6 ms·

Elon has this bizarre conspiracy in his head where he thinks software engineers don't do anything until he realizes they do everything. Btw, a dev build is in

Elon has this bizarre conspiracy in his head where he thinks software engineers don't do anything until he realizes they do everything. Btw, a dev build is in prod right now. Or someone forgot to minimize the JS. Tons of import map issues.

danrocks 4y ago
Is it really that bizarre of a conspiracy? If you browse Blind for a day you kind of lose the faith in software engineering as a profession. People proud for making $400k while working 5 hours a week.
- Macha 4y ago
  I'd suggest the problem there is reading Blind uncritically. There's at least as many trolls as serious posters
  - christkv 4y ago
    TC please
    - Macha 4y ago
      666k/yr, 4.20 years of experience
- halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
  Blind is an alternate reality and a fraction of the market. A lot of people on Blind completely misrepresent themselves and have either worked really hard to get there or are just skilled. Sure some paper chase but using Blind as a gauge of anything is a mistake.
  - time_to_smile 4y ago
    What Blind shows is that for a portion of the population TC is just a game. Sure they have "skills" but a lot of those skills are grinding leetcode, creating referral networks, and otherwise becoming skilled at getting hired and surviving in a large FAANG. In my experience leetcode has surprisingly low correlation with programming ability and most definitely software engineering. It's not just Blind either. I've been surprised how many young people aspire to "work at a FAANG" as a goal, and software is just a convenient way to get there.
- drewbeck 4y ago
  The "conspiracy" in that case is poor management and oversight, not slacker devs. One of the (many) aspects of this that Elon has not grasped.
  - deckard1 4y ago
    the whole thing really does feel like when VW tried to blame engineers for their emissions scandal. Engineers do not set hiring goals or vision for the company. They are not responsible for coming up with features. Yet they are getting 100% of the blame right now. This is really about two things. 1) Twitter can't afford the debt burdens Elon put on them and 2) Elon really resents being forced to buy a company he does not want and is sticking it to people in the most asinine way possible.
- makestuff 4y ago
  I don't think the issue is all on the engineers. Empire building at big tech companies is how we get to a place where some engineer can work 5-10 hours per week doing essentially nothing of value. The entire management track is set up to promote people who have X number of reports under them. A manager who makes 1b in revenue with a team of 10 will be passed up for a promotion over a team of 50 that makes 100m but looks busy.
- tayo42 4y ago
  Why? One of my projects I saved ~14mil in one year. Youd break even on my employment after 28 years
Tenoke 4y ago
I'm a software engineer and I still suspect Twitter will be on average no worse (could be better even) with 1/3rd or less of its current engineer count.
- Macha 4y ago
  It's current engineer count as of today, or it's current engineer count as of 2 weeks ago? By all accounts after the layoffs, voluntary resignations in response to layoffs, and people who refused the ultimatum and so probably consider themselves laid off, it's not clear Twitter even has a skeleton crew
- disintegore 4y ago
  I'm personally surprised that with so much of the workforce gone, and internal operations being total bedlam, the only thing that went down were 2FA emails. Someone at Twitter knew what they were doing. Let's hope they didn't get swept up.
  - vasco 4y ago
    If they stopped builds, should be stable. All the infrastructure I've ever worked with has been the most stable when developers aren't pushing to production. 95% or more of incidents are caused by deployments. If you send everyone home, and things autoscale, it can stay up for a good while without SRE or similar functions having to do something.
- dagmx 4y ago
  I’m a software engineer too and I think software engineers are some of the worst at understanding the extents of a business outside their own niches.
- butterlesstoast 4y ago
  Very insightful. It is definitely a balance. They could get away with less devs. I guess I am curious what the specific breaking point will be. Sr Devs will only put up with so much (Even when making an incredible salary). Side note: do we know how much Twitter Sr. Devs make for sure? I know the term "400k for 5hrs a week" keeps getting thrown around. However, that doesn't seem incredibly well researched and has some triggers baked in
guelo 4y ago
He's obviously been infected with all the online right-wing anti-wokism ideas about tech companies. What's surprising to me is that I thought a lot of those people were in on the troll, but apparently he was a true believer.
Teandw 4y ago
