Twitter engineers told to print out their code
twitter.com
twitter.com
Obviously musk doesn't have time to review it all... But saying 'print out a couple of pages of your recent code you are proud of and bring it to a review with your tech lead' is a good way to discuss coding style.
The 'you are proud of' is key to this working though - all your code is visible in the VCS anyway, but asking you to pick a good bit to discuss seems valuable.
Maybe with a bit of back and forth with team mates it might help people like me as well who struggle with imposter syndrome on a daily basis feel like they can be proud of things they do.
Strong arming Elon's intentions, may be he is used to perhaps how code reviews work in Space industry? Sometimes old school ways are fine, under the hood it is just code.
It is simply much quicker and much more efficient to do something like a proper code share in an office with one person driving the code and being able to jump between areas of the code.
To say it bluntly: Anyone that uses printed code for code reviews is wrong. It assumes all functionality is colocated and nearby. It wastes time by forcing people to index through multiple pages of paper. Anyone that demands it should see prompt pushback.
We did have very thorough design documents and manuals and all of them have been printed (including documented function headers) as the contract dictated, but we only used the original word documents and the version control system to review our code.
If I'm forced to print code, I would probably do it. It is essentially a few clicks taking a few minutes of my time.
On the other hand, your tech lead reviewing code on paper is going to be extremely painful. The tech lead who is forced to review code on paper would probably quit first.
And sure, if I was getting judged by LoC I'd just paste in a library versus including it, which would generally be worse.
Do I bring shredded paper to demonstrate that?
Is scheduling every single person in the company to have a discussion about... coding style solve any particular problem Twitter has?
This reeks of 'I am the new owner, I need to do something, this is something, everyone will now be doing it.'
Yeah bring code so we can talk about it is fine at the bottom level. Dumb for owner in first week. The good programmers know nothing will ultimately come of this codiscovery process thus making a bad impression on the good employees
Not saying his intentions are noble, but the act of these mettings, in and of themselves, does not signal anything in either direction.
And even if were not of zero value, it's not what they were told to do anyways. Printing out your code of the past 30 days is a demeaning power play to test your loyalty. They could just look at your pull requests or commits themselves.
> Amid layoff fears, some Twitter employees were instructed to print out copies of the code they had written recently as possible proof of work, said two people with knowledge of the situation.
Perhaps the two people don’t have knowledge of the situation.
How about the photo of the Twitter engineer holding her printed source code?
I also saw tweets from other Twitter engineers talking about printing out their code.
I’d like to see Twitter fire the cottage industry of professional non-contributors that has seeped into tech for the pay.
Employees like the TikToking “Facebook PM” who showed off 20 mins of emailing for work and the rest of the day brunching/lunching with their crew need to go.
I’ve worked for orgs where engineer head count alone pushed 250 people. The number of people in power with no technical skills managing technical workers was a huge waste of time.
Why not troll the public and traditional media who are far more obsessed with office life than doing real things for others?
Why bother taking the article seriously? It’s unverifiable. I see no reason to give it a sincere discussion.
Of course the best way to get it to run smoothly is have people show their work with printouts to prove that they shouldn’t be fired.
Those lines are normally the hardest. Maybe referencing a weird behaviour, not implemented feature, and stackoverflow is the only place that explains it
The story I had until I finally got to this article was:
Elon rounded up everybody in the company and personally, possibly and likely with a megaphone, demanded that “whomever is in charge” and/or everybody in general to immediately drop all their work and print off the entire code base so he, Elon, can personally perform a code review with like a highlighter in a meeting room while his 50 Spartan Tesla engineers watching like gremlins so they can cackle at the code quality.
Twitter engineers would then also need to stay at the office so they can be personally called in to be laughed at and fired on the spot. All the other twitter engineers would be lining the halls and be forced to laugh at the fired engineers as they’re escorted out in handcuffs. Failing to laugh and point adequately, or falling asleep, means they would be next.
Whiteboards + pseudocode? Perfect.
Most comments critics the lack of usefullness of such request.
Most comments are funneled in a technological sideration, and fail to consider such request in a context of power take over, social hierarchy and group dynamic.
Please, stop being hypnotized. And think a little out of the box of your modern, sterilized, way of thinking.
Also, it is well known that Musk hiring process emphazises on "doer" profile. Not only the activities of his company are highly seducing to high intellectual profiles, Musk over select them based on the "doer" criteria. People highly intelligent, but emprisonned only in theorical masturbation are not selected.
"Show me your code" is nothing different than "show me the rocket you build in your yard"
Lot of smart people can talk about rocket. Only a few are doing rocket. Lot of smart people can talk about code, only a few are coding.
So Musk is just trying to detect who are the 20% coders from the dev staff that are doing the 80% of the work. In order to fire the 80% remaining as promised.
This is the first time he bought a big company which was not designed from origin by his paradigm.
Most of big company are kindergarden (to be nice to them). Musk now is turning twitter from kindergarden to efficient, profitable structure, in regards to Tesla or SpaceX.
This is quite a big challenge, as far as Elon's paradigms were not part of the inner culture, staffing policies of the company, since birth.
Let's see how it will go.
ps: If once, you place yourself in the field of complexity, collective intelligence, group dynamic, you first understand that companies structure are the only allowed (accepted) form of experimentation by the capitalism system.
The family structure has been totally destroyed by promoting all kind of