:
| I think the fact that he's taking Twitter private allows
| him to do what he wants. It won't be publicly traded
| soon.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| But Tesla is public, that's the interest here.
| eclipxe wrote:
| Who is going to stop him? No one. Nothing matters
| anymore.
| [deleted]
| wyclif wrote:
| Apparently it's completely legal, though (IANAL). It's
| just like being a contractor on the side.
| deaddodo wrote:
| Elon Musk didn't commit a criminal offense here, no. No
| one is claiming he has.
|
| But he almost certainly acted against the interests of
| the company he was hired to shepard and committed a civil
| offense against the shareholders.
| ekianjo wrote:
| For sure the tesla stock is going to plunge because a few
| guys took time off to come assess twitter...
| karencarits wrote:
| Unless the Tesla engineers also can learn a thing or two
| from the internals of Twitter and bring back to benefit
| Tesla. Or they are planning to do things that will
| benefit both parties in the long run
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I don't see your "Period" here. Perhaps it is in best
| interest of both Tesla and Twitter to cooperate on some
| topics, but not to the degree of acquisition of one by
| another.
|
| 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.
| acdha wrote:
| That's not "unless" - it's a translate post hoc
| rationalization. It's a stretch that they'd be working on
| that feature - considering the distracted driving problem
| it's something of a liability - but even if they were,
| that might mean that you send a couple of people from
| that specific team to talk APIs or something. Pulling
| random engineers over to review things outside of their
| specialty doesn't make any sense.
| eclipxe wrote:
| Not to be used while driving. Tesla has a bunch of built
| in apps not to be used while driving. Ex: TikTok and
| Netflix.
| acdha wrote:
| Yes, and people use them while driving because the
| vehicle doesn't prevent it. You can get away with that
| kind of legal attempt to dodge responsibility but at some
| point public awareness catches up with you, similar to
| how telling people to drive safely wasn't enough to avoid
| generations of safety technology becoming legally
| required.
| eclipxe wrote:
| That's not true, the car does prevent it.
| acdha wrote:
| Maybe it's easy to disable? The guys I see commuting to
| work with action movies on those giant dashboard TVs are
| all driving Teslas.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| Heaven forbid Tesla engineers decide to feed the homeless
| during their work hours at the CEOs directive. That's not
| servicing the publically traded company.
| girvo wrote:
| Except that's not what they're doing, so I've no idea why
| you think that a relevant argument. They're working for a
| different public company while being paid by Telsa.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > They're working for a different public company while
| being paid by Telsa.
|
| 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.
| Sunspark wrote:
| Why would a TSLA shareholder make a fuss? It is likely
| that Tesla will bill Twitter for the use of staff
| resources. Other than that, being on good terms with the
| owner of Twitter is a possible advertising
| opportunity/tie-in in the future.
| bagacrap wrote:
| Twitter is no longer public.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Not public anymore, they were delisted this past Friday,
| but the rest of your point stands ofc.
| josho wrote:
| Your example generates company pr value, employee morale,
| etc. Meanwhile there is no value being generated to Tesla
| by moving these engineers to some side project for
| another company.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Leaving aside the maximum potential upside of a lawsuit
| (Musk writes a check to Tesla for... $100k?), it's
| entirely possible that Musk asked them to take a personal
| day, or that they had already worked 40 hours that week,
| or similar. After all, I can see a trusted TSLA engineer
| seeing a way to get a promotion being transferred to TWTR
| treating it as an "interview" half-day and going unpaid.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| If Musk did that, requesting a favor of TSLA engineers or
| even hinting at a promotion, that would be so unethical
| and immoral.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I said they would get promoted by moving to TWTR. It
| could be Musk inviting them to interview as managers as
| TWTR as much as he's using them to evaluate TWTR talent.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| I used to work for a guy who was a shareholder in
| multiple companies, and I would do work for the other
| companies all the time. When I did the company I actually
| worked at would just bill the other company for my time.
| It's hardly different from doing work for and billing it
| to a different department.
| kcplate wrote:
| Same, for nearly 10 years, I got prostituted to nearly
| every company a major shareholder had a piece of, my fee
| was just billed to whoever I was doing work for at the
| time. No big deal. I really do not understand the
| surprise at this, this is pretty normal. I think it's
| just media tossing shade trying to find something,
| anything.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| He doesn't own all of TSLA, so if there's no contract,
| he's appropriating TSLA to his private project. If it was
| done off the books, it's syphoning money from something
| you don't own to something you do.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| This point has already been made several times in this
| thread, but you typed "if" several times in that comment.
|
| Nobody on here knows the details, this is just a
| rorschach test.
| kcplate wrote:
| You are taking as gospel a uncorroborated rumor from what
| is likely a single Twitter engineer who is salty that
| someone outside the org is reviewing their code.
|
| 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.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| I literally say: 'if there's no contract' in the first
| sentence of my response.
| clnq wrote:
| Same. I worked for a company owned by a group of friends
| that owned a few more businesses. We'd do work for all
| these companies and just log the hours in our human
| resource system - accountants figured out inter-company
| payments. Some employees were employed at multiple of
| these companies at the same time as well.
| skellington wrote:
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| Curious, why would you think that a person who has trouble
| finding a group of banks (what is a group of banks called, a
| flight?) to produce the cash that he owns on paper, is solely
| interested in chasing more cash? Is it not more believable
| that he has a social agenda? At this very moment, I find it
| believable that Musk is drawing a line in the sand to be seen
| by folks who would have others irreparably silenced if their
| views aren't fashionable.
| Jotra7 wrote:
| ajross wrote:
| The counter argument is that Tesla has created more
| shareholder value over the past few years than any other
| single company, and in fact more than a ton of whole market
| segments. I mean, investors know he's sort of a loon, this is
| hardly the weirdest thing he done[1], and they're still on
| board.
|
| 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?
| bitexploder wrote:
| Making a bunch of money does not give you ethical credits
| you can spend later. He can probably get away with it
| though.
| burnte wrote:
| Yeah, it does.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Martin Shkreli returned a profit for his investors, and
| yet...
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Winning at the casino with money you stole from the gas
| station doesn't make the original theft okay, even if you
| return more than you stole.
| deaddodo wrote:
| Exactly the point being made. Musk _stealing_ Tesla 's
| resources to buy an asset for himself is not ok, even if
| it later helps Tesla.
| notjoemama wrote:
| Isn't it the case people on news.ycombinator.com aren't
| familiar with the nature of the arrangement?
|
| Is there maybe a source that substantiates a perspective
| of "theft"?
|
| Or am I just missing that a rhetorical discussion is
| being had here?
| tedunangst wrote:
| Given the timeframe, I think people are skeptical that 1.
| Elon arranged for twitter to contract with Tesla for code
| review and 2. Recused himself from the negotiations
| regarding scope of work and rate charged.
| ericd wrote:
| Who cares? The companies in his orbit benefit
| substantially from the cross pollination between them,
| and the PR opportunities that generates - much more than
| any arms-length negotiated rate would. Avoiding the type
| of fake work that you describe is very helpful for
| achieving the high iteration speeds his companies have.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| It also risks fostering a dangerous culture of ends
| justifying the means, and trust the 'genius'/'strong'
| leader.
| burnte wrote:
| I never said it was limitless. Borrowing a few engineers,
| that's very different from a 1500% price hike.
| ilyt wrote:
| Yeah, investors don't care about ethics
| threatofrain wrote:
| > Making a bunch of money does not give you ethical
| credits you can spend later.
|
| 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.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Many shareholders would offer their firstborn if Elon
| asked. He's a strange and unique character among the
| billionaires.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Proven track record gives you a really, really long
| leash. Only Steve Jobs has attained the rarefied air of
| being able to do whatever the fuck you want that Musk
| has.
| dmitriid wrote:
| darkwater wrote:
| Because Jobs spent 70% of his career without any sort of
| social media or globally interconnected world around.
| noobermin wrote:
| billionaires aren't smart, they just had an easier spawn
| point and loadout
| concordDance wrote:
| Musk's, Gate's, Zuckerberg, other-tech-billionaires spawn
| point was about as good as any other upper middle class
| American kid's. If you exclude genes were they probably
| got a bit luckier than average.
| yakubin wrote:
| I can sort of see how that may be the case with Musk and
| Zuckerberg, but Gates? Is it normal in US for upper
| middle class fathers to be partners at multi-national law
| corporations?
| acdha wrote:
| ... and specifically to have a company-defining early
| deal go to someone who shared a board membership with
| their mother? Microsoft didn't even have a product when
| the deal went through (they bought a CP/M knockoff from a
| smaller company). Gates certainly executed well but most
| people wouldn't have had the opportunity to even attempt
| something like that.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-
| influe...
| mrdatawolf wrote:
| Do you remember why he got kicked? He could miss big too.
| notjoemama wrote:
| I recall Steve Jobs was known to blow up at his staff,
| sometimes seemingly randomly. He arguably created a
| hostile work environment. He also denied and estranged
| his own daughter. Let's not put CEOs on a scale.
|
| @kcplate
|
| Site isn't allowing me to reply, but I guess I can edit
| here?
|
| What I meant by scale was weighing CEOs or their behavior
| against each other. It sounded to me, and maybe I read it
| wrong, from the comment I replied to that Musk's issues
| were being levied against Musk with the implication
| (Their first sentence) Jobs didn't have issues like that.
| A better example of Jobs tanking Apple stock price was
| the partnership with Microsoft. At the time that was seen
| as Apple marrying the evil Jobs regularly criticized. So
| much for thinking different. But my point was the other
| things carried some form of risk and certainly didn't
| paint Jobs as not having character flaws.
|
| So I'm in agreement with you, he's human, Musk is human,
| mistakes are allowed to be made without, I don't know,
| "cancelling" someone I guess. Maybe it's just fashionable
| to pick on Musk right now? I don't know some people are
| so judgmental. I mean honestly, what does the average
| HackerNews user know about the nature of the Tesla
| engineers reviewing Twitter code? While it _could_ be a
| problem, it could also be legal and considered above
| board. No one here seems to know the contractual
| agreements and why would they? Companies don 't publish
| every thing that runs across executives desks.
| kcplate wrote:
| Exactly what is the point here? I've seen fast food shift
| supervisors blow up at their staff and know at least one
| person who is estranged from a child. Are CEOs (including
| famous ones) not allowed to be human. I have never met a
| human that wasn't to some degree or another a shithead at
| various points of time.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| I think personal flaws can taint professional
| accomplishments. And the worship of these strong/genius
| people only reinforces bad behavior.
|
| Of course there should be some slack given for
| indiscretions of youth. No one is born perfect. For
| adults though, let's keep our eyes wide open and praise
| the good works--not the flawed people who do them.
| Klinky wrote:
| I think their point is exactly that, they're human. The
| whole Twitter acquisition seems impulsive, petty, and
| obviously was poorly thought out.
| HyperSane wrote:
| Musk's track record is more hype than substance.
| kcplate wrote:
| True. Watching him shoot rockets into space from my
| backyard 3-4x a month and seeing a half dozen Teslas on
| the road every time I drive a few miles isn't very
| substantive at all.
| HyperSane wrote:
| This is exactly what I mean. Musk had very little to do
| with actually designing rockets. Much like Thomas Edison
| his main skill is getting credited for the work of other
| people.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| I keep seeing people say that Musk had little to do with
| SpaceX's technical side, and I wonder where this meme (in
| the original Dawkins sense of the word) is coming from.
|
| 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.
| smcin wrote:
| > _If you watch the EverydayAstronaut interviews with
| Musk it shows that he has a deep understanding of the
| engineering tradeoffs and design reasons_
|
| Which interview specifically? from https://www.youtube.co
| m/results?search_query=Everyday+Astron...
| HyperSane wrote:
| Musk sounding smart in a friendly interview is not the
| same as actually designing rockets.
| afarrell wrote:
| No, but it is very close to creating an intellectually
| friendly atmosphere for smart people who want to design
| rockets.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| I'm happy to see information to the contrary, but so far
| this is the closest I've seen to actual human/work style
| interactions with him. What would you suggest as
| alternative data sources which could be used to build a
| more accurate opinion?
| HyperSane wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=33392313
| snovv_crash wrote:
| Engineering optimism, even egregious optimism, is not the
| same as a con job.
| HyperSane wrote:
| Musk is smart enough to know those were lies.
| kcplate wrote:
| No, his main skill is believing that big things are
| possible, and then being willing to commit resources and
| to be patient to let those possibilities come to reality
| when many others are will not.
| slaw wrote:
| I think SpaceX and Tesla succeeds despite Musk actions.
| root_axis wrote:
| What about FSD? Boring Company? Robo Taxies? Solar?
| Cybertruck? Neurolink? Mars colonies? Elon has had some
| amazing successes, that's just a fact, but judging what
| he will accomplish based on what he says is almost always
| a losing bet.
| HyperSane wrote:
| All excellent examples of how much hot air Musk spews.
| HyperSane wrote:
| And the cybertruck and the electric semi that was
| announced 5 freaking years ago.
| squokko wrote:
| What about Sun King? Dig It? Don't Bother Me? Boys?
| Flying? (all terrible Beatles songs)
|
| 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.
| HyperSane wrote:
| "it doesn't really matter how many failures you have"
|
| The thing is that they are not just honest failures, they
| are outright lies.
| ZiiS wrote:
| - I can beat Vias and MasterCard at their own game.
|
| - Electric cars only will build a more valuable company.
|
| - I can launch more rockets then everyone else combined.
|
| Were also lies at the time.
| fallingknife wrote:
| You want to make the accusation that the business
| failures of someone who has had legitimate successes on
| the scale of Elon Musk are con jobs then the burden of
| proof is on you. And I don't see an proof. Not from you,
| and not from anyone else who says it.
| HyperSane wrote:
| Hyperloop is very much a con job. "Full Self Driving is
| just a year away" is very much a con job. The cybertruck
| is a con job. The Tesla Semi is a con job. The tesla
| robot is a con job.
|
| 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
| root_axis wrote:
| > _When you have successes like Tesla and SpaceX and
| PayPal it doesn 't really matter how many failures you
| have_
|
| It matters if you care about evaluating whether or not
| you should believe what Elon says.
| jlmorton wrote:
| Boring Company is right up with Tesla and SpaceX on the
| success trajectory by lots of measures. This is a company
| that just started from nothing a few years ago, and it's
| already building a massive transit project, and is in
| final bidding in several other major projects.
|
| 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.
| root_axis wrote:
| Boring Company is all hype, it's current trajectory is
| failure.
|
| > _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.
| jlmorton wrote:
| > It's only massive in terms of wasted taxpayer funds
|
| 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.
| tomarr wrote:
| I would love to agree but it's simply not correct. They
| are buying existing tunneling machines and there is
| nothing yet to suggest a step change.
|
| 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).
| jlmorton wrote:
| > They are buying existing tunneling machines and there
| is nothing yet to suggest a step change.
|
| 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.
| hobs wrote:
| Getting a project to use typical tunnel boring machines
| via renting tunnel boring machines is not anything
| special.
|
| 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.
| Phlarp wrote:
| You forgot roadster 2.0 and the mannequin robot
| viraptor wrote:
| And hyperloop.
| kcplate wrote:
| > but judging what he will accomplish based on what he
| says is almost always a losing bet.
|
| 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?
| georgeg23 wrote:
| He had help from the government, specifically Mike
| Griffin:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
|
| 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
| ksidudwbw wrote:
| Rome wasn't built in a day and were all standing on the
| shoulders of giants. However you need trailblazers to cut
| through and push the threshold. Elon is a hacker and
| disruptor and entrenched interests would like to just
| keep things they way they were, thereby pumping money
| into PR firms to talk down disruption and innovation.
| You're either a paid talk downer or a victim of that.
| underdeserver wrote:
| All that is true and yet nobody else got EVs on the road
| and reusable rockets in the sky at scale.
| tomp wrote:
| You do realize that _everyone_ had those benefits? _In
| particular_ dinosaur rocket companies.
|
| Yet Elon's the only person/company who put those
| privileges to good use
| hbarka wrote:
| wutbrodo wrote:
| You're not familiar with Henry Ford and his reputation?
| People whose personality solely consists of
| embarrassingly irrational hatred of Musk are as
| cringeworthy as those who worship him.
| HyperSane wrote:
| It isn't irrational to hate Elon Musk.
| mpweiher wrote:
| It is.
|
| By definition. (Look up what "hate" means and what
| "rational" vs. "irrational" mean).
|
| It is just as irrational to love him.
| HyperSane wrote:
| I hate anyone who lies as much as Musk does.
| concordDance wrote:
| It really is. There are thousands of more hateable public
| figures who have done far less good and far more bad who
| get only a tiny fraction of the hate I see on hackernews
| and reddit. Heck, pick a billionaire that's not Bill
| Gates...
|
| Musk has an actual hatedom of people who try and downplay
| every good thing he's done and every good trait he has
| while spreading bad rumours about him, both well founded
| (impulsive, stubborn, optimistic to delusional levels and
| not good with peoples feelings) and not (Musk knows
| nothing about rockets, paypal money came entirely from
| superrich daddy's slave labour emerald mines and no one
| wanted the mini submarine).
| karencarits wrote:
| Hate is a very strong feeling. The threshold for hating a
| co-human should be quite high. Most people "hating" Musk
| have not met him and have not been assaulted, wronged or
| harmed by him, and he has only had minor impact on their
| lives (depending on how much credit you give him
| personally for products such as Tesla)
|
| I find it difficult to understand the level of
| aggressiveness he awakes in some people. Are they
| actually feeling _hate_ or just camouflaging some other
| feelings? Envy? Injustice? Are they hating him on the
| behalf of others?
| HyperSane wrote:
| I hate anyone who lies as much as Musk does.
| concordDance wrote:
| He's mostly not lying, he's just delusionally optimistic.
| ksidudwbw wrote:
| It's not typical for hackers to not acknowledge the
| achievments of musk
| [deleted]
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| Go out and see the world. You are living in a biased
| bubble.
| kcplate wrote:
| Well I have seen the world, and I am not biased or
| frankly even a Musk fan, despite finding myself defending
| him as of late here on HN. I don't own a Tesla (find them
| ugly vehicles), don't use or care about Twitter, but I'll
| admit that I think the SpaceX stuff is pretty exciting
| mainly because I can see it.
|
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| That might or might not be true, but it doesn't matter
| much for the argument about the length of the leash.
| lolbert3 wrote:
| Many shareholders would cram his index finger inside his
| own penis hole at walgreens
| lolbert2 wrote:
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Isn't the counter argument to this that he's also the guy
| who has lost the stock 43% of its value over the last year?
| kjksf wrote:
| SantalBlush wrote:
| The Fed had been giving corporate handouts via rock-
| bottom interest rates since 2008. Your reasoning is
| backwards.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| If you haven't noticed the whole market got a 10 year
| rally because the FED poured insane amount of money into
| economy
| lupire wrote:
| TSLA got far more than a proportional share of that.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Yeah but would it ever become a hot stock it is without
| so much dumb money slushing around?
| thelittleone wrote:
| Can you expand on that? I'm genuinely curious about the
| stats.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Ah, so the good is Elon, the bad is Jerome Powell? Also,
| the whole stock market isn't down 43% - the S&P is only
| down 13%.
| wfme wrote:
| TSLA has underperformed the S&P 500 over the last year,
| but vastly outperformed it if you expand your time frame
| to 5 years - ~1,000% vs 50%.
|
| Perhaps comparing the 43% drop over the last year to
| other comparable companies would provide a better
| picture.
|
| 1 Year TSLA: -43.28% GM: -29.99% FORD: -26.13% STLA:
| -33.09%
|
| 5 Years TSLA: 1,019% GM: -8.24% FORD: 9.24% STLA: -25.23%
| spookie wrote:
| You can't compare such a recent company, to others that
| were well established for decades. It means nothing.
|
| I believe the criticism comes from the volatility of the
| company.
| Klinky wrote:
| Obviously Musk should go on Twitter and lie that he's
| taking Tesla private again to juice the stock. Maybe
| he'll get two slaps on the wrist this time.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Who says Jerome Powell is bad? Fighting inflation due to,
| well, inflated asset values is a good thing, not bad.
| Just because it makes numbers go down doesn't mean it
| should be considered a bad thing.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Arguably the increase in the stock was because of the
| feds monetary policy. Low interest rates are why
| speculation was rampant in the past.
| bagacrap wrote:
| that announcement most certainly did spook the market and
| news about the Twitter acquisition has been a drag on TSLA
| all year. You may have noticed the stock trading for
| slightly more than half of its peak value.
| wwweston wrote:
| > Tesla has created more shareholder value over the past
| few years
|
| Given the PE, seems to me the shareholders have created the
| shareholder value.
| ratsmack wrote:
| > sort of a loon
|
| I prefer eccentric, which may be an advantage for him.
| marvin wrote:
| He's doing the reverse with SpaceX employees, so it's a net
| win.
| chris_wot wrote:
| A truly confidence-inspiring move, to have Twitter
| developers work on mission-critical SpaceX systems. Bravo!
| dhruval wrote:
| Space X engineers are working on Tesla
| broknbottle wrote:
| Real life Rocket League?
| chris_wot wrote:
| A truly confidence-inspiring move, to have Twitter
| developers work on safety-critical Tesla subsystems.
| Bravo!
| [deleted]
| fallingknife wrote:
| You probably wouldn't since those engineers probably signed
| consulting agreements with Twitter, and are being paid by
| Twitter, not Tesla for this work.
| ratsmack wrote:
| Do you believe that Musk is not going to push his cars on
| Twitter? Seems to me that you have access to a fairly large
| audience on there.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Just being tangentially related to the company isn't enough
| to justify it imo. You could also buy a lot of twitter ads
| for the cost of having devs come over.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I guess that's the concept of a CEO, to decide if it is
| justified. He will answer to the board and shareholders.
| rvba wrote:
| Doesn't USA have the tax concept of "transfer pricing"?
|
| 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.
| nerdawson wrote:
| > Later, people inside the company reported that Tesla
| engineers were in fact reviewing the code.
|
| 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.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| Quite sure this is just false, as I've done this in some
| contexts before, would be great to hear from an eypert. -
| Consulting pro bono, even during hours on another company
| should generally be fine, it might just make it more
| likely to be tax audited.
| bawolff wrote:
| I think the key point is whether the companies are at
| arms length or not, not that it is pro-bono.
| powerapple wrote:
| Is it confirmed that it is "free" consulting service? The
| article didn't mention anything about it.
| nly wrote:
| Devs are salaried. If they're doing nothing else than the
| effective cost of contracting them out to Twitter is zero
| [deleted]
| Jach wrote:
| What do you mean by push? Tesla already doesn't run ads,
| this would be a strange way to start.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Tesla already doesn't run ads
|
| That is a great idea, running ads in Tesla cars. They can
| introduce a monthly subscription to opt out of the ads.
| midasz wrote:
| Now that the words have been uttered its become
| inevitable
| yayr wrote:
| I thought that was already obvious when Google started
| working on cars ;-)
| [deleted]
| ratsmack wrote:
| All he has to do is tweet something about Tesla...
| instant advertising.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Well, he could already do that.
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| He tweeted all sorts of ridiculous nonsense, to include
| talking about Tesla, long before he bought twitter
| zackees wrote:
| There's the presumption here that Tesla is footing the bill.
| For all you know Tesla hired out of these workers on contract
| and the Twitter is footing the bill.
| morelisp wrote:
| If Twitter is paying under fair market rate, that's
| collusion to benefit Twitter at the expense of Tesla.
|
| 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.)
