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Twitter engineers told to print out their code
- olliej 4y ago
- elkos 4y ago
- ditn 4y agoThey use git.
- olliej 4y agoSo given you didn’t read it - the engineers were told to print out their last 30 days of changes so that musk could read it. Then they were told to shred it a few hours later. This had nothing to do with VCS (which they obviously use), and everything to do with musk’s ego.
- fatneckbeardz 4y ago
- ss108 4y ago1. Elon Musk has time to sit around reading code? 2. Printing that much code makes it easier for him to read? (Not trying to attack you or your post, to be clear)
- HeckaSmart 4y agoYea, sounds like BS to me. Imagine Elon reading code printed on hundreds of thousands of real paper from thousands of developers. Makes no sense.
- TillE 4y agoThere are a really surprising number of rich people who spend a large chunk of their lives getting mad on Twitter. I have no difficulty believing that he wants to waste a bunch of time leafing through random snippets of code for some bizarre reason.
- prepend 4y agoI think he would leaf through digital source files but Elon doesn’t seem like the giant stacks of paper kind of person.
- fzeroracer 4y agoThe way I view it is that it's more or less a way to harass people. Get them to print out code and then if you do follow-up, you can weed out people that rebuke your authority. He was never going to read the code (or even really understand it), it's just pettiness from a petty person.
- efficax 4y agothey use git, but elon is not in fact a smart man
- rockemsockem 4y agoSo the title of this post is actually just the author's hook to get you to pay for their article.....
- nr2x 4y agoDo you work for free?
- meany 4y agoThis seems suspect. Without more confirmation, I’d hold off on believing this narrative in its entirety
- valleyer 4y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/business/twitter-elon-musk.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/business/twitter-elon-mus... > Amid layoff fears, some Twitter employees were instructed to print out copies of the code they had written recently as possible proof of work, said two people with knowledge of the situation. https://twitter.com/leahculver/status/1586145696163373056 https://twitter.com/leahculver/status/1586145696163373056
- prepend 4y agoIn what world is a print out of code proof of work? This sounds way too stupid to be believable. Perhaps the two people don’t have knowledge of the situation.
- lapcat 4y ago> Perhaps the two people don’t have knowledge of the situation. How about the photo of the Twitter engineer holding her printed source code? I also saw tweets from other Twitter engineers talking about printing out their code.
- freemrkt8 4y agoPerhaps Twitter is staffed by middle managers who sell well in interviews but have zero fucking clue. I’d like to see Twitter fire the cottage industry of professional non-contributors that has seeped into tech for the pay. Employees like the TikToking “Facebook PM” who showed off 20 mins of emailing for work and the rest of the day brunching/lunching with their crew need to go.
- valleyer 4y agoTFA says that the code was to be printed to show to Musk, not to these middle managers.
- mgamache 4y agoIt seems like a way to figure out if some people are actually coding. They might be faking it or maybe doing a lot of StackOverflow copy pasta. Print out something you’ve written recently so we can talk about it. Not defending, but that’s the most likely explanation.
- nr2x 4y agoIn all fairness, that’s still stupid.
- furstenheim 4y agoCopy stackoverflow, understand it, link to the original source. What's wrong with it. Those lines are normally the hardest. Maybe referencing a weird behaviour, not implemented feature, and stackoverflow is the only place that explains it
- kirykl 4y agoPlease bring a white board with your code written out to the evaluation
- systemvoltage 4y agoHonestly, whiteboard interviews are much better IMO than opening up an online-window-of-sauron that the interviewer can see what I am typing and it makes me super concious. I froze in one of the interviews, couldn't remember syntax about a language I've coded for 8 years. WTF. After the interview was cut short, I had a good 2 hours of self-reflection. Strangest feeling ever when someone misunderstands your strengths from some shallow shit. Have you experienced a time when you can't believe this is how a word is spelled? It doesn't look right, but it is. There is a term for this phenonenon in psychology, I forgot. Whiteboards + pseudocode? Perfect.
- willio58 4y agoSo toxic. Twitter employees please get out of there and find jobs that value you as people.
- londons_explore 4y agoElements of this plan sound good. Obviously musk doesn't have time to review it all... But saying 'print out a couple of pages of your recent code you are proud of and bring it to a review with your tech lead' is a good way to discuss coding style. The 'you are proud of' is key to this working though - all your code is visible in the VCS anyway, but asking you to pick a good bit to discuss seems valuable.
- fzeroracer 4y agoIf a tech lead told me to print out some code and bring it to a review, I'd strongly reconsider the team I'm on. Not only is it among the worst ways to review code, but it also includes a lot of irrelevant information.
