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Tesla devs at Twitter misunderstand Slack privacy; leak fire lists based on LOC
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
- moistly 4y ago> and now he can do what he wants Honest to gods I do not understand how you can think like this. Elon is not a medieval King. He can not just do what he wants. There are laws. Elon isn’t operating in a full-on cartel environment quite yet.
- dereg 4y agoIs it possible to have this discussion without calling him a grifter and con man? Why have people decided that it’s okay to bring the Twitter-style tone of discussion to HN?
- loceng 4y agoNot for the ideological mob lacking emotional regulation and self-control. Edit to add: I see I triggered some of that mob.
- undoware 4y ago..nor the ideological mob lacking basic human empathy or prosocial scruple
- kaidon 4y agoNo. It is important to understand the foundation from which all these decisions originate.
- loceng 4y ago
- jimmywetnips 4y agoI love hn
- loceng 4y agoIt could do without the downvotes so lazy people don't get a dopamine hit reward by simply clicking a down arrow to suppress conversation, without adding anything to it - nor proving they deserve that power to downvote a specific comment.
- acoustics 4y agoIt is fair to call Elon Musk a grifter. I’d invite you to take a look at the what he has promised with Hyperloop. Just from an engineering perspective, his plans are completely infeasible. He sold the public (including governments) on fancy sci-fi renderings.
- loceng 4y agoIsn't the issue here that you're putting such a weight or strong conviction on Elon as any promises he makes are gospel, the problem is you're putting him on a pedestal and under unreasonable expectations? And I'm familiar with the Hyperloop: an almost vacuum tube system [vehicle on a skate that accelerates] that can travel up to 1,223 kmph. You're aware of Tesla and his success with SpaceX, that he's an engineer, and that they put out a 30+ page white paper on the Hyperloop outlining their math - and I'd trust math by a team who's running SpaceX, no? So what specific claim and logic can you put forward that outweighs the proven expertise/competency of Elon, SpaceX et al? Anything? Or you just simplify things down to "grifter" and/or "conman" and that's satisfying enough for you?
- samstave 4y agomost successful conman in hist
- kweingar 4y agoWhy is that important to remember? I rarely see this sentiment when it’s anybody else under discussion. When articles about outrageous corporate behavior are shared on here, I never see “well if this is what the shareholders want, they own the business, so it’s their right.” You have ethical responsibilities that extend beyond the bare bones of legal obligation. I’m not just going to shrug when someone messes with thousands of livelihoods just because legally it’s their right to do it.
- gjsman-1000 4y agoWhat if those employees have gained the hatred of well over half the nation; and set up a system where they can do nothing but drink wine and attend yoga classes for half the day? This is a long-awaited reckoning.
- emptyparadise 4y agoI mean of course those tik toks will show them drinking wine and attending yoga because showing actual work would violate their employment rules? There's a lot of bad takes floating around, but "Twitter employees deserve it" is really unfair.
- kweingar 4y agoI applaud you for being honest in a way that many commenters aren’t: you are just happy to see people you don’t like being punished. People have been embarrassing themselves trying not to directly say this (“actually making engineers print out their code changes on paper is good management”, etc.)
- gjsman-1000 4y agoIf you take a look at Twitter’s employee lifestyle before Elon took over, it is not that I do not like them. They had, quite literally, objectively, built a system where they could do almost nothing, their platform didn’t need to innovate in any way and could continue losing money indefinitely, and they could (as stated) drink wine and do yoga all day. In which case, they had it coming. Sorry, not sorry. You can’t continue losing money and handing out unlimited wine forever at the bar. Cry me a river when that inevitably had to end. Any Twitter employee should have been able to figure out that a business can’t have crazy perks, almost no new features, declining market share, and constant financial losses, without something having to give.
- dannyw 4y agoFiring based on LOC is stupid, but I don't understand this comment: > Elon’s engineers were given instructions to follow: they did. It’s how Elon’s companies are operate apparently. Maybe I've worked different comments to everyone else, but if I was told by my boss to do something like deactivate X, change something to Y, or in this case, fire X% of people, do people really expect employees to not follow it?
- splitbrain 4y agoWell, if I'd tell my employees to do something stupid, I'd expect them to tell me why it's a stupid idea. But I also wouldn't fire them for talking back to me...
