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Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

• adave 4y ago
  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.
• wnevets 4y ago
  Was the code printed on paper?
  • aaronbrethorst 4y ago
    Sure looks that way. https://twitter.com/leahculver/status/1586145696163373056 https://twitter.com/leahculver/status/1586145696163373056
    • ergocoder 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        it definitely happened.
        • ergocoder 4y ago
          Because you said so... Or Leah's obscure tweet is the only source.
          • aaronbrethorst 4y ago
            Casey Newton seems quite certain, and he's been pretty reliable. https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1586132155062620160 https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1586132155062620160
            • ergocoder 4y ago
              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 4y ago
        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 4y ago
          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 4y ago
            Fuck you money means you keep the house. House rich, cash poor is a thing.
            • ergocoder 4y ago
              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.
    • xiphias2 4y ago
      Looks like the next person to have a baby.
• perihelions 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/xtF0x https://archive.ph/xtF0x
• jstx1 4y ago
  > 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.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • _vertigo 4y ago
    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.
    • whateveracct 4y ago
      I guarantee Elon is surrounded by yes-men.
      • generalizations 4y ago
        That's not how you build a spaceship.
        • jayd16 4y ago
          Eessh, I hope not.
      • sroussey 4y ago
        • 4y ago
• WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Ah yes the “4dchess” argument that seems to come up anytime a narcissist looks stupid, because it definitely can’t just be that simple.
• spaceywilly 4y ago
  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.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • aaronharnly 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
      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.
• toomanyrichies 4y ago
  • awinder 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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_ 4y ago
    I wonder how much damage short-sellers & tech journalism have caused tesla through twitter? There might be some business justification here.
  • Salgat 4y ago
    SpaceX does the same thing with Tesla engineers, and they pay contracting fees to do this, which is completely above board legally speaking.
    • toomanyrichies 4y ago
      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.
• giantdude 4y ago
  Someone probably told elon to look into the 'plumbing' of twitter. He brought a sink just in case.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • love2read 4y ago
    The joke was “Let that sink in”.
    • JustSomeNobody 4y ago
      > The joke ... Don't jokes have to be funny?
      • mhh__ 4y ago
        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 4y ago
          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__ 4y ago
            He thinks he's being ironic, but that isn't enough.
      • rejectfinite 4y ago
        Stay mad. What colour is your hair btw?
• RadixDLT 4y ago
• moomin 4y ago
  People said the acquisition would be bad, but it’s already given us so many innocent laughs.
• Waterluvian 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  • system16 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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 4y ago
          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.
• marstall 4y ago
  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.
  • smt88 4y ago
    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.
    • grogenaut 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        > 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.
        • 4y ago
• PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    • BurningFrog 4y ago
      That's a dumb internet myth that will never die.
    • infinityio 4y ago
      he may have been rich from his family, but he became Rich from zip2 and x.com/paypal (and subsequent re-investments)
    • ergocoder 4y ago
      His family's mine is $100B usd? wowza. TIL
  • LouisSayers 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
• sidibe 4y ago
  I think the goal here is to get people to quit voluntarily by doing the most ridiculous things possible.
  • XorNot 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      And they're heading towards companies which run a wage-fixing conspiracy during a fire sale... without a union... Unlucky
• throwaway728274 4y ago
  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.
  • cbeach 4y ago
    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 :-)
    • slaw 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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.
• Tiktaalik 4y ago
  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.
  • uni_rule 4y ago
    See also: Tumblr losing Yahoo/Verizon nearly a Billion dollars with it's own implosion.
    • IgorPartola 4y ago
      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.
      • giantrobot 4y ago
        > 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.
      • Spivak 4y ago
        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 4y ago
          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.
• daniel-thompson 4y ago
  Hopefully they can find that one last use-after-free that's the root of all of Twitter’s problems.
• Havoc 4y ago
  Surprised how sceptical all the comments here are. Dick or not the guy has a talent for building companies
  • lawgimenez 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Twitter just took itself private for 42 billion dollars. I'd say it was run very, very competently. Hall-of-fame leadership, really.
      • davewritescode 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        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.
        • Gibbon1 4y ago
• steele 4y ago
  Oddly enough Twitter employees can work from home forever. Guess Tesla employees just raided the snacks.