I think you're misunderstanding the situation. It's not that ALL software engineers don't do anything. It's that Twitter has so much staff, you start to question what can they all actually be doing. If someone had 10 people cleaning a small apartment every day, you'd question what were they actually doing. That wouldn't make sense.
- kibwen 4y ago
  Conversely, if you had 7,000 people cleaning an apartment occupied by a few million people across the globe, that might make some sense. There's no doubt that Twitter could be leaner than it was as of September, but haphazardly firing employees at random and alienating the most employable of the remainder into resignation is not the way to go about it. He could have spent a few months getting to know the place, but deliberately chose not to.
  - butterlesstoast 4y ago
    Best comment hahaha. Made my day.
  - wwkeyboard 4y ago
    Exactly, go to your 25 year old HotMail account and open the spam folder. That's what they've been fighting.
  - Terretta 4y ago
    Not if all few million people live in the same few variants of one apartment, and the same cleanup cleaned all of them. TBC, talking about the code part. There's another Twitter, which is not code, but guest and resident services. Your example holds there.
  - ceres 4y ago
    And yet WhatsApp had 55 employees at acquisition. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/whatsapp-bought-for-19-billion-what-do-its-employees-get/tx2ebge88# https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/whatsapp-bought-for-19-b...
love2read 4y ago
Not really a problem, just that when the app is run in the intranet sourcemaps will be applied, since you aren’t in the twitter intranet, you don’t have access to the sourcemaps so they just fail to import. Not a problem :)
cududa 4y ago
Went to confirm this for myself and: lol. Also, poke around the loaded JS - most certainly not minified
- thinkingemote 4y ago
  theres a bunch of interesting strings too. Things about being a super follower and users being paid for that. Uploading 1080p video ""Support your favourite people on Twitter for bonus content and extra perks.""
lzooz 4y ago
>Btw, a dev build is in prod right now. Or someone forgot to minimize the JS. Tons of import map issues. That's the way it works. Maps aren't uploaded to production so they fail to load for you.
adventured 4y ago
That's not what Elon thinks based on his actions. He's trying to decimate the workforce on purpose, although it's not going as smoothly as he hoped from outside appearances. He wants huge numbers of Twitter employees to quit, and he has been very clearly laying out the terms for behavior for the type of people he would like to run Twitter with. He's intentionally shaking the tree violently. He's hoping that the types that remain will be his types of employees. He's going to try to rebuild the workforce starting from those, so it's his company in ethos / function. He thinks Twitter can run with far fewer engineers, and drastically fewer staff overall, than what it was operating with previously. He knows the value of engineers, he has made that part clear: he plainly said that engineers are most of what is important about Twitter, not the rest of the staff, he said it should be an engineer heavy company.
- qwytw 4y ago
  I highly doubt the majority of engineers who are actually good at what they do would be willing to remain in such a toxic environment Musk is creating. Also so far he has displayed very little understanding of what engineers actually do (the bring you screenshots thing and the way he responded to one of them correcting him on Twitter and a bunch of other cases don't paint the brightest picture).
  - adventured 4y ago
    I make no wager on whether he can actually reach what he's trying to achieve. Rather, I'm merely proposing what I think he's doing / why he's doing it. I don't think he can run Twitter very effectively out of San Francisco going forward, after his behavior. He'll try to run it out of Texas instead.
- ProjectArcturis 4y ago
  That's definitely the bet he's making. I think most of the best people will leave because they can make the same money working normal hours. He'll end up with those who can't find another job, those stuck at Twitter because of visas, and some unknown percentage of his desired "hardcore" employees.
- 4y ago
NilsIRL 4y ago
> Btw, a dev build is in prod right now. Or someone forgot to minimize the JS. Tons of import map issues. Not the first time this has happened: https://twitter.com/NilsIRL/status/1479065003684765697 https://twitter.com/NilsIRL/status/1479065003684765697
nunez 4y ago
holy shit you're totally right. not sure if this is normal but tons of resources link to ton.local.twitter.com which NXDOMAINs against quad-8 also you're totally right; none of the JS is minified!
hyuuu 4y ago
what dev build? for twitter?

danrocks 4y ago

Is it really that bizarre of a conspiracy? If you browse Blind for a day you kind of lose the faith in software engineering as a profession. People proud for making $400k while working 5 hours a week.

