9 ms·

Imagine thinking you can judge anything about a developer (especially Senior/Staffs) from screenshots of code. Elon has truly lost the plot.

dshpala 4y ago
That would be nice. I know a senior developer that doesn't actually do anything, he had like 2 small CLs this year. But apparently he can't be fired, so he is just there, increasing work load for everyone else.
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  Does he not do anything, or does he do things you don't see? How do you know?
- teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  How does he get away with doing almost nothing? Why can't he be fired?
  - jnwatson 4y ago
    Lots of staff devs do nothing but coordinate and plan technology.
    - eddsh1994 4y ago
      > Lots of staff devs do nothing but coordinate and plan technology. "coordinate and plan technology" can be a huge amount of effort, vastly greater than "nothing".
    - drewbeck 4y ago
      "A lot of staff devs do nothing but critical organizational work"
    - fknorangesite 4y ago
      > Lots of staff devs do nothing but their jobs.
    - riskable 4y ago
      That's not "doing nothing" it's "doing bureaucracy" and IMHO it's a lot more mentally exhausting than coding. Imagine if every hour of every work day in your calendar is full of various forms of "planning" meetings. How are you supposed to write code and attend all this nonsense at the same time? You can't. To be fair it sure feels like doing nothing but employers consider it necessary and a job that only senior people can handle.
      - yunwal 4y ago
        I've been in one of these jobs before, and it's certainly exhausting. I'm not necessarily convinced it's useful though. It always seemed like a lot of planning and replanning of work that prevented anything from actually getting done.
    - dceddia 4y ago
      It seems like a lot of replies to this are reading it as "Lots of staff devs do nothing; they just coordinate and plan technology". Another way to read this is as saying coordination and planning are the job. They "do nothing but", as in "only do".
      - jnwatson 4y ago
        Exactly. I'm staff at Google.
    - khazhoux 4y ago
      Yes. But some senior devs actually do very little, for a number of reasons.
- butterlesstoast 4y ago
  Sorry to hear. That is honestly a huge reflection on the company and in my case for every 1 of those devs there are 9 that are incredibly talented and hard working (in my <10 year experience in the CS workforce)
- TigeriusKirk 4y ago
  I suspect this is what he's after. For whatever reason he thinks a significant number of Twitter devs did little if anything. Maybe he's even right about that, it's not exactly unheard of in big companies. But I don't think this is a particularly effective way to root those people out. It's also possible he's reassigning teams from the ground up, and this is his sorting method.
- justapassenger 4y ago
  I'm a senior developer at bit tech and I had 1 small CL this year. I've spent whole year aligning a team strategy with an overall company strategy, and making sure that rest of the people on my team build is actually fitting into that strategy. In the past, team spend many years build custom stuff, that always had to be thrown away. Now, work we're doing is a part of a company direction, our expertise influenced it, and as a result we're no longer building throw away things, but also building something that impacts the whole company. I'll be blunt - I've made people on my team 10x more productive as a result. At bigger companies there's many ways you can be a senior developer. Does it sucks that people need to do stuff like that? Oh yeah, I'd prefer to have 100s of CL this year. But that's often a motion, not progress. As a senior, I'm accountable to make sure we make progress.
chrislan815 4y ago
lmao exactly what I was thinking
jmeister 4y ago
It could be a rough test to weed out the non-coders who may try to cheat his call. What matters is a low false-positive rate. Like there may be several hostile employees looking to sneak in for some stories they can sell to the media later.
danrocks 4y ago
This simple method would weed out half of Microsoft. Lots of Principals and Architects who haven't coded in a decade.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  I thought Microsoft got rid of the architect role? At least it was that way in the mid-2010s when I was there. After Vista/Longhorn there was a definite push to stop all the architecture astronauts and actually build and ship things.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Teandw 4y ago
Of course you can? It's basically asking to see what you consider your best work. If you're earning 100k a year and the most important code you show is how you turned a link colour from light blue to blue -- then your $100,000 a year job has now become questionable. It's hardly losing the plot to ask someone "What have you achieved and what do you think your best work is?"
- MarkMarine 4y ago
  That's like asking an artist to bring screen shots of the best 10 brush strokes.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    It also reminds me of this scene[1] in Amadeus where the king criticizes Mozart for having too many notes. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6_eqxh-Qok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6_eqxh-Qok
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  Lots of jobs work precisely like that. If you want to argue whether the people who do them should get US$100k/yr, that's a different question.
  - khazhoux 4y ago
    It’s literally the question being asked, not a different question.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      I don't consider that clear at all. Lots of development jobs involve doing work that isn't flashy, showy or even cool. Does the lack of flashy, showy cool stuff mean it's of less value? Almost certainly not. There are other reasons why a specific developer may not be "pulling their weight", but a bunch of code excerpts is about the least likely way to discover them.
l33t233372 4y ago
I think you can judge some things. It’s crude but if you give a paragraph of context and a screenshot of a function or something, I think that gives some nonzero amount of information.
winternett 4y ago
There is a huge back end on Twitter even though the front end looks poorly thought out and over-simplified... The back-end reporting and tracking apparatuses built into that site are probably failing miserably, and pissing off a lot of undisclosed clients. Elon needs technical architects and technical direction more than just developers if you ask me. I don't think Twitter will completely fail, but I'm pretty sure it will stumble quite publicly/visibly a lot in the coming weeks.
- Macha 4y ago
  I think it will have outages/fail whales until stumbling into a new sale or bankruptcy because it's scared off the advertisers. I don't think the majority opinion on engineers is that it'll crash and then they'll throw in the towel and that's it, but there's plenty of other ultimately fatal outcomes for twitter, and plenty of non-fatal technical issues they can encounter on the way there.
  - adventured 4y ago
    It's not going to stumble into a new sale or bankruptcy anytime soon (next several years). He'll slash the costs dramatically to adjust for the loss of revenue. He just sold another $4 billion in Tesla stock the other day to most likely cover the expected losses over the next few years. Slash deep enough and you can easily run Twitter on a few hundred million dollar loss per year. He probably thinks he can get it to break-even following this approach over the next few years and go from there. Facebook was profitable at under $1b in sales with a larger userbase size 12 years ago. Why can't Twitter get there today? Twitter was unprofitable with $5.2b in sales, it was an exceptionally bloated corporation.
- moolcool 4y ago
  > The back-end reporting and tracking apparatuses built into that site are probably failing miserably, and pissing off a lot of undisclosed clients I guess every cloud has a silver lining
yumraj 4y ago
Also can’t one just print someone else’s code, especially if the person is already gone.
rolph 4y ago
im not supporting the move, but i do think this is why its important to have a personal portfolio; of things you do yourself, have done for other jobs, and that you have kludged together independently for the benefit of the company, but were not yet received. use the opportunity to prove how undervalued you were, and how essential you will be to restructuring.