- delecti 4y agoDefinitely. And likewise, if my manager told me to do something I thought was stupid, I'd feel totally comfortable telling him (politely of course) why I thought it was a bad idea. Either I know something he doesn't, or he knows something I don't, but either way we want to not do dumb things.
- cratermoon 4y agoWhat if the employee knows the action, or results, violate the law? What if the employee is part of an important community or organization in the field that has ethical standards that would be violated and result in the employee's ejection from that community? There are many reasons why in many engineering fields there's a licensing process and exam, but one of the most important ones, from the employee's perspective, is being able to say "No, I can't do that, I would lose my license".
- majewsky 4y agoHence also why it's frankly ridiculous when developers refer to themselves as "engineers".
- cratermoon 4y ago
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- datalopers 4y agoMy most productive days are when I delete code. Do you think they calculated absolute values, or would I be at the bottom with -50,000 LOC?
- deegles 4y agoWrite code? Fired. Refactor code? Fired. Delete code? Believe it or not, fired!
- dymk 4y agoI'd be pushing for your bonus if you were on my team and had -50,000 LOC contributed
- alias_neo 4y agoIt's also the best part of software engineering. The only thing I love more than deleting other people's code is deleting my own code.
- mas-ev 4y agoDeleting 50k lines of code still counts as lines of code changed...
- brookst 4y agoSo they created selection pressure to maximize LOC created? Intentionally? I can just see the remaining devs frantically running everything through code obfuscation tools. Double the size of everything! That’ll look great!
- KMnO4 4y agoGuess I’ll just add a couple NPM packages. Easy 6k LOC.
- luckylion 4y agoFrom what I understand, they used some past period's (-30 days to -60 days?) results so that people could not optimize for the stated goal. They might in the future, if they believe that remains the number 1 metric, but who knows.
- brookst 4y agoWell, if you were one of the survivors there today, how would you be thinking about LOC?
- luckylion 4y agoI'd ignore it unless it was given out as an official metric of success. People would optimize for it, making it useless as an indicator, and I'm pretty sure Musk and his team are smart enough to have considered that.
- encryptluks2 4y agoIf this is true.. then all those people that were let go now have a lot more ammo to use in court. Basically they publicly discussed their termination strategy of making up reasons to fire people.
- gjsman-1000 4y agoUh… no? They are at-will employees. Their employer can fire them for any reason as long as it is not for an illegal reason. Firing even 100% of your employees, just because you “don’t like their vibe”, is not illegal. Just make sure they get their required notice and wages depending on company size before firing. If anything, the leaked public discussions provide proof that employees weren’t fired for an illegal reason.
- emptyparadise 4y agoThe mental image of Elon Musk firing 100% of Twitter employees is quite funny. Well, if you ignore the fact that 7000+ people would suffer.
- encryptluks2 4y agoYou're forgetting his previous statements that employees wouldn't be fired without good cause. Also, his reasons stated publicly are different than what is being said in the chat logs. This is both a breach of implied contract and implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing that can be argued.
- lawn 4y ago> Firing even 100% of your employees, just because you “don’t like their vibe”, is not illegal. In some (many?) countries it is in fact illegal.
- laichzeit0 4y agoIf they weren’t being measured on LOC before, it might be a decent metric, since they wouldn’t have been trying to “game” it. Now I know as well as anyone that LOC is mostly bullshit, but I also know a lot of developers who slack off. For example, if John Carmack was at Twitter, I highly doubt he’d be anywhere near the firing line.
- PuppyTailWags 4y agotbh I wouldn't be surprised an engineer with the technical scope, prowess, and responsibilities of John Carmack is bottom 50% of actual LOC. His behaviors would actually be in boosting the LOC of other developers through mentorship, code review, technical mtgs, and pair programming sessions!
- Someone 4y agoAnd even if he was doing (mostly) programming, he would probably be assigned harder jobs than most, and may have spent the last months researching some gnarly bug, experimenting with all kinds of code variants, but committing not much yet.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- PaulHoule 4y agoI think the most valuable work in applications development is the ontology work to figure out the mental models. If that is right the code is much easier to write, shorter, and less buggy. In fact it often works right the first time. The wrong mental model will turbocharge your LoC but not your business.
- electrondood 4y agoReading the article, they assumed Slack channels were private by default (coming from MS Teams), one dev floated the LOC idea, and another dev linked to a fire list. The post title is misleading.
- ShamelessC 4y agoThat was exactly what I gathered from the title.