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Collusion? No.
| ratorx wrote:
| Does Case 2 matter if the company is privately owned?
| morelisp wrote:
| Yes, because it's not really public vs. private that
| matters, in both cases it's whether the shareholders
| care. (If it's public they complain to the SEC, if it's
| private they complain to their contract lawyers who
| hopefully included some accountability in the contracts.)
|
| 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...)
| ratorx wrote:
| In this case, isn't Elon the only shareholder?
| morelisp wrote:
| I'm not really sure - I think that depends on the details
| of how X Holdings is set up, which I'm not going to
| bother looking into. I should've used a more general term
| like "creditor", but the point remains.
|
| 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.
| seanhunter wrote:
| I don't know what this "collusion" is. Companies with
| common ownership often cross-bill and this is used as a
| vehicle (search "transfer pricing" if you want to know
| more) to move profits around and optimise tax. There are
| restrictions on transfer pricing, but there's no concept
| of collusion here and in particular there really is no
| restriction related to fair market rate. There are lots
| of ways to do the billing part of this which would be
| perfectly normal.
|
| 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.
| morelisp wrote:
| > Companies with common ownership
|
| 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.
| seanhunter wrote:
| No they couldn't. Fiduciary responsibility doesn't mean
| you have to only do things that shareholders agree with.
| It means you have to act in good faith to represent their
| interests.
|
| 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.
| morelisp wrote:
| As I said, I don't believe any significant TSLA holder
| will actually sue Musk. It's clear by now they're
| comfortable with Musk's view that his interests and any
| of his companies' interests are equivalent. But if they
| did, they'd have a good case unless Twitter overpaid (at
| which point the issue would be any Twitter shareholders).
| weinzierl wrote:
| Either Twitter footing the bill or maybe he pays Tesla for
| the project out of his own pockets.
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| But surely at the very least there is an opportunity cost
| of the Tesla engineers not working. What is the point of
| them if they don't work?
| exabrial wrote:
| Huh? Free national press time for tesla for a few thousand
| bucks of dev time send like a good deal, no? The fact we're
| sitting here talking snot it pretty much proves that....
| nightski wrote:
| I'm not pissed and I am a stockholder.
|
| 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.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| That's absolutely insane. Tesla employees are paid by Tesla
| to do work for Tesla. Freelancing during the workday at
| Twitter, SpaceX, or any of the other company just because
| Musk is the owner or CEO is basically wage theft by Musk.
|
| How would you feel if he had Tesla assembly line workers
| renovate his house?
| noncoml wrote:
| They wouldn't mind. The employees have expertise in
| renovating. So makes sense.
|
| What a weird timeline we are living in..
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| It's not about the employees liking the work or not. It's
| about whether or not Tesla is paying them to do work that
| does not benefit Tesla.
|
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| It's a field trip. Is taking the team out to lunch also
| "stealing from shareholders"?
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Are you real my equating eating with your team the same
| as doing work for another org?
| noncoml wrote:
| The mental gymnastics of Musk supporters are only matched
| by the Trump supporters.
|
| You can only lose by trying to have a conversation with
| them.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Agreed I muddied things with the phrase wage theft. It's
| theft from shareholders.
| kcplate wrote:
| > Managers, directors, CEOs, etc. cannot have the
| corporation do services for them for free
|
| 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.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I feel like there is a lot of misinformation here and am
| compelled to comment, I've started and administered two
| corporations.
|
| 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.
| DFHippie wrote:
| Point taken, but it's not wage theft so long as he's paying
| them. He's stealing from Tesla stockholders. Though I
| imagine the engineers he borrowed have existing priorities
| and deadlines, so the experience for them and their teams
| probably isn't great.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Correct. I used wrong term. It's theft from Tesla
| shareholders.
| ksidudwbw wrote:
| What if the developers wanted to this excursion?
| nomel wrote:
| "Hey, take some vacation days to do some lucrative
| consultation work" is probably how it went.
| willnonya wrote:
| Ya, no, it may not be popular but it isn't illegal and
| the impact on Tesla will be neglible.
|
| It may be poor options or even poor management but it
| isn't theft.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| You are living in a dream if you think top executives don't
| get people working for the company to also do stuff for
| them.
| mikebenfield wrote:
| Maybe so.
|
| And... you approve of this? Or what? What exactly is your
| message here?
| [deleted]
| eclipxe wrote:
| Doesn't matter. There's no remedy.
| tsol wrote:
| I don't approve of minimum wage, but I'm still not going
| to be surprised when people pay minimum wage.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Of course GP realizes this which is why they were able to
| recognize and characterize the pattern. Objecting to
| something isn't failure to recognize its existence.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| I'm chastising an alleged shareholder who pronounces this
| as good.
|
| 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"
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > That's absolutely insane. Tesla employees are paid by
| Tesla to do work for Tesla.
|
| Unless Twitter is paying handsomely for the consultation?
| deaddodo wrote:
| It is still ethically a no-go. Tesla isn't a consultation
| firm and they haven't done this type of work ever except
| for personal interests of the CEO. It doesn't take a
| particularly skilled lawyer to establish a conflict of
| interest there.
| kcplate wrote:
| Happens all the time and the only reason anyone cares
| about this time is because _Musk_. If Twitter pays a FMV
| to Tesla for any resources, and as long as the Tesla
| board doesn't care (which they won't), this is a non-
| issue. Doesn't matter what kind of "firm" Tesla is.
| deaddodo wrote:
| If the CEO of Ford used Ford resources to purchase a
| rental property for themselves, people would _definitely_
| be talking about it. I would even flip your claim and say
| the only reason people are _dismissing_ this is because
| it 's Musk.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Ah yea I'm sure Musk ran it by HR, compliance and legal..
| had all the paperwork squared away on both sides and is
| making sure time tracking is done carefully.
|
| or he just winged it and grabbed some engineers and said
| "come with me"...
|
| Which is more in character for him?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > Musk ran it by HR, compliance and legal
|
| Right? Tesla hasn't had General Counsel since 2019, and
| is not looking for one.
| shalmanese wrote:
| Tesla definitely seems like the kind of place where they
| love hiring HR people who habitually push against
| powerful higher ups.
| kmbfjr wrote:
| Not all it has a stellar reputation
| mhh__ wrote:
| In vision...
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| Unless Twitter is paying the Tesla for Tesla's employees time
| to Tesla, whether you care or not, doesn't matter. A part
| time CEO of a public company is using the public company's
| resources on one of his private project. If I owned a
| business with someone and found out the other owner was using
| our company's funds but told our employees to go mow his
| house's lawn, I would consider that misappropriation,
| embezzlement even. We don't know the details here but I would
| hope it's above board.
| spamizbad wrote:
| I get the impression you aren't a software engineer. So to
| clarify: AI is not generalized enough to the point where
| there'd be much common expertise unless, say, this code
| review was very narrowly focused on computer vision. And even
| then this article specifically talks about code review,
| which, unless you have the context of the Twitter codebase
| isn't going to be very meaningful. You might do this if
| you're buying a teeny tiny startup with no real engineering
| culture - not (formerly) publicly traded company.
|
| 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.
| 314 wrote:
| Both the vision systems at Tesla and the bot-detection at
| Twitter are classifiers. Both would have trained on large
| datasets. Both would have domain specific feature detection
| sitting below a more general algorithm. Both would have a
| similar basis for evaluation. Both have real-time
| constraints on the classification problem. An engineer (who
| is probably an ML specialist) familiar with one would not
| be starting from scratch in understanding and evaluating
| the other system.
| jaxn wrote:
| Counter-point: Tesla is rumored to be working on a phone.
| That team could be very interested in Twitter for
| shareholder-value reasons.
|
| Do we have any reason to believe it was Tesla's AI
| engineers?
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Counter-point: Tesla is rumored to be working on a
| phone.
|
| 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?
| jaxn wrote:
| Who has a better notification / messaging system at
| scale, that isn't already a phone maker? I suspect the
| Tesla phone team would be thrilled to review that code.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Who has a better notification / messaging system at
| scale
|
| 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.
| throwtheacctawy wrote:
| SantalBlush wrote:
| I hear they're rumored to be working on a Cybertruck as
| well.
| shapefrog wrote:
| I hear they're rumored to be working on a self driving as
| well.
| [deleted]
| dylan604 wrote:
| Are these the same Tesla AI experts that can't make FSD work?
| giantrobot wrote:
| Maybe they're the ones responsible for making the door
| handles work when the car is on fire. Or the ones that
| wrote the AI that runs over children or in front of trains.
| arglebargle123 wrote:
| The obvious solution is to have the tesla tweet at the
| child to get out of the way, or at the local fire
| department that there's a bbq'd customer who needs
| assistance.
| nxm wrote:
| Because Waymo has been able to?
| [deleted]
| dylan604 wrote:
| What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Aeolun wrote:
| giantrobot wrote:
| Based on Tesla's PE the only people responsible for the
| increased share price of Tesla are investors gambling on
| hype. There's nothing about Tesla's fundamentals that
| justifies even their current valuation. It's all
| irrational exuberance of gamblers. The only thing Musk
| has contributed to the stock price has been hype and
| vapor ware.
| concordDance wrote:
| And calling it too high.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| TSLA is down 43% ytd, yes truly evolving before our very
| eyes. The DOJ criminal probe into the bogus self-driving
| claims three days ago bodes well also.
| helf wrote:
| adave wrote:
| This has a material impact just no enough for folks to
| understand or complain about. Can't do that with fanboys
| around.
| jefftk wrote:
| Tesla and Twitter both have experience in AI in the sense
| that Exxon and Unilever both have experience in chemistry.
| derefr wrote:
| Hey now, it would be perfectly cromulent for Unilever and
| Exxon chemists see real value in a collaboration around,
| say, a higher-efficiency fracking solution.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| The well water then can he reused to make some purple
| drink
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| The key is whether or not Twitter is compensating Tesla (and
| therefore its shareholders) at a fair market value for the
| time and resources used by Tesla employees for the benefit of
| Twitter (and therefore Musk as its owner). Not whether or not
| it makes sense to do so.
|
| 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.
| ratg13 wrote:
| There is no definition of "fully compensated"
|
| 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.
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| ditn wrote:
| Then why were they reviewing unrelated codebases? iOS,
| Android? This doesn't hold up
| jjfoooo6 wrote:
| AI as practiced in self driving cars is dramatically
| different than what is practiced in bot detection.
|
| 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.
| bumby wrote:
| They are certainly different domains, but can you justify
| the claim "Self driving has a well defined, static problem
| space"?
|
| 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.
| DFHippie wrote:
| I think it's static inasmuch as it isn't an inherently
| adversarial problem. The world isn't bent on thwarting
| self-driving cars. Bot authors are bent on subverting
| detection.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > The world isn't bent on thwarting self-driving cars.
|
| Oh, that'll come.
| [deleted]
| warbler73 wrote:
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Elon bought Twitter, he didn't take Tesla private. TSLA is
| listed on the NASDAQ, check it if you don't believe. Please
| stop asserting things as true that are demonstrably wrong.
| warbler73 wrote:
| VintageCool wrote:
| But that's TWTR, not TSLA.
| warbler73 wrote:
| Yes that is exactly what I said.
| klyrs wrote:
| From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33389159
|
| > I'm not pissed and I am a stockholder.
|
| Given that Tesla, not Twitter, is public, and the
| conversation was about Tesla stockholders, don't you
| think it would be better to assume that the comment above
| was written by a Tesla stockholder?
| warbler73 wrote:
| The discussion here very clearly is primarily about
| Twitter. Assertions it is primarily about Tesla are
| unequivocally disingenuous.
| [deleted]
| klyrs wrote:
| Why do you keep posting that? I count 3 copies of the
| same comment. You're confused, please re-read the thread
| and note the difference between TSLA and TWTR.
|
| edit: in retrospect, I see that you're a new user. FYI:
| I've flagged this comment, but not the original, because
| you're spamming. Spam isn't cool.
| warbler73 wrote:
| greesil wrote:
| Yeah but you'd be asking for metrics, PR curves, labeled
| data, and things like this. Not code.
| bloqs wrote:
| abc_lisper wrote:
| I'm a TSLA holder and I don't mind at all. The everyday
| minutiae don't concern me as long as the big picture for Tesla
| is in focus and with in reach
| warbler73 wrote:
| [deleted]
| 1024core wrote:
| You're confusing TSLA with TWTR.
| warbler73 wrote:
| [deleted]
| jmillikin wrote:
| You're thinking of Twitter (TWTR). TSLA is Tesla, which is
| still publically traded.
| drakythe wrote:
| No. It's not. Musk bought Twitter and took it private.
| Tesla is still a publicly traded company that Musk (as I
| understand it) actually had to sell a non-trivially portion
| of his stock in in order to finance part of the deal.
|
| Tesla is not his personal fiefdom. Stop.
| xmprt wrote:
| How does Musk acquiring Twitter have anything to do with the
| big picture of Tesla?
| theteapot wrote:
| It's the everyday minutiae.
| skellington wrote:
| Oh no, reddit has to get Elon because they are maaaaaadddddd.
| Every long shit he takes is another act not in the best
| interest of shareholders!
| gvv wrote:
| Like you assume ALL the engineers at Tesla are on site at
| Twitter or what? Maybe it's like 4-5 principal engineers for a
| couple of days.
| deltree7 wrote:
| bobkazamakis wrote:
| zepppotemkin wrote:
| this cracks me up lol
| jefftk wrote:
| I can't tell if you are being sarcastic?
| mpenick wrote:
| I hope this is parody. I agree with being pragmatic and not
| being arbitrarily constrained, but this comes off as
| fanatical.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| > Otherwise, it's tons of thousands of dollars Tesla is pissing
| away on behalf of the CEO's side-hustle.
|
| Seems like a drop of water. For something to be legally
| relevant it has to be significant.
| iboisvert wrote:
| That's probably what Martha Stewart was thinking as well
| bemmu wrote:
| Maybe it's an opportunity to spot Twitter employees who could
| be adding more value working at Tesla instead?
| [deleted]
| tomschlick wrote:
| Whos to say that these TSLA engineers didnt take PTO time and
| Musk is paying them a consulting rate?
| rtp4me wrote:
| Exactly! Just like I said in my comment down below. Most
| commenters in this thread just assume Musk told a bunch of
| guys just to show up on TLSA time to do some code review. My
| suspicion is he helped setup some sort of consulting
| arrangement between the two companies to make it legal. Why
| is that so hard to believe?
| tedunangst wrote:
| Because Musk ordering a bunch of TSLA employees to do
| whatever isn't so hard to believe?
| wyclif wrote:
| If you think Musk didn't run it past legal first, you're
| delusional.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| What 'legal'?
|
| Tesla hasn't had General Counsel since 2019.
| lupire wrote:
| Musk has in the last been officially sanctioned by the
| government for disobeying a direct order to...run things
| by Legal before putting them on Twitter.
| drakythe wrote:
| He signed a contract waiving due diligence, agreeing to
| buy a company at a frankly ludicrous valuation compared
| to their stock price and then tried to back out saying
| they wouldn't let him do due diligence.
| squokko wrote:
| LOL. Musk clearly does a ton of shit without running it
| by legal first. Not that it's really hurt him.
| wyclif wrote:
| Maybe, but not the due diligence stuff which is what I
| was referring to.
| salmonet wrote:
| I am surprised this is the top comment. Yes, I am sure they
| have done the paperwork for these "tons of thousands of
| dollars." I think it is unlikely that many shareholders are
| concerned about this exercise
| duxup wrote:
| What paperwork?
| spuz wrote:
| They would have to sign NDAs at the very least.
| colechristensen wrote:
| You'd only be pissed off if you had a predisposition to dislike
| elon and then why would you be a TSLA shareholder?
|
| 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.
| acdha wrote:
| > This is a tiny amount of money compared to the daily cost
| of running TSLA
|
| 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.
| drakythe wrote:
| So you have no problems with employees stealing the odd petty
| cash here or there for their side hustle, right?
| colechristensen wrote:
| As a shareholder? No. Tiny losses are not of concern to me.
| I am concerned with large scale long term outcomes not
| obsessing over not losing hundredths of a percent of
| revenue.
| [deleted]
| bdowling wrote:
| It would be reasonable for Twitter to pay Tesla for the audit
| work, because otherwise it would be a misuse of Tesla resources
| to only benefit the Tesla CEO.
| howlin wrote:
| Even if TWTR paid TSLA, this is still an obvious conflict of
| interest.
| Nomentatus wrote:
| Companies sell to each other all the time, and this is just
| the beginning. Tesla is a leader in AI, and Twitter needs a
| lot of AI to help counter bots, etc, etc. Humans will be in
| the mix, but AI coming from Tesla is no doubt a huge part
| of the plan, too. So a look at what code's there now is
| just a start. Good business for Tesla, good business for
| Twitter. If one isn't being sacrificed for the sake of the
| other, there's no conflict of interest.
| shapefrog wrote:
| > Tesla is a leader in AI, and Twitter needs a lot of AI
| to help
|
| We will have self twetting twitters by next year.
| _djo_ wrote:
| Tesla's AI expertise is narrow and has no applicability
| to Twitter's situation.
|
| 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.
| Nomentatus wrote:
| It's the hardware, even more than the software, that
| Tesla can contribute. Identifying patterns is the task.
| Gathering and in effect indexing enormous amounts of data
| is necessary, to say, identify a bot.
|
| 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.
| sveme wrote:
| Well, NLP is very different from computer vision.
| Nomentatus wrote:
| Pattern recognition is the game, and that's downstream of
| NLP, although NLP is a (narrow) variety of pattern
| recognition. Also, Transformer, and again, it's the
| hardware that may be Tesla's biggest contribution.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| > Pattern recognition is the game
|
| 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.
| Nomentatus wrote:
| Pattern recognition is our best way to express what
| neural nets do, though no words fully suffice. It's a
| phrase that goes back to the time when AI was based more
| on propositional logic, and was used to point to the
| largest portion of what that approach obviously couldn't
| do at all well. You could use "sorting by complex
| characteristics" if you prefer, but I'm not sure what the
| advantage of that equally vague phrase is. "Pattern
| recognition" is a way of pointing to complex calculations
| that chug a lot of data, and don't analyse (literally
| "break apart") well, but spit out good sorts.
|
| 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.
| zo1 wrote:
| This is scraping the bottom of the barrel.
| alar44 wrote:
| How? Why wouldn't you pool your resources? What interest is
| in conflict?
| Weryj wrote:
| I think the point here is that it's not Elon's resources
| to pool. Since TSLA is a public company and shareholders
| don't benefit from their resources going to the CEO's
| other company for free.
| tsol wrote:
| Plenty of companies with the same owner contract with one
| another. It's extremely common. When they're in the same
| industry, we call it 'vertical integration'
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| Which is completely irrelevant considering Tesla and
| Twitter don't have the same owner.
| brookst wrote:
| Musk doesn't own Tesla. It's a public company, and that
| comes with obligations to all shareholders.
| [deleted]
| minhazm wrote:
| This happens all the time between SpaceX and Tesla.
| SpaceX is a private company just like Twitter and Elon
| owns a lower percentage of SpaceX than he does Twitter.
| There are even people who are on payroll for both
| companies. For example Charles Kuehmann is VP of
| Materials Engineering for both Tesla and SpaceX[1].
|
| [1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-
| kuehmann-00308a12/
| eclipxe wrote:
| Sure but who is going to realistically enforce any kind of
| consequence?
| kadoban wrote:
| Shareholders can and do sue for that type of thing. Doubt
| anyone serious will though.
|
| If anything it seems more concerning for Twitter, morale
| there must be just the best right now.
| Cypher wrote:
| Aren't you also pissed that Elon works on spaceX ?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| How do you know Twitter or Musk aren't paying for those
| contractors to come and assess the code?
| theteapot wrote:
| They should be happy. Get your engineers out and about for a
| bit, dump on some disposable soon to be ex Twitter developers
| to boost their morale while at it. Genius.
| warbler73 wrote:
| [deleted]
| scheme271 wrote:
| Tesla is not privately owned. And if their employees are
| working to review twitter code, then Tesla stockholders
| should rightfully be mad that Tesla is paying employees to
| benefit Elon Musk's private ventures.
| lol768 wrote:
| Tesla Inc is public.
| Vivtek wrote:
| Tesla, not Twitter. I misread it the same way.
| wil421 wrote:
| Can't tell if you're serious or not. Allegedly, Tesla
| engineers were sent to evaluate Twitter code. Why would Tesla
| investors want employees to work on their CEOs side
| investment.
| jmyeet wrote:
| If this sort of thing concerns you, you should already be
| pissed because it's not the first time it's happened.
|
| 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-...
| WalterBright wrote:
| Musk failed so badly, his rocket company handily outshines
| all the government rocket programs in existence.
| cma wrote:
| He did it with SpaceX too and had to reach a settlement:
|
| > 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.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| This is a little aggressive. The boring company is unproven
| technology in a perpetually capex heavy delivery model. If I
| was a spacex shareholder I'd probably value it at $0 in 2018,
| and strongly prefer it to be not associated with spacex at
| all.
| shapefrog wrote:
| Yes but on t-1 your 1% of spacex also represented 1% of
| boring company - which you were paying to devlop. At t+1
| you owned 1% of spacex and 0% of boring company.
|
| If you want to sell your shares for 0$ 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?
| texasbigdata wrote:
| Fair. I've worked on divesting on unprofitable unit for
| $0 that ended up being worth $XXM and the distraction
| elimination it caused for management way more than
| outweighed the multi year ROI on the process. But your
| point stands. The counter argument to your point is taken
| to the absurd extreme you should be like those people on
| TV buying entire abandoned storage lockers full of junk
| in the hope of finding _something_. The fact that the
| boring company seems to partially be working (and many
| people on HN would likely disagree) is rear view mirror
| luck. Look at Facebook and oculus now, for an analogy.
| dhruval wrote:
| Tesla can bill Twitter for the work at a fair market price.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Totally valid opinion. Tesla needs to be focused on delivering
| cars and software. They can't be distracted. This also hurts
| the banks who are looking at Tesla stock as collateral. By
| lumping their activities, both companies are now at risk.
| seydor wrote:
| squidbeak wrote:
| sojournerc wrote:
| Yeah, making 20x on my investment really was foolish
| lukevp wrote:
| You could've made 1000x on GME or bitcoin!
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| And then lost it!
| dilyevsky wrote:
| I once got 35x by betting on a zero
| eterevsky wrote:
| As an actual TSLA stock owner, I'm ok with this. It's a pretty
| trivial amount of work in the grand schema of things and it
| will probably be compensated to Tesla in some way.
| [deleted]
| voidfunc wrote:
| Musk has made TSLA stock holders fabulously wealthy over the
| last decade. He's gonna get a long leash from TSLA
| shareholders.
| bbarn wrote:
| When you invest in a company like Tesla, you're investing your
| money and your trust that ultimately there will be a return.
|
| 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.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Why do you care enough to comment as a non stock owner? Got an
| axe to grind?
| alfor wrote:
| There is a lot of cross pollination between his companies,
| that's is fine:
|
| - 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.
| riffraff wrote:
| Has SpaceX developed any new materials?
|
| It was my understanding they use pretty standard steel
| alloys.
| xcskier56 wrote:
| I'm not sure if they developed them themselves, but the
| alloys SpaceX uses in the pre burners in the raptor engines
| are really advanced and likely have not been known (in the
| US) before. They have to be able to withstand pure (nearly)
| oxygen gas at very high temperatures and pressures. I
| wouldn't be surprised if these super specialize alloys were
| developed by spacex.
|
| 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.
| shapefrog wrote:
| SX 300 & soon SX 500. Kind of a modern version of Inconel
| superalloys
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| dotancohen wrote:
| This is plain wrong. In the US it was assumed that
| Oxygen-rich preburners would erode any manufacturable
| material - metal, ceramic, or exotic. When the RD-170 (If
| I remember correctly) was found to have an oxygen-rich
| preburner, very knowledgeable people called it a lie,
| misrepresentation, or proclaimed that is was severely
| wearing (possibly ablating) and thus had to be very
| heavy.
|
| 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.
| shapefrog wrote:
| Elon Musk disagres with what you think Elon Musk does.
|
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1008385171744174080
| dotancohen wrote:
| I made no reference to Elon Musk, I do not see why you
| are invoking him here.
|
| 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
| ratg13 wrote:
| Now do Amazon and give your take on how it's great for
| society for them to branch out into every business sector
| imaginable.
| karencarits wrote:
| I think this is an example of the differences in image that
| Bezos and Musk have made, Musk creating an impression (and
| perhaps even being) more of an idealist
| fallingknife wrote:
| It's great for customer like me, and there are hundreds of
| millions of us, so that's quite a lot of benefit to
| society. And the things that Amazon is criticized for, like
| treatment of its employees, are not unique to Amazon
| itself, but standard in the industries that they operate
| in. It's just that journalists don't report on it when
| other less successful companies do it. The case against
| Amazon, and other billionaires, is driven by envy much more
| than anything else.
| ratg13 wrote:
| The thing about Amazon is that they have proven that they
| are willing to operate at a loss for as long as it takes
| to destroy their competition and take a monopoly on the
| market (diapers.com, etc.)
|
| The true American dream!