Macha 4y ago
I'd suggest the problem there is reading Blind uncritically. There's at least as many trolls as serious posters
- christkv 4y ago
  TC please
  - Macha 4y ago
    666k/yr, 4.20 years of experience
halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
Blind is an alternate reality and a fraction of the market. A lot of people on Blind completely misrepresent themselves and have either worked really hard to get there or are just skilled. Sure some paper chase but using Blind as a gauge of anything is a mistake.
- time_to_smile 4y ago
  What Blind shows is that for a portion of the population TC is just a game. Sure they have "skills" but a lot of those skills are grinding leetcode, creating referral networks, and otherwise becoming skilled at getting hired and surviving in a large FAANG. In my experience leetcode has surprisingly low correlation with programming ability and most definitely software engineering. It's not just Blind either. I've been surprised how many young people aspire to "work at a FAANG" as a goal, and software is just a convenient way to get there.
drewbeck 4y ago
The "conspiracy" in that case is poor management and oversight, not slacker devs. One of the (many) aspects of this that Elon has not grasped.
- deckard1 4y ago
  the whole thing really does feel like when VW tried to blame engineers for their emissions scandal. Engineers do not set hiring goals or vision for the company. They are not responsible for coming up with features. Yet they are getting 100% of the blame right now. This is really about two things. 1) Twitter can't afford the debt burdens Elon put on them and 2) Elon really resents being forced to buy a company he does not want and is sticking it to people in the most asinine way possible.
makestuff 4y ago
I don't think the issue is all on the engineers. Empire building at big tech companies is how we get to a place where some engineer can work 5-10 hours per week doing essentially nothing of value. The entire management track is set up to promote people who have X number of reports under them. A manager who makes 1b in revenue with a team of 10 will be passed up for a promotion over a team of 50 that makes 100m but looks busy.
tayo42 4y ago
Why? One of my projects I saved ~14mil in one year. Youd break even on my employment after 28 years

Tenoke 4y ago

I'm a software engineer and I still suspect Twitter will be on average no worse (could be better even) with 1/3rd or less of its current engineer count.

Macha 4y ago
It's current engineer count as of today, or it's current engineer count as of 2 weeks ago? By all accounts after the layoffs, voluntary resignations in response to layoffs, and people who refused the ultimatum and so probably consider themselves laid off, it's not clear Twitter even has a skeleton crew
disintegore 4y ago
I'm personally surprised that with so much of the workforce gone, and internal operations being total bedlam, the only thing that went down were 2FA emails. Someone at Twitter knew what they were doing. Let's hope they didn't get swept up.
- vasco 4y ago
  If they stopped builds, should be stable. All the infrastructure I've ever worked with has been the most stable when developers aren't pushing to production. 95% or more of incidents are caused by deployments. If you send everyone home, and things autoscale, it can stay up for a good while without SRE or similar functions having to do something.
dagmx 4y ago
I’m a software engineer too and I think software engineers are some of the worst at understanding the extents of a business outside their own niches.
butterlesstoast 4y ago
Very insightful. It is definitely a balance. They could get away with less devs. I guess I am curious what the specific breaking point will be. Sr Devs will only put up with so much (Even when making an incredible salary). Side note: do we know how much Twitter Sr. Devs make for sure? I know the term "400k for 5hrs a week" keeps getting thrown around. However, that doesn't seem incredibly well researched and has some triggers baked in

guelo 4y ago

He's obviously been infected with all the online right-wing anti-wokism ideas about tech companies. What's surprising to me is that I thought a lot of those people were in on the troll, but apparently he was a true believer.