- tootie 4y agoJeez Elon, give Bill Gates a call and he'll tell why that's dumb.
- drooby 4y agoWhere are the screen caps of the convo.. “Query for lines of code” can get interpreted multiple ways.
- snickerbockers 4y agoI still don't get how he can make employees from a different company he owns come over and do this. Twitter belongs to musk personally, not tesla, correct?
- brightball 4y agoTechnically he could hire them as contractors?
- soraki_soladead 4y agoThat’s correct. As I understand it, it only becomes a problem when Tesla’s board says it is.
- midislack 4y ago
- r2_pilot 4y ago"Other duties as assigned."
- detaro 4y agoI assume it's something like this: Musk asks Tesla if Tesla would be willing to contract out some employees to Twitter to help with some stuff. Tesla says yes because nobody wants to get fired for telling the CEO "no, that's stupid". Some shareholders think it's a stupid idea but by and large won't do anything because if you are a Tesla shareholder you own Tesla stock fully knowing that "Musk occasionally does stupid things" is just what happens. If some decide to sue it's going to maybe lead to some small-ish settlement and don't actually change anything.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
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- paxys 4y agoHe is the CEO of Tesla. He can make the employees do whatever he wants.
- yrgulation 4y agoTo be fair this undermines my trust in tesla workers. No only because the nature of their work is radically different but not having the guts to tell ellon off for firing people based on loc tells me they probably cut other corners at tesla just because their boss tells them. Lack of integrity and two ton vehicles are not a good mix.
- paulgb 4y agoThat they let him launch the Cybertruck already makes me think he doesn’t have people who can say no to him.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago> That they let him launch the Cybertruck already Huh? It's still vaporware. AFAIK they haven't even pretended to start production yet.
- Fatnino 4y agoThey built just one for him to drive around in a one of one vehicle. Like the pope.
- novok 4y agoIf this is the event that makes you feel like they cut corners at tesla, vs the many, many more that has been public in the news about the cars themselves, I have a bridge to sell you.
- yrgulation 4y agoI kept hoping and didnt want to sound like that grumpy old man shouting at clouds. Tesla to me looks more like an mvp with good batteries. I think it will go downhill as more ev makers enter the market and tesla cant compete with them in making actual cars. Elon spent 44 billion on a bloody troll platform and is heavily distracted by it.
- antihero 4y agoHe seems like an utter idiot
- mas-ev 4y agoI have still yet to see evidence that people were fired for their "lines of code added" as everyone is implying. Would it not be reasonable to take into consideration a employees LOC as a metric? If you're an engineer and made very few code contributions without a solid justification of why, I'd expect you to be on the chopping block... These headlines are misleading and people are jumping the gun making assumptions as always.
- ShamelessC 4y agoAre you yourself a software engineer?
- dom96 4y agoSo you're doubting that LOC was used but also completely happy for LOC to be used as the criteria for firing?
- poszlem 4y agoIs believing in both of those things is somehow a contradiction? "I haven't seen a good proof that he fired based on LOCs and even if he did that would not be stupid anyway"?
- isitmadeofglass 4y agoJust because you take something into consideration does not mean it becomes a criteria. But I think we can all agree that it would be a mistake in a mass layoff to accidentally fire the top 10 contributors to a given project if the 11th contributor only ever made 3 contributions all just updating comments right? Well that sort of logic requires you review the logs. It doesn’t have to mean you set up some arbitrary “anyone under ckloc per week is fired”
- mas-ev 4y agoNo. I DO believe lines of code was used as metric. It's a fast way to protect the top code contributors. I just don't think it's the only thing taken into consideration like people are implying... There are countless teams and examples for it being a horrible metric to solely fire on. I just think it's not right to jump to conclusions like Dictator Elon fires engineers with low LOC. All we have to go off of is they had review meetings where they had to show off the code they contributed and Elon "suggested to query for lines committed."
- paxys 4y agoLoC isn't a perfect metric by any means, but it's also not a completely irrelevant metric as people always keep claiming. Especially if you showed up at a new company and had to fire 50% of the staff with zero context. There are too many tenured employees at Twitter, Google, Facebook and everywhere else who stopped writing code a long time ago and spend their time trying to seem as busy and important as they can while doing basically nothing. Firing based on LoC will definitely get rid of a few great engineers, but it will also correctly identify the 40% useless engineers.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- PuppyTailWags 4y agoI don't think it rises even to 40%, because I think an excessively productive idiot is way harder to deal with than a person who just doesn't write enough code. Cutting based on LOC biases towards retaining excessively productive idiots.