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > Our goal should be to make things better first and then to
| make money second
|
| 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.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Imagine the possibilities of Twitter to help improve SpaceX.
| No, I mean really, if you have that broad an imagination then
| I consider you to be the next Edward de Bono.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Well it can amplify praise and neuter criticism, of course.
| baxuz wrote:
| And how does Twitter fit into Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink?
| MrMan wrote:
| marketing
| paganel wrote:
| Love him or hate him, without Musk Tesla would have been dead
| in the water as a company and its shares would have been
| worthless by now. Those stock owners knew what they did when
| they got into TSLA.
| hota_mazi wrote:
| > without Musk Tesla would have been dead in the water as a
| company and its shares would have been worthless by now
|
| 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.
| paganel wrote:
| Tesla is literally a unicorn in the car industry, in terms
| of stock valuations, that is. If that isn't verifiable I
| don't know what else is.
| onion2k wrote:
| I don't think there's any doubt that Musk has grown Tesla
| significantly and had a very positive impact on the share
| price, but that's something he did in the past. You can't
| just accept everything he does in the future because of past
| wins. Tesla shareholders don't owe him anything. He's there
| to do a job, and if he's not doing it well then they _should_
| complain.
|
| 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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Once Tesla bought Solar City, Musk's cousin's company, it
| became clear that he's prone to this sort of misuse of
| resources. I agree that he shouldn't use Tesla resources like
| this, but it's not out-of-character, either.
| geekraver wrote:
| Phantom braking coming to Twitter?
| giantdude wrote:
| Someone probably told elon to look into the 'plumbing' of
| twitter. He brought a sink just in case.
| love2read wrote:
| The joke was "Let that sink in".
| [deleted]
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| > The joke ...
|
| Don't jokes have to be funny?
| mhh__ wrote:
| Musk aims to be funny to people he doesn't know on twitter
| using memes that weren't that funny 5 years ago.
|
| I genuinely don't get it. He's shockingly not funny
| considering how hip he is for his age.
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| It's a style of humour unto itself. The lack of humour is
| itself humorous. The real question is whether or not he
| thinks he is being directly humorous or ironically
| humorous. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the former.
| Plus he's rich so people probably laugh at his jokes
| regardless.
| mhh__ wrote:
| He thinks he's being ironic, but that isn't enough.
| rejectfinite wrote:
| Stay mad. What colour is your hair btw?
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| What color would Elmo's be if he didn't dye it or plug
| it?
| [deleted]
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| Kind of insulting but understandable coming from an owner that
| just bought a new toy. He should have done it before he bought
| it.
|
| It's interesting how much publicity this whole situation is
| getting. Musk must be loving it.
| xcrunner529 wrote:
| Ah yes the "4dchess" argument that seems to come up anytime a
| narcissist looks stupid, because it definitely can't just be
| that simple.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm still looking for a concise term for "someone who claims to
| be an expert but immediately reveals beyond any doubt that they
| have no clue what they're saying, simply by opening their mouth
| on the subject."
|
| Having Tesla engineers over to review Twitter code is definitely
| that. It's ridiculous.
| chadlavi wrote:
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm using this. It's amazing. And when people ask I'll enjoy
| giving your explanation.
| jahewson wrote:
| A "dilettante"?
| [deleted]
| system16 wrote:
| It's just another thing to add to the pile that should make
| anybody question why on earth people think he is a genius.
|
| 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.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| If nothing else house trolling on social media helps to hype
| up a dedicated fanbase which drives up the multiple on the
| stock value and allows to hire people to work on moonshot
| projects. Several of those projects of his would have never
| gotten funded in more conventional companies and even if they
| had, the funding would likely have gotten cut when no
| immediate, monetary success was visible. All this is only
| possible because of Musk's confidence/arrogance and his
| ability to take others with him.
| scaramanga wrote:
| We can only dream of such a world where those projects
| hadn't been funded. Along with the immeasurable wastage of
| resources, diversion of human talent, and theft of tax
| revenue.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I'm not a big Musk fanboy (anymore), but the work SpaceX
| has done is clearly ground breaking. I also wonder where
| electric cars would be without Tesla. They were all but
| dead after GM killed theirs.
| scaramanga wrote:
| Yes, but there's no doubt any and all of that could have
| been done in a way that's less harmful to society at
| large. Which isn't a specific criticism of Musk, rather
| of our corporate culture in general.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| What's the harm?
| strangeattractr wrote:
| What wastage are you referring to specifically?
| arrow7000 wrote:
| You really managed to fool yourself into thinking that his
| sad attempts to be Funny Online are him playing 5D chess
| somehow
| lupire wrote:
| Please provide a mechanism by which a person can amass
| $200B in wealth from the general public via non-smart
| behavior.
|
| Note: not all smart behavior is programing, engineering,
| or even product design.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Does it matter if it's 5D chess or his behavior just
| happens to create the environment needed to create
| rockets that can land and revitalize the electric car
| market after GM had killed it? I don't like the guy much,
| but his companies are creating great results and
| innovation. Do they live up to the hype? Does her
| understand himself why? I'm not sure how much it matters.
| colechristensen wrote:
| The things SpaceX and Tesla have done under his direction
| speak for themselves. Of course you can find silly
| exaggerations of his contributions, but it is likewise
| ridiculous to deny his influence on their success.
| atrettel wrote:
| Nassim Nicholas Taleb has referred to this concept as
| "epistemic arrogance". In "The Black Swan", Taleb defines it
| the following way:
|
| > 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.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Even better coming from Taleb (love him to bits but he's
| describing himself sometimes)
| elcritch wrote:
| I don't know if that quote makes sense. ;)
| chris_wot wrote:
| So you are an epistemocrat?
| ryandrake wrote:
| A lot of senior execs, CxOs and founders have built multi-
| million dollar careers around their ability to speak at length
| with complete confidence about topics of which they are
| clueless. This works because the people who actually know what
| they are talking about tend to be powerless worker-bees and the
| people who are fooled by confidence projection tend to be
| investors and powerful career kingmakers.
|
| The people rolling their eyes when they hear bullshit are not
| the people writing the checks.
| stefan_ wrote:
| I don't know about the Tesla engineers, but printing out code
| is a great hallmark.
| timmytokyo wrote:
| Recall that Elon alienated Peter Thiel by insisting on Windows
| over Unix at PayPal. Thiel resigned.
| AustinDev wrote:
| Might you think that they're not actually reviewing code and
| that the journalists are idiots? Because all evidence I've seen
| about journalism is that it's completely skin deep and often
| blatantly wrong. It's likely the engineers are reviewing
| architecture and looking at how the whole system works.
| Gene_Parmesan wrote:
| WaPo is not HuffPo.
|
| Generally, you can still trust the real news coming out of
| places like the Post and Times to at least be accurately fact
| checked.
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| That's a joke. Wapo is just as full of shit as any other
| news outlet these days
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| How have you quantified this?
| lupire wrote:
| A report from a team of reviewers from Tesla, presumably.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| wasn't this from actual employees?
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| Politician.
|
| Nailed it!
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| word you're looking for is charlatan
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I was thinking that, perhaps.
|
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Hubris is a good word.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| No smoking guns I suppose, but there's a fair amount of
| suggestion at trying to trick others.
|
| 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.
| elcritch wrote:
| It's possible Musk is all of the above. He could
| genuinely believe in hyperloop and boring co as solutions
| and as ways to spread FUD.
|
| Actually I'd suspect it'd be very likely if he's high on
| the IQ / autism spectrum as he seems to be.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| Relating to criticisms of the Boring Company and his
| theories around transportation, Musk is on the record
| himself of asserting that Induced Demand doesn't exist
| which is a pretty remarkable statement considering that
| it's effectively an uncontroversial proven fact in
| transportation planning circles.
|
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| Self-delusion?
|
| "It's not a lie if _you_ [the teller] believe it ".
| -Seinfeld/David
| recuter wrote:
| jwilber wrote:
| What about twitter engineers makes you think this?
| recuter wrote:
| The notable lack of humor.
| squidbeak wrote:
| Ultracrepidarian.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| "The note continues, "Please come prepared with code as a backup
| to review on your own machines with Elon." Later, people inside
| the company reported that Tesla engineers were in fact reviewing
| the code."
|
| 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-...
| completelylegit wrote:
| Once upon a time at Tesla, Elon brought SpaceX staff in to weed
| out the undesirables.
|
| 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.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Look how well all of that ended...
| rvba wrote:
| As much as I dont like Elon, I wonder how much of them quit
| since they couldn't answer those questions.
|
| 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.
| Tronno wrote:
| Competence is not measured by one's ability to drop a
| leetcode solution on command.
|
| 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.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| If people developing a system that controls two-ton death
| machines get their panties in a twist about having to
| demonstrate basic competency in a memory-unsafe language...
| it's probably good that they quit.
|
| Airline pilots don't quit in a huff because they have to
| demonstrate basic competency annually.
| thwayunion wrote:
| This take might have more credibility if Tesla weren't facing
| criminal charges for its failure to deliver autopilot.
| nxm wrote:
| Criminal? No one is going to jail for failure to deliver on
| a very difficult AI problem
| thwayunion wrote:
| _> Criminal?_
|
| 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.
| bilbyx wrote:
| Tesla software engineers still have not managed to get their FSD
| shit working, I don't see how this would help Tesla nor Twitter.
| donatj wrote:
| I think FSD is a couple magnitudes more complex than Twitter
| bilbyx wrote:
| That's exactly my point. Get your own shit working before
| wasting time on another company's shit.
| davidtranjs wrote:
| It is a stupid action. We do the code review all the time, but we
| do review the commits on Github. It is unreasonable to print it
| on the paper. I believe it is just a marketing tactic of Elon.
| scaramanga wrote:
| I don't see anyone discussing what seems, to me, the most likely
| explanation.
|
| 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)
| ksec wrote:
| Just a note for myself here, Interesting HN is showing 1210
| comments in a single page. I think this is new.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| They are making people work all weekend on this shit. All in
| order to save Musk the Nov 1st vest money.
| fredgrott wrote:
| Twitter has always been somewhat, let's say not tech IQ in code
| and tech infrastructure.
|
| 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.
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| So the developers from Tesla are engineers, but the devs from
| Twitter are just "workers". So is also "on-site code evaluation".
| Interesting word choice from the Post, whose owner is a known
| critic/competitor of Musk.
| Thaxll wrote:
| How Tesla engineers are relevant into evaluating Twitter code.
| tyingq wrote:
| Probably just a third party that Elon would trust to
| corroborate answers to questions. He probably hasn't made many
| friends in the Twitter building, and may not take what he's
| told at face value.
| tootie wrote:
| How is evaluating code relevant to evaluating the company?
| qaq wrote:
| Who to keep and who to let go, Tesla runs it's own large
| scale datacenters they might be evaluating shifting workloads
| to onprem
| jjfoooo6 wrote:
| I'm curious as to how existing Twitter employees get compensated
| after the sale. Do they have to stay for some amount of time to
| collect payouts on their shares?
|
| These actions only make logical sense if the goal is to make life
| unpleasant for employees, and get a lot of them to quit.
| throoo0ooowaway wrote:
| When Dell was taken private, RSUs were converted to cash
| bonuses at the sale price. Most likely option.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Anyone holding stock just got a massive bump above the market
| value(3-4x?) after Elon overpaid for it. If an employee already
| sold all their RSUs, well, they probably got nothing.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| 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.
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| Twitter engineers already aren't trying, unless you're counting
| under flow or something HN meta to increase output while
| reducing effort.
| ch33zer wrote:
| Maybe try for a month, get stock to vest, then take off.
| williamsmj wrote:
| I wish Elon Musk all the best handling whatever this is with a
| skeleton crew of people who hate him on Tuesday:
| https://xeiaso.net/blog/openssl-3.x-secvuln-incoming.
| mikeryan wrote:
| If these numbers are right and they're laying off 50% the
| workforce, half of me wonders how much Parag could raise to
| build a new Twitter from scratch and just hire 500 - 1000
| talented folks off the street for the venture, I mean if Travis
| K could raise almost a billion for his shitty ghost kitchen
| venture I'd have to think they could get enough runway to get
| something launched pretty quickly.
|
| 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.
| armatav wrote:
| Didn't Kalanick raise that money for his "shitty ghost
| kitchen venture" after using Uber Eats to prove that the
| model would actually be more lucrative than the cab-service?
| parkingrift wrote:
| Twitter isn't some engineering marvel. Anyone could go build
| a scalable Twitter clone. There are a handful of competitors
| on the market and a few open source projects. All things
| considered, it's easy.
|
| Making a viable business out of it is hard.
| wittycardio wrote:
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Man, you and rest of the salt men and fanboys are turning
| this comment section into a useless firepit
| rl1987 wrote:
| Making a Twitter clone that could handle 10 users is indeed
| quite trivial. Making one that would handle 0.4M+ users is
| not.
| parkingrift wrote:
| Disagree. Back in 2006 it would have been really hard,
| but not in 2022. We've figured out all sorts of novel
| ways to scale platforms.
|
| 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.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Not really. Twitter is really a very simple messaging
| system with messages being public.
|
| 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.
| rl1987 wrote:
| This is pretty much like saying that Dropbox can be
| trivially replicated with rsync(1) or that one can code
| Uber in a weekend. Perhaps you can do so at small scale
| for yourself and your friends. The essence of Twitter (or
| Dropbox, or Uber) is indeed quite simple.
|
| 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.
| mousetree wrote:
| These are all valid points but none speak to GP's comment
| that the scale aspect is no longer as difficult to solve.
| yieldgap wrote:
| akmarinov wrote:
| > Making a viable business out of it is hard.
|
| Even Twitter wasn't able to figure that part out
| DeathArrow wrote:
| And here comes Musk. If he manages to make Twitter
| profitable he deserves some credit.
| lrvick wrote:
| There are plenty of ways I can think of to make Twitter
| profitable, but none of them are ethical. There is no
| good that will come from this.
| shapefrog wrote:
| Twitter gross profit for the twelve months ending June
| 30, 2022 was $3.181B, a 11.24% increase year-over-year.
| Twitter annual gross profit for 2021 was $3.28B, a 39.58%
| increase from 2020.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| True but as with all tech companies at the moment Twitter
| is also going to feel the pinch and they don't have the
| business size to wear it as well as the others.
| eps wrote:
| Arguably Twitter wasn't trying even the most obvious
| things that were laying on the surface, e.g. account
| fees, or tweet promotion to one's _existing_ followers,
| or fees for following, etc.
|
| 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.
| nmfisher wrote:
| The success of most* social media platforms was largely
| unconnected with the developers who built it or the
| underlying software. You can't just hire a few hundred
| retrenched developers and expect to come up with a successful
| social media platform after some number of months. Timing,
| marketing, and user psychology are much more important.
|
| * 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.
| mikeryan wrote:
| I agree with a lot of what you say, but in this
| hypothetical I'm envisioning this a bit differently then a
| completely new social network so much as Twitter 2.0 with a
| very direct focus on getting a large "Lift and Shift" of
| users directly from Twitter. I should also be clear that
| I'm assuming a relatively proportional level of talent
| across Product, Design etc too not just retrenched
| engineers.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >getting a large "Lift and Shift" of users directly from
| Twitter
|
| 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.
| Nowado wrote:
| Avoiding some of that free speech. One could even hope
| for all of it to stay contained within Twitter.
| misnome wrote:
| > more freedom of speech and less bots on Twitter
|
| Isn't this a self-contradiction?
| Certhas wrote:
| It's not hard to have a free speech platform. It's hard
| to have a useful speech platform. Useful speech probably
| requires editing and moderation and so far it's pretty
| clear algorithms and upvote/downvote systems aren't
| terribly good at it.
|
| 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.
| cudgy wrote:
| It seems to me that the last decade or so provides ample
| evidence that not allowing everyone to say everything
| they want is almost certainly anti-correlated with
| substantial and meaningful debate.
| Certhas wrote:
| Our perceptions differ markedly then.
|
| 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.
| cudgy wrote:
| "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 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.
| Certhas wrote:
| > To take away people's freedom of expression due to the
| revenue model is arbitrary and inconsistent with a free,
| advanced society.
|
| 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:
|
| [Jurgen Habermas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrg
| en_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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_speech_situation
| cudgy wrote:
| For a scientist, you sure do ignore the facts of fallible
| human nature and basic mathematical set logic theory.
| These platforms are not newspapers and magazines printed
| by individual companies with a cultivated set of content
| creators; they are platforms that are open to all people
| in the world. Applying the same principal to these
| platforms is inconsistent and arbitrary.
|
| "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.
| Certhas wrote:
| I nowhere claimed that platforms are like newspapers. I
| claimed that newspapers provided a function that improved
| discourse and that has been lost.
|
| 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"?
| bamboozled wrote:
| Yes but this is good timing. A lot of people are pretty
| unsatisfied with Musk as a human lately and it seems like
| if there was an alternative available, people would go
| there quickly.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Who is unsatisfied with Elon and would switch to
| something else for that? Is there a market study?
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Switching cost is 0 as long as your friends are on the
| other platform. Just get enough people pissed off at elon
| to "try" out the new service and enough might stick
| around.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I've seen him say and do a lot of controversial and in my
| opinion very immoral things in the last year.
|
| 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.
| cudgy wrote:
| Interesting. What technologies do you use that you are
| fully aware that no assholes were involved in its
| creation? How does one go about ensuring they follow this
| no-asshole rule?
|
| 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 ...
| Bubble_Pop_22 wrote:
| > What technologies do you use that you are fully aware
| that no assholes were involved in its creation?
|
| 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.
| cudgy wrote:
| Fair question. Elon is definitely not the answer to all
| that ails the planet. Yes, electric cars are not a
| panacea: they require mining of nasty elements from the
| ground and (especially the batteries) must be disposed of
| properly; they still require electricity which is largely
| still created using fossil fuels.
|
| 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.
| Bubble_Pop_22 wrote:
| > That's a significant contribution and Elon Musk is
| largely credited with moving the auto industry in that
| direction.
|
| 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.
| cudgy wrote:
| Decentralized energy is a net benefit to all in my
| opinion, including the sub-saharan farmer. Fewer silly
| fossil fuel wars benefit a few people too.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Funny because I use Linux as my primary OS, while I think
| Linus can be abrasive, I don't think he is an asshole in
| the same way, because with Linus, it's not about money,
| in the same way that money is a thing for Musk or Gates.
| Woz built a lot of Apple and I feel his presence in a lot
| of their earlier stuff. He wasn't a money guy.
|
| 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.
| cudgy wrote:
| Overall I personally agree with most all of those
| decisions. However, my decisions are made based on the
| product or business practices not my perception of the
| personality or political beliefs of their founders or
| significant contributors based on social media or news
| accounts.
|
| 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.
| Jotra7 wrote:
| concordDance wrote:
| Interesting that you think he's done a lot of unethical
| things over the past year compared to previous ones...
| this is the year where a good half of starlink terminals
| in Ukraine are being SpaceX funded. Rather than the year
| he accused someone of being a pedophile or the year he
| refused to comply with covid regs.
| bamboozled wrote:
| He did also threaten to shut them down after receiving
| flack for suggesting that a sovereign country give up
| part of it's territory to a lunatic, so yeah, still not a
| great year.
| cudgy wrote:
| There seem to be many lunatics when it comes to this
| Ukraine affair. Putin's not the only one.
| trollied wrote:
| The general populace don't know much about him & don't
| care. The subset of people that do is just a rounding
| error.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Could a commercial player grab an existing open protocol
| like Mastodon and just put a really slick UI/UX on that?
| lrvick wrote:
| Mastodon and ActivityPub already exist. It lacks ads or a
| path to profit and thus all content is neutral and
| untargeted. These are features, not bugs.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >half of me wonders how much Parag could raise to build a new
| Twitter from scratch
|
| 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.
| shapefrog wrote:
| > Why would investors be willing to lose money, especially
| in the current economic situation
|
| A whole bunch of genius investors just bought a company
| worth $11 billion for $44 billion...
| IshKebab wrote:
| Twitter wasn't too far off profitability. I looked at the
| numbers and you could definitely get it to profitability by
| reducing staff numbers and relocating to much cheaper
| places (literally anywhere except SV).
|
| 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.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Yet Elon bought Twitter for $44B, with $11B funded by a
| variety of external partners.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If these numbers are right and they're laying off 50% the
| workforce, half of me wonders how much Parag could raise to
| build a new Twitter from scratch and just hire 500 - 1000
| talented folks off the street for the venture
|
| 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.
| karol wrote:
| Parag is not an entrepreneur, he has 0 track record. I expect
| him to start a podcast:D
| riffraff wrote:
| Why would anyone jump on Parag's new Twitter?
|
| 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.
| seydor wrote:
| because he s leftist
| DeathArrow wrote:
| A leftist who makes tons of money from other people's
| hard work. Bizarre but that is the new normal.
| ehnto wrote:
| America's Left and Right are in general both quite skewed
| to the right. Our right wing party here in Australia
| would be considered left in America. The American left
| wing party is still considered right wing through the
| Australian political lens.
|
| 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.
| cudgy wrote:
| Arresting people for going into a local park is
| considered to be more left wing? Locking down people is
| considered to be more left wing? The draconian,
| authoritarian measures taken in Australia surrounding its
| covid response were truly shocking.
| ehnto wrote:
| You can't gauge Australia's general policymaking from
| what was an unprecedented event in our history, we were
| in a state of emergency, it can be hard to get every
| decision right in such a situation. I'm not sure how
| informed you are on the matter, but it was also state
| lead not a federal response. Some states were barely
| affected, some states threw away the precautions pretty
| quickly. Victoria had it the hardest, and I don't agree
| with the level of lockdown there. But it was also the
| decisions of one guy, who we elected, Dan Andrews, on the
| advice of his health officials. This is why we have a
| democracy, we vote him out if his decisions were bad.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Arresting people for going into a local park is
| considered to be more left wing? Locking down people is
| considered to be more left wing?
|
| Generally yes, the leftists like to control individuals
| and consider the state more important than individuals
| and their freedom.
| cudgy wrote:
| This is a disturbing recent trend unfortunately.
| samatman wrote:
| How many people do you think would join a Twitter clone
| founded by a sore loser from the dregs of the old company?
|
| Would they be fun to hang out on the Internet with?
|
| None, and no. I appreciate the chuckle though.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| The last thing we all need is another Twitter clone...no
| matter how well intentioned.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Didn't he just get a golden parachute of around 54 Million
| dollars? Would a portion of that be enough to get going?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Didn't he just get a golden parachute of around 54
| Million dollars?
|
| 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.)
| bamboozled wrote:
| I've thought the same thing, while Twitter is hard to scale,
| it's pretty freaking simple product to build, if I had a bit
| of spare time, I'd be building a clone right now so as
| everyone leaves Musk's platform they have a place to go.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| There are probably Twitter alternatives laying on GitHub.
| How much people would you expect leaving Musks platform for
| another one? Are you willing to bet your life savings on
| it? I hope not, at least not without solid market research.
| bamboozled wrote:
| There is nothing on Earth I'd be willing to bet my life
| savings on, sounds like a kind of stupid idea?
| uni_rule wrote:
| See also: Tumblr losing Yahoo/Verizon nearly a Billion dollars
| with it's own implosion.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Oh come now. Tumblr didn't fail due to engineers sabotaging
| it. It failed because the new owners decided that they were
| too squeamish for porn and it turned out that porn was what
| sustained Tumblr. This was Yahoo simply not understanding
| what the product actually was.