Teandw 4y ago

I think you're misunderstanding the situation. It's not that ALL software engineers don't do anything. It's that Twitter has so much staff, you start to question what can they all actually be doing. If someone had 10 people cleaning a small apartment every day, you'd question what were they actually doing. That wouldn't make sense.

kibwen 4y ago
Conversely, if you had 7,000 people cleaning an apartment occupied by a few million people across the globe, that might make some sense. There's no doubt that Twitter could be leaner than it was as of September, but haphazardly firing employees at random and alienating the most employable of the remainder into resignation is not the way to go about it. He could have spent a few months getting to know the place, but deliberately chose not to.
- butterlesstoast 4y ago
  Best comment hahaha. Made my day.
- wwkeyboard 4y ago
  Exactly, go to your 25 year old HotMail account and open the spam folder. That's what they've been fighting.
- Terretta 4y ago
  Not if all few million people live in the same few variants of one apartment, and the same cleanup cleaned all of them. TBC, talking about the code part. There's another Twitter, which is not code, but guest and resident services. Your example holds there.
- ceres 4y ago
  And yet WhatsApp had 55 employees at acquisition. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/whatsapp-bought-for-19-billion-what-do-its-employees-get/tx2ebge88# https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/whatsapp-bought-for-19-b...

love2read 4y ago

Not really a problem, just that when the app is run in the intranet sourcemaps will be applied, since you aren’t in the twitter intranet, you don’t have access to the sourcemaps so they just fail to import. Not a problem :)

cududa 4y ago

Went to confirm this for myself and: lol. Also, poke around the loaded JS - most certainly not minified

thinkingemote 4y ago
theres a bunch of interesting strings too. Things about being a super follower and users being paid for that. Uploading 1080p video ""Support your favourite people on Twitter for bonus content and extra perks.""

lzooz 4y ago

>Btw, a dev build is in prod right now. Or someone forgot to minimize the JS. Tons of import map issues. That's the way it works. Maps aren't uploaded to production so they fail to load for you.

adventured 4y ago

That's not what Elon thinks based on his actions. He's trying to decimate the workforce on purpose, although it's not going as smoothly as he hoped from outside appearances. He wants huge numbers of Twitter employees to quit, and he has been very clearly laying out the terms for behavior for the type of people he would like to run Twitter with. He's intentionally shaking the tree violently. He's hoping that the types that remain will be his types of employees. He's going to try to rebuild the workforce starting from those, so it's his company in ethos / function. He thinks Twitter can run with far fewer engineers, and drastically fewer staff overall, than what it was operating with previously. He knows the value of engineers, he has made that part clear: he plainly said that engineers are most of what is important about Twitter, not the rest of the staff, he said it should be an engineer heavy company.

qwytw 4y ago
I highly doubt the majority of engineers who are actually good at what they do would be willing to remain in such a toxic environment Musk is creating. Also so far he has displayed very little understanding of what engineers actually do (the bring you screenshots thing and the way he responded to one of them correcting him on Twitter and a bunch of other cases don't paint the brightest picture).
- adventured 4y ago
  I make no wager on whether he can actually reach what he's trying to achieve. Rather, I'm merely proposing what I think he's doing / why he's doing it. I don't think he can run Twitter very effectively out of San Francisco going forward, after his behavior. He'll try to run it out of Texas instead.
ProjectArcturis 4y ago
That's definitely the bet he's making. I think most of the best people will leave because they can make the same money working normal hours. He'll end up with those who can't find another job, those stuck at Twitter because of visas, and some unknown percentage of his desired "hardcore" employees.
4y ago

NilsIRL 4y ago

> Btw, a dev build is in prod right now. Or someone forgot to minimize the JS. Tons of import map issues. Not the first time this has happened: https://twitter.com/NilsIRL/status/1479065003684765697 https://twitter.com/NilsIRL/status/1479065003684765697

nunez 4y ago

holy shit you're totally right. not sure if this is normal but tons of resources link to ton.local.twitter.com which NXDOMAINs against quad-8 also you're totally right; none of the JS is minified!

hyuuu 4y ago

what dev build? for twitter?