4 ms·

Yeah, I read this as a stunt to sift out the people who are confident in their abilities and contributions from those who just kind of show up and do some minor

Yeah, I read this as a stunt to sift out the people who are confident in their abilities and contributions from those who just kind of show up and do some minor edits. I have no idea how many people get through the code interviews at Big Tech and then think they've proved their value and just phone it in, but I guarantee it's not zero. If I have any particular concern it's that this sort of thing misses some real unsung heroes in any big technical project, i.e. the people who write good documentation and the people who chase down bugfixes. This is important work, but won't be captured by screenshots of code very well. "Here's a screenshot of where I fixed an off-by-one error, but it took two weeks of unraveling 137 microservices to find which RPC was guilty." Important, but not exactly impressive in the way one might think.

sagebird 4y ago
Elon isn’t an idiot who has never been around real world software development. He will happily accept:” Here's a screenshot of where I fixed an off-by-one error, but it took two weeks of unraveling 137 microservices to find which RPC was guilty.” Not to mention, it plays into his perception that twitter architecture is too bloated to be productive. He is likely looking for people who have zero or less than 10 things to show. I bet you could squeeze by with one big thing to show and nothing else if it is explained. This sort of net would catch lots of zero screenshot responses for multiple reasons- I doubt there will be any scrutiny applied.
- rurp 4y ago
  > He is likely looking for people who have zero or less than 10 things to show. If this were actually the goal, he could just find a couple hardcore coders who know how to use git and ask them to produce a list of commits by developer for every repo he cares about. It's hard to tell if he actually thinks he can evaluate people via code screenshots or if this is another dumb hazing ritual, but I can't believe he's really trying to figure out who writes code from this.

sagebird 4y ago

Elon isn’t an idiot who has never been around real world software development. He will happily accept:” Here's a screenshot of where I fixed an off-by-one error, but it took two weeks of unraveling 137 microservices to find which RPC was guilty.” Not to mention, it plays into his perception that twitter architecture is too bloated to be productive. He is likely looking for people who have zero or less than 10 things to show. I bet you could squeeze by with one big thing to show and nothing else if it is explained. This sort of net would catch lots of zero screenshot responses for multiple reasons- I doubt there will be any scrutiny applied.

rurp 4y ago
> He is likely looking for people who have zero or less than 10 things to show. If this were actually the goal, he could just find a couple hardcore coders who know how to use git and ask them to produce a list of commits by developer for every repo he cares about. It's hard to tell if he actually thinks he can evaluate people via code screenshots or if this is another dumb hazing ritual, but I can't believe he's really trying to figure out who writes code from this.