• ipqk 4y ago
  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.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    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.
    • ajross 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        Making a bunch of money does not give you ethical credits you can spend later. He can probably get away with it though.
        • geerlingguy 4y ago
          Many shareholders would offer their firstborn if Elon asked. He's a strange and unique character among the billionaires.
          • 4y ago
• jjfoooo6 4y ago
  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.
  • 01100011 4y ago
    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.
  • throoo0ooowaway 4y ago
    When Dell was taken private, RSUs were converted to cash bonuses at the sale price. Most likely option.
• JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
  Tesla engineers need to look at their own code, the app is a total nightmare. Try chatting with customer service on it sometime.
• antipaul 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Why would the code be relevant to generating more profit? It doesn’t seem like the domain of a CEO.
  • jiggawatts 4y ago
    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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Comparing Twitter to Tumblr is laughable. The same thing that happened to tumblr cannot happen to twitter.
    • borski 4y ago
      Why?
      • braingenious 4y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ym555 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ym555 This appears to be the only comment this account has ever made
        • themitigating 4y ago
          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".
          • ym555 4y ago
            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.
• lohii 4y ago
  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.
  • thepasswordis 4y ago
    Do you not think you could sit down with somebody and explain it?
  • Aeolun 4y ago
    New people regularly join our company and evaluate our code. Why do you think you couldn’t do that without joining?
    • closeparen 4y ago
      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 4y ago
      How long does it take them to be fully productive in the systems?
      • Aeolun 4y ago
        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).
  • alchemist1e9 4y ago
    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.
• ufmace 4y ago
  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.
  • SanjayMehta 4y ago
  • zzzeek 4y ago
    > 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.
    • cowtools 4y ago
      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.
• hindsightbias 4y ago
  So Twitter’s C++, Java and Scala will be redone in Tesla Python. This will be awesome.
• SanjayMehta 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    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.
• JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  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.
• tasty_freeze 4y ago
  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?
  • lgleason 4y ago
  • ttyprintk 4y ago
    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.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • asdffdsa 4y ago
    Exactly, more code isn't better
    • jacob019 4y ago
      Not only that, less code is better. The elegant and performant solution is the simple one, for example wireguard vs openvpn.
      • philliphaydon 4y ago
        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.
• dmak 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  • helf 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      What are your thoughts on EVs and SpaceX?
    • scaramanga 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        This reads off as really salty because of how you are trivializing it.
        • scaramanga 4y ago
          All I said was the guy bought the company then shafted the other guys he bought it off... Added a bit of colour for my own amusement :)
  • rootusrootus 4y ago
• sys_64738 4y ago
  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.
• ctvo 4y ago
  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.
  • ttyprintk 4y ago
    “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.”
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • cube00 4y ago
    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.
• dzink 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Maybe. But is all of this PR worth $44 billion?
    • la64710 4y ago
      Yes it is (to spoiled toddlers).
    • throwaway0asd 4y ago
      Yes, Twitter was the primary tool he used to inflate the market value of his properties and manipulate the market in his interest.
      • fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
        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.
      • BHSPitMonkey 4y ago
        But that was all possible without owning the company. Surely becoming its owner just invites added scrutiny and doubt?
    • colinmhayes 4y ago
      Musk's twitter presence have turned Tesla from a $100 billion cap company to a $700 billion one.
• scaramanga 4y ago
  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)
• tinyhouse 4y ago
  They are making people work all weekend on this shit. All in order to save Musk the Nov 1st vest money.
• Thaxll 4y ago
  How Tesla engineers are relevant into evaluating Twitter code.
  • tyingq 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    How is evaluating code relevant to evaluating the company?
    • qaq 4y ago
      Who to keep and who to let go, Tesla runs it's own large scale datacenters they might be evaluating shifting workloads to onprem
• robbywashere_ 4y ago
  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.
• snshn 4y ago
  Well, they must know a thing or two about bots, they're working on the AI for self-driving cars... makes sense to me.
• keyle 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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.
• fleddr 4y ago
  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.