dshpala 4y ago

That would be nice. I know a senior developer that doesn't actually do anything, he had like 2 small CLs this year. But apparently he can't be fired, so he is just there, increasing work load for everyone else.

jvanderbot 4y ago
Does he not do anything, or does he do things you don't see? How do you know?
teaearlgraycold 4y ago
How does he get away with doing almost nothing? Why can't he be fired?
- jnwatson 4y ago
  Lots of staff devs do nothing but coordinate and plan technology.
  - eddsh1994 4y ago
    > Lots of staff devs do nothing but coordinate and plan technology. "coordinate and plan technology" can be a huge amount of effort, vastly greater than "nothing".
  - drewbeck 4y ago
    "A lot of staff devs do nothing but critical organizational work"
  - fknorangesite 4y ago
    > Lots of staff devs do nothing but their jobs.
  - riskable 4y ago
    That's not "doing nothing" it's "doing bureaucracy" and IMHO it's a lot more mentally exhausting than coding. Imagine if every hour of every work day in your calendar is full of various forms of "planning" meetings. How are you supposed to write code and attend all this nonsense at the same time? You can't. To be fair it sure feels like doing nothing but employers consider it necessary and a job that only senior people can handle.
    - yunwal 4y ago
      I've been in one of these jobs before, and it's certainly exhausting. I'm not necessarily convinced it's useful though. It always seemed like a lot of planning and replanning of work that prevented anything from actually getting done.
  - dceddia 4y ago
    It seems like a lot of replies to this are reading it as "Lots of staff devs do nothing; they just coordinate and plan technology". Another way to read this is as saying coordination and planning are the job. They "do nothing but", as in "only do".
    - jnwatson 4y ago
      Exactly. I'm staff at Google.
  - khazhoux 4y ago
    Yes. But some senior devs actually do very little, for a number of reasons.
butterlesstoast 4y ago
Sorry to hear. That is honestly a huge reflection on the company and in my case for every 1 of those devs there are 9 that are incredibly talented and hard working (in my <10 year experience in the CS workforce)
TigeriusKirk 4y ago
I suspect this is what he's after. For whatever reason he thinks a significant number of Twitter devs did little if anything. Maybe he's even right about that, it's not exactly unheard of in big companies. But I don't think this is a particularly effective way to root those people out. It's also possible he's reassigning teams from the ground up, and this is his sorting method.
justapassenger 4y ago
I'm a senior developer at bit tech and I had 1 small CL this year. I've spent whole year aligning a team strategy with an overall company strategy, and making sure that rest of the people on my team build is actually fitting into that strategy. In the past, team spend many years build custom stuff, that always had to be thrown away. Now, work we're doing is a part of a company direction, our expertise influenced it, and as a result we're no longer building throw away things, but also building something that impacts the whole company. I'll be blunt - I've made people on my team 10x more productive as a result. At bigger companies there's many ways you can be a senior developer. Does it sucks that people need to do stuff like that? Oh yeah, I'd prefer to have 100s of CL this year. But that's often a motion, not progress. As a senior, I'm accountable to make sure we make progress.