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean there is still not porn on Tumblr and Automattic has
| been a good steward of it. Verizon lost a billion dollars
| because they bet on a growth play for a mature social
| network where their new owners are running it like a
| lifestyle business.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I would argue that when Yahoo decided to remove all the
| porn off Tumblr that it caused a major brain drain that
| took a long time to recover. It also soured the
| relationship between bloggers and Yahoo. There was no way
| for the same entity to pull out of that nose dive but a
| bit of time and new ownership helped pivot Tumblr to a
| slightly different crowd.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > This was Yahoo simply not understanding what the product
| actually was.
|
| This is Yahoo's core competency though: not understanding
| what their product actually is.
| smk_ wrote:
| You are a psychopath.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| The new owner knows this, that the whole company is itching to
| self sabotage and crash twitter if they can..
| agilob wrote:
| >Passively destroying Twitter from within by not trying
|
| A code review? TL;DR; LGTM, straight to prod!
| scaramanga wrote:
| Because they don't have a union so they were excluded from all
| the big-boy negotiations at the sale, and they've no way to
| resist the demands of their bosses. They can put up, or shut
| up. Or just complain pathetically.
| lupire wrote:
| Or they can join a competing social network.
| uni_rule wrote:
| Well it's not like meta is having a great time right now
| either.
| lukewrites wrote:
| Well then why don't they go to Snapch...oh, never mind.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| tbh Musk very lucky right now that he's doing this during
| a downturn when there's not a lot of recruiters banging
| on the door for his workers.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Facebook is out of cash. And even if they were expanding,
| Facebook is orders of magnitude more complex, is not sure
| all ex Twitter employees would have been a good match for
| Facebook.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Isn't Peter theil launching a competing product. Maybe he
| tricked musk into buying twitter so this happens
| mantas wrote:
| The crowd that isn't happy with Musk probably wouldn't be
| happy with Theil... Musk is asshat saying stupid things.
| While Theil is both further in the same political direction
| and much smarter.
| TheChaplain wrote:
| Comments like this makes me lose faith i humanity.
|
| 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.
| gaze wrote:
| The site has been flooded with 4chan users saying the n-word,
| and there are no attempts to stop this. This is the new
| Twitter. This means it's trashed. It's like trying to save a
| piece of raw meat left out in the sun. Why put a single shred
| of effort into this?
| seydor wrote:
| what kind of information is in twitter that does not exist
| elsewhere? i never remember searching for something and
| ending up to find the answer in twitter
| vore wrote:
| What is the point of this self-imposed honor when the person
| at the top is more than happy to play you as the fool?
|
| 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.
| codegladiator wrote:
| Reminds me of Michael Scott in the analysis of The Office
| in The Gervais Principle [1]
|
| [1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
| principle-...
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| > What is the point of this self-imposed honor when the
| person at the top is more than happy to play you as the
| fool?
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| probably_wrong wrote:
| > _When winds start blowing the other way, that's when
| one's true character is tested._
|
| 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.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| Current Twitter employees did not join Twitter with Musk
| at the helm. They owe him no loyalty. Nothing at all.
|
| At this moment the onus is on Musk to win the loyalty of
| his new workers.
| lifeformed wrote:
| Blind devotion to your employer or country is not a
| virtue, but a naive idealism. Honor is just a general
| heuristic for doing good, it's not the good itself. Doing
| good is done on a case by case basis, ideals are just a
| guide. We have to evaluate all our actions with an
| ethical criticality.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Sincere question: do you believe that Twitter (the
| business) is honourable in respect of its employees? Is
| Elon Musk honourable?
| yafbum wrote:
| Values are multiple. You have to consider professional
| responsibility and weigh it against responsibility to
| yourself and your family as well, and most people would
| place those above all others.
|
| 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.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| We're talking about work and corporate world.
|
| 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.
| lrvick wrote:
| Is it honorable to die on your sword for a casino or a
| big pharma price gouging department? Or an adtech
| company?
|
| 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.
| JasserInicide wrote:
| Let's be honest here: you wouldn't be seeing people saying
| they should sabotage the code base if a left-leaning CEO
| bought the company.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| Comments like this make me wonder just how divergent peoples
| outlook on life are.
|
| 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.
| nverno wrote:
| But you must understand taking pride in your work. I don't
| know if I'd have called it honorable, but there is
| certainly no honor in sneakily doing shitty work on
| purpose. I wouldn't write software if it didn't give me
| satisfaction, and doing a shitty job is never satisfying.
| dustedcodes wrote:
| When you ask you accountant to do your accounts so you
| don't get hugely screwed by the tax man then you
| expect/hope that they will do their best work in your
| interest.
|
| 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.
| rajamaka wrote:
| I think you are over dramatizing the importance of
| Twitter just a bit here
| Tronno wrote:
| People do their utmost because of mutual respect, and
| because of the expectation of conducting repeat business
| - not because of honor.
|
| 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.
| dustedcodes wrote:
| I didn't say or use the word honour even once. I simply
| said that everyone plays a part in creating a nice
| society.
| Tronno wrote:
| Apologies, I thought your post was in a different thread.
| Point stands though.
| concordDance wrote:
| Sure,don't be loyal to the company. But loyalty to
| individuals who work there and your end users? That I think
| is important.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| Place the comment in context. The other post is advocating
| for actively destroying the company
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I was commenting on @TheChaplain saying they'd do their
| "absolute best up to the minute I have to leave" and
| offering an opinion asymetric loyalty in tech businesses.
| Thats all I was commenting on. I think thats pretty
| clear.
| therouwboat wrote:
| You joined Tesla to build cars of the future and bring self
| driving to the masses and then they ask you to review some
| other companys codebase, so that the boss can fire bunch of
| people. Yay, I will do my absolute best.
| diceduckmonk wrote:
| Do we know if those Tesla engineers were forced into it or
| it was an opt-in?
| shagmin wrote:
| Curious about this as well. I could understand being a
| little peeved as a shareholder if this is purely coming
| out of Tesla's pockets, but I realize a lot of people
| have bought into Tesla and think of Elon Musk's
| distractions as part of the bad that comes with the good.
| mikkergp wrote:
| Im not 100% convinced that tanking Twitter is less honest and
| ethical than continuing to support it... depending on the
| scope of the context.
| x128 wrote:
| You don't owe your dignity to your company.
| lrvick wrote:
| One could argue that centralized surveillance capitalism
| companies are unethical to start with. In the hands of a
| billionaire seeking to make them more profitable at all
| costs, they can become dangerous weapons.
|
| 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.
| activitypea wrote:
| >degenerates
|
| wew lad
| yrgulation wrote:
| > who value being honest and ethical, to be the better person
| even if I'm in a room of degenerates
|
| 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.
| rtikulit wrote:
| I think being "honest and ethical" is at its heart a useful
| strategy for organizing the collective work of individuals.
| It's part of the ethos required for building high-trust
| groups.
|
| 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.
| jwie wrote:
| This is a laudable position. But consider that, depending on
| your level and immediate boss, you might not be in a position
| to survive the layoffs no matter how personally productive
| and impactful you are.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| tgv wrote:
| > ... Twitter ... honest and ethical
|
| 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.
| tourist2d wrote:
| > It's detrimental to mental health and society
|
| Got a source for that? Sounds like you expanded that
| personal anecdote a bit too much.
| plq wrote:
| > ... running twitter into the ground might be the most
| ethical thing an employee could do.
|
| 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.
| tgv wrote:
| "Aye, sir!"
|
| 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.
| plq wrote:
| I don't think we disagree. You don't like the company you
| work for? You Quit. You think it's not the company you
| joined some time ago? You Quit. I can go on and on like
| this. You didn't promise to increase shareholder value,
| but you did promise you would try in good faith.
|
| 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.
| jen20 wrote:
| > You didn't promise to increase shareholder value, but
| you did promise you would try in good faith.
|
| And by most measures, twitter employees did that
| successfully.
| MarcoZavala wrote:
| nigerianbrince wrote:
| `git blame`
| shaburn wrote:
| Tesla = Elon. Dont delude yourselves
| cr4nberry wrote:
| I wonder if the main goal of doing this isn't to judge people by
| "who has the most PRs" or "who's contributed the highest number
| of LOC", but to see who can explain what they work on vs who
| can't
|
| 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
| robbywashere_ wrote:
| tech stacks, especially of this magnitude run on processes, some
| machine some human some rube goldberg taped together combination
| of the two. Code is simply an artifact. 'Evaluating the code',
| sounds like a rather strange way to appraise the state of
| twitter's tech.
| pwthornton wrote:
| Tesla is a hardware company not known for stellar software. Both
| its self-driving/driver assist capabilities are suspect, and the
| functionality of the giant tablet UI could be better. You hear a
| lot of requests to be able to use Apple CarPlay in Teslas.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| dkarras wrote:
| I think they are there to figure out "the lay of the land". I
| don't think they'd be assessing code line by line. Just there
| to figure out how everything is connected, what the ongoing
| projects are, what is on fire etc. done by people Musk
| personally knows and presumably trusts.
| chippiewill wrote:
| Some Tesla engineers will be better than Twitter engineers and
| vice versa, but the Tesla engineers aren't there as a bastion
| of better software engineering.
|
| 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.
| walrus01 wrote:
| For those who don't remember, one example of just how badly
| they can fuck up their software, the operating system on Teslas
| for a number of years was based on a default Ubuntu that wrote
| logs which destroyed the SSD. Exceeded the total write wear
| leveling endurance after just 1-2 years of use of the car.
| Required total motherboard replacement on a great number of
| cars, because of course the ssd was permanently soldered down.
| CalChris wrote:
| Yeah, this did happen to my S. It was covered out-of-warranty
| because the TSA said it would be a good idea if Tesla covered
| it out-of-warranty. Tesla concurred.
|
| https://www.tesla.com/support/8gb-emmc-recall-frequently-
| ask...
| super_linear wrote:
| A decent article on this:
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/flash-memory-wear-
| killing-...
|
| We have this example as a "don't do this" example for
| excessive logging in our engineering guidelines.
| foobiekr wrote:
| This was such a basic, newbie mistake that everyone I knew
| who had ever worked even minimally in embedded couldn't
| believe they were that incompetent and inexperienced.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Telecom systems and ISP people were also astonished, as it
| is quite normal for core switching and routing equipment to
| have a very limited write endurance solid state boot and OS
| storage device. For a long time very serious $300,000+
| routers booted off compact flash cards, back in the day.
| extheat wrote:
| "Better software engineers" to anyone who does software
| engineering is a joke. It's an totally unquantifiable measure,
| and some people use dumb metrics like leetcode capabilities as
| some IQ test.
| nlitened wrote:
| There absolutely _are_ better and worse software engineers.
|
| 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.
| greesil wrote:
| Sshhh, don't give them any ideas.
| [deleted]
| CloudRecondite wrote:
| Absolutely, I don't view Tesla as a place top tier talent goes.
| Twitter much more so.
| trident5000 wrote:
| This seems ridiculous to me. Self driving cars are cutting
| edge tech. Social media algos are not for the most part,
| certainly not Twitters. Top talent goes to wherever cutting
| edge developments are. If I wanted to participate in
| developing the future I would choose Tesla over Twitter any
| day.
| CloudRecondite wrote:
| Top tier talent generally goes where they get compensated
| the best
| WWLink wrote:
| This exactly!
|
| 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! :)
| marvindanig wrote:
| What self-driving car are you talking about? I'd bet
| Twitter has had more success in computational neuroscience
| with their structured tweets than Tesla has had with broken
| roads.
| trident5000 wrote:
| I bet they dont.
| govg wrote:
| Twitter does some cutting edge ai research, they are unique
| (just like meta and google and some other firms) in that
| the challenges they face at the scale they do are unique,
| and need unique solutions. If you think "social media
| algos" are a) not cutting edge or b)all Twitter does
| technically, then you are incredibly misinformed. It's not
| just Twitter, Google and Meta are also doing incredible
| research in AI and are among the biggest contributers at
| any platform you choose (conference papers, libraries,
| datasets, architectures)
| snshn wrote:
| Well, they must know a thing or two about bots, they're working
| on the AI for self-driving cars... makes sense to me.
| glitchc wrote:
| Musk sounds like a nightmare to work for. Why would any self-
| respecting developer stick around under these conditions? I
| expect an exodus of talent from Twitter in short order.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Have you looked at the Tesla share price history, or SpaceX
| valuation?
|
| Elon makes his equity-compensated employees rich. You don't
| need complex psychology to explain the appeal.
| threeseed wrote:
| Cult of personality.
|
| Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates etc. were all a nightmare
| to work when they were younger.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| Well-behaved men rarely make history.
| Spivak wrote:
| Yeah you can't really turn this quote around like that
| because it drastically changes the meaning. Well-behaved
| means with respect to an establishment and not accepting
| one's place as imposed by it. Being a dick makes you not
| well-behaved in the way you would describe a toddler.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| For there to be an exodus of talent there must be first be
| talent.
|
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| Large group tends toward the mean, news at 11. Average
| engineers keep the world running. Most code that needs to be
| written does not meaningfully benefit from talent.
|
| 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.
| fastball wrote:
| This assumes Twitter has serious talent. The company that
| implemented "undo tweet" with a setTimeout[1].
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1513301310434529288?s=20&t=Q...
| perfectstorm wrote:
| what a waste of everyone's time. as a manager, I can tell you
| that even my smartest engineers go through highs and lows in
| their career and there are days when they push out code like
| there's no tomorrow and days when they don't push out anything
| because you know there's life outside of work that affects them
| (their dog passed away or their wife filed for divorce or their
| daughter is sick and was taken to ER etc). An arbitrary 60 days
| look back makes no sense.
| Areading314 wrote:
| It's especially dumb _after_ buying a company to be acting like
| the developers are so incompetent across the board that they
| could be judged on this criteria. Elon just bought all this IP
| -- now he's going to make extremely rash decisions about who is
| contributing and who is not based on this very flawed
| methodology?
| guax wrote:
| I bet there was nothing happening in the last 60 days that
| would demotivate people on twitter. All was well.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| So Twitter's C++, Java and Scala will be redone in Tesla Python.
|
| This will be awesome.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| > 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.
|
| > 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?"
| scaramanga wrote:
| To which the reply would be "cut the bullshit, we both know you
| don't give a shit about code, so just show me which demeaning
| hoop you need me to jump through and what I'm going to get for
| doing it."
|
| And then just hope it isn't quid pro quo sexual harassment.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Does Twitter have a large, observable quality problem. If there
| is one, I never noticed it myself but I'm not a particularly
| active user.
|
| 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.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| Ex: With all the Kanye meltdown stuff going on, which is
| "general interest", Twitter has been amplifying the tiny % of
| antisemitic voices in the black community and mixing them into
| my feed. That is quite distracting for a site I use for various
| tech industries' news during breaks. (Common use case of
| Twitter, and big $ for them.) In contrast, a site like LI will
| only rarely allow, and more importantly, freely & widely
| amplify that sort of garbage - I can list the exceptions I've
| seen.
|
| 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
| osigurdson wrote:
| I'm hopeful there is a "HN" like mode which is actually
| heavily moderated where only constructive, non-inflammatory
| discussion is allowed. I wouldn't use this all the time, but
| having one button to tune out all of the noise would be cool.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| Twitter has reportedly got the opposite problem to Facebook.
| Facebook was move fast and break stuff, at Twitter they've got
| such a beleif that Twitter is amazing that they're incredibly
| resistant to change anything. So it's not that the stuff they
| do is bad, it's just that where other companies try lots of new
| stuff, Twitter didn't. That has actually changed a bit since
| Jack was forced out, but still, they move very slowly.
|
| 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.
| spaceywilly wrote:
| This is pretty standard procedure when a company gets bought. The
| new owners will conduct a review and decide who to keep and who
| to get rid of. They have probably been given a target of how many
| people they want to lay off and are evaluating who is worth
| keeping.
|
| 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.
| matwood wrote:
| You're talking more about standard procedure after an
| acquisition. The new owners come in and look for redundancies
| and try to cut there.
|
| 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."
| threatofrain wrote:
| You say "the new owners" but Tesla is not the new owner. Is it
| really standard procedure for employees from another company of
| the same CEO to do labor on the CEO's new company? And is
| printing out code really standard? Like, if you have the
| prerogative to review company code, why wouldn't you rather
| just use code tools on a computer, such as Git?
|
| I wouldn't be quick to dismiss the idea that this is a show.
| code_runner wrote:
| To your point, can't they just poke around the recent
| activity across all of twitters repos? Surely these brilliant
| Tesla engineers can figure that out.
| apexalpha wrote:
| It's pretty common for a new CEO or leader to bring in his
| own people, too.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I think what you're saying is not untrue. But this isn't that.
| There would be an entire process performed over many months
| (some of which should have happened during due diligence.)
|
| Imagine if Elon bought an airline and asked them to line up all
| the planes on the tarmac for review.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| > 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
| regpertom wrote:
| Hey, excuse me for using you as an example but there's a
| lot of this rough idea in this comment section and I'm
| rather confused by it. I don't mean to single you out.
|
| 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?
| Joeri wrote:
| In every field there are ways that things are done. To
| review a fleet of airplanes I assume "the way it is done"
| would be based on trawling through inspection reports,
| not looking at the actual planes. Elon Musk has a
| complete disregard for "the way it is done" to the point
| of not even trying to do things that way as a sane
| default to iterate from, and that makes him the sort of
| person who would line up the airplanes on the tarmac
| instead of going through inspection reports. That
| attitude is why people who are deep into conventional
| wisdom dismiss him as an idiot.
|
| 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.
| recyclelater wrote:
| Russia has inspection reports on planes and tanks that
| don't run. They say they are ready for use.
|
| 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.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| This is a perfect caricature of the "how hard can it be?"
| tech startup mindset. Well done.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| If there is a reasonable suspicion that the airplanes are
| not of considerable quality beyond rumours online and
| there is an honest intent to fix the airplanes rather
| than dispose of the ones that are deemed unnecessary,
| such a plan could certainly be executed over several
| weeks or months.
|
| 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.
| 8cmj7A wrote:
| They were asked to print their code and typically this is done
| as part of diligence _before_ closing. This is not sop. It's
| Elon making a show of things.
| snotrockets wrote:
| Very rarely does due diligence involves actual critique of
| code on paper. Or code reviews at all, for that matter.
|
| Edited: technical review isn't code review.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I've done 2 due diligence in the last 3 years. Both time I
| read a large part of the code base, and I read the code
| reviews of the engineers as well. Codebase to find issues
| with the code but also liabilities that we'd need to deal
| with. I read the code reviews to help level set for the
| engineers.
|
| 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 :)
| x86x87 wrote:
| You need to write a book and/or explain how you can
| review 500kloc in 8 hours. That sounds ridiculous to me
| but I may be missing something
| grogenaut wrote:
| This is an average rate. There are large parts of the
| code base that are configurations, mappings, or just glue
| code. Even if you're not familliar with the language you
| get a sense for it quickly, you can power through those
| at 10kloc or higher when you hit a run, you can also rule
| out directories quickly after you see an example. You can
| also ask the people you're reviewing "is this directory
| just all kube config? where's the security settings?".
| and go at a high rate for reviewing the code.
|
| 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.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Yeah no. I still don't see it. You claim "I could review
| the 200-500kloc codebases".
|
| I've worked on due diligence from both sides of the table
| in the past and this is not how it works.
| TomBombadildoze wrote:
| You aren't missing anything. This guy is absolutely,
| completely, without rival or parallel, beyond compare,
| unquestionably supreme, the God-King, the Emperor, the
| One True Big Kahuna, and the Head Motherfucker In Charge
| of being Full Of Shit. If this guy were the biggest fish
| in the ocean, he'd be stuffed to the gills with it.
| [deleted]
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| > You need to write a book and/or explain how you can
| review 500kloc in 8 hours. That sounds ridiculous to me
| but I may be missing something
|
| 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?
| x86x87 wrote:
| In 8 hours I would be surprised if you got more than a
| 10000 feet view. Also, there is deployment, ops, policy.
|
| To say you got everything you needed in 8 hours is
| disrespectful at best (even for way smaller code bases)
| grogenaut wrote:
| What you're missing is that dilligence is NOT coming in
| as the new Super Senior Distinguished Principal Architect
| who's going to rebuild the whole system overnight.
|
| 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.
| x86x87 wrote:
| That's shifting the goalposts quite a bit. You're looking
| for process, you are also asking for pointers from the
| people working on the project. Throwing out numbers like
| 500kloc is completely unnecessary as you're not going to
| look at them unless in cases where you're spotchecking
| (and you won't know where to look without someone
| pointing it out to you)
| grogenaut wrote:
| I don't feel I'm moving the goal posts. I'm relating what
| I did with numbers. Others may have assumed my goals.
|
| 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.
| chris_wot wrote:
| That's not really code review though, I'd argue. The
| report was that they wanted their code printed on paper,
| and to review it. That seems very... specific to the code
| itself. Not the same as reviewing code coverage,
| documentation and Ops specific workflows.
|
| Of course, those things are absolutely vital, and must be
| long and tedious work, and I give you kudos for having
| these skills :-)
| closeparen wrote:
| That's fair as far as kicking the tires on the truth
| value of management's claims, but what Elon's doing here
| is performance management. Deciding someone's work is bad
| and they should be fired, _does_ imply that you know how
| the work ought to have been done instead.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Due diligence happens before not after the deal closes.
| This is not due diligence, it's a clown show
| grogenaut wrote:
| Does it tho? If you're cutting 70% of 1000-2000 coders is
| that what you're doing, fully understanding twitter, or
| are you just looking for dead weight or unimportant
| systems and axing those immediately?
| x86x87 wrote:
| This is IMHO a very naive take on software engineering
| and on keeping a complex system running.
|
| 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.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Oh I 100% agree with everything you said here. You do due
| diligence before. You don't just blindly cut 70%.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| mousetree wrote:
| In the DD's I have been part of there was always some
| element of code review.
| collegeburner wrote:
| this is literally not true. nost diligence has a technical
| component, esp in M&A (vs. early-stage)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| aaronharnly wrote:
| Respectfully, very little of this seems to be operating by
| standard procedure. Have you seen the incoming CEO ask people
| to bring printouts of their code, ever?
| crazytalk wrote:
| Makes plenty of sense if said employees no longer have access
| to source code by the time the interview takes place. Red
| Wedding silicon valley edition
| renewiltord wrote:
| A Twitter engineer walks into a programming interview.
|
| 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?