  • inferiorhuman 4y ago
    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 https://twitter.com/caseynewton/status/1586127052767318016
    • kjksf 4y ago
      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
• nelox 4y ago
  Twitter will somehow benefit from Tesla FSD vaporware
• la64710 4y ago
  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.
• sbf501 4y ago
  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.
• ozzythecat 4y ago
  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?
  • theCrowing 4y ago
    Snakeoil salesmen were hugely successful.
    • groffee 4y ago
      Back in the day snake oil was actually beneficial. https://www.amusingplanet.com/2022/08/clark-stanley-first-snake-oil-salesman.html https://www.amusingplanet.com/2022/08/clark-stanley-first-sn...
    • liketochill 4y ago
      Are tesla and spaceX snake oil?
      • tmh88j 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        FSD sure feels like it is. I say this as one of the suckers who wasted my money on it.
  • themitigating 4y ago
    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.
• viburnum 4y ago
  The software in Tesla cars is terrible. Twitter actually works pretty well in comparison.
• black_13 4y ago
• MangoCoffee 4y ago
  "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-twitter-employees-trick-media-outlets/ https://nypost.com/2022/10/28/pranksters-posing-as-laid-off-...
• completelylegit 4y ago
  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.
  • jiggawatts 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      This take might have more credibility if Tesla weren't facing criminal charges for its failure to deliver autopilot.
      • nxm 4y ago
        Criminal? No one is going to jail for failure to deliver on a very difficult AI problem
        • thwayunion 4y ago
          > Criminal? Yes: https://www.reuters.com/legal/exclusive-tesla-faces-us-criminal-probe-over-self-driving-claims-sources-2022-10-26/ 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.
  • bamboozled 4y ago
    Look how well all of that ended...
  • rvba 4y ago
• iepathos 4y ago
  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?
• glitchc 4y ago
  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.
  • threeseed 4y ago
    Cult of personality. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates etc. were all a nightmare to work when they were younger.
    • DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
      Well-behaved men rarely make history.
      • Spivak 4y ago
        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.
        • hnfong 4y ago
          That's exactly what the establishment would say to the non-well-behaved person.
  • fastball 4y ago
    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=QMBXSYQUcelY_HoRsdNaSw https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1513301310434529288?s=20&t=Q...
  • bpodgursky 4y ago
    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.
• pwthornton 4y ago
  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.
  • walrus01 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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-asked-questions https://www.tesla.com/support/8gb-emmc-recall-frequently-ask...
    • super_linear 4y ago
      A decent article on this: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/flash-memory-wear-killing-older-teslas-due-to-excessive-data-logging-report 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 4y ago
      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.
• alerighi 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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 4y ago
• bagels 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    That’s probably the goal here. Elon is following the cult leader playbook. Make the followers do strange and humiliating rituals.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  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-intensive-applications/9781491903063/ 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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
  • bpodgursky 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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
      • 4y ago
• longrod 4y ago
  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.
  • ratsmack 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Tesla didn't buy Twitter, as far as we know though. Seems grossly inappropriate.
      • ratsmack 4y ago
        I can see where people that get a sense of entitlement, for whatever reason, would have a problem with it.
        • kalkin 4y ago
          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.
• mancerayder 4y ago
  Will the new bots be fully self-driving?
• bilbyx 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    I think FSD is a couple magnitudes more complex than Twitter
    • bilbyx 4y ago
      That's exactly my point. Get your own shit working before wasting time on another company's shit.
• bagels 4y ago
  Honestly, this seems like the second best time for twitter engineers to unionize. Best time would have been a couple weeks ago.
• e9 4y ago
  They are probably just trying to see if they should transfer some engineers to Tesla instead of firing them.
• xkcd1963 4y ago
  It's a text messaging platform (that needs to load like 50MB just to show you some 100 characters) ...
• shantanu77 4y ago
  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
  • georgeg23 4y ago
    Nailed the government connection. Mike is his handler for SpaceX, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
  • croes 4y ago
    >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.
    • oceanplexian 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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.
• johnnyAghands 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Why would $TSLA shareholders want to pay for a Twitter code-review?
      • biztos 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        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 4y ago
    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.
    • 4y ago
• willnonya 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  How quickly could a Tesla engineer get up to speed on Twitter’s code in order to make any kind of useful conclusions?