- systemvoltage 4y agoWhy? Printed code is code, NASA/Military does it for formal review. I've worked on avionics systems that are developed in similar fashion. You ought to be able to explain what it does. Most of it is going to be plumbing. Call this, fetch that, join foo, collate bar. Strong arming Elon's intentions, may be he is used to perhaps how code reviews work in Space industry? Sometimes old school ways are fine, under the hood it is just code.
- fzeroracer 4y agoNo, no they do not. I've worked for the government and in that sector. We did not print code to review it. That might've been a thing a decade or two ago, but it is not a thing now and for good reason. And I would strongly question the technical capabilities of a team that was not able to adapt to modern tools even for older codebases. What exactly is your citation that they still do that? It is simply much quicker and much more efficient to do something like a proper code share in an office with one person driving the code and being able to jump between areas of the code. To say it bluntly: Anyone that uses printed code for code reviews is wrong. It assumes all functionality is colocated and nearby. It wastes time by forcing people to index through multiple pages of paper. Anyone that demands it should see prompt pushback.
- netmonk 4y agoMost comments fail miserably to understand the underlying meaning of such move. Most comments critics the lack of usefullness of such request. Most comments are funneled in a technological sideration, and fail to consider such request in a context of power take over, social hierarchy and group dynamic. Please, stop being hypnotized. And think a little out of the box of your modern, sterilized, way of thinking. Also, it is well known that Musk hiring process emphazises on "doer" profile. Not only the activities of his company are highly seducing to high intellectual profiles, Musk over select them based on the "doer" criteria. People highly intelligent, but emprisonned only in theorical masturbation are not selected. "Show me your code" is nothing different than "show me the rocket you build in your yard" Lot of smart people can talk about rocket. Only a few are doing rocket. Lot of smart people can talk about code, only a few are coding. So Musk is just trying to detect who are the 20% coders from the dev staff that are doing the 80% of the work. In order to fire the 80% remaining as promised. This is the first time he bought a big company which was not designed from origin by his paradigm. Most of big company are kindergarden (to be nice to them). Musk now is turning twitter from kindergarden to efficient, profitable structure, in regards to Tesla or SpaceX. This is quite a big challenge, as far as Elon's paradigms were not part of the inner culture, staffing policies of the company, since birth. Let's see how it will go. ps: If once, you place yourself in the field of complexity, collective intelligence, group dynamic, you first understand that companies structure are the only allowed (accepted) form of experimentation by the capitalism system. The family structure has been totally destroyed by promoting all kind of law attacking the inner mecanism of family structure viability. Therefore blocking all possibility of collective intelligence from it. The religious structure has been totally destroyed by instillating all kind of memetic virus such as new-age bullshit to sabotage all the core mechanism of religious structure to offer any fertile environment of collective intelligence. The only allowed space is the business and company. In such paradigm, every company is an experiment of collective intelligence, group dynamic, and complex system. Twitter, or any kind of social media have a special place in this experiment. As far as their main business is collective intelligence itself, (introduction of recursion principle). So for all peoples asking themselves why Musk made this purchase. It's seems pretty logical. As far as the efficiency he demonstrated to design very fertile environment for the emergence of a outclassing collective intelligence, demonstrates that he is well aware of the topic. And purchasing twitter will only (i hope) allow him to enter the metalevel of collective intelligence experiments.
- knaik94 4y agoThis is most likely a joke that got lost in translation because there has poor communication by top leadership. Elon Musk may have questionable attributes but hiring or assessing engineers poorly isn't one of them.
- netsharc 4y agoCitation? Feels like he's got an aura of "genius" surrounding him so people think he's super clever. Meanwhile I wonder if he's just a tiny bit more smarter than Trump and he's been lucky in his whole career...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Dudelander 4y agoListen, it's fine to have outside engineers audit the source code of a newly acquired company, but literally requiring them to print out their code is insane. It is entirely possible that the article was wrong about that point and he just asked for access to their github repos or something, but if it's true it points to incompetent leadership on a truly impressive scale.
- bgro 4y agoOK, so it looks like someone working for Elon, possibly non technical, at first asked employees to print out code to discuss in a review. Possibly resulting from a miscommunication, or to ensure no holdups due to computer crashes or something. The story I had until I finally got to this article was: Elon rounded up everybody in the company and personally, possibly and likely with a megaphone, demanded that “whomever is in charge” and/or everybody in general to immediately drop all their work and print off the entire code base so he, Elon, can personally perform a code review with like a highlighter in a meeting room while his 50 Spartan Tesla engineers watching like gremlins so they can cackle at the code quality. Twitter engineers would then also need to stay at the office so they can be personally called in to be laughed at and fired on the spot. All the other twitter engineers would be lining the halls and be forced to laugh at the fired engineers as they’re escorted out in handcuffs. Failing to laugh and point adequately, or falling asleep, means they would be next.
- Animillz88 4y agoSorry to interupt the conversation. But... have you seen my baseball?