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> 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 troub

• deleted 4y ago
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• _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
      • ryandrake 4y ago
        I suspect that anyone who says No to Elon or outwardly disagrees with him doesn’t last long in leadership at his companies.
    • justinhj 4y ago
      Then maybe he’s always right. As chief engineer at Space X for example, if he was an idiot or surrounded by idiots do you really think he would be succeeding?
      • giantrobot 4y ago
        > As chief engineer at Space X If that line itself isn't enough to tell you he's full of shit you have hopelessly fallen for the myth of his Tony Stark-like brilliance. Do you honestly think he contributes any meaningful engineering work at SpaceX? If he didn't own SpaceX, what about his history suggests he could even be an engineering intern there?
        • georgeg23 4y ago
          Mike Griffin was the real chief engineer at SpaceX... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
          • kjksf 4y ago
            They guy didn't even work at SpaceX. Please explain how it's possible to be chief engineer at SpaceX without even working there.
            • georgeg23 4y ago
              Read his career history and do a little digging. Mike was the government side of Elon's circus.
        • thepasswordis 4y ago
          Yes? Many, many people who don’t work for musk or have a financial interest in him being competent have said in interviews that he has a deep engineering understanding of the rockets and especially their engines.
          • 4y ago
    • coffeeblack 4y ago
      I guarantee you he isn’t.
  • uni_rule 4y ago
  • tootie 4y ago
    I think that's all besides the point. Does anyone think any of Twitter's problems are related to code quality? Literally go read the unit test suite and you'll what it does and if it works. If he just wants to cut heads, cut them from verticals you want to exit (whatever they might be). What the hell could he possibly achieve with this stunt? It feels more like the old cliche about your first day at prison where you should pick the toughest guy and beat him up to establish dominance.
• llamaLord 4y ago
  14 months ago a lot of people said it was “laughable” that Tesla thought they’d have a working prototype of a humanoid robot in under a year… I’ll take Tesla engineer’s over 95% of the industry any day.
  • heavenlyblue 4y ago
    Is it as working as their FSD?
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  • dragontamer 4y ago
    No. Most of us correctly noted that no matter how much effort Tesla puts into Optimus, it won't be as good as Honda's Asimo demo for years. Let alone Boston Dynamic's demos. Or Disney's stunt robot. ------- So we're mostly laughing at the wasted effort. Of course it's possible, other companies made humanoid walking robots like 20 years ago. The other questions, like how to actually make money from them, remain unanswered.
    • cbeach 4y ago
      The differentiator with Tesla’s bot is not in the way it walks, but the way it learns and “thinks” - Tesla engineers are building Artificial General Intelligence into their bot: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intellige... In a few years I think even the general public will be able to understand the difference between Asimo and Optimus. It will be remarkable to see Optimus performing tasks independently. Update: it’s fair to be skeptical, but bear in mind the concept of a desirable EV was an “I’ll believe it when I see it” until Musk’s sheer force of willpower made it happen. He delivers later than he promises, but he does tend to deliver.
      • cochne 4y ago
        That claim has about as much behind it as all of the full self driving claims.
• timcavel 4y ago
  The primary reason enterprise distributed systems software are complicated is that most code is hidden behind teams of teams of teams of hundreds of mediocre people, not inherent complexity.
  • Aeolun 4y ago
    Heh, I’m still fairly confident that our 100 man software project would proceed much faster if the team was cut down to the best 6 people.
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• TigeriusKirk 4y ago
  At the moment, my default position on all stories out of Twitter is that they didn't happen unless confirmed officially by Twitter. And the more nonsensical the story, the firmer that belief is for me.
  • uni_rule 4y ago
    Well it's not like Twitter will ever officially state: yeah they just walzted in here and did a bunch of moves that made absolutely zero sense, it was a shit show.
• the_doctah 4y ago
  What hubris to think that your system is so complex that other engineers couldn't understand it.
  • sidibe 4y ago
    The hubris is thinking Tesla engineers (who are offered worse pay and wlb relative to Twitter) are coding masters of every domain. I won't even snipe at their own software here. It takes a long time to onboard to a big mature infrastructure that is serving hundreds of millions of users for people moving from a similar company, even longer if your day job is whatever Tesla engineers are doing. And that's onboarding, not pretending to be an expert which seems to be the role they're taking on.
    • Nicksil 4y ago
      >The hubris is thinking Tesla engineers (who are offered worse pay and wlb relative to Twitter) are coding masters of every domain. I won't even snipe at their own software here. Who is thinking that?
      • hnfong 4y ago
        I think you think that the GP is thinking the Tesla engineers are thinking that :D
    • MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
      On one hand, you can usually safely ignore 99% of code in a system that does the plumbing in a system and focus on the few key algorithms. It wouldn't be a stretch at all to take one of the self driving AI guys and have them evaluate say, an ML classifier used to flag spam/abuse content. That would be well inside their domain.
      • johnbcoughlin 4y ago
        > That would be well inside their domain. Would it?
• hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Tesla engineers don't just work on in-vehicle code though. The servers and systems needed to implement Tesla's telemetry and software updates would be in the same ballpark of expertise, albeit with much less scale and different requirements than Twitter. But Musk got started by confounding x.com/PayPal, which does have very similar engineering needs as Twitter. It's not like Musk is a newbie to this stuff, people pretending that he's clueless in this domain just want to feel schadenfreude.
  • apavlo 4y ago
    > But Musk got started by confounding x.com/PayPal, which does have very similar engineering needs as Twitter. But PayPal was running Oracle on IBM bigiron machines even after Musk left them.
    • beachy 4y ago
      > But PayPal was running Oracle on IBM bigiron machines even after Musk left them. Oracle on IBM big iron is a pragmatic (but expensive) way to achieve a highly vertically scalable database platform. Not trendy at all but also not a bad technology position to be in, even now.
