5 ms·

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 valuab

by 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
  - jquery 4y ago
    You know what else is below most CEOs? Tweeting poop emojis when given a rundown on why his arguments are specious. Elon is a mixed bag. He’s reminds me of a living Steve Jobs, in a way. People sometimes forget he’s human like the rest of us.
  - inferiorhuman 4y ago
    Counterpoint: what other CEO would be involved in low level stuff like looking at code or personally interviewing newly acquired employees? None, because that's not the role of the CEO.
lgleason 4y ago
Number of PR's means very little with overall productivity. It's a vanity metric.
- Forge36 4y ago
  100% I made 400 last year. It was two fixes across many files owned by many different teams. Ideally it would have been two. Sometimes playing the politics game is required.
  - spullara 4y ago
    To be fair Twitter has a monorepo.
    - threeseed 4y ago
      Mostly. Many of their foundational components e.g. Finagle are open sourced and in separate repos. https://github.com/orgs/twitter/repositories https://github.com/orgs/twitter/repositories
      - OmarAssadi 4y ago
        I haven’t seen much info regarding their setup, aside from the bits about Pants and Bazel. Are those actually the upstream repositories, though? And is it known how they interact with them? Google has Copybara [1], which allows portions of a monorepo to live outside as an entirely separate repository without the need for things like Git submodules. It supports synchronization of histories, pull requests, path and file transformations, etc. In that sense, something like Copybara would allow them to, relatively, easily open source those bits, receive outside commits, and then sync the changes back to the monorepo. [1]: <https://github.com/google/copybara https://github.com/google/copybara>
    - super_linear 4y ago
      (and so does Tesla)
- 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?
- themitigating 4y ago
  Imagine I said I could. Why would you believe me if you don't believe the Washington Post?
  - Cupertino95014 4y ago
    I don't know you, but that's a low bar. WaPo has zero standards of journalistic integrity anymore. They will print anything that draws clicks.
    - themitigating 4y ago
      Is that the case here? What's the probability that it is?
      - Cupertino95014 4y ago
        That what is?
        themitigating 4y ago
        Sorry, that the article is truthful
        Cupertino95014 4y ago
        don't know. OP made a general statement about WaPo, and my remark followed on that. It wasn't about any one article.
        4y ago
blackSnake 4y ago
The other part of it is Musk probably has good rapport with his engineers from Tesla. There's that trust vs. twitter engineers at the moment may be seen in the eyes of Musk as an unknown, undoubtedly everyone has their guard up because of all the uncertainty.
threeseed 4y ago
I think that is actually a terrible way to measure the qualities of an engineer. The most valuable engineers to me are the ones that can bring a thoughtful, elegant, well-implemented solution to a business problem. And typically that doesn't translate to lots of PRs, often is not appreciable from non-engineers and can not be easily judged in a few days. But their work almost always stands the test of time. Before hiring/firing people it would seem prudent to me to at least spend some time getting to know the dynamics in the team, the challenges facing them and then evaluate who deserves to be there or not. I really don't understand what the big rush is here.
- vasco 4y ago
  If I look at my company's gitlab statistics, the best engineers correlate with the top third of number of PRs not only in quality (perceived) but also in volume (number of open/merged PRs). I hear this a lot of the mythical top level engineer that thinks for 3 days and then bursts a small PR that changes the world, but I haven't seen it. Mostly because for good things to get pushed out in the real world, they are broken apart in several iterations, they will have extra PRs for terraform changes, new tests, new monitors, etc. And those engineers will not only do their core work but also clean up a bug here and there during the week, while mostly never getting stuck on any single change. Curious if you have actually seen the top engineers in your organizations somehow being on the bottom by volume of PRs, because in my experience the differences sometimes are easily 3-5x the volume of PRs. We do value small PRs and incremental changes that shouldn't take more than a day or less to develop before getting merged, so your mileage may vary if you let people create huge changes in one go (it has some disadvantages I personally don't like in terms of reliability)
  - jquery 4y ago
    How do you determine who are your best engineers? Is the number of PRs an input to this function ?
    - vasco 4y ago
      We have several criteria that we look at, including impact on the team and outside the team, expertise, etc, which includes feedback from peers. But after a few years (been here over 6), with the output of that process and correlating to the statistics I came to the conclusion it was significant enough to casually look at. I never found an outlier in the direction of very little PRs but also very good impact on the team/company. For the performance criteria that affects promotions etc we don't actually look at it, this is something I do because I like to see my own statistics and after a while you remember who is usually where in the sorted list.
greenthrow 4y ago
> How mang PRs? For a junior engineer sure this is probably a reasonable gauge of your productivity. As you become more and more senior number of PRs and LOCs becomes a worse and worse measurement. This is basic software engineeting. > What does the code do? How was it reviewed? What value does it bring to the stakeholders These things are impossible to accurately assess without a lot of context. Context which outside engineers are entirely lacking. If the accounts of what Musk is doing are an accurate reflection of his leadership -- and based on accounts we have heard from Tesla and Space X in the past it sounds like they are -- he is a terrible leader and his companies are successful despite that deficiency.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nr2x 4y ago
Or you can command a senior position somewhere else and you were interviewing and ready to bounce after vest.
xiphias2 4y ago
There’s one more thing: Elon uses interviews of people to learn about the code base / product. He surrounds himself with people who can answer the technical details, that’s why he knows so much. Galileo’s interview at SpaceX shows his thinking and way of working quite well.

by fleddr 4y ago

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
- jquery 4y ago
  You know what else is below most CEOs? Tweeting poop emojis when given a rundown on why his arguments are specious. Elon is a mixed bag. He’s reminds me of a living Steve Jobs, in a way. People sometimes forget he’s human like the rest of us.
- inferiorhuman 4y ago
  Counterpoint: what other CEO would be involved in low level stuff like looking at code or personally interviewing newly acquired employees? None, because that's not the role of the CEO.

lgleason 4y ago

Number of PR's means very little with overall productivity. It's a vanity metric.

