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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
by 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 agoThat's like asking an artist to bring screen shots of the best 10 brush strokes.
- pmoriarty 4y agoIt 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 agoLots 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 agoIt’s literally the question being asked, not a different question.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoI 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.
- khazhoux 4y agoTotally agree. As distasteful as Elon’s process may be, at the end of the day all of us making boatloads of money should be able to point to our results and deliverables. If an engineer is making $200k and wrote a couple hundred lines of code all year, that’s probably a problem. Certainly, only a relatively few people should have the valid excuse that their work doesn’t involve writing code.
- lentil_soup 4y agoI can show you my results and deliverables all you want, but they're definitely not going to be measured in the number lines on code in a screenshot. Come on, you know this
- khazhoux 4y agoTotally agree. But I think you would agree that a good engineer (with lots of exceptions for architects, tech lead managers, etc) should be able to look at their git history and find some nice chunks of code besides just adding comments or cleaning up imports/includes.
- kibwen 4y agoFrom screenshots? There's no way that Musk has any ability to judge the quality of a programmer based on "up to 10" screenshots of code entirely divorced from its context, especially since he is not a programmer and has no experience whatsoever with any of Twitter's codebases.
- khazhoux 4y agoIt’s probably more of a filter to see who can’t even come up with 10 examples of work they’ve delivered over the course of a year. I do a lot of code reviews, and it’s very obvious who on the team barely churns out useful code —- even just from the low density and volume of their code.
- deckard1 4y agorun a git blame on any file and you're likely to see a dozen or more people touching it. You would need a large chunk of freshly-written code unmolested by your coworkers. And what's that even going to prove? You're not inventing any novel algorithm. You're going to write whatever code your PM wanted written to support whatever stupid features or A/B test they wanted done. And Elon's going to sit there and judge the worth of that? Based on what metric?
- khazhoux 4y agoWhile fully acknowledging that Elon is a jerk… Most engineers should be able to run “git log -p —author=myname —since=‘12 months ago’” and find 10 examples of non-trivial code. And those that can’t, should be able to provide a good explanation of what they contribute instead.
- michaelmrose 4y agoIt must be amazing to have such good will that even batshit crazy behavior is rationalized as somehow reasonable. Elon's going off the deep end. The primary role of leadership is to feed tasks and guidance to skilled people who your organization has selected based on known temperament and skillset. If you run a software company and don't know you employ who can code you are at titanic slipping beneath the waves status still calling on skilled ship designers. It's done he burned 44B by being a bad leader.
- krapp 4y agoBut people aren't paid based on the quality of their work, or productivity, but simple supply and demand. We're constantly told this justifies both the high wages of tech and the low wages of, say, Amazon warehouse workers and janitors, on principle. People at Twitter make $100,000 a year because that's what the market value of keeping an ass in that chair is worth.
- halfmatthalfcat 4y agoA lot of Seniors/Staff don't write "code". They're architecting/planning/guiding. If I'm a Senior Staff DevOps engineer who maintains our entire Kube infra, am I gonna show Elon some sweet YAML configs? "Oh here's my Go templating for our org wide Helm charts that isn't really novel but is really important?"
- khazhoux 4y agoIn an org with thousands of software engineers, shouldn’t most of them be writing code? Feels like everyone wants to be the exception, and just assumes “someone else” should do actual hands-on work
- dboreham 4y ago> shouldn’t most of them be writing code In an org of that size, there's much work just in stopping other people writing really bad code.
- khazhoux 4y agoI definitely agree with this. But if an org is full of people doing nothing but this, you got a real problem on your hands.
- halfmatthalfcat 4y agoEvery organization is different but no, I don't think most of them should be writing code. I wouldn't put any kind of quantifier on it. Software development is not just "writing code". Shipping code from ideation to production is more complicated than layman want to make it out to be, especially at these scales. This dystopian "nobody works" fantasy that some people wish for is simply that, a fantasy. I'm willing to bet most, if not all Twitter developers were above average across the industry and were producing work of value.
- qwytw 4y agoIt's the other way around, The smaller the org the more lines per code you would expected per engineer. Scaling codebases is hard. > Feels like everyone wants to be the exception Right. You can easily write 10x the number of lines than an average engineer and create negative value for the product.
- extesy 4y agoIf the new link color brought in 0.1% increased engagement and $5M increased revenue then that engineer's salary is more than justified.
- timeon 4y agoI wonder if even color scheme in requested screenshot can influence review.
- tedunangst 4y agoSomething about $1 for the part and $99 for knowing where to put it.
- piva00 4y agoHow do you expect a staff engineer in the middle of driving a multi-year project to revamp some large crufty part of the architecture to a better state, something that will pay off in 3-5 years time, be able to take screenshots of their "best work" to prove to Elon Musk they're worth it? It's a special kind of hell, it manages to be much worse than the hell it is on having to politically push this kind of project to multiple layers of decision-making higher management to get enough buy in because it's a damn expensive project.
- khazhoux 4y agoIn this hypothetical, did the staff engineer do anything besides attend meetings in the last 12 months? Did they write any code, or design docs, or actually contribute anything? Elon’s a jerk, but this thread seems to be full of people saying “I deliver value even though I can’t actually demonstrate any evidence of it.”
- michaelmrose 4y agoDo you write code?
- khazhoux 4y agoOnly at home these days. First fifteen years of my career, as engineer and TL, I wrote a ton of code — every day was for coding, and even late nights and weekends for the extra-fun projects. Now as a manager and sometimes architect, no code from me but I still review code and spend time stopping bad ideas, getting teams to work together, and all that fun stuff. But I still regard code merged into master, as the ultimate tangible of our work.
- lentil_soup 4y agoSo you wouldn't have a single screenshot of code to show for the past year either? So, you DO understand what we're trying to say on this thread. I don't get why you are defending this measure as a valid way to measure engineers
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- BoorishBears 4y agoThe most important person on my team can probably no longer write idiomatic code for the platform we use at this point, as the platform has moved forward while he's spent the last 6 years mostly working on high level architecture and tying together systems that range from HMI to Automotive to AI... You could probably fit his committed code for the last 6 months on one page, confuse it for a junior dev's output, and yet firing him would kneecap the team. Other people know individual parts of what he knows, but the value of having one person who knows them all in immeasurable. I can't imagine a place at Twitter scale didn't have similar individuals.
- khazhoux 4y agoOk, so that’s one person that just needs to explain his role to the new boss. But the same excuse can’t apply to everyone on the team.
- mint2 4y agoHow is that the fault of the developer since in all likelihood a PM dictates what they do. If the PMs don’t prioritize important things and obsess over the shade of blue, fire the PM and give the dev a chance
- cesaref 4y agoWhat if your most important contribution so far this year has been removing 10,000 lines of code?
- awinder 4y agoPresumably this case was covered in the first round of layoffs when they stack ranked engineers by lines of code produced in the last (6 months? 1 year?)
- tibbydudeza 4y agoWhere do you see yourself in 5 years - dumbest HR question ever - earn bucket loads of more money ???.
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y agoHere's a different take. I was a Staff Engineer at one job. Want to know what my best work one year was? An outsourcing contract I spent a few months negotiating. Any code I checked (that year anyway) in paled in comparison to the value I added by doing that.
- lentil_soup 4y ago> It's hardly losing the plot to ask someone "What have you achieved and what do you think your best work is? that's not what's being asked, they're asking for screenshots of code. Which is not the same.
- UncleMeat 4y agoMy best work is architecture, design, and domain modeling. You can't see that on a page of code.