• jiggawatts 4y ago
  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…
• cptaj 4y ago
  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.
• kweingar 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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?
  • KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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”)
    • NegativeK 4y ago
      "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 4y ago
        Elon fan brain is a debilitating condition
    • govg 4y ago
• cr4nberry 4y ago
  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
• xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
  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.
  • blindriver 4y ago
    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.
    • kalabilla 4y ago
      Private companies have stocks. They are just on traded on exchange
      • djbusby 4y ago
        I think you have a typo.
        • shapefrog 4y ago
          The technical term is stonks
        • jzl 4y ago
          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.
      • blindriver 4y ago
        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.
• chrismarlow9 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    [deleted]
• yalogin 4y ago
  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.
  • bamboozled 4y ago
    Agreed, it feels like a severely degrading and unnecessarily hostile act.
    • catmanjan 4y ago
      In what way is it degrading to show your work?
      • bamboozled 4y ago
        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 ?
        • catmanjan 4y ago
          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 4y ago
            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.
• dqpb 4y ago
  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.
• Jotra7 4y ago
• dmingod666 4y ago
  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.
• tmsh 4y ago
  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.
• armatav 4y ago
  Thread is insane; he's checking to see who's doing actual work.
  • nxm 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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.
• seydor 4y ago
  Next up, twitter's engineers to evaluate Tesla's code
• dmode 4y ago
  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
• perfectstorm 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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?
    • hnfong 4y ago
      He bought the users. Not sure about the IP part.
  • guax 4y ago
    I bet there was nothing happening in the last 60 days that would demotivate people on twitter. All was well.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  >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 4y ago
    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.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  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-with-billionaire-halloween-party-in-transylvania-s-bran-castle-202451.html https://www.autoevolution.com/news/musk-celebrates-expansion...
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• shaburn 4y ago
  Tesla = Elon. Dont delude yourselves
• maxrev17 4y ago
  Kinda makes me sad. This is all so far from the Web 2.0 fun back in the day.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    • awestroke 4y ago
      You want them to provide a citation for their opinion?
• praptak 4y ago
  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.
  • uwuemu 4y ago
    • johneth 4y ago
      An impressively buzzword-laden, almost unhinged comment.
      • poorlyknit 4y ago
        GP is a great example of how HN is left-leaning and woke. /s
    • theduder99 4y ago
      well said. I also think this is about getting rid of all people who worked on those items.
  • concordDance 4y ago
    Isn't this kind of thing standard for takeovers?
    • guax 4y ago
      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.
• seu 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    All hail the great Khan. Elon Musk is singlehandedly saving democracy.
• ksec 4y ago
  Just a note for myself here, Interesting HN is showing 1210 comments in a single page. I think this is new.
• theGeatZhopa 4y ago
  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.
• davidtranjs 4y ago
  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.
• rejectfinite 4y ago
  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.
• sinuhe69 4y ago
  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.
• ThinkBeat 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
  Maybe Musk is planning something completely different with the Twitter tech. Intercar / Interplanetary communication? https://app.finclout.io/t/A3lkgnE https://app.finclout.io/t/A3lkgnE
• slapthatchild 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
• pavlov 4y ago
  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.
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    [deleted]
  • cudgy 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
• fredgrott 4y ago
  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.
• truchococookie 4y ago
  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.
• osigurdson 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
    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.
• askepticlist 4y ago
• geekraver 4y ago
  Phantom braking coming to Twitter?
• jzl 4y ago
  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.
• magwa101 4y ago
• 7e 4y ago
  Tesla code is pretty bad. If anything, a Twitter engineers should be evaluating Tesla staff.
• PeterStuer 4y ago
  I would guess it is not so much an indepth architecture review as it is a review on specific topics such as business rules implemented for content moderation and bot detection algorithms.
• tablespoon 4y ago
  Isn't there some violation of fiduciary duty here? IIRC, Musk personally bought Twitter, but he only owns 17% of Telsa. Isn't having Tesla engineers work on his personal project a lot like a middle manager assigning his subordinates to work on a personal side-gig project of his?
• sam_bristow 4y ago
  Tesla is a public company right? Why does it sound like Musk is directing resources from an unrelated business to do work on his personal investments.