- paxys 4y agoAn engineer who writes a lot of code and contributes nothing of value is an outlier. An engineer who writes no code but contributes a lot of value is an outlier. So yes, you will miss these two outliers if you go by LoC, but sometimes that is acceptable as long as you are handling the majority correctly.
- PuppyTailWags 4y agoThe thing is, in my experience, the people who write a ton of LoC often need more effort to review, introduce instability, and slow down the rest of their team because their stuff needs bugfixing or is difficult to parse.
- paxys 4y agoThere's an easy way to validate these assumptions. Go to any repo in your company's GitHub and open the contributors section. Tell me who you'd rather fire - the 10 people on the top of the page or the 10 people at the bottom?
- Havoc 4y ago>Elon’s engineers were given instructions to follow: they did. It’s how Elon’s companies are operate apparently. Tiny bit surprised that anyone is surprised about this? Seemed pretty clear to me that his is a very top down type style
- midislack 4y agoThis is good, dead weight is being shed across all of the tech sector now.
- sanj 4y agoI wrote code that wrote code. I regularly topped that “SLOC touched list.” But there were a heap of much more talented engineers than me.
- hellodanylo 4y agoIn my recent job, I committed Jupyter notebooks to Git, and they tend to be giant JSON files. I had 10x SLOC of anyone who did not commit Jupyter notebooks.
- wwarner 4y agoI think Musk wants to start over, and a first step is to cut drastically. That’s a new management plan and is not the responsibility of the employees, who were delivering on the goals of the old plan. It’s a layoff, and requires notification of employees, unemployment benefits, and usually some severance package, too. It’s really dirty pool to invent a reason to fire people in order to avoid those obligations.
- hellodanylo 4y agoIf you had 3 days to find bottom 50% of devs to be fired, what would be your heuristic?
- lapcat 4y ago> If you had 3 days to find bottom 50% of devs to be fired I would not get myself into that situation in the first place. ;-)
- metadat 4y agoWhy does the timeline need to be so dramatically short? It doesn't need to take years or months, but executing such a change almost instantaneously with a new purchase is careless, crude, and risky. It also reveals a lot about the mentality of the person making the decree.
- Volundr 4y ago> If you had 3 days to find bottom 50% of devs to be fired, what would be your heuristic? Taking more than 3 days instead of rushing such an important decision.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rsynnott 4y agoWell, first of all, spend more than three days, obviously. If, for some reason, that was necessary (it clearly is not) use historical performance reviews.
- PuppyTailWags 4y agoEven if you need to cut headcount, why burden your employees with the job to cut the livelihoods of other employees without the necessary business context in which to do so intelligently? Now Musk can blame the engineers making the cuts if Twitter starts to fail-over from missing domain knowledge, because he explicitly set these people up for failure.
- poszlem 4y agoI don't get how hung up on the LOC firing people got. If you want to fire 3500 people you obviously don't care that much about false negatives. I would not be surprised if it turned out that it's much more economical to fire based on LOC and then rehire a few good people than to go through thousands of conversations and try to do it "the right way". Especially since Elon can be sure most of the Twitter workforce is hostile to him anyway.
- gamblor956 4y agoIf you fire people based on LOC just because it's convenient for you (the employer), the good employees won't come back. They'll take a better-paying job at a place that doesn't treat them as disposable or try to screw with their lives.
- poszlem 4y agoI don't think the plan was to re-hire good people from the same pool that got fired. And I honestly don't expect Elon's Twitter to have any problem hiring good new people (even in the absolute worst case scenario there is a huge untapped pool of non-left-wing programmers who would previously never work at Twitter because of the culture of that place).
- netmonk 4y agoIf they find better paying works. For what I know they have been fired, therefore they are not in a dominant position to negotiate anything, esp if they have student/home loan monthly and family to feed. They are not any kind of prey. They are more thousand of white rabbit who are going to compete in the next few months to find job when all major Company in the industry are holding recruitment or even worse are also firing their own employee.
- Eji1700 4y agoIf you're some midsized average company it's probably fine. If you're one of the tech giants scraping for top talent, it's going to be a massive dent in all your future hiring.
