7 ms·

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 com

by 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.

deleted 4y ago
[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.
  - cudgy 4y ago
    Elon has only been there for 24 hours. It sounds like your not a fan of Elon and nothing he’ll do can change your opinion. Why not hold back the strong judgements and conclusions for at least a few months? Maybe he will surprise you?
    - Jotra7 4y ago
    - pavlov 4y ago
      See, this is where a car and a social network are fundamentally different. I own a Tesla. It’s a good car (although I’m unhappy about how much I paid for the FSD package which was nothing of the sort — borderline advertising fraud). Next year I’m probably buying another car, and if Tesla is still the best for the money, I’ll get one regardless of my personal feelings. But with Twitter it’s not an objective decision. The app doesn’t deliver quantifiable day-to-day value like a car does. Now that I’ve removed Twitter from my life, it’s very unlikely that I’d ever go back. MySpace did a lot of product changes in 2008 to bring back the users who had defected to FB. Nothing moved the needle. That’s just how it is with these products. I’m surprised Elon pretends to be oblivious to this dynamic. My 10-year experience with Twitter was one of frustration. I had almost 1,000 followers, I tweeted regularly, tried to be nice and occasionally witty, replied and retweeted mostly useful stuff. Yet I never got any engagement. A few likes on a tweet was the upper limit of interest. Every other social media platform is much better at rewarding regular users like me. But Musk doesn’t seem to want to address this; instead he wants to bring back Trump. Why should I stay?
      - cudgy 4y ago
        Hard for me to say. What type of reward are you expecting to get out of Twitter or social media in general? Maybe you are expecting too much or the wrong types of rewards?
        pavlov 4y ago
- sangnoir 4y ago
  > Given the activist mentality (and possibly hostile to new ownership) of a certain number of developers, it seems perhaps prudent to analyze the code and evaluate the existing developers immediately upon purchase of the company. Checking the code doesn't make sense, unless you think Twitter is some rinky-dink outfit[1]. If they want to inspect foe activism, they should check the configurations - not code. The engineers only add the knobs and dashboards[1], an entirely different team takes care of operations. 1. Based on what I've gleaned from similar-sized tech companies, or even those 2 orders of magnitude smaller.
- eshch 4y ago
  Musk has bought Twitter out of activism and is possibly hostile to a certain number of employees.
trashtester 4y ago
My guess is that at least part of the reason to bring in these devs, is to make sure none of the code or git histories (or their backups) are tampered with.
- mousetree 4y ago
  Why would they be tampering with code and git histories?
  - qull 4y ago
    Many twitter staffers seem willing and motivated to sabatouge the new owner over purely political issues. A few have even suggested it on their own twitter accounts. Elon is polarizing and that leads to both more challenges and more opprotunities.
    - pavlov 4y ago
      “Fifth column” paranoia is a hallmark of authoritarian leadership.
      - ForHackernews 4y ago
        A corporation is not a democracy. Most CEOs are are unitary authoritarian leaders within their own companies.
        gtowey 4y ago
        There's a big difference in this case between a position of authority and an authoritarian leader. Typically most people would regard good leaders as people you follow because they inspire confidence, you feel like you can trust them, and that your efforts will be rewarded. Authoritarian leaders on the other hand are typically those who use their ability to punish people to force compliance. While the owner of a private company doesn't need the approval of their employees to make decisions I would never work for someone who uses threats and doesn't explain the rationale behind their decisions.
aliqot 4y ago
> drive fear at Twitter Auditing what you just bought is about as smart as taking the used car you just bought to the shop to get everything checked over and tightened and lubricated.
- manuelabeledo 4y ago
  Right. But smart people would take a mechanic with them before buying the car. A meaningful audit at Twitter would take months. This is but a stunt.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - aliswe 4y ago
    Would you really show your source code before purchase?
    - Moto7451 4y ago
      That’s precisely how acquisitions at my current and past company worked. Everyone signs NDAs, there’s a fee paid by the purchaser for the time should they decline the deal, and the audit commences. I’ve been asked to do the evaluation a few times and it’s pretty straightforward. Even if you think the code is of poor quality, it may still make sense to complete the purchase because of the business case.
      - dmak 4y ago
        Not necessarily. It depends on the company acquiring. I've seen M&As focus solely on the relationships (ex, customers), so the tech DD was just checkboxes without deep dives.
        Moto7451 4y ago
        Not necessarily… what? This is my actual professional experience. I’m sure people just buy things without any due diligence somewhere but I have never seen it. In one case my judgement was that the customer list was all that there was of value. They opted to not buy that company.
bertil 4y ago
I suspect it’s less a complete review and more an interview of the senior technical manager, to get a sense of whether they are up to par. Do they think about observability, alerting, refactoring, service architecture, etc. reasonably well? Are there issues with how they motivate their teams or when they give them responsibilities? Are timelines challenging but doable? “Code” is most likely “architecture” and “architecture” is code for “management”.
- dmak 4y ago
  This. Evaluation always starts at high level then you gradually get lower level until you draw line to delegate tasks.
- shaburn 4y ago
  Playing the players not the cards for sure. Silly to think they'd try to weight the code.
- eshch 4y ago
  Well, if only Tesla was an example for others in that.
  - bertil 4y ago
    I think it’s less about strictly better talent and more about trust and familiarity. Musk trusts Tesla software engineers to tell him what is good, what is better than Tesla, and what is concerning. I’m not a software engineer (data scientist) and I’ve only managed up to 15 people, but if a friend who worked in a factory asks me to review a CTO of a team of 50, I feel confident I can say “Asking people to write their own unit tests isn’t abuse of power” and “Asking people to be behind their desk at 9 am or risk pay cut would not fly anywhere else” — things that he might not have the context to know. Sure, there might be a new paradigm that I’m not familiar with where devs don’t write unit tests, but I’m fairly confident if I hear about that, I can ask questions and see why it’s more efficient. A really good (reverse) example of that is James Douma. Several Tesla commentators rely on him to comment on Tesla’s AI announcements. He doesn’t work at Tesla and confesses that he might not be able to lead the AI team there, but he’s personable, clear, and familiar enough with ML to offer some judgment on why things are done in a certain way. He’s usually very positive but he could easily be asked which teams don’t seem to be executing as well, and what questions to prod them.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
_fat_santa 4y ago
My guess is this would be a very high level look at their architecture and maybe a closer look as some specific portions. Like you said these systems are so complex that you wouldn't be able to figure out what is even happening in a day. I don't agree that it's to drive feat at Twitter, as just about any engineer will know what I just said. What I think it's about is driving the headlines, "Tesla engineers are doing a code review at twitter" sounds very important to the lay person.
- jzl 4y ago
  Twitter has been publishing about their architecture and all the updates to it for years and years, and given countless presentations on it. https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/ https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/
la64710 4y ago
Hahahaa https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428775/twitter-fake-employee-layoff-rahul-ligma-elon-musk https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428775/twitter-fake-em...
lumost 4y ago
I utterly fail to understand how this would yield anything other than. Ooh they use tabs here rather than spaces! And that experimental code over there contains an unused variable! This A/B testing pipeline has minimal test cases! They ship in a day without a Q/A pipeline. All of the above would happen if any company were acquired by any other. The code style will be different, and the dev practices will be different. Companies optimized to ship quickly will appear low quality to those who optimize for quality, optimizing for quality will appear as a slow moving dinosaur to those who move fast.
- Nomentatus 4y ago
  But if you're part of a fast-shipping culture, your habits are a problem. FWIW, also I'd add to your list telemetry such as asserts, and concision and documentation.
  - lumost 4y ago
    Why? One of the production goals of software is to minimize inventory time. Software that is written and not shipped incurs capex without revenue, unlike tech debt - I can put an explicit number on this cost. Similarly, software that goes unshipped also does not get customer feedback. It may be worthless. There’s a balance here - but it’s not at all obvious what the balance should be in every business.
    - Nomentatus 4y ago
      You're right, every business is different, and that goes for software businesses, too. I'm thinking that Twitter's central position re the dissemination of information, and its international scope make it a fairly high security operation, in this day and age, whether it wants to be or not.

by pavlov 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[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.
- cudgy 4y ago
  Elon has only been there for 24 hours. It sounds like your not a fan of Elon and nothing he’ll do can change your opinion. Why not hold back the strong judgements and conclusions for at least a few months? Maybe he will surprise you?
  - Jotra7 4y ago
  - pavlov 4y ago
    See, this is where a car and a social network are fundamentally different. I own a Tesla. It’s a good car (although I’m unhappy about how much I paid for the FSD package which was nothing of the sort — borderline advertising fraud). Next year I’m probably buying another car, and if Tesla is still the best for the money, I’ll get one regardless of my personal feelings. But with Twitter it’s not an objective decision. The app doesn’t deliver quantifiable day-to-day value like a car does. Now that I’ve removed Twitter from my life, it’s very unlikely that I’d ever go back. MySpace did a lot of product changes in 2008 to bring back the users who had defected to FB. Nothing moved the needle. That’s just how it is with these products. I’m surprised Elon pretends to be oblivious to this dynamic. My 10-year experience with Twitter was one of frustration. I had almost 1,000 followers, I tweeted regularly, tried to be nice and occasionally witty, replied and retweeted mostly useful stuff. Yet I never got any engagement. A few likes on a tweet was the upper limit of interest. Every other social media platform is much better at rewarding regular users like me. But Musk doesn’t seem to want to address this; instead he wants to bring back Trump. Why should I stay?
    - cudgy 4y ago
      Hard for me to say. What type of reward are you expecting to get out of Twitter or social media in general? Maybe you are expecting too much or the wrong types of rewards?
      - pavlov 4y ago
sangnoir 4y ago
> Given the activist mentality (and possibly hostile to new ownership) of a certain number of developers, it seems perhaps prudent to analyze the code and evaluate the existing developers immediately upon purchase of the company. Checking the code doesn't make sense, unless you think Twitter is some rinky-dink outfit[1]. If they want to inspect foe activism, they should check the configurations - not code. The engineers only add the knobs and dashboards[1], an entirely different team takes care of operations. 1. Based on what I've gleaned from similar-sized tech companies, or even those 2 orders of magnitude smaller.
eshch 4y ago
Musk has bought Twitter out of activism and is possibly hostile to a certain number of employees.

trashtester 4y ago

My guess is that at least part of the reason to bring in these devs, is to make sure none of the code or git histories (or their backups) are tampered with.

mousetree 4y ago
Why would they be tampering with code and git histories?
- qull 4y ago
  Many twitter staffers seem willing and motivated to sabatouge the new owner over purely political issues. A few have even suggested it on their own twitter accounts. Elon is polarizing and that leads to both more challenges and more opprotunities.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    “Fifth column” paranoia is a hallmark of authoritarian leadership.
    - ForHackernews 4y ago
      A corporation is not a democracy. Most CEOs are are unitary authoritarian leaders within their own companies.
      - gtowey 4y ago
        There's a big difference in this case between a position of authority and an authoritarian leader. Typically most people would regard good leaders as people you follow because they inspire confidence, you feel like you can trust them, and that your efforts will be rewarded. Authoritarian leaders on the other hand are typically those who use their ability to punish people to force compliance. While the owner of a private company doesn't need the approval of their employees to make decisions I would never work for someone who uses threats and doesn't explain the rationale behind their decisions.

aliqot 4y ago

> drive fear at Twitter Auditing what you just bought is about as smart as taking the used car you just bought to the shop to get everything checked over and tightened and lubricated.

manuelabeledo 4y ago
Right. But smart people would take a mechanic with them before buying the car. A meaningful audit at Twitter would take months. This is but a stunt.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- aliswe 4y ago
  Would you really show your source code before purchase?
  - Moto7451 4y ago
    That’s precisely how acquisitions at my current and past company worked. Everyone signs NDAs, there’s a fee paid by the purchaser for the time should they decline the deal, and the audit commences. I’ve been asked to do the evaluation a few times and it’s pretty straightforward. Even if you think the code is of poor quality, it may still make sense to complete the purchase because of the business case.
    - dmak 4y ago
      Not necessarily. It depends on the company acquiring. I've seen M&As focus solely on the relationships (ex, customers), so the tech DD was just checkboxes without deep dives.
      - Moto7451 4y ago
        Not necessarily… what? This is my actual professional experience. I’m sure people just buy things without any due diligence somewhere but I have never seen it. In one case my judgement was that the customer list was all that there was of value. They opted to not buy that company.

bertil 4y ago

I suspect it’s less a complete review and more an interview of the senior technical manager, to get a sense of whether they are up to par. Do they think about observability, alerting, refactoring, service architecture, etc. reasonably well? Are there issues with how they motivate their teams or when they give them responsibilities? Are timelines challenging but doable? “Code” is most likely “architecture” and “architecture” is code for “management”.

dmak 4y ago
This. Evaluation always starts at high level then you gradually get lower level until you draw line to delegate tasks.
shaburn 4y ago
Playing the players not the cards for sure. Silly to think they'd try to weight the code.
eshch 4y ago
Well, if only Tesla was an example for others in that.
- bertil 4y ago
  I think it’s less about strictly better talent and more about trust and familiarity. Musk trusts Tesla software engineers to tell him what is good, what is better than Tesla, and what is concerning. I’m not a software engineer (data scientist) and I’ve only managed up to 15 people, but if a friend who worked in a factory asks me to review a CTO of a team of 50, I feel confident I can say “Asking people to write their own unit tests isn’t abuse of power” and “Asking people to be behind their desk at 9 am or risk pay cut would not fly anywhere else” — things that he might not have the context to know. Sure, there might be a new paradigm that I’m not familiar with where devs don’t write unit tests, but I’m fairly confident if I hear about that, I can ask questions and see why it’s more efficient. A really good (reverse) example of that is James Douma. Several Tesla commentators rely on him to comment on Tesla’s AI announcements. He doesn’t work at Tesla and confesses that he might not be able to lead the AI team there, but he’s personable, clear, and familiar enough with ML to offer some judgment on why things are done in a certain way. He’s usually very positive but he could easily be asked which teams don’t seem to be executing as well, and what questions to prod them.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

_fat_santa 4y ago

My guess is this would be a very high level look at their architecture and maybe a closer look as some specific portions. Like you said these systems are so complex that you wouldn't be able to figure out what is even happening in a day. I don't agree that it's to drive feat at Twitter, as just about any engineer will know what I just said. What I think it's about is driving the headlines, "Tesla engineers are doing a code review at twitter" sounds very important to the lay person.

jzl 4y ago
Twitter has been publishing about their architecture and all the updates to it for years and years, and given countless presentations on it. https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/ https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/

la64710 4y ago

Hahahaa https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428775/twitter-fake-employee-layoff-rahul-ligma-elon-musk https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428775/twitter-fake-em...

lumost 4y ago

I utterly fail to understand how this would yield anything other than. Ooh they use tabs here rather than spaces! And that experimental code over there contains an unused variable! This A/B testing pipeline has minimal test cases! They ship in a day without a Q/A pipeline. All of the above would happen if any company were acquired by any other. The code style will be different, and the dev practices will be different. Companies optimized to ship quickly will appear low quality to those who optimize for quality, optimizing for quality will appear as a slow moving dinosaur to those who move fast.

Nomentatus 4y ago
But if you're part of a fast-shipping culture, your habits are a problem. FWIW, also I'd add to your list telemetry such as asserts, and concision and documentation.
- lumost 4y ago
  Why? One of the production goals of software is to minimize inventory time. Software that is written and not shipped incurs capex without revenue, unlike tech debt - I can put an explicit number on this cost. Similarly, software that goes unshipped also does not get customer feedback. It may be worthless. There’s a balance here - but it’s not at all obvious what the balance should be in every business.
  - Nomentatus 4y ago
    You're right, every business is different, and that goes for software businesses, too. I'm thinking that Twitter's central position re the dissemination of information, and its international scope make it a fairly high security operation, in this day and age, whether it wants to be or not.