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Musk is reportedly looking to cut deadweight before Nov 1st
| when equity vests -- with layoffs possibly happening over the
| weekend. He might already have a basic idea of key teams and
| for non-key teams he might be looking to cut very fast.
|
| 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.
| optymizer wrote:
| What a ridiculous viewpoint. I spent two days last week to
| write a single line of code. It cuts the startup time of
| the app in half with no downsides. I had to make sure it
| works in all flavors, on all OS builds, benchmark it to
| show it works, cherry pick it into various release
| branches, talk to people about it, etc
|
| If you ask me to print my code and defend it in a meeting,
| I will instead skip the meeting and respond to one of the
| dozens recruiters who reach out every week in my inbox. You
| can keep the engineers who wrote the slow code in the first
| place. I'm sure they'll have thousands of lines of code to
| print.
|
| It's just a demeaning process meant to assert the dominance
| of the new owners.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > If you ask me to print my code and defend it in a
| meeting, I will instead skip the meeting and respond to
| one of the dozens recruiters who reach out every week in
| my inbox.
|
| Isn't that his goal? Reduce headcount before vesting
| bonuses on Nov. 1st? It seems like you would be just the
| sucker that Musk is trying to get rid of before one last
| milestone cash payment.
|
| On top of which, why couldn't you defend that line in a
| meeting? "I changed this one line cutting the loading
| time in half for the program. It took 2 days of profiling
| to find where to change and another week to ensure that
| it works across all build targets and work on a
| deployment timeline."
|
| > 's just a demeaning process meant to assert the
| dominance of the new owners.
|
| It is in fact a bit of that. Employees who quit are
| cheaper than fired employees or continued-to-be-hired
| employees. doing something unreasonable to make them quit
| seems reasonable, even if that might skew more towards
| the better employees.
|
| But it's also a rough attempt to identify deadweight who
| cannot explain why they did anything of value in 2
| months.
| dotBen wrote:
| Your comment basically sums up the entire goal and
| strategy of this exercise - it's surprising how many
| smart people here seem to have missed the point, gone
| down rabbit holes about how you can't traverse functions
| on printed paper, etc etc.
|
| It's about identifying the most extreme offenders and
| pushing out people like the GP who will rage quit without
| severance.
| optymizer wrote:
| I'm at a point in my life where I value what I do more
| than I value money, because I don't need more money to
| sustain my lifestyle.
| dotBen wrote:
| Then bluntly but respectfully, join a startup (or a non
| profit like archive.org, Mozilla, Signal etc). Don't hang
| out at Twitter.
|
| Not sure if you personally are a Twitter employee but
| Twitter fits a certain demographic of employee who wants
| to traverse that fine line between not wanting to risk an
| early startup for potential huge upside but also doesn't
| want a boring cushy job at Salesforce or Google or
| whatever.
|
| If you value your time and not the money, there's better
| places to apply your talents and labor than Twitter (pre
| or post Elon)
| jessaustin wrote:
| Congratulations on your good work. ISTM if you could
| evangelize the improvement to all those different people,
| you could also evangelize it to one more person? Sure,
| your assigned Tesla auditor could be an idiot (although
| that seems less likely for a Tesla person than for a
| twitter person), but would it hurt to try?
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| > "What a ridiculous viewpoint. I spent two days last
| week to write a single line of code. "
|
| Sure, I've done the exact same thing. What's stopping you
| from bringing that line of code to an interview and
| talking about it?
|
| > "If you ask me to print my code and defend it in a
| meeting, I will instead skip the meeting and respond to
| one of the dozens recruiters who reach out every week in
| my inbox. "
|
| When you interview with your new employer, won't you be
| discussing notable achievements such as the single line
| of code you wrote that cuts app startup time by half?
|
| > "It's just a demeaning process meant to assert the
| dominance of the new owners."
|
| Are interviews demeaning? In a sense, sure. Sounds like
| you're doing it one way or the other, though.
| thwayunion wrote:
| _> Sure, I 've done the exact same thing. What's stopping
| you from bringing that line of code to an interview and
| talking about it?_
|
| GP's answer is essentially "sure, but what stops me from
| _not_ doing that instead? ":
|
| _> > I will instead skip the meeting and respond to one
| of the dozens recruiters who reach out every week in my
| inbox._
|
| I have to say, I agree. Why stay around for the circus
| when you can leave and make an honest living as a
| respected professional instead of playing post-
| acquisition hunger games as a pawn in a rich boy's ego
| trip gone awry?
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| > "GP's answer is essentially "sure, but what stops me
| from not doing that instead?":"
|
| Nothing of course -- and this is always true, every
| second of every day.
|
| > "I have to say, I agree. Why stay around for the circus
| when you can leave and make an honest living as a
| respected professional instead of playing post-
| acquisition hunger games as a pawn in a rich boy's ego
| trip gone awry? "
|
| If you see it that way then it seems in everyone's best
| interest that you leave the company, which means the
| system worked exactly as intended.
|
| As to the question of whether this makes sense, it would
| seem we all agree that it does, then.
| thwayunion wrote:
| _> that you leave the company_
|
| 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.
| vincnetas wrote:
| " If you ask me to print my code and defend it in a
| meeting"
|
| Its not about "defending", its about explaining. Even
| from your reply one can feel the instant defensive
| position you take when asked about (your) code. I think
| ability to disassociate from your code and just be able
| to discuss it (not defend) and explain what and why
| (tradeoffs) and how was done is very valuable in
| developer, and in anyone actually if you extend it beyond
| the code.
|
| When take over a company ant talk with people and they
| take defensive position thats a red flag for me. (I take
| over companies in my head only so far)
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| That's a ridiculous position. I would expect good
| engineers to laugh at the entire process and not see a
| future in that company. There is no way that engineers
| can be accurately assessed on code output.
|
| It doesn't matter if it's about defending or explaining.
| Either one is an absolutely absurd situation to find
| yourself in where you have to explain stuff to people
| with zero context to save your job.
|
| If I was given these instructions I'm out.
| vincnetas wrote:
| why do you think that explaining something is ridiculous?
| i have been to meetings multiple times with
| representatives of other departmens and openly asked them
| to explain to me things that i didnt knew and needed to
| get understanding to implement some functionality. why
| its ridiculous when its other way arround and someone
| asks to explain what and why is this code doing? again,
| it looks like ypure taking it personally.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| It's ridiculous because this is not genuine interest in
| someone's work but a way to sieve out at scale.
|
| (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)
| downvote_magnet wrote:
| > not genuine interest in someone's work
|
| 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?
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| Intention and context matters. The goal here is clearly
| to significantly downsize the operations with the least
| amount of severance to be paid.
|
| I won't go into your ad hominem.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Your anger with what's going on is coming through
| clearly. It sounds like you don't approve of any of the
| steps being taken because it's a downsizing.
|
| While you're entitled to your opinion, it doesn't seem
| particularly relevant in discussions about whether or not
| this process is effective.
| optymizer wrote:
| On the contrary, I'm more than happy to discuss my code
| with my colleagues, because their intent is to understand
| the code. In the hypothetical scenario, the new owner's
| intent is to evaluate my worth, not my code.
| vincnetas wrote:
| is there something wrong to evaluate your worth? and
| explaining your worth through the things that you have
| done (recently) is in my opinion one of most direct ways
| to do so.
|
| no one wants your code just for fun of it or it beying
| extra nice and smart. code is neded becauae it creates
| value.
| optymizer wrote:
| In general? No, because I agreed to yearly evaluations.
| Randomly asking me to prove my worth like my time so far
| didnt matter? Yes, there is, and the company being sold
| is a random event from my point of view.
|
| The question itself comes from a place of authority, and
| the employee has nothing to gain, only to lose. Best case
| - I keep my job. Worst case - I get fired. That
| introduces stress into my life unnecessarily.
|
| The new owners can go and read past evaluations instead
| of boiling the ocean. But, of course they won't do that.
| It's much easier to assert your authority and stress
| everyone out, to make sure they know that they are just
| resources churning out code.
|
| If you step out of the soulless business mindset for one
| second, I'm sure you'll understand why asking me to prove
| my worth out of the blue is insulting.
|
| "Prove your worth to the new gods, employee #1337!"
|
| No, thanks.
| [deleted]
| ch33zer wrote:
| What is going to happen to people's stock vests? There is
| no public company any more. Can they just hold the stock or
| do they get a cash value?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| They get a cash value at the same $54.20/share as current
| holders get. They _may_ be allowed to instead vest
| shares, but that would be a new agreement. The merger
| document converts it to cash.
| code_runner wrote:
| I believe the stock still exists (still has an active
| ticker/cusip) but trade volume is at 0. At some point it
| will be delisted and shareholders will just get cash. I
| _assume_ grant vesting is still meaningful until that
| point.
| xnyan wrote:
| >I can see why it might make sense to just tell people to
| print stuff out to demonstrate competency
|
| 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.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| He's planning on laying off people without even letting
| their next equity tranche vest? I'm sorry but what an
| absolute piece of human garbage.
| djur wrote:
| Do you understand why people who aren't making lots of
| money from it might be angry and upset about this process?
| Xeronate wrote:
| The ability of the process to prune dead weight and the
| emotions of the people affected are kind of unrelated.
| It's a business not a charity.
| [deleted]
| exadrid wrote:
| tsol wrote:
| You mean hackernews, the site for people who make
| ridiculous incomes for working on menial digital products
| like social media? It's strange when people walk into a
| room and assume everyone else must think like them.
| undersuit wrote:
| Oh we're supposed to make ridiculous incomes? Lets go
| tell my public sector employer.
| tsol wrote:
| No, but you're supposed to understand that most of the
| people on HN aren't going to be dedicated against
| capitalism. I don't make much myself but I can figure
| that much out. SV is a capitalists wet dream.
| undersuit wrote:
| Slight criticism of capitalism == dedicated against
| capitalism?
| dagmx wrote:
| And you know the same people would be shedding tears if
| they were being cut short in any way.
|
| It's a total lack of empathy.
| hnusersarelame wrote:
| jddil wrote:
| You're on a board founded by a VC fund to market their
| investments, I would expect capitalists to be the
| majority here.
| lupire wrote:
| Hacker News is a recruiting website for those
| capitalists' employees. (Look at the only ads that ever
| appear on HN).
| uni_rule wrote:
| I don't doubt this site is mostly libertarian types but
| it still strikes me how such people can say some of the
| shit they do with a straight face. It's especially
| apparent how nuts some of them are when they are felating
| Elon Musk specifically.
| jjulius wrote:
| You're both correct in this instance.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| We should not celebrate sociopathy.
|
| 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.
| Xeronate wrote:
| I'm fine with the argument that its not rational and not
| a good process because the outcome will be bad (firing
| people that you should have kept). I'm only pushing back
| against the idea that a business should put protecting
| peoples feelings over the wellbeing of the company. Sure
| do it humanely. Give a nice severance. But if people
| aren't producing the company has no obligation to keep
| them.
| croes wrote:
| >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.
|
| 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.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| It's a crazy thing to do
|
| Just shut the company down and start over, don't turn
| people's lives into a living hell for weeks or months
| downvote_magnet wrote:
| Being asked to summarize your recent work is "a living
| hell"?
|
| 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?
| croes wrote:
| Things like this are always context sensitive or it
| becomes a race to the bottom where only the people in the
| worst condition have the right to complain.
|
| 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.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Have my boss' boss' boss' boss summarize what his teams
| are up to. Don't call everybody in and glare at them in a
| small room over the course of weeks like in "Office
| Space"
|
| _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
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > asked them to basically interview for their own jobs
| while showing me the most important thing they wrote in the
| last quarter
|
| 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.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| You're assuming this is the only process they have in
| place -- and there's no rational basis for that
| assumption.
|
| 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.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| We can only discuss the information given to us. Sure,
| the other processes may work, but the process that I'm
| addressing, your claimed process (so you could give us
| more information if you wanted) seems DEEPLY
| dysfunctional.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Would you like to talk about my process? I'm happy to
| share details.
|
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I have definitely seen them replace whole systems without
| ever looking at or evaluationg the code.
|
| Doing that seems like an improvement.
| abledon wrote:
| you don't like comedy?
| bagels wrote:
| Do you have any references to this printouts of code? I saw
| this mentioned on another thread too. I asked about it and
| was mocked for asking about it.
|
| 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...
| zzzeek wrote:
| agree, the reason he wants it "printed on paper" is strictly so
| he can gauge output by lines of code measured in pages.
| Basically the dumbest metric in the world for judging the
| effectiveness of a programmer.
| bagels wrote:
| Honestly, this seems like the second best time for twitter
| engineers to unionize. Best time would have been a couple weeks
| ago.
| maxrev17 wrote:
| Kinda makes me sad. This is all so far from the Web 2.0 fun back
| in the day.
| theGeatZhopa wrote:
| Musk isn't an average Joe and not dumb, unexperienced or
| something like that.
|
| 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.
| wnevets wrote:
| Was the code printed on paper?
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Sure looks that way.
|
| https://twitter.com/leahculver/status/1586145696163373056
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Looks like the next person to have a baby.
| ergocoder wrote:
| She later tweeted "Just following orders" on the Musk's tweet
| "comedy is now legal on Twitter".
|
| 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.
| throoo0ooowaway wrote:
| it definitely happened.
| ergocoder wrote:
| Because you said so... Or Leah's obscure tweet is the
| only source.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Casey Newton seems quite certain, and he's been pretty
| reliable. https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/15861321
| 55062620160
| ergocoder wrote:
| CNBC was also certain Rahul ligma was laid off yesterday.
|
| 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.
| 8cmj7A wrote:
| She put the house back on the market for what she paid. Not
| sure she's quite at f-you money, but who knows. Maybe she
| was leveling up.
| ergocoder wrote:
| Anyone who can buy a 3m house has a fuck you money.
|
| 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.
| 8cmj7A wrote:
| Fuck you money means you keep the house. House rich, cash
| poor is a thing.
| ergocoder wrote:
| Oh that house she bought is her second house... because
| she planned to spend 3m more on renovation but apparently
| pandemic hit and the plan failed, so she is selling it 3
| years later.
|
| She is not cash poor by any mean. Having 3m after tax for
| renovation is kinda insane.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Inside Twitter, in a highly unusual arrangement, engineers from
| Musk-led Tesla were examining the company's code as the tech
| executive sought the input of his technical experts he trusted.
|
| I would have expected they already did that prior to the
| acquisition.
|
| It seems the acquisition was a blind buy.
| dmak wrote:
| Obviously this isn't a technology acquisition. This was clearly
| for the platform and buying the existing eye balls on it.
| Technology can be secondary and improved a lot more easily than
| trying to capture the cultural relevance that Twitter has.
| keyle wrote:
| What makes me smile is the idea that Google searches related to
| "How do I print the code I committed in the last 60 days" must be
| shooting up on Google Trends.
| undersuit wrote:
| What makes me chuckle is my memory of spending 2/3s of my time
| on a coding project in college to find a syntax colorizer I
| liked for the printed submission of an assignment... and I
| spent $1.50 printing the code out on a color laser printer with
| some pretty fancy paper.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Don't forget `how do I hide the code I've deleted in the last
| 60 days`.
|
| 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.
| truchococookie wrote:
| I worked at Twitter.
|
| 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.
| marstall wrote:
| I was thinking the "30-60" day time window may be a somewhat
| subtle way of catching out engineers who haven't written a thing
| in that amount of time. that would be one way to identify low-
| performers.
|
| 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.
| zzzeek wrote:
| right, they'll fire the gurus who know how everything works and
| barely write a line of code anymore, and things will be pretty
| hilarious when they have their next outage.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Quick! Force push branch with fake historic commits from
| everyone in the team!
| smt88 wrote:
| Any slightly competent software leader would know that you can
| track every character of code written by any dev using version
| control.
|
| 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.
| ergocoder wrote:
| > Printing it out as a mark of honor/shame is something a
| petty, arrogant tyrant would do
|
| 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.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| It's not. There have been multiple twitter engineers that
| have shared that the print out stuff was real [1].
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/leahculver/status/1586145696163373056
| ergocoder wrote:
| Multiple?
|
| 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.
| smt88 wrote:
| The article says only some engineers received the invite to
| print code, and Washington Post's sourcing (some engineers
| at Twitter) is the same as yours.
|
| Casey Newton is reliable and says the same:
| https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-takes-over-twitter
| ergocoder wrote:
| Which engs? Apart from Leah's obscure tweet.
|
| 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?
| fzeroracer wrote:
| How about you post your evidence, since you talked to
| some engineers at twitter. Give me some screencaps.
| Emails. Slack messages.
| ergocoder wrote:
| You want me to post an evidence that Elon didn't ask for
| a print out. Like asking my friend to show all thousands
| of emails in his inbox and say "see? Elon didn't email me
| at all"?
|
| 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.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| I wasn't asking you to 'prove a negative', I was
| specifically asking you to prove a positive. Which is
| that you have friends that work at Twitter that say
| otherwise.
|
| 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.
| ergocoder wrote:
| > I wasn't asking you to 'prove a negative', I was
| specifically asking you to prove a positive.
|
| 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.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| > you think Elon asked for this in a public slack channel
| that anyone can see? That is ridiculous.
|
| 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.
| ergocoder wrote:
| > We know they use Slack for internal communications
|
| 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.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| For one, I never said 'some engineers are asked', you
| made that up. The closest thing I said was 'multiple
| engineers were asked and shared that they were told to do
| so'. Which means we have anywhere from M confirmed to N
| unconfirmed.
|
| 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.
| ergocoder wrote:
| > multiple engineers were asked
|
| 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
| mhh__ wrote:
| Not impossible he literally doesn't understand version
| control as a way of life.
|
| More likely just a power trip.
| jpgvm wrote:
| Elon is a tyrant, not an idiot.
|
| 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.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Why is he a capable software engineer? He wrote some code
| in the 90s, isn't that it?
| smt88 wrote:
| He's absolutely not a capable software engineer or any
| other kind of engineer.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I've been in a few situations where we printed it out. It's
| just a lot faster than granting someone access to internal
| systems. It's also a firewall of access if you need that
| legally. 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.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _a lot faster than granting someone access to internal
| systems_
|
| 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.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I wasn't defending their _supposed_ use of paper, just
| pointing out reasons why you might find yourself doing
| so.
|
| 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?
| uerobert wrote:
| 20pt font sizes goes brrr!
| yrgulation wrote:
| Are we back to measuring performance in klocs? I can get you a
| bunch of incompetent devs that change hundreds ofines of code a
| day. All you need to do is change indentation and eols or just
| rewrite basic stuff too lazy to understand.
| convery wrote:
| According to the engineers in the undercover interviews, a
| large part of the staff only work "when they feel like it",
| which would result in some taking months of paid time off or
| just hanging out in the office all day.
|
| 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..
| yrgulation wrote:
| I see and the issue lies with the engineers? If thats the
| company's policy the whats the problem? He should change
| the policy and only then review performance in that
| context.
| swader999 wrote:
| Change the formatting lol.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| If those engineers worked on the distributed services that Tesla
| uses, this makes sense. But if Elmo just picked a handful of
| rando engineers to flank him, it makes no sense at all.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| A great attempt to dodge vesting schedules and escape doling out
| severance. Even if they convince many engineers to quit
| willingly, one presumes that the next step is rounds of layoffs
| _with cause_.
|
| 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.
| kweingar wrote:
| > 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.
| ergocoder wrote:
| What are some strategies for this? I can't think of any and
| would have been a sitting duck.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Get everything in writing. If someone wants an in-person
| meeting with no notes taken send an e-mail to them
| afterwards confirming what was said in the meeting. That
| way you have a paper trail of what was said/known and when.
| itake wrote:
| Do you have more context as to why this is important? Is
| this for all project work, or is this for meetings
| discussing severance?
| giantrobot wrote:
| This is advice if you think your employer is going to try
| firing you for cause so they don't need to pay a
| severance. When they're trying to do that your manager
| will try to have more face to face meetings so none of
| the discussions are recorded. Then they will send some
| e-mails to their manager with some colored description of
| what took place. For instance they'll say your
| productivity dropped or you're mismanaging your time
| because you didn't work on project A but in your one-on-
| one they explicitly told you to stop working on project A
| and instead focus on B. When it comes time to drop the
| hammer they'll have one-sided documentation of your
| performance.
|
| 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.
| sbarre wrote:
| If your employer is trying to fire you "with cause" then
| they will be producing a paper trail of their own, to
| justify their decision. Their paper trail will be very
| one-sided, of course.
|
| 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.
| rendall wrote:
| > _I 'd be trying to figure out how to maximize my severance
| package..._
|
| How would one go about doing that? Is there a way to have
| influence on that?
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| i don't know, but quit vs fire probably makes a difference.
| rendall wrote:
| Quit vs fire vs _layoff_ is the strategy of deciding to
| have a severance or not having one.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Fire = chance of lawsuit
|
| Layoff = severance (to avoid the lawsuit)
|
| Quit = neither
|
| It's obvious which one Musk would prefer.
| Markoff wrote:
| sometimes quitting voluntarily can give you better
| severance than forced layoff
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| How does that work? Do they make an open offer to
| everyone if they quit they get $x?
| Markoff wrote:
| yes, though not exactly sure how is it beneficial to
| company, maybe then they are not obliged to follow
| stricter rules for mass layoffs, if they can lower the
| threshold of leaving people
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| That can happen, but people tend to call that a voluntary
| layoff.
| blindriver wrote:
| Twitter is a private company now. There are no more stocks to
| vest, so the idea that this is to dodge vesting schedules
| doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
| jxf wrote:
| This doesn't make sense. There are certainly options and
| stock to vest; every pre-IPO startup employee in the world
| knows about the four-year vesting schedule.
| blindriver wrote:
| It makes total sense. Twitter was just bought on Friday.
| All existing shares are now owned by Elon. There are no
| private shares of Twitter yet, and it won't be ready to
| distribute by Nov 1, which is Tuesday.
| kweingar wrote:
| Until recently I worked at a private company with a stock
| vesting plan.
| blindriver wrote:
| Completely irrelevant. Twitter just got bought. There are
| no shares anymore and Twitter hasn't had time to go through
| the process to create and distribute them.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| The employees are vesting the cashed out value (at
| $54.20/share) of whatever stock they were vesting as of when
| the deal closed.
|
| 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.
| adastra22 wrote:
| The company just buys back the shares. It's essentially a
| cash bonus.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| For SpaceX? I knew the company offered to buy back the
| shares at regular intervals. I am disappointed to learn
| they are mandatory.
| adastra22 wrote:
| I didn't mean to imply that. I think you can keep the
| shares.
|
| 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.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| sjg1729 wrote:
| It's not mandatory, spacex employees can keep their
| shares in hope of an eventual IPO
| kalabilla wrote:
| Private companies have stocks. They are just on traded on
| exchange
| blindriver wrote:
| Not Twitter. They all got bought on Friday by Elon. There's
| no way they would have time to create the necessary legal
| structure by Tuesday to be able to allocate shares and even
| to give them to employees.
| djbusby wrote:
| I think you have a typo.
| jzl wrote:
| I blame all typos nowadays on the sorry state of
| autocorrect on phones. Nine out ten "typos" from me are
| bad autocorrects that I missed.
| shapefrog wrote:
| The technical term is _stonks_
| 7e wrote:
| cookingrobot wrote:
| According to blind, vesting schedules are converted to cash
| grants on the same schedule.
|
| 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...
| MrMan wrote:
| another reason I think taking twitter private immediately
| was a wide choice
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| tannedNerd wrote:
| This reeks of the arrogance someone who has never gone
| through recession layoffs. Sometimes your division gets
| slashed for no reason other then your vp wasn't slightly more
| persuasive. When investors want to see cuts, lots of good
| people end up fired for no reason other than bad luck.
|
| Trying to time a parachute into a not super terrible market
| isn't the worst idea. Plus usually the first and second round
| are the most generous. As belt tightening gets worse and the
| PR isn't as bad expect worse benefits.
| cole-k wrote:
| Yeah lol, it definitely has the same vibes I see from
| people that are like:
|
| "Corporations aren't people, they're capitalistic entities.
| They don't owe you anything" while also turning around and
| saying "how greedy of you to act in your own self interest
| and not to the benefit of your company!!"