- 4y ago
- rexreed 4y agoDoes it not seem ironic to anyone else that all these scoops and news about Twitter are communicated using... Twitter? Is there really no other way besides Twitter to publish and communicate news and information? Maybe others are bought into Twitter, but I'd really like to stop consuming information on the Twitter platform, especially if it's about... Twitter. I know it's passe to complain about Twitter threads as a means of communicating, but there's a reason why people complain - it's a truly awful way of consuming content that requires any amount of depth. I hope the industry can find a better way to complain about Twitter and communicate other valuable information without using Twitter.
- lapcat 4y agoThe author also has a newsletter (paywalled, on substack) and a blog. https://www.pragmaticengineer.com/ https://www.pragmaticengineer.com/
- rexreed 4y agoAnd yet, on HN we post the Twitter thread instead of the blog post. It just seems to me there's some entrenched user behavior that will be very difficult to change. Regardless, this thread wasn't posted on his blog or newsletter, so there's only one way to consume this information, and that's on Twitter. Twitter is entrenched for sure.
- lapcat 4y ago> It just seems to me there's some entrenched user behavior that will be very difficult to change. I definitely agree with that. I left Twitter myself this week, and I've increased my blogging and started a Slack. But it's difficult, because a lot of people are still on Twitter, and they refuse to leave. By leaving, I've decreased my own reach, unfortunately. We'll see what the long-term consequences are. The catch is that Twitter is full of people who never write their own content, aside from tweets. If they leave Twitter, they silence themselves. They can follow RSS, newsletters, etc., but they don't have a voice outside of Twitter. And to be frank, maybe they don't have much interesting to say, but they're still the primary audience for creators. > Regardless, this thread wasn't posted on his blog or newsletter I can't say whether or not it was in the newsletter, as I don't subscribe. It might have been there too?
- dom96 4y agoIt's absolutely ridiculous that the firings were allegedly done using LOC. This is especially true when Twitter has certainly had performance reviews which could be used as much better firing criteria than freaking lines of code. To all of you that think this is a fair way to fire engineers, please reconsider.
- gjsman-1000 4y agoIf your company is losing $4 million a day, and you want to fire a ton of people, and if LOC is even 75% accurate… In those circumstances, I do believe that it is a decent metric to consider. You got a better plan?
- dom96 4y agoYeah, what I outlined above: performance reviews. One possibility: just fire those that have had performance below a certain rating threshold.
- gjsman-1000 4y agoIf I am Elon, that would require that I think Twitter, and prior management, did objective and honest performance reviews. All the while knowing I’m taking over and everyone is trying to save each other’s skin. I don’t think so. The performance reviews are more than likely self-congratulating BS and to be ignored.
- bilsbie 4y agoThat’s ironic considering one of Elons main principle is to remove parts and requirements. The best part is no part and all that. I’d be more interested in how many lines of code someone prevented. But I guess if these groups had the impossible goal of choosing how to rate engineers they don’t know then you need to find something objective to point to. (Maybe in future jobs we should commit tons of code and write a bot to delete it a few minutes later.)
- bilsbie 4y agoImagine being the guy that keeps his job because one time you checked in a third party library.
- kweingar 4y agoThe fact that so much of this conversation has turned into “well he has the legal right to do this, even if it’s bad” shows how far standards have fallen.
- boosteri 4y agoI'm a bit low on LOC this quarter .... let me rename one of our micro services, create a new repo for it and copy the code over....
- guantanamo_bob 4y agoDon’t be surprised if Elon sets a precedent that is soon followed by the other tech companies that are struggling to generate profit.
- mritun 4y agoI gotta believe that this culture is not also present at Tesla. These cars are drive by wire and I am feeling very very concerned that people writing. code to control these 2ton hulks are optimizing for lines of code written. And yeah, Mr Elon has a LOT of fans and if you’re a professional, you need to be concerned that someone in your line of management might be getting inspired by this!
- readthenotes1 4y agoI wouldn't be at all surprised if there were software engineers at Twitter who had not committed anything to a repository in the last year. And perhaps they're smart enough to take the absolute value of additions and deletions?
- r0m4n0 4y agoI implemented linting in our 200k LOC app. I ruined the LOC contest for everyone
- yucky 4y agoWhy is HN so obsessed with Elon buying Twitter? The non-stop obsessing is a bad look.
- sys_64738 4y agoSustaining engineers write very little code. Tell me how they'd all stay employed with such a metric.