chrislan815 4y ago

lmao exactly what I was thinking

jmeister 4y ago

It could be a rough test to weed out the non-coders who may try to cheat his call. What matters is a low false-positive rate. Like there may be several hostile employees looking to sneak in for some stories they can sell to the media later.

danrocks 4y ago

This simple method would weed out half of Microsoft. Lots of Principals and Architects who haven't coded in a decade.

qbasic_forever 4y ago
I thought Microsoft got rid of the architect role? At least it was that way in the mid-2010s when I was there. After Vista/Longhorn there was a definite push to stop all the architecture astronauts and actually build and ship things.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Teandw 4y ago

Of course you can? It's basically asking to see what you consider your best work. If you're earning 100k a year and the most important code you show is how you turned a link colour from light blue to blue -- then your $100,000 a year job has now become questionable. It's hardly losing the plot to ask someone "What have you achieved and what do you think your best work is?"

MarkMarine 4y ago
That's like asking an artist to bring screen shots of the best 10 brush strokes.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  It also reminds me of this scene[1] in Amadeus where the king criticizes Mozart for having too many notes. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6_eqxh-Qok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6_eqxh-Qok
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
Lots of jobs work precisely like that. If you want to argue whether the people who do them should get US$100k/yr, that's a different question.
- khazhoux 4y ago
  It’s literally the question being asked, not a different question.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    I don't consider that clear at all. Lots of development jobs involve doing work that isn't flashy, showy or even cool. Does the lack of flashy, showy cool stuff mean it's of less value? Almost certainly not. There are other reasons why a specific developer may not be "pulling their weight", but a bunch of code excerpts is about the least likely way to discover them.

l33t233372 4y ago

I think you can judge some things. It’s crude but if you give a paragraph of context and a screenshot of a function or something, I think that gives some nonzero amount of information.

winternett 4y ago

There is a huge back end on Twitter even though the front end looks poorly thought out and over-simplified... The back-end reporting and tracking apparatuses built into that site are probably failing miserably, and pissing off a lot of undisclosed clients. Elon needs technical architects and technical direction more than just developers if you ask me. I don't think Twitter will completely fail, but I'm pretty sure it will stumble quite publicly/visibly a lot in the coming weeks.

Macha 4y ago
I think it will have outages/fail whales until stumbling into a new sale or bankruptcy because it's scared off the advertisers. I don't think the majority opinion on engineers is that it'll crash and then they'll throw in the towel and that's it, but there's plenty of other ultimately fatal outcomes for twitter, and plenty of non-fatal technical issues they can encounter on the way there.
- adventured 4y ago
  It's not going to stumble into a new sale or bankruptcy anytime soon (next several years). He'll slash the costs dramatically to adjust for the loss of revenue. He just sold another $4 billion in Tesla stock the other day to most likely cover the expected losses over the next few years. Slash deep enough and you can easily run Twitter on a few hundred million dollar loss per year. He probably thinks he can get it to break-even following this approach over the next few years and go from there. Facebook was profitable at under $1b in sales with a larger userbase size 12 years ago. Why can't Twitter get there today? Twitter was unprofitable with $5.2b in sales, it was an exceptionally bloated corporation.
moolcool 4y ago
> The back-end reporting and tracking apparatuses built into that site are probably failing miserably, and pissing off a lot of undisclosed clients I guess every cloud has a silver lining

yumraj 4y ago

Also can’t one just print someone else’s code, especially if the person is already gone.

rolph 4y ago

im not supporting the move, but i do think this is why its important to have a personal portfolio; of things you do yourself, have done for other jobs, and that you have kludged together independently for the benefit of the company, but were not yet received. use the opportunity to prove how undervalued you were, and how essential you will be to restructuring.