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| Sorry, but there's so much fat these days I don't buy the
| sob story.
|
| I saw the datacenter engineers at work for Twitter, they do
| fck all and get a handsome reward scanning barcodes and
| rolling racks around
| wiseowise wrote:
| Why do you care? And why do you focus on people who have
| it ok like they took it from poor people? There's a whole
| layer of people who are used and abused by rich, but hey,
| fvck datacenter sob, how dare he not work up to your
| standards?
| kredd wrote:
| What's your point? It's an organizational failure for
| over-hiring and/or not having enough work, not the
| employees fault. Good for them for making the money with
| minimal effort.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| So when the organization makes attempts to correct what
| amounts to a failure and cleans house the people getting
| a free ride should also get a handout on their way to the
| door?
|
| Freeloaders have always existed, getting their position
| thanks to their connections and not their effort. It
| isn't something new and other work is being done that
| could be shared. A few people are working hard while a
| bunch of others pray on them for a paycheck. Haha, and my
| other post got _flagged_ , ha, that's the pettiness in
| action.
|
| If this is you, then I don't think you want to view it
| from the other perspective. Somebody is working really
| hard to get things done and a bunch of others jump in at
| the last minute to grab some credit, then go back to
| doing nothing. Or worse still, back to undermining the
| hardest workers out of promotions and recognition for not
| being "a team player"
|
| They have everything to lose if they don't defend this
| attitude, but you have everything to gain if you start
| realizing your worth
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| I've never been laid off but my productivity would
| definitely tank if I knew half of us were getting cut. I
| think I'm pretty good, but not above getting the axe. Which
| is also why I choose my teams/projects wisely because a lot
| of them disappear
| adave wrote:
| Lol musk is overemployed and actively stealing from Tesla. I
| don't think anyone will blink an eye as its a cult at this point.
| Both employees and shareholders are part of it and given the
| track record noone will complain.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Twitter's core operation is running a massively distributed
| database, as I understand it, where concurrency issues are pretty
| important to get right. See Data-Intensive Applications (2017),
| Part II: Distributed Systems (Replication, Partitioning,
| Transactions, etc.) for an overview.
|
| 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.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Everyone thinks that these Tesla engineers are going there to
| "evaluate" but nobody is really considering them going there to
| "steal" code to bring to Tesla.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| This makes no sense, they wouldn't even know what to look for
| and likely there is little that would be of use to them.
| jpgvm wrote:
| Tesla stores an absolutely silly amount of captured training
| data. They are very familiar with large distributed databases.
|
| 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.
| plazmatic wrote:
| bpodgursky wrote:
| The suggestion algorithms are more of a technical challenge
| than concurrency, at Twitter scale. Tesla does a lot more ML
| than SpaceX.
|
| (and let's be honest, Twitter _hasn 't_ solved the concurrency
| issues, so I'm not sure there's much to review)
| permo-w wrote:
| twitter is one of the slowest of all the big modern websites.
| half the time all it has to load is text and it still takes
| up to 30 seconds
| bpodgursky wrote:
| My unread notifications always load 15-60 seconds after
| loading my timeline. Definitely does not seem like a
| pageload issue, it's some kind of BE processing latency.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| That's a site design issue, not a backend / data storage /
| concurrency algorithms issue.
| permo-w wrote:
| how do you know
|
| but also yes it probably is just shitty overuse of
| worthless js
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Because the requests that render the actual content are
| very fast, it's just overhead that makes things slow.
| fleddr wrote:
| 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. 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.
| nr2x wrote:
| Or you can command a senior position somewhere else and you
| were interviewing and ready to bounce after vest.
| lgleason wrote:
| Number of PR's means very little with overall productivity.
| It's a vanity metric.
| Forge36 wrote:
| 100%
|
| 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.
| spullara wrote:
| To be fair Twitter has a monorepo.
| threeseed wrote:
| Mostly. Many of their foundational components e.g.
| Finagle are open sourced and in separate repos.
|
| https://github.com/orgs/twitter/repositories
| OmarAssadi wrote:
| I haven't seen much info regarding their setup, aside
| from the bits about Pants and Bazel.
|
| 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.
|
| [1]: <https://github.com/google/copybara>
| super_linear wrote:
| (and so does Tesla)
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| It's only useful in debugging a bad situation. Larger PRs are
| associated with slower development velocity. However, it's
| not clear if that's because larger PR tend to come from
| inexperienced developers or experienced developers are making
| significantly more complex changes.
|
| 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.
| threeseed wrote:
| > Larger PRs are associated with slower development
| velocity
|
| 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.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| "The note continues, "Please come prepared with code as a
| backup to review on your own machines with Elon." Later, people
| inside the company reported that Tesla engineers were in fact
| reviewing the code."
|
| Can anyone verify this story?
| themitigating wrote:
| Imagine I said I could. Why would you believe me if you don't
| believe the Washington Post?
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| I don't know you, but that's a low bar. WaPo has zero
| standards of journalistic integrity anymore. They will
| print anything that draws clicks.
| themitigating wrote:
| Is that the case here? What's the probability that it is?
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| That _what_ is?
| themitigating wrote:
| Sorry, that the article is truthful
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| don't know. OP made a general statement about WaPo, and
| my remark followed on that. It wasn't about any one
| article.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| https://archive.ph/xtF0x
|
| "Later, people inside the company reported that Tesla
| engineers were in fact reviewing the code."
|
| really?
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| Actually, I will stick up for the use of anonymous
| sources, even by a partisan rag like WaPo.
|
| 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.
| themitigating wrote:
| Even if a news source is bias it doesn't mean they are
| lying.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| No, indeed. You still have to judge if something they say
| happened, _actually_ happened.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| "Later, people inside the company reported that Tesla
| engineers were in fact reviewing the code."
|
| lets say you could. is your source = "people inside the
| company"?
| greenthrow wrote:
| > How mang PRs?
|
| 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.
| threeseed wrote:
| I think that is actually a terrible way to measure the
| qualities of an engineer.
|
| 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.
| rtev wrote:
| The big rush is the November 1st stock vest. They need people
| out by Monday at the latest to avoid a massive payday.
| vasco wrote:
| If I look at my company's gitlab statistics, the best
| engineers correlate with the top third of number of PRs not
| only in quality (perceived) but also in volume (number of
| open/merged PRs). I hear this a lot of the mythical top level
| engineer that thinks for 3 days and then bursts a small PR
| that changes the world, but I haven't seen it.
|
| 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)
| nr2x wrote:
| Hey it's Broccoli Man!
| Retric wrote:
| I have seen it, but it really depends on the type of
| problems being solved and the overall team.
|
| 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.
| jquery wrote:
| How do you determine who are your best engineers? Is the
| number of PRs an input to this function ?
| vasco wrote:
| We have several criteria that we look at, including
| impact on the team and outside the team, expertise, etc,
| which includes feedback from peers. But after a few years
| (been here over 6), with the output of that process and
| correlating to the statistics I came to the conclusion it
| was significant enough to casually look at. I never found
| an outlier in the direction of very little PRs but also
| very good impact on the team/company. For the performance
| criteria that affects promotions etc we don't actually
| look at it, this is something I do because I like to see
| my own statistics and after a while you remember who is
| usually where in the sorted list.
| hhmc wrote:
| > I never found an outlier in the direction of very
| little PRs but also very good impact on the team/company.
|
| How about outliers in the opposite quadrant?
| jquery wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. I was legitimately curious. This is
| very interesting. I still have a healthy dose of
| skepticism, but it's not like you're stack ranking based
| on PR frequency or size, and the fact it's not an input
| to your function might be why it has the signal you see.
| Kind of a catch-22 for lazy managers.
| vasco wrote:
| Yeah, we've tried to be reeeeeaaally careful in not
| letting this become important for evaluating performance
| due to all the pitfalls it has and how it can be gamed.
| End of the day nothing beats actually reviewing the PRs
| themselves and trusting the feedback from peers in my
| opinion.
| jamra wrote:
| The best engineers I see farm out the easier issues and
| even some of the hard work. But they supervise and mentor.
| Counting lines of code disincentivizes mentoring.
| blackSnake wrote:
| The other part of it is Musk probably has good rapport with his
| engineers from Tesla. There's that trust vs. twitter engineers
| at the moment may be seen in the eyes of Musk as an unknown,
| undoubtedly everyone has their guard up because of all the
| uncertainty.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| I think most are missing that this is a code review + loyalty
| review.
|
| I think most people realize that it's more than a code review,
| in fact I suspect that it's such a transparent loyalty review
| is exactly why so many people's feathers got ruffled.
| 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.
|
| Yeah, maybe. But Musk is asking SWEs to _print_ 50 pages of
| their code so _he_ can personally can review it. Any halfway
| competent manager or exec should be able to see this is not a
| good way of reviewing performance in earnest.
|
| https://twitter.com/caseynewton/status/1586127052767318016
| kjksf wrote:
| Counterpoint: what other CEO would be involved in low level
| stuff like looking at code or personally interviewing newly
| acquired employees?
|
| 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
| jquery wrote:
| You know what else is below most CEOs? Tweeting poop emojis
| when given a rundown on why his arguments are specious.
|
| 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.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| Counterpoint: what other CEO would be involved in low level
| stuff like looking at code or personally interviewing
| newly acquired employees?
|
| None, because that's not the role of the CEO.
| [deleted]
| xiphias2 wrote:
| There's one more thing: Elon uses interviews of people to learn
| about the code base / product. He surrounds himself with people
| who can answer the technical details, that's why he knows so
| much.
|
| Galileo's interview at SpaceX shows his thinking and way of
| working quite well.
| longrod wrote:
| I think people are looking at this the wrong way. It's not so
| much about the code as it is about establishing an authority.
| Musk takeover is often regarded as banditry and I wouldn't be
| surprised if the employees didn't take him seriously in the
| beginning. This is his way of saying, "I don't trust you, I don't
| know what you have been up to but things are going to be
| different so better get used to it."
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| aclatuts wrote:
| Yeah, I don't see the problem. Tesla investors benefit from
| SpaceX material science expertise solely because Elon owns
| SpaceX and allocates the time and resources. I don't see Tesla
| investors complaining about that.
|
| 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.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| This week Musk sure sounded like someone who was a bit
| concerned over the potential of losing advertising revenue.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > I don't think they can get a clear picture by looking at last
| 30 days of code
|
| 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.
| bamboozled wrote:
| No you can't because being a good developer isn't always
| about smashing out code, I've easily spent 30 days with great
| developers talking about planning and implementation before
| much code is written.
|
| Hopefully it's not you who is the mediocre developer?
| sangnoir wrote:
| > It's not so much about the code as it is about establishing
| an authority
|
| 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.
| matwood wrote:
| > 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).
|
| 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.
| dboreham wrote:
| It's the same thing riding a horse.
| kibwen wrote:
| Only incompetent managers (and executives) think that
| "authority" is interchangeable with "respect". Fortunately for
| Musk, incompetence rarely disqualifies billionaires from
| anything.
| Kamq wrote:
| There's no way Elon would have any respect yet, there hasn't
| been nearly enough time (respect is earned).
|
| 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.
| lake-view wrote:
| I'm not a fanboy, and there are many things you could call
| Elon Musk, but incompetent isn't credibly one of them.
| mathieuh wrote:
| How many times has he tanked his own company's stock with
| ill-advised comments? Do you think this Twitter saga
| demonstrates competence?
|
| In my experience, outside tech bro circles he is
| unanimously regarded as an idiot and not someone to
| emulate.
| ralusek wrote:
| I'm not sure you want to use "value of his companies due
| to things he says" as your marker for incompetence. Many
| of his companies are seriously overvalued precisely
| because the things he says drive up the value far beyond
| where it should be.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| Someone can be incompetent at some things and not others.
| We know with 100% certainty that Elon Musk is incompetent
| at purchasing Twitter dot com in a way that is most
| financially optimized for himself. We know with 100%
| certainty that Elon Musk is exceptionally competent at
| procreation.
| ratsmack wrote:
| Respect really doesn't have a lot to do with it, being a
| professional at your position does.
| throwntoday wrote:
| It's painfully obvious your disdain for Musk prevents you
| from making an observation worth taking seriously.
| duxup wrote:
| Seems like an extreme step if he feels after a few days he
| isn't being taken seriously enough. That's not a lot of time.
| ratsmack wrote:
| Every company I was with when it sold had lawyers come in and
| inform everyone that all processes are frozen, no equipment can
| move or be transferred while inventory is taken, everyone
| involved with computers surrender their passwords to their
| incoming engineers... etc, etc, etc. It is standard practice
| and there is nothing nefarious about it.
| bagels wrote:
| Tesla didn't buy Twitter, as far as we know though. Seems
| grossly inappropriate.
| ratsmack wrote:
| I can see where people that get a sense of entitlement, for
| whatever reason, would have a problem with it.
| bagels wrote:
| My comment was more about spending Tesla money on Musk's
| personal projects. I also think it pretty insulting to
| have to justify your job to some random engineer from
| Tesla.
| kalkin wrote:
| What you call entitlement sounds to me something more
| like self-respect. If I was asked to show the last 30
| days of my code to a random engineer from another company
| to prove I deserved my job, I'm pretty sure I'd quit on
| the spot. (Though if I'd worked at Twitter I'd have
| gotten out months ago; I imagine the people staying
| through today have fewer options for whatever reason.)
| Luckily there's still plenty of work for programmers at
| companies that understand that impact isn't usefully
| measured in lines of code.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| If Tesla engineers are at Twitter who is working on FSD?
| It's supposed to be finished this year.
| lupire wrote:
| Why would anyone take him seriously when he is making a massive
| embarrassment of himself on his first day on the job (after
| doing the same for months leading up to the takeover?)
|
| 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.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I have failed to source this claim after some searching:
|
| > 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?
| sjs382 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33366381
| dagmx wrote:
| Part of the lawsuit
|
| https://twitter.com/techemails/status/1585804674170355712?s
| =...
| [deleted]
| thepasswordis wrote:
| I mean...he does sound like a non engineer manager type.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >Why would anyone take him seriously [...]
|
| Well, they should, he is their boss now.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| "No one should be the boss of anybody" - Elon Musk 2022
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think respect is earned, not an entitlement due to
| someone's ability to buy a company. There are plenty of bad
| bosses who should not be taken seriously.
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| Whether they respect him or not they should definitely
| take him seriously.
| dragontamer wrote:
| The opposite.
|
| 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.
| marcusverus wrote:
| > Technology is famous for inverting the classic boss vs
| lackey relationship.
|
| If only Elon Musk knew as much as you do about managing
| engineers!
| moralestapia wrote:
| Rights and obligations go hand in hand. Want to tell your
| boss what you really think about em? Sure, you can do it
| any day, just better have some savings and an alternate
| source of income :).
|
| Disclaimer: Self-employed so I don't have to deal with
| that.
| marcusverus wrote:
| He's not respected because he can buy twitter. He's
| respected because he's objectively one of the most
| accomplished businessmen of his generation.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| The incoming CEO of the last company I worked for had a
| similar opinion. Everyone left and he was left floundering.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Why does Twitter need to end? Have you before and do you
| currently use Twitter? I've met and talked to a great deal of
| cool people on there, such as a lot of prominent people in
| the web dev space, as well as scientists in various fields.
|
| 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.
| notjoemama wrote:
| I agree it shouldn't end, but what I do wish would end is
| the new media reaching for tweets to pump drama for
| engagement on their platforms. The economy for attention is
| just exhausting as an end user, even if I agree with what's
| being said.
|
| 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.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Why read those news outlets then? I never hear about X
| person saying Y thing because I don't read general news
| outlets.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Why does Twitter need to end?
|
| 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.
| exodust wrote:
| What you described are good ideas for improvements and
| new features, not reasons for ending.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Much of the toxicity and misinformation on twitter stem
| from the fact that there are no controls to filter out
| the garbage on the receiver's end, but there is a
| perverse incentive dir tweeter not to add these controls
| because the more tweets they see, the more ad slots
| Twitter can fill.
| parkingrift wrote:
| Why would anyone take him seriously?
|
| 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.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| > This guy, one of the most successful people in all of
| human history, is apparently an idiot and no one should
| take him seriously
|
| 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"...
| parkingrift wrote:
| No I mean business success. Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink,
| PayPal, and now Twitter.
|
| 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.
| godelmachine wrote:
| Source?
| earth2mars wrote:
| "funding secured" "pedo guy" and this total twitter fiasco
| where he was forced to pay premium to buy it. These are few
| examples where he made fool of himself.
|
| 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!)
| [deleted]
| godelmachine wrote:
| On the "Funding secured" part, I think he has proved in
| court (Musk vs SEC) that to the best of his knowledge,
| funding was indeed secured and the Arab sheikhs ditched
| him later. He shared text messages in the court.
|
| Still needs corroboration.
| exodust wrote:
| > "pedo guy"
|
| 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.
| tronicdude wrote:
| https://tinyurl.com/2p8yds6e
| HyperSane wrote:
| Musk is just constantly revealing himself to be a fool over
| and over.
| georgeg23 wrote:
| His real enterprise is a massive DoD program, which
| requires Republicans to fund. Twitter helps him with that
| and curry favors.
|
| 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
| alostpuppy wrote:
| Oh man. I'd never thought of this.
| readsadhours wrote:
| I can't believe people still respect Parag after what
| happened with Mudge.
| Skywing wrote:
| I suspect that not much will change for users. The folks who
| want to continue tweeting will do so. The folks who do not want
| to tweet won't. Everything else is office politics.
| shantanu77 wrote:
| Musk has extraordinary capability of extracting every bit of
| potential a person can deliver. Either you work crazy at your
| 200% or you are worthless and the company is not for you. Twitter
| will see lots of layoffs, massive restructuring - some unknown
| people being promoted for top roles, but end result will be
| better financial. I am not sure Twitter will remain the same as
| it is. Lots of people think Elon is not good at dealing with
| public perspective or government, but if you see most of his
| businesses, his expertise is dealing with governments, contracts
| and policies makers. On PR, he really doesn't care. And it works
| for him
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Musk has extraordinary capability of extracting every bit of
| potential a person can deliver. Either you work crazy at your
| 200% or you are worthless and the company is not for you
|
| 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.
| fomine3 wrote:
| > Elon is not good at dealing with public perspective or
| government
|
| 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.
| georgeg23 wrote:
| Nailed the government connection.
|
| Mike is his handler for SpaceX,
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
| croes wrote:
| >Musk has extraordinary capability of extracting every bit of
| potential a person can deliver. Either you work crazy at your
| 200% or you are worthless and the company is not for you.
|
| 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.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| I've been thinking about this a lot lately while reading
| books about leadership
|
| 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.
| matwood wrote:
| He's tapped into leveraging his sycophants. IMO, that's not
| leadership, though it can work for awhile.
|
| 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.
| kamaal wrote:
| >>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
|
| 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.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| I could believe it. People on here and TeamBlind who work
| for him often love him and his style, even though you'd
| expect them to hate his guts for all the ridiculous BS
| he's constantly getting up to
|
| "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!"
| gonzo41 wrote:
| This is magical thinking. Eventually those people burn out.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Anyone capable of doing software engineering for TSLA isn't
| being exploited. They can take home an upper class income
| working for their choice of the cream of the crop of tech
| companies. It's like an outside observer complaining that MIT
| exploits students because it's expensive and the students
| have to do hard work. Well, of course. That's what you agree
| to when you go there.
| croes wrote:
| I doubt that both, Tesla engineers and MIT students, work
| crazy at 200%.
|
| And it's a big difference between writing software for a
| car company and a social media service.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| The big difference between this and all of Musk's other
| ventures, is that this is performing a wheel change whilst
| you're still driving the car. Everything in Tesla and SpaceX
| has been more or less built from scratch, and involves the
| release of new products, which can slip. If Twitter's servers
| fall over, or some Nazis manage to co-ordinate assinating Nancy
| Pelosi whilst he's at the wheel, or he accidentally endorses an
| anti-free speech authoritarian regime that hack up journalists
| with bonesaws... he's going to be in trouble. Because anyone
| with any sense will leave, and network effects go both ways.
| plazmatic wrote:
| moomin wrote:
| People said the acquisition would be bad, but it's already given
| us so many innocent laughs.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| I don't at all object to code reviews/evaluation, but the thing I
| wonder about is this: I rarely open an empty file and write some
| big block of code. 98% of the time I'm fixing bugs in legacy code
| or shimming in some new feature. It would be trivial to produce
| the diffs I generated in the past 30 or 60 days, but the volume
| of code isn't really a great metric for my productivity.
|
| 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?
| segmondy wrote:
| I once reviewed code for a company that got purchased. I took
| less than a few hours to reach conclusion. There were 7
| developers and in 2 months only one was writing code. The
| entire team but that one developer was fired. Twitter has grown
| a reputation for being slow and a rest and vest haven. Won't be
| surprised if they are looking for people not writing code.
|
| 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.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| Please. If any we, developers, should be removing code. I
| solve problems. The fewer code I write the better.
| SNosTrAnDbLe wrote:
| There is quality, quantity and then there is common sense. I
| have seen an entire new dependency system invented because
| the author did not like open source ones. It worked great for
| 10 years and then they left. I also have seen a scenario
| where we killed a hundred thousand lines of code for
| concurrency by using standard libraries and a couple hundred
| lines for adapters
| abraae wrote:
| > I once reviewed code for a company that got purchased. I
| took less than a few hours to reach conclusion. There were 7
| developers and in 2 months only one was writing code. The
| entire team but that one developer was fired.
|
| 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".
| jjav wrote:
| > 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".
|
| Funny, since the key job description at oracle is lawyer.
| thwayunion wrote:
| This is just the prelude to an apocryphal story. At the end
| of that story, Oracle stops innovating and becomes a legal
| and license auditing firm with sales and engineering
| departments bolted onto the side, slowing atrophying into
| the sunset.
|
| ;)
| imwillofficial wrote:
| 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".
|
| "IM A PEOPLE PERSON, IM GOOD WITH PEOPLE!"
| fab1an wrote:
| I guess in the case of Oracle, the answer is most likely "a
| lawyer" :D
| rcxdude wrote:
| That's basically sales at Oracle
| ithkuil wrote:
| And yet we have people whose job is to help software
| getting deployed, infrastructures getting the timely
| upgrades, capacity planning, monitoring and alerting,
| honing their troubleshooting skills so when time comes to
| save your business they know how to do it and have the
| right tools not break in their face.
|
| Yes, let's treat those tasks as less honourable than
| developers and enjoy the results
| newone2three wrote:
| > software getting deployed, infrastructures getting the
| timely upgrades..
|
| 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.
| ciarcode wrote:
| What about SETs?