  • zerohp 4y ago
    All stories from the x.com/Paypal days say that he was entirely clueless during that time. The board removed him.
  • jjfoooo6 4y ago
    We've gotten quite a few public comments from Musk on what he plans to do with Twitter, and they indicate total cluelessness from a product and engineering point of view. There's nothing to indicate an appreciation for the unique challenges Twitter has in balancing free expression with appeal for advertisers (or even that these needs might be in conflict), or even on the subtleties in what free speech even means for Twitter. The acquisition seems motivated by politics and impulsiveness rather than any coherent vision for the product. A rocketing share heals a lot of wounds. His abusive management practices might fly at Tesla, or his vision oriented startups. There's ample room for doubt his tactics will get results on a turnaround job like Twitter.
• taf2 4y ago
  Isn’t twitter a pretty simple thing… db with writes and reads… it was maybe still is rails? I don’t know MySQL , Pgsql have come a long way and most of the hard parts would be scaling these services…. Keeping good caches in memory with redis or memcached… not really sure I see twitter being all that crazy other then it being so many people and so many years of edge case handling they would be hard for an outsider to follow … but it’s not like it was handling a complex UI or enterprise style hacks for a handful of worth it customers… Would be really interesting to see the code base for sure and definitely exciting to modify a code base handling so much traffic… not sure I can recall a fail whale in many years so maybe they did something right or maybe fearing the whale set the large organization into stone code fear Contrast that with Tesla and ever car is requesting data from Tesla servers and many many different complex interactions with much more complex engineering to accomplish a task and id imagine the Tesla engineering to be pretty impressive… but who knows it probably does not handle the same amount of read or write traffic…
  • x86x87 4y ago
    Hahaha. No. They switched to the JVM eons ago. Also, you are severely underestimating how difficult it is to build and run something like twitter at scale.
  • ikiris 4y ago
    "It's just a simple matter of programming"
    • birken 4y ago
      Tesla has millions of cars in service and Twitter has millions of users. Same level of complexity!
  • jvm___ 4y ago
    Twitter is just a ticket booth. Had over request, get tickets back. Except the ticket booth is in the middle of Times Square in New York and it needs to serve millions of people per second and be instantly accessible around the globe. The complexity is in the infrastructure, not in the complexity of what they're serving.
• recuter 4y ago
  > Distributed systems, the large-scale and spread-out network that Twitter is composed of, are not the automaker’s specialty, the person said. You can giggle along with the anonymous source who wasn't involved if you wish but Tesla collects a rather large amount of telemetry and has all manner of micro services crap internally just like Twitter. I imagine the Twitter codebase itself is a farcical Rube Goldberg machine. Insert your own how many engineers does it take to change lightbulb jokes. As part of that process, some engineers received a calendar invite Friday, telling them: “Stop printing, please be ready to show your recent code,” a reference to engineers being asked to show the code they had written in the last 30 to 60 days on their computers. Sounds like he knows exactly what he is doing. I'd do just that. For an unfathomable amount of the people working at twitter the answer will be zero lines of code.
  • the_sleaze_ 4y ago
    > the answer will be zero lines of code. Ugh, I bet you're exactly right..
  • CogitoCogito 4y ago
    > I imagine the Twitter codebase itself is a farcical Rube Goldberg machine. I'd presume Tesla's codebase is exactly the same.
    • recuter 4y ago
      Absolutely correct. :)
  • thepasswordis 4y ago
    > For an unfathomable amount of the people working at twitter the answer will be zero lines of code. And what’s the average salary of these people? $15k/mo? $20k/mo?
  • throwup 4y ago
    > For an unfathomable amount of the people working at twitter the answer will be zero lines of code. True, but an accusatory calendar invite still isn't a good way to do this. He could find out himself from the commit history/JIRA tickets, with the additional benefit of not putting people on the defensive and making a poor first impression. Then again, relationship building isn't really his style, so this doesn't surprise me.
• Aeolun 4y ago
  What a weird thing to say. I can evaluate any code. If it’s code I’m unfamiliar with it takes longer, and the result is more variable, but it’s far from impossible. It’s certainly more reliable than the evaluation of the person whose job depends on it being evaluated as correct.
  • uoaei 4y ago
    • dmak 4y ago
      You don't have to evaluate other peoples code or something?
  • jensgk 4y ago
    Off course you can have an opinion about any code. It will just not always be correct.
  • SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    > If it’s code I’m unfamiliar with it takes longer, and the result is more variable, but it’s far from impossible. Yeah, I'm sure it's of value to have Tesla engineers come in and spend the 3 months to a year getting enough context with the code base to be be able to produce useful and informed critiques.
  • ctvo 4y ago
    Given 24-48 hours in a gigantic tech company’s code base made up of dozens of teams and hundreds (thousands?) of logical services? No, I couldn’t tell you the “quality” of the code. Someone who doesn’t understand engineering at that scale would presume it’s the structure of the if statements. And sure, if that’s what you’re looking for, print out some lines and let a person lacking all context take a look.
    • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > Given 24-48 hours in a gigantic tech company’s code base made up of dozens of teams and hundreds (thousands?) of logical services? No, I couldn’t tell you the “quality” of the code. You could probably call out the bullshitters, though. They aren't refactoring the code base.
• tootie 4y ago
  Did they bring the experts in autonomous vehicles?
• jahewson 4y ago
  In fairness there’s plenty of Tesla engineers that used to work across the bay at Twitter.
• Taniwha 4y ago
  It makes sense because twitter is mostly written in scala and Tesla's engineers are scala experts right? ..... right?
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• oittaa 4y ago