Forge36 4y ago
100% I made 400 last year. It was two fixes across many files owned by many different teams. Ideally it would have been two. Sometimes playing the politics game is required.
- spullara 4y ago
  To be fair Twitter has a monorepo.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    Mostly. Many of their foundational components e.g. Finagle are open sourced and in separate repos. https://github.com/orgs/twitter/repositories https://github.com/orgs/twitter/repositories
    - OmarAssadi 4y ago
      I haven’t seen much info regarding their setup, aside from the bits about Pants and Bazel. Are those actually the upstream repositories, though? And is it known how they interact with them? Google has Copybara [1], which allows portions of a monorepo to live outside as an entirely separate repository without the need for things like Git submodules. It supports synchronization of histories, pull requests, path and file transformations, etc. In that sense, something like Copybara would allow them to, relatively, easily open source those bits, receive outside commits, and then sync the changes back to the monorepo. [1]: <https://github.com/google/copybara https://github.com/google/copybara>
  - super_linear 4y ago
    (and so does Tesla)
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?

themitigating 4y ago
Imagine I said I could. Why would you believe me if you don't believe the Washington Post?
- Cupertino95014 4y ago
  I don't know you, but that's a low bar. WaPo has zero standards of journalistic integrity anymore. They will print anything that draws clicks.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    Is that the case here? What's the probability that it is?
    - Cupertino95014 4y ago
      That what is?
      - themitigating 4y ago
        Sorry, that the article is truthful
        Cupertino95014 4y ago
        don't know. OP made a general statement about WaPo, and my remark followed on that. It wasn't about any one article.
        4y ago

blackSnake 4y ago

The other part of it is Musk probably has good rapport with his engineers from Tesla. There's that trust vs. twitter engineers at the moment may be seen in the eyes of Musk as an unknown, undoubtedly everyone has their guard up because of all the uncertainty.

threeseed 4y ago

I think that is actually a terrible way to measure the qualities of an engineer. The most valuable engineers to me are the ones that can bring a thoughtful, elegant, well-implemented solution to a business problem. And typically that doesn't translate to lots of PRs, often is not appreciable from non-engineers and can not be easily judged in a few days. But their work almost always stands the test of time. Before hiring/firing people it would seem prudent to me to at least spend some time getting to know the dynamics in the team, the challenges facing them and then evaluate who deserves to be there or not. I really don't understand what the big rush is here.

vasco 4y ago
If I look at my company's gitlab statistics, the best engineers correlate with the top third of number of PRs not only in quality (perceived) but also in volume (number of open/merged PRs). I hear this a lot of the mythical top level engineer that thinks for 3 days and then bursts a small PR that changes the world, but I haven't seen it. Mostly because for good things to get pushed out in the real world, they are broken apart in several iterations, they will have extra PRs for terraform changes, new tests, new monitors, etc. And those engineers will not only do their core work but also clean up a bug here and there during the week, while mostly never getting stuck on any single change. Curious if you have actually seen the top engineers in your organizations somehow being on the bottom by volume of PRs, because in my experience the differences sometimes are easily 3-5x the volume of PRs. We do value small PRs and incremental changes that shouldn't take more than a day or less to develop before getting merged, so your mileage may vary if you let people create huge changes in one go (it has some disadvantages I personally don't like in terms of reliability)
- jquery 4y ago
  How do you determine who are your best engineers? Is the number of PRs an input to this function ?
  - vasco 4y ago
    We have several criteria that we look at, including impact on the team and outside the team, expertise, etc, which includes feedback from peers. But after a few years (been here over 6), with the output of that process and correlating to the statistics I came to the conclusion it was significant enough to casually look at. I never found an outlier in the direction of very little PRs but also very good impact on the team/company. For the performance criteria that affects promotions etc we don't actually look at it, this is something I do because I like to see my own statistics and after a while you remember who is usually where in the sorted list.

greenthrow 4y ago

> How mang PRs? For a junior engineer sure this is probably a reasonable gauge of your productivity. As you become more and more senior number of PRs and LOCs becomes a worse and worse measurement. This is basic software engineeting. > What does the code do? How was it reviewed? What value does it bring to the stakeholders These things are impossible to accurately assess without a lot of context. Context which outside engineers are entirely lacking. If the accounts of what Musk is doing are an accurate reflection of his leadership -- and based on accounts we have heard from Tesla and Space X in the past it sounds like they are -- he is a terrible leader and his companies are successful despite that deficiency.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nr2x 4y ago

Or you can command a senior position somewhere else and you were interviewing and ready to bounce after vest.

xiphias2 4y ago

There’s one more thing: Elon uses interviews of people to learn about the code base / product. He surrounds himself with people who can answer the technical details, that’s why he knows so much. Galileo’s interview at SpaceX shows his thinking and way of working quite well.