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > This is veering into made-up-job world. These people
| are getting fired. All these tasks can be done by
| developers.
|
| 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.
| newone2three wrote:
| You're misunderstanding me slightly. I'd put systems
| administrators in the same category as developers, and I
| think so would Elon Musk and Larry Ellison.
|
| But if someone's entire job is "capacity planning",
| they're getting fired.
| ithkuil wrote:
| > All these tasks can be done by developers.
|
| 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.
| newone2three wrote:
| I probably wasn't clear. I'm putting developers and ops
| people all in the same "skilled computer people" pot. And
| I think so would Musk and Ellison.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Yeah sorry. The story here is how people at Twitter must
| prove their worth by printing the lines of code they
| wrote, so I erred on the side of that angle also for the
| Ellison quote even if I had no reason to do so.
| jimmydorry wrote:
| >> software getting deployed, infrastructures getting the
| timely upgrades..
|
| >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.
| thwayunion wrote:
| _> > capacity planning, monitoring and alerting, honing
| their troubleshooting skills_
|
| _> 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.
| crmd wrote:
| These functions are mission critical, but if you can't
| show how you've automated / created programmatic
| solutions in these domains then you are probably part of
| the problem.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| Twitter was not profitable last quarter. It rarely has
| turned a profit. How does an unprofitable business
| qualify as "stable if unexceptional?" I should think an
| unprofitable cash burn as long as Twitter's should count
| as highly exceptional.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Cancel culture as a service could be a new biz model. You
| can call it revrse advertising.
| Retric wrote:
| Twitters revenue been growing quite well though it's
| clearly spiky. Spending isn't really a question of what
| developers are doing that's all about management.
|
| https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
| newone2three wrote:
| I think we agree. I'm not saying these things don't need
| to be done. I'm saying that " capacity planning"
| shouldn't be someone's entire job.
| thwayunion wrote:
| _> I'm saying that " capacity planning" shouldn't be
| someone's entire job._
|
| 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.
| PeeMcGee wrote:
| Larry Ellison is also famously hated within the software
| community...
| hahaters wrote:
| Don't hate the player. Hate da game.
| ben_w wrote:
| That works for, say, trademark infringement lawsuits,
| where even the businesspeople doing the suing say it
| makes them feel dirty.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Areading314 wrote:
| Fixing bugs is part of the job. If you care about the product
| you work on, you have to fix the bugs and not whine about who
| originally wrote the code.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >If you care about the product you work on
|
| 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.
| sbarre wrote:
| So then you _do_ care about the product you work on.
| b4je7d7wb wrote:
| Sure. But also if all you do is fix bugs, unless they are
| really hard and complex ones in occasionally new domains
| it's probably not the best career path.
|
| 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.
| paganel wrote:
| > it's probably not the best career path.
|
| Which is a damn shame for our industry, fixing bugs
| should be a good career path.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I agree with it. There a rare subspecies of developers
| who enjoy fixing bugs. The more rare and obscure, the
| better. Maybe they derive the same kind of pleasure as a
| police detective solving a hard case.
|
| 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!
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Bug fixing is fun and easy. You just need a good test
| suite.
| Areading314 wrote:
| fixing bugs is more important than trivial stuff like
| swagger, css variables, or adding new test frameworks.
| Function over form
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| But isn't having no bugs to begin with better then fixing
| them later?
|
| 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
| Areading314 wrote:
| CSS variables, test frameworks, are good tools for
| catching bugs -- but at the end of the day the goal is
| that the code should work and be easily maintainable.
| Best practices help you do that, but theres many
| instances of a code base full of bugs that has to be
| maintained and improved over time. Developers who turn up
| their nose at "fixing bugs" are of no use to a business.
| These ideas are great when starting a new codebase but
| thats not the situation a developer is going to be in
| most of the time in practice. And if you follow every
| best practice there will still be bugs that need to get
| fixed.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| You're arguing with a straw man then. Their argument was
| that only solving bugs is an issue, because you should be
| taking preventative measures so they're occurring less
| frequently.
| Areading314 wrote:
| If the bugs are all your doing, I agree. But many times
| the developers working on a project are maintaining code
| that was written years ago before they even joined the
| company, by other devs that had totally different
| incentives.
| krashidov wrote:
| Honest question - have you ever worked on a codebase with
| 0 bugs? I don't think that's feasibly. What you're asking
| for is an infallible god-like programmer.
|
| You will always have bugs. The best engineers can solve
| the hardest bugs
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| Honest question - How did you get from "less bugs" to "0
| bugs"?
| cudgy wrote:
| Maybe because there's a bug in your statements. You use
| "no bugs" and "less bugs" to describe the same point.
| [deleted]
| brailsafe wrote:
| I agree, but I do think that's kind of an imaginary
| enemy. I don't know that anyone said "All I do
| exclusively all year is fix trivial bugs in hacky or
| minimal ways". Probably what anyone does is a bit of
| this, a bit of new code writing, and a bit of new feature
| stuff.
|
| 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.
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| People leave jobs. If you're working at a company that's
| decades old, the people who did create the bug might have
| left the company 20 years ago.
|
| 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.
| criley2 wrote:
| Hard agree. The only case where "You fix all your own bugs"
| makes sense is a small company or start-up... but it's also
| a bad idea. Every engineer should get up to speed on every
| feature until it is no longer feasible/reasonable to do so.
|
| 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).
| julianlam wrote:
| > Developers should be writing new code and maintaining their
| own code.
|
| 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.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > There were 7 developers and in 2 months only one was
| writing code.
|
| 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.
| mlonkibjuyhv wrote:
| This is probably an extreme example, but it is no secret
| that the majority of people employed in an organization
| actually does barely anything of value. Price's law comes
| to mind.
| [deleted]
| EricDeb wrote:
| This is a inaccurate in my opinion. Obviously all developers
| should be writing code but in my experience there's usually
| about half new feature work and half maintenance. A lot of
| the maintenance is of projects written by people no longer at
| the company. I guess you're advocating for a policy of
| complete silo-ing where devs only ever work on what they
| wrote in the first place and no one can jump in and help
| other teams under any circumstance, but at least the
| companies I've worked at have not advocated for that policy
| sheeshkebab wrote:
| > I once reviewed code for a company that got purchased. I
| took less than a few hours to reach conclusion. There were 7
| developers and in 2 months only one was writing code. The
| entire team but that one developer was fired. Twitter has
| grown a reputation for being slow and a rest and vest haven.
| Won't be surprised if they are looking for people not writing
| code.
|
| 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.
| yonaguska wrote:
| I'm finally working directly with one of these developers.
| Thankfully he is leaving next week on his own volition. My
| work load has doubled over the past several weeks due to
| rewriting most of his code. And needing to extensively vet
| code that he's still submitting. The worst part is that
| he's reasonably productive at producing lines and lines of
| code that barely function.
| manishsharan wrote:
| I am curious. Does your organization not use TDD ? How
| would the code be allowed to marge without running your
| test suite ?
|
| 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.
| morelisp wrote:
| > coach and mentor developers [rather than] vet their
| code.
|
| 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.
| lawn wrote:
| If you churn out new code and features, your test suite
| will be of very little help if any.
|
| 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.
| turtleyacht wrote:
| Mutation testing can help evaluate the quality of a test
| suite. The application code is automatically tweaked and
| tests run. If a mutant is not "killed," then additional
| tests may be needed.
| cad1 wrote:
| "Almost every software development organization has at
| least one developer who takes tactical programming to the
| extreme: a tactical tornado. The tactical tornado is a
| prolific programmer who pumps out code far faster than
| others but works in a totally tactical fashion. When it
| comes to implementing a quick feature, nobody gets it done
| faster than the tactical tornado. In some organizations,
| management treats tactical tornadoes as heroes. However,
| tactical tornadoes leave behind a wake of destruction. They
| are rarely considered heroes by the engineers who must work
| with their code in the future. Typically, other engineers
| must clean up the messes left behind by the tactical
| tornado, which makes it appear that those engineers (who
| are the real heroes) are making slower progress than the
| tactical tornado." -- John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of
| Software Design
| TrueSlacker0 wrote:
| I remember reading somewhere people can be broken down
| into 3 types. It applies in programming as well as in a
| restaurant kitchen or your family's garage cleanup.
|
| *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.
| cdavid wrote:
| LOC produced is a good example of what I call "negative"
| metric: high value does not mean much, but low value is a
| good indication that something is up.
|
| 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.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| At some point, the curve definitely bends negative. I
| used to work on a team adjacent to one of the most
| "productive" programmers at G by that metric.
|
| 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.
| cdavid wrote:
| Yes, there are large negative externalities to a certain
| type of engineers who write a lot of code of dubious
| quality. Even after ignoring all the trivial cases of
| "artificial code stuffing", etc.
|
| 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.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| That was similar to this guy - he was a good IC who ended
| up being over-promoted to an "architecture" role (L7). He
| didn't really know how to architect things, so he went
| for creating externalities while resurrecting old, dead
| projects that past people had designed for him.
| iopq wrote:
| What if I produced only 30 lines of code and removed 1950
| lines of code?
| [deleted]
| xgbi wrote:
| Maybe the metric should be "How much diff did you
| produce. Removing 2k LOC and being able to replace it
| with 30 is kind of great.
| cdavid wrote:
| Yes, obviously you would look at number of lines changed.
| Which is what git reports to you when you do git log
| --stat and so on.
| morelisp wrote:
| If this is what you did all quarter (and don't have any
| other artifacts to show, like an ML model or system
| design or whatever), yes it's a red flag.
|
| 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.
| cdavid wrote:
| In your career, how often have you seen good software
| engineers whose main contribution was deleting code ?
|
| 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.
| Thews wrote:
| I've seen a few projects across different organizations
| where an old dev was bad at copying and pasting code and
| ignored DRY principles. The projects had almost no
| refactoring, and the primary goal of a new dev was
| cleaning up the redundancy to better map things out for
| better organization of the codebase.
| jjav wrote:
| > In your career, how often have you seen good software
| engineers whose main contribution was 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.
| wantoncl wrote:
| Hi Bill!
|
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000
| _Li...
| ZeKK14 wrote:
| This is also a sign that code reviews are not working
| properly (either missing due to a team too small; or not
| enough time invested to do them properly; or people are not
| "free" enough to tell their coworker that their code is
| bad; or it was done too late, once there isn't enough time
| to fix it; etc).
|
| That's mostly an organisation failure.
| morelisp wrote:
| Or code reviews are working fine but there are no long-
| term consequence for people whose code consistently takes
| 10x more revision after reviewing. (This is also a kind
| of organizational failure, but one where reprimanding the
| IC in question can still be the right response. But I
| also doubt a drive-by ad hoc external review of every
| person in the company is going to be the best approach to
| find this!)
| pyrale wrote:
| I guess we then have to trash every profitable system when
| original authors leave now...
| cdavid wrote:
| why do you need a code review for this ? It is easily
| scriptable w/ GH, and I would expect whatever system used by
| twitter to support this kind of basic functionalities.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I'd be very interested in such scripts, do you have links?
| cdavid wrote:
| If you use GH, you can use something like this:
| https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-
| cloud@latest/organizat...
|
| I have some very basic scripts at work that I never
| bothered cleaning up, but maybe I can, let me look
| tomorrow.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Nice, looks like a good start.
|
| 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.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Assuming that whoever wrote it in the first place is (1)
| Still employed, (2) Capable of fixing the bug and (3) Would
| never be told about the bug fixes you may be right.
|
| 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.
| chris_wot wrote:
| I once reviewed why colors were off in the MacOS version of
| LibreOffice. Not being all that familiar with the code, I
| spent days reading through the code. Then I idly looked up
| the kCGColorSpaceGenericGray and kCGColorSpaceGenericRGB in
| Apple's documentation, and realized they had been deprecated.
| Switched to the correct color space and suddenly all the
| tests passed.
|
| 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.
| ..
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Spending a few days to produce a short bugfix is normal.
| But in a full-time employment scenario, you might have a
| bug hunt like this every once in a while, but definitely
| not all the time, you're also usually working on new
| features, so you do have some output to show.
| willio58 wrote:
| I 100% object to code reviews in this way. If you have dignity
| as a developer you'd quit swiftly.
| jxf wrote:
| My advice to someone earlier in their career would not be to
| quit, but to make them pay you while you look for your next
| job if the writing is already on the wall.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Yep. Phone it in while you job hunt, without making it
| completely obvious that's what you doing.
|
| 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.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Lol. People have been leaving in large numbers ever since
| this circus began. The exodus will continue.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| So having dignity means having a financial loss and be job
| hunting for some time? Why should someone get punished for
| having dignity?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I think this is true and an big problem when artificially
| separating the top 10% from the top 20%, or top 1% from top
| 5%...
|
| ... 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.
| okay_dude13 wrote:
| > notoriously unproductive
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| lgleason wrote:
| ttyprintk wrote:
| I work in a regulated sector. If I need to know the priority of
| a PR, it's the speed from code review to integration.
| smk_ wrote:
| I would imagine this fact is obvious to any Tesla engineers
| reviewing code. I would imagine they look at more factors than
| simply lines of code.
| [deleted]
| asdffdsa wrote:
| Exactly, more code isn't better
| geekraver wrote:
| Quite. Code is a liability. LOC is an utterly idiotic metric
| of programmer contribution, as it incentivizes increasing
| liability, over all sorts of other better contributions like
| good design, more automation, mentoring, customer obsession,
| etc.
|
| (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).
| jacob019 wrote:
| Not only that, less code is better. The elegant and
| performant solution is the simple one, for example wireguard
| vs openvpn.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| Nope. Less code is not always better. Collapsing a loop
| into a single line lambda with single char variables doing
| 5 times is not elegant or better. It's orders of magnitude
| worse.
|
| Less code is more readable. But absolute minimal amount of
| code can be unreadable.
| jacob019 wrote:
| By less code I mean less logic, not less characters. Less
| code generally means less work for the CPU (faster), less
| surface area for attacks, a smaller codebase that is
| easier to pick up and work on. When working with sets of
| numerical data, there are often two or more ways to come
| up with the desired result. A dumb imperative way, that
| may involve several loops and stages, or a simple and
| intelligent way that requires a deeper understanding of
| the math to implement properly. I've seen pages of slow
| code reduced to a few simple lines that are performant
| and easy to grok.
| jxf wrote:
| "Less" doesn't mean "fewer bytes", it means "less
| complexity". If two ASTs do exactly the same thing, but
| one is easier to understand and has less structure, that
| one is probably better.
| kamaal wrote:
| Less complex in lots of situations means being explicit,
| not being too template'y, not being too generic, abstract
| and writing code that is supposed to be a kind of meta
| that takes in a config and does several things for
| several inputs.
|
| 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.
| jacob019 wrote:
| Being kind of meta, taking config, and doing several
| things for several inputs are good examples of ways to
| reduce the amount of code--when used appropriately. Being
| explicit reduces code too. Over abstracting and premature
| optimization can result in bloated spaghetti code.
| [deleted]
| shapefrog wrote:
| 0 code is the best then?
| thwayunion wrote:
| Yes.
|
| 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.
| jason-phillips wrote:
| > 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.
| cptaj wrote:
| And if you indeed make "more lines!" the guiding metric for
| developer performance, you're setting yourself up for a world
| of pain because they will sure as hell find out and start
| gaming the metric. This will lead to a feedback loop of rising
| expenses and tech debt.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| As a Vim user, I'll happily expand my for loops with just a
| couple of key presses
| akomtu wrote:
| Another technique is "versioning" when instead of fixing a
| function, you duplicate it and _slowly_ migrate callers of
| this function to its new version.
| vimwannabe wrote:
| How do you do the increments smartly
| WalterBright wrote:
| I love being able to fix a bug with a one line change.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I love deleting lines. The more lines I delete, the less
| bugs.
| tcoff91 wrote:
| The hardest bugs to find are often the ones that can be fixed
| with a one line change. If you figure out a bug quickly, then
| you are usually in trouble and have to refactor your codebase
| to resolve it or introduce an awful hack to fix it.
| chromakode wrote:
| "Making chalk mark on generator $1. Knowing where to make mark
| $9,999."
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-stein...
| eterevsky wrote:
| I don't think the code review involves counting the lines. A
| reviewer can distinguish hundreds of lines of boilerplate from
| a non-trivial few lines change.
| seadan83 wrote:
| Agree, I would expect the first question after "what did you
| change", would be "walk me through the impact of this change"
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| Didn't Musk get rich solving complex problems? The ink isn't even
| dry yet and there is a rush to judgement, speculation, and wild
| assumptions that are simply shameful.
|
| How many cars did Tesla sell on the day after his investment?
| chadlavi wrote:
| infinityio wrote:
| he may have been rich from his family, but he became _Rich_
| from zip2 and x.com /paypal (and subsequent re-investments)
| BurningFrog wrote:
| That's a dumb internet myth that will never die.
| ergocoder wrote:
| His family's mine is $100B usd? wowza. TIL
| LouisSayers wrote:
| People always do this with Elon... it doesn't matter if he's
| making cars, building rockets or taking on social media, the
| general consensus is that he doesn't know what he's doing and
| will fail.
|
| 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.
| georgeg23 wrote:
| He was given the money, team, idea, and government
| connections by this guy for SpaceX at least:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
| LouisSayers wrote:
| I'm glad there are enough people out there helping to
| support his ventures.
|
| Can totally understand how people say "it's lonely at the
| top"...
| scaramanga wrote:
| Or as they say in devout circles "the lord works in
| mysterious ways, who are we to question his divine
| judgement?"
| LouisSayers wrote:
| If we do get to Mars, the least we could do is have a giant
| Elon statue :)
| scaramanga wrote:
| We could use his coffin/capsule for it. A sad, but
| poignantly dignified monument that shall serve as a
| warning to others. I suggest the epitaph: "We repeatedly
| told you that Mars was uninhabitable."
|
| Edit: or perhaps more relevantly: "well, we tried to but
| you fired us."
| LouisSayers wrote:
| So the moral of the story is "never try"?
| kyleamazza wrote:
| It's not a matter of never try, it's more of a matter of
| what's even practical. Inhabiting Mars is not as simple
| as just landing a rocket on there with a bunch of people
| and materials. Space travel requires immense physical
| training, enormous costs just to get into space, plus
| there's the issue of handling emergencies if anything
| goes wrong while on Mars.
|
| 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.
| LouisSayers wrote:
| You could go back in time before other countries were
| discovered and make a lot the same arguments about
| heading out into the ocean on a boat.
|
| 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.
| kyleamazza wrote:
| Here's a difference: you or I could get on a boat with
| little difficulty besides sea sickness and wobbly legs.
| On a rocket, you or I would die or suffer from other
| physical ailments caused by simply being in space and in
| different gravitational environments for extended periods
| of time. This isn't an unknown, it's a known.
|
| 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.
| voxl wrote:
| Being rich has almost nothing to do with your ability,
| talent, or intelligence. It the single most important factor
| is luck. This is why you often find CEOs looking down on
| those with PhDs, because they have an inflated sense of self-
| worth for being "more rich." When in reality a PhD is a very
| difficult test of your work ethic and creativity, and being a
| successful CEO is a matter of luck and connections.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| >Being rich has almost nothing to do with your ability,
| talent, or intelligence.
|
| 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?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Musk is not "self made rich", his family was already
| quite wealthy. But I'd guess the distribution is pretty
| close for rich people in general. Consider some of the
| outstandingly stupid rich people out there like the
| "MyPillow" guy or Donald Trump.
|
| 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...
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| His family wasn't wealthy, unless you mean well off in
| the upper middle class sense. His father gave him
| something like 15k to start his first company.
| LouisSayers wrote:
| Let us assume that is 100% true.
|
| 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?
| voxl wrote:
| > Was it lucky that he happened to start what became
| PayPal with some others?
|
| 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.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Are you going to go further on the whole Paypal
| situation? The fact that he was running the company into
| the ground, had to be ousted and replaced all of which
| occurred before Paypal saw any success?
|
| The 'luck' there is that he got removed and replaced by
| someone far more successful, but retained a large share
| of stock.
| askepticlist wrote:
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Tesla engineers need to look at their own code, the app is a
| total nightmare. Try chatting with customer service on it
| sometime.
| seydor wrote:
| Next up, twitter's engineers to evaluate Tesla's code
| rejectfinite wrote:
| Now, English is not my first language. But.. I cant read the
| article. The prose is a mess of quotes, maybes and feels like a
| mess.
| iepathos wrote:
| Interesting, wasting Tesla resources and engineer time to review
| code from an unrelated business just for Musk... Tesla's board is
| ok with this why?
| johnnyAghands wrote:
| I don't see what the big deal here is. I feel like it's the
| obvious move. He wants a no nonsense review of the current state
| of things at Twitter, and isn't wasting time. I'm assuming these
| engineers he trusts and wants an objective review instead of some
| bs from folks too removed.
| electriclove wrote:
| Exactly! There is too much hate here on anything he does. It
| just makes sense that he'd want to get people that he trusts
| looking into this.
| slenk wrote:
| Why would $TSLA shareholders want to pay for a Twitter code-
| review?
| biztos wrote:
| This story is very publicly pushing the narrative that
| Tesla's software engineers are some elite Ninjas you can
| helicopter in to pass judgement on the spoiled SF
| "engineers."
|
| 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.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Who says that they are? Presumably Musk, Twitter and Tesla
| all have accountants who will ensure that everything is
| above board.
|
| Tesla shareholders are also free to fire Musk if they don't
| like the way he runs the company.
| jldugger wrote:
| The big deal is that Tesla didnt buy Twitter, Musk did. Based
| on the Tesla engineers doing due dilligence on a non-Telsa
| acquisition seems like a conflict of interest.
| osigurdson wrote:
| I suppose there is a small conflict of interest as Tesla is
| paying some of its employees to do this work which doesn't
| benefit Tesla. As long as Twitter compensates them for this
| in some form however, I think this conflict is eliminated.
|
| 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.
| mousetree wrote:
| What exactly is the conflict of interest here?
| mayankkaizen wrote:
| That he is using resources of a publicly traded (Tesla)
| company for personal use. This exercise isn't in the
| interest of Tesla.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| That isn't what conflict of interest means. It's a complete
| non-sequitur in this context.
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| Elon Musk has an obvious conflict of interest here. As CEO
| of a publicly traded company he has an obligation to act in
| the best interest of Tesla's shareholders. By using Tesla's
| engineers to look at his private company's source code he
| arguably doesn't act in their best interest, but in his own
| personal best interest.
| heurist wrote:
| It's not really a big deal though?
| willnonya wrote:
| The "idea of Elon being flanked by his Tesla engineers reviewing
| Twitter code is laughable,"
|
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| How quickly could a Tesla engineer get up to speed on Twitter's
| code in order to make any kind of useful conclusions?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I don't quite understand why everyone here is so defensive about
| what seems like a pretty common practice in a takeover.
|
| 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...
