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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 o
by 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 agoThis. Evaluation always starts at high level then you gradually get lower level until you draw line to delegate tasks.
- shaburn 4y agoPlaying the players not the cards for sure. Silly to think they'd try to weight the code.
- eshch 4y agoWell, if only Tesla was an example for others in that.
- bertil 4y agoI 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.
- sushid 4y agoI'm pretty sure Twitter software engineers are considered more elite than Tesla engineers in the Valley.
- londons_explore 4y agoThey're different... Twitter software engineers get very high pay to do dull work, whereas Tesla engineers get actually impactful work, but very demanding working hours and low pay. Of the engineers I've met, I'd put the Tesla ones as 'smarter'.
- sushid 4y agoThis is strictly re: software engineers but I don't think that's true IMO. Put another way, I think the average recruiter/co-founder/EM would be more interested in hiring an ex-Twitter engineer vs an ex-Tesla engineer.
- netjiro 4y agoI know zero about twitter, but I have inspected plenty of organisations where strong engineering teams are drowned by management bullshit. even found places where most of the individuals, engineering and management both, are arguably competent but the overall organisational decreptitude kills any and all effective work, no matter how heroic or skilled the individual and collective effort gets.
- ramblerman 4y agoWhy is that. At first glance the tesla engineering problems seem far more complex no? I get twitter has some issues of scale to solve, but its tweets, even netflix would be far more challenging imo.
- freejazz 4y agoIt's PR to make Elon seem like he's a tough guy. "Let that sink in."