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I have no insight into the Twitter codebase, but I presume it is
| vast. I would think so just based on how many programmers they
| employ. I wonder if their auto moderation system has a larger
| code base than the main product.
|
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| It doesn't seem like a review, and certainly not an audit. My
| guess would be that it's to get a sense of what is being worked
| on. If the Tesla engineers have been brief of the plan for
| Twitter in the future, then they could mostly just sit back and
| assess if the projects and code presented is relevant to that
| future.
|
| 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".
| jsemrau wrote:
| Maybe Musk is planning something completely different with the
| Twitter tech. Intercar / Interplanetary communication?
| https://app.finclout.io/t/A3lkgnE
| dmode wrote:
| Tesla has very mediocre computer vision AI. I am not an ML
| engineer, but how does that skill set translate to probably a
| series of ML programs optimized for very specific problems - for
| account take overs, for spam, for hate speech, for bots, for
| profanity, payment frauds, identity frauds. It's not like
| computer vision suddenly makes you an expert on what features
| will maximize precision and recall for a spam detector
| RadixDLT wrote:
| nelox wrote:
| Twitter will somehow benefit from Tesla FSD vaporware
| DeathArrow wrote:
| While Musks men from Tesla are reviewing code he's partying in
| Romania with Angelina Jolie, Peter Thiel and other 140
| celebrities and billionaires.
|
| https://www.autoevolution.com/news/musk-celebrates-expansion...
| [deleted]
| bagels wrote:
| Did the Twitter engineers get any kind of retention deal? If I
| were there, it'd take a lot to convince me to stay with this kind
| of thing going on.
| jquery wrote:
| That's probably the goal here. Elon is following the cult
| leader playbook. Make the followers do strange and humiliating
| rituals.
| e9 wrote:
| They are probably just trying to see if they should transfer some
| engineers to Tesla instead of firing them.
| alerighi wrote:
| This is a very stupid thing to do. First, code is not the issue.
| Code can be rewritten in not a lot of time, when you have clear
| what to write. Twitter is not something so complex, in principle,
| thus it shouldn't be that difficult (a team of 10 good
| programmers in a month can probably rewrite everything).
|
| 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.
| aroman wrote:
| > a team of 10 good programmers in a month can probably rewrite
| everything
|
| 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
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Probably not as hard as it seems, Amazon does this regularly
| with the concept of 2 pizza team. The real challenge is
| figuring out what is the 20% of Twitter that drives 80% of
| revenue. Probably basic Twitter posting and ads, and whatever
| fraud/bot prevention is needed to keep running smoothly.
| bagacrap wrote:
| why would you throw away 20% of your revenue? Obviously a
| lot of functionality is there to chase marginal percentages
| of revenue, but it's still worthwhile at Twitter scale.
| propogandist wrote:
| Because twitter is a money losing business. The cost of
| that 20% revenue is too high and hurts the profit margin.
| lupire wrote:
| Amazon has more than 50 employees.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| given how many people twitter employs and how many features
| actually get shipped at twitter, I'd say scope-down isn't
| that terrible of an idea
| turmeric_root wrote:
| I agree, I made my own google docs implementation using a
| `<textarea>` and it was super easy.
| trident5000 wrote:
| Its not stupid because he knows and trusts his engineers at
| Tesla. He knows nobody at Twitter. Hes probably trying to get
| an understanding of whats going on without relying on a bunch
| of employees who might not like him. It takes a while to build
| an employee base you trust, certainly in his situation.
| code_runner wrote:
| I believe you're missing the point. Random code reviews
| performed by people in a whole different sector aren't the
| best way to find out "what's going on".
| dfadsadsf wrote:
| In my career I did a few rescue operations when I as
| external expert was asked to come in and understand why
| project was failing. Random code review is amazing tool to
| understand quality of engineering talent and process
| maturity.
|
| 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.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| We don't know who they people he brought over are. It's
| doubtful that they are people who've never done anything
| but write code for Tesla. Were I in Elon's shoes, I could
| easily imagine digging up some employees with prior
| relevant experience and asking them to just browse through
| the codebase and give a rough appraisal of how tight it is.
| You can tell a lot by looking at basic things like coding
| standards, state of source control, development
| environment, testing strategies, what kind of code reviews
| are happening, how modular the code base is, what the
| service architecture looks like, etc. I've worked in a
| number of industries and good code and tight systems look
| different from bad code and sloppy systems. He's probably
| not looking for anything specific, but rather to get some
| understanding of the state of engineering there.
| trident5000 wrote:
| I never said it was the best way, but it may be the most
| viable option. And you dont have Tesla engineers personally
| go through the code, you have them sit down with twitter
| engineers and have them walk through how it works. Its
| probably a general understanding exercise.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Those who think this is a code review for the sake of
| looking for bugs or architecture issues are missing the
| point.
|
| 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.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| It may not be the best way, but I could certainly see it
| having _some_ value.
|
| 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.
| robryan wrote:
| They don't really need to find out anything meaningful.
| They are basically just putting Twitter employees on notice
| that they may be going deep into the details when assessing
| where the company is at and what changes they might want to
| make.
| runlevel1 wrote:
| It's the job of an incoming CEO to (1) gather information
| from the existing staff, (2) build relationships (and trust)
| with them, (3) use that information to help inform/tailor
| strategy, and (4) identify key individuals that can help
| execute said strategy.
|
| 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.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| > (a team of 10 good programmers in a month can probably
| rewrite everything).
|
| Is this satire?
| sedatk wrote:
| Just the iOS app is 2.5 million lines[1]. Good luck writing
| tenth of that from scratch in a month.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/bhcarpenter/status/1585834343766773761
| jwilber wrote:
| Here's just what Twitter has open-sourced:
| https://github.com/orgs/twitter/repositories
|
| 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.
| cptaj wrote:
| I wonder if the claims of printed code are true.
|
| Elon is definitely not a luddite when it comes to code, it seems
| like a very uncharacteristic request.
| perihelions wrote:
| https://archive.ph/xtF0x
| la64710 wrote:
| This is really a drama a publicity stunt , what it really is a
| deal bankrolled by the right wing / ultra conservative class that
| is ok with and even desires to put down other human beings based
| on their race or religion and do it freely without getting
| banned.Twitter is the battleground where this played out.
| magwa101 wrote:
| sbf501 wrote:
| From the company that gave you "cars that crash themselves and
| hit kids on bikes" comes a review of software from a company that
| gave you "disinformation that can topple governments".
|
| What could possibly go wrong.
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| It's a text messaging platform (that needs to load like 50MB just
| to show you some 100 characters) ...
| kweingar wrote:
| The most bizarre aspect of this was when Twitter engineers were
| told to print out their code on paper.
|
| 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.
| kuramitropolis wrote:
| Were they? The article said they were told to "stop printing".
| As in "stop the presses", perhaps. Still sounds weird, though -
| maybe the author of the invite is not a native English speaker?
| duped wrote:
| It's easier than giving source code access to all the outside
| staff that are coming in to actually read it. But it doesn't
| really sound like it's a meaningful review, since "last N days"
| of work isn't useful without context, and only people on the
| team can give them that.
|
| It's truly bizarre.
| saxelsen wrote:
| The text messages that were published as part of the suit to
| close the acquisition showed Musk discussing "return to office"
| as a way to naturally trim some of the workforce by having the
| dissatisfied remote workers quit on their own.
|
| 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.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Yup, Jason Calacanis "back of napkin"ing a 30% reduction in
| workforce based on nothing more than some texts with Musk and
| an hour or two of bloviating.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Do you think the trimming will apply to all levels of
| performance? Will it push out the poor performers, the high
| performers, or just take out a random cross section?
|
| Is there a correlation between employees who like to avoid
| the office and employees you don't really want on the team
| any more?
| ergocoder wrote:
| The two aren't similar at all.
|
| 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.
| catmanjan wrote:
| Imagine if you printed off your code and ended up with only
| a few pages of paper you'd fee pretty silly and may quit
| from embarrassment
|
| Just a thought nothing to back up this claim
| ergocoder wrote:
| Do you need to print code for that? You can just look at
| your PR history instead.
|
| 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.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Why would I quit from embarrassment? This doesn't make
| sense.
| catmanjan wrote:
| Have you written more than a few pages of code in the
| past 30 days?
| Spivak wrote:
| Good lord no, that's the worst metric to measure someone
| by. The diffs one produces on a mature codebase are
| usually tiny but with a small novel in the ticket about
| what the change will affect.
|
| I could pump those numbers up easily but my coworkers
| would hate me for it.
| wiseowise wrote:
| I'm not paid by lines of code.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Imagine if you printed off your code and ended up with
| only a few pages of paper you'd fee pretty silly
|
| I would copy/paste some hundreds pages from GitHub so
| Musk would give me a raise. :)
| catmanjan wrote:
| Can someone from Twitter do this and let us know how it
| goes
| agilob wrote:
| >There is literally no good reason to do that
|
| 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.
| ergocoder wrote:
| > At worst it is an intentionally pointless and expensive
| exercise that serves purely as a loyalty test.
|
| 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.
| activitypea wrote:
| > It's one minute of work to print something
|
| 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 :')
| ergocoder wrote:
| At the office like twitter, printers are already set up on
| your work laptop for you.
|
| 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.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Maybe this is a way of asking engineers who have zero pages to
| print to walk out?
|
| 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?
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Nah paper is still more efficient than computers in quick
| meetings. You can imagine many seconds being wasted if they
| were on a laptop and the engineer needs to find his files.
|
| Paper the UX is perfect and instant.
| kweingar wrote:
| Paper is instant until you say "can you show me that part of
| the code that handles X" or "where is this function defined"
| and then it's multiple orders of magnitudes slower.
|
| (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")
| seadan83 wrote:
| I very recently reacted the same copy/pasted code that was in
| in 7 files, each one had 6 touch points of 5 lines each, and
| the touch points were 50-300 lines as part. Would be a lot of
| paper for what had been a 30 minute exercise. I cantquite how
| to picture going over that diff on paper. The time wasted
| doing so seems sad, as do the natural resource waste (which
| tends to make me think the guy got into electric cars because
| it was cool and had an open market opportunity rather than
| ecological reasons - but that is a very random aside)
| NegativeK wrote:
| "Please send us links to your changes before the meeting
| begins." And display them on a large screen.
|
| I don't think it's really relevant, though. The entire
| situation is cruel and silly.
| wittycardio wrote:
| Elon fan brain is a debilitating condition
| govg wrote:
| How do you search, tag, jump to code definitions, look up
| libraries referenced if it is in paper?
| jen20 wrote:
| Unclear to me why this is being downvoted. I always read code
| on paper, it's easier to annotate.
|
| 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...
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| Hopefully they can find that one last use-after-free that's the
| root of all of Twitter's problems.
| tmsh wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if some of the "Tesla engineers" brought
| in are former social media company engineers in the early days.
| It's an incorrect assumption that all they've done is program for
| cars.
| chrismarlow9 wrote:
| Sounds fun on both ends, and I don't mean that sarcastically,
| assuming as a Twitter dev I get the chance to defend my code. But
| in the end I think this will just point to the same thing devs
| always holler about which is technical debt.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| sys_64738 wrote:
| You don't just look at the code, you do a "git blame" and see who
| wrote it and then discuss the code with them. The Twitter
| engineers are likely being interviewed to see if they should keep
| their job. Evaluating engineering staff first hand is an
| important step to evaluating a company's portfolio of products
| upon taking it over.
| slapthatchild wrote:
| I once reviewed code written by an outsourcing place in India.
| That is when I realized the difference in quality between the
| hemispheres. It was riddled with hard coded unescaped SQL
| strings. Old habits die hard for many of us. Especially if we are
| here on H1B's.
|
| 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.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| I don't think it's about the hemispheres, but about
| outsourcing. The developers I know who work for outsourcing
| companies are the less skilled devs I know. Also the pay is
| lower and the conditions are worse. Zero incentives to become
| better at your job. Working for a product company is a game
| changer.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Twitter is the platform where world leaders, celebrities,
| billionaires and famous politicians can insult and threat each
| other.
|
| That is valuable and is not going away.
| i5heu wrote:
| awestroke wrote:
| You want them to provide a citation for their opinion?
| dmak wrote:
| Comments are just full of people who want to bring down Musk for
| the most trivial things without acknowledging the amount of good
| he has put forth.
|
| 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.
| ryder9 wrote:
| helf wrote:
| That's because you can start a buncha stuff that ends up great
| and still be a raging narcissistic man-child.
|
| And a whole lot of people want to just overlook everything
| because "he makes a lot of money" or "I like this tech thing"
| dmak wrote:
| What are your thoughts on EVs and SpaceX?
| scaramanga wrote:
| Or buy it off someone else after they start it, and then use
| them for non-consensual buggery (in the metaphorical sense,
| since only one of them is blonde enough for Musk's tastes).
| dmak wrote:
| This reads off as really salty because of how you are
| trivializing it.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Ha, there's at least as many fanboys here. It's not a lopsided
| discussion.
| Nicksil wrote:
| >Ha, there's at least as many fanboys here. It's not a
| lopsided discussion.
|
| 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.
| voxl wrote:
| When it comes to work place environment I have not heard a
| single good thing about Musk. And that is what is being
| discussed here.
| kweingar wrote:
| I would make these kinds of comments about _any_ CEO who comes
| into a large tech company and makes the engineers print out
| diffs on paper.
|
| 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.
| chx wrote:
| > without acknowledging the amount of good he has put forth.
|
| and what that would be , exactly? Come on, list the good.
| ozzythecat wrote:
| I'm honestly baffled with the obsession with Musk. Many folks
| here seem to despise him. But we can't stop obsessing with the
| guy. At this point, to me it feels like envy. Musk, despite
| however he is as a person, is wildly successfully across several
| verticals. Rather than being a suit and tie corporate person, he
| literally posts memes, and has a IDGAF attitude. Does he owe this
| crowd anything? Twitter and its board moved forward with this
| deal, no? Are we surprised Musk is being Mush?
| conorcleary wrote:
| He's one of the main characters in our collective animated
| comedy; we check in with the regular cast.
| [deleted]
| theCrowing wrote:
| Snakeoil salesmen were hugely successful.
| groffee wrote:
| Back in the day snake oil was actually beneficial.
|
| https://www.amusingplanet.com/2022/08/clark-stanley-first-
| sn...
| liketochill wrote:
| Are tesla and spaceX snake oil?
| tmh88j wrote:
| The roadster, semi and cyber truck have that feel. Pepsi is
| supposed to get semis soon, would be really cool if that
| works out.
| jacquesc wrote:
| FSD sure feels like it is. I say this as one of the suckers
| who wasted my money on it.
| tsol wrote:
| I was hoping for more legitimate discussion on something
| tangible, but the majority of this thread is righteous
| indignation. Which, no one is saying you can't feel that way,
| but generally on HN things have a bit more substance. Seems
| like just a lot of wasted energy, as none of it is of any real
| consequence.
| noncoml wrote:
| People despise him in HN? Have you looked at the comment
| section? Looks like the exact opposite to me.
| themitigating wrote:
| He means "why doesn't everyone like him"
| ozzythecat wrote:
| Not at all. There's a Musk post just about every day or
| every other day. Much of it is either flaming the guy or
| praising him. I'm raising the question - why the obsession
| with this person? If you don't like him, don't do business
| with his companies. It feels like the people against him
| give him a shocking amount energy focusing on him, as
| opposed to themselves.
|
| 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.
| noncoml wrote:
| One thing I love about this is that it forces everyone to
| show their true colors.
|
| 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.
| themitigating wrote:
| I'm confused because you said you were baffled about why people
| are obsessed then explained why people are obsessed.
|
| 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.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| The worst of the right wing is gutting pregnant women,
| throwing them out of a helicopter to drown and putting the
| baby up for adoption with the people who murdered the mother.
|
| People in the twitter bubble need a serious wake up call to
| what 'worst' actually means since they've been happily
| cheering on the CIA funding them under Biden/Obama.
| rollnrock wrote:
| Totally disagree. Musk is not some random dude you met on the
| street. This guy is the richest man today
| yalogin wrote:
| What code is he reviewing? And why is he reviewing it? There must
| be millions of lines of code. Also, why bring in Tesla employees?
| Twitter employees are also his own, they could do they review for
| him. Just shows how musk feels about Twitter and the people
| there. Such disrespect.
| guax wrote:
| They are not reviewing code, they are reviewing people. And
| doing a terrible job at that if it really involves code
| printouts and short interviews. This is likely a fishing
| expedition to collect data to disguise layoffs as performance
| firings. He's not interested in accurately tell if they are
| capable or not, he's likely just trying to gauge who to
| "obviously" maintain and get rid of the rest since he already
| stated that in his view 75% of the company is redundant.
| mousetree wrote:
| He doesn't know the Twitter employees. Seems reasonable to ask
| employees you know to give you a technical read on how things
| stand.
| snissn wrote:
| Article clearly says per employee code written in last 30-60
| days
| bamboozled wrote:
| Agreed, it feels like a severely degrading and unnecessarily
| hostile act.
| catmanjan wrote:
| In what way is it degrading to show your work?
| bamboozled wrote:
| So you'd be ok if you come to work tomorrow and some dudes
| are there all of a sudden asking you to print off your code
| looking for flaws so you can be fired?
|
| 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 ?
| exodust wrote:
| It would be irresponsible for Musk _not_ to review code
| for the last 60 days given the dramatic circumstances.
|
| 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.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Yeah sure no problem.
|
| 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!)
| catmanjan wrote:
| I genuinely wouldn't care, we already have code review
| and I know I am a productive worker
|
| Quiet quitters are probably shitting themselves
| bamboozled wrote:
| You'd be most likely the most stressed and hurt, because
| you've worked hard and invested yourself, I think you'd
| stand more to lose if you got laid off for stupid
| reasons, such as cost cutting.
|
| But anyway, it's good you see yourself as ultra-
| resilient.
| catmanjan wrote:
| Yeah maybe it's a cultural thing because having to
| justify your value as employee is pretty normal where I
| work, across all industries
| bamboozled wrote:
| It's the same for me but this isn't the time or way to go
| about it. First week on the job to boot ?
| pavlov wrote:
| I worked at Facebook and remember what it was like to first face
| the total complexity of the system.
|
| 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.
| la64710 wrote:
| Hahahaa
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428775/twitter-fake-em...
| bertil wrote:
| I suspect it's less a complete review and more an interview of
| the senior technical manager, to get a sense of whether they
| are up to par. Do they think about observability, alerting,
| refactoring, service architecture, etc. reasonably well? Are
| there issues with how they motivate their teams or when they
| give them responsibilities? Are timelines challenging but
| doable?
|
| "Code" is most likely "architecture" and "architecture" is code
| for "management".
| dmak wrote:
| This. Evaluation always starts at high level then you
| gradually get lower level until you draw line to delegate
| tasks.
| shaburn wrote:
| Playing the players not the cards for sure. Silly to think
| they'd try to weight the code.
| lumost wrote:
| I utterly fail to understand how this would yield anything
| other than.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| _fat_santa wrote:
| My guess is this would be a very high level look at their
| architecture and maybe a closer look as some specific portions.
| Like you said these systems are so complex that you wouldn't be
| able to figure out what is even happening in a day.
|
| 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.
| jzl wrote:
| Twitter has been publishing about their architecture and all
| the updates to it for years and years, and given countless
| presentations on it. https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| cudgy wrote:
| Yes, software is typically more complex than a laymen would
| expect once all of the edge cases and layers of legacy code or
| "guano" are implemented. However, I doubt that these outside
| developers are expected to understand everything in a single
| day.
|
| 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.
| pavlov wrote:
| In a typical acquisition this would have taken place under
| NDA during due diligence, before closing the deal. But Elon
| waived it.
|
| 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.
| shswkna wrote:
| If Musk would have announced the details of the layoffs
| within 24 hours of closing the twitter deal, commentators
| would have said, "So soon after taking over it is be
| impossible to make an informed decision about how to
| restructure and who to keep and who to layoff.
|
| 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.
| sangnoir wrote:
| What you outlined were not the only viablw options: Musk
| had _months_ to do a proper transition after signing the
| agreement. He chose not to do that, for reasons best
| known to him.
| cudgy wrote:
| Elon has only been there for 24 hours.
|
| 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?
| etc-hosts wrote:
| Personally I was willing to believe the Musk Twitter
| company will be a net benefit
|
| 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.
| Jotra7 wrote:
| pavlov wrote:
| See, this is where a car and a social network are
| fundamentally different.
|
| 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?
| cudgy wrote:
| Hard for me to say. What type of reward are you expecting
| to get out of Twitter or social media in general? Maybe
| you are expecting too much or the wrong types of rewards?
| etc-hosts wrote:
| Jack would constantly email everyone internally that one
| of their jobs is to provide a Delightful Experience for
| Twitters users.
|
| 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?
| cudgy wrote:
| Why not avoid the algorithmic feed from Twitter and only
| look at what your chosen followed users are posting?
| Relying on a third party to provide both breadth of
| information and inoffensive posts is asking too much.
|
| 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.
| pavlov wrote:
| If the social product isn't rewarding to me, that's
| entirely their problem, not mine. There's no other reason
| to use it.
| crmd wrote:
| > Nobody in Elon-space seems to be bothered that there's no
| undo on alienating a social network's user base.
|
| Where are they going to go? I don't see journalists like
| Nikole Hannah-Jones moving their personal brands to
| Facebook.
| [deleted]
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > the same person who committed $44 billion without due
| diligence.
|
| 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.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| trashtester wrote:
| My guess is that at least part of the reason to bring in these
| devs, is to make sure none of the code or git histories (or
| their backups) are tampered with.
| mousetree wrote:
| Why would they be tampering with code and git histories?
| qull wrote:
| Many twitter staffers seem willing and motivated to
| sabatouge the new owner over purely political issues. A few
| have even suggested it on their own twitter accounts. Elon
| is polarizing and that leads to both more challenges and
| more opprotunities.
| pavlov wrote:
| "Fifth column" paranoia is a hallmark of authoritarian
| leadership.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| A corporation is not a democracy. Most CEOs are are
| unitary authoritarian leaders within their own companies.
| gtowey wrote:
| There's a big difference in this case between a position
| of authority and an authoritarian leader.
|
| 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.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| Perhaps a better analogy is that the CEO is captain of
| the ship. You get credit for things going well but if
| things go wrong you are responsible. It does not matter
| who screwed up. There's a wide range of ways to implement
| that model ranging from despots like Chainsaw Al to
| consensus builders like Jim Whitehurst. [0, 1]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_J._Dunlap
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Whitehurst
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| >Tiktaalik 17 hours ago | prev | next [-]
|
| "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
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| Did you just cite a random HN commenter who doesn't work
| at Twitter to prove what "Many twitter staffers seem
| willing and motivated" to do?
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| Nope.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| I'm curious why you thought that was relevant, then.
| adamwk wrote:
| The quote is also unrelated to actively sabotaging the
| codebase. An L on multiple fronts
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| How could that be unrelated?
|
| An "L"? Are you 17?
| chinabot wrote:
| Down vote the guy all you want but this does happen I've
| seen it with my own eyes.
| aliqot wrote:
| > drive fear at Twitter
|
| 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.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| Right. But smart people would take a mechanic with them
| _before_ buying the car.
|
| A meaningful audit at Twitter would take months. This is but
| a stunt.
| [deleted]
| pessimizer wrote:
| You have to remember that he didn't want to buy the car at
| all.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| He went through all the paperwork, got the money, _then_
| he didn't want to buy it.
| benj111 wrote:
| He did want to buy the car, signed a contract to buy the
| car that decided that he didn't want to buy it because it
| had a head gasket leak. Even though that was the whole
| reason he was buying the car, and he doesn't have any
| evidence for said leak anyway.
| aliswe wrote:
| Would you really show your source code before purchase?
| caminante wrote:
| Getting/giving access to the actual code/backend
| (especially as a competitor!) is a heavily negotiated
| diligence request.
|
| 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?
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| It's a pretty standard procedure, so yeah.
|
| It's worth mentioning that Musk waived his right to do
| so.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Yes, that's normal. At least when a PE from is buying.
| NDAs signed, automated scanners run, consultants sent in,
| etc.
| Moto7451 wrote:
| That's precisely how acquisitions at my current and past
| company worked. Everyone signs NDAs, there's a fee paid
| by the purchaser for the time should they decline the
| deal, and the audit commences.
|
| 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.
| dmak wrote:
| Not necessarily. It depends on the company acquiring.
| I've seen M&As focus solely on the relationships (ex,
| customers), so the tech DD was just checkboxes without
| deep dives.
| shaburn wrote:
| Were these companies more public and independently well
| capitalized or cash fires with little bargaining leverage
| for asset sales?
| mayankkaizen wrote:
| I once read about an acquisition attempt by Google which
| eventually failed because Google found codebase less than
| impressive. So I guess this is normal to review codebase
| before a buyout.
| dastbe wrote:
| yes. would you buy a company without reviewing and
| inspecting its assets?
|
| remember you have to tell us if you're elon musk.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| Inspecting the source code is a condition of all deals
| I've been involved with. Most sensible people want to see
| what they buying, unless they are under pressure to close
| fast due to competition. It's a lot like buying a house.
| shaburn wrote:
| This is systematic purge bringing in trusted, independent
| professionals. He just spared McKinsey ETC fees.
| morelisp wrote:
| On the contrary, he found the only "consultancy" less
| independent than one of the big ones who will confirm
| whatever their paycheck wants them to.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| It's not the right people so it's not an audit
| Jotra7 wrote:
| dqpb wrote:
| As someone who has always thought Twitter is stupid, I'm glad
| Musk bought it and is shaking things up. Both possible outcomes
| are interesting - either Twitter finally becomes not stupid, or
| even the worlds richest man and greatest tech entrepreneur
| couldn't make Twitter not stupid.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-10-30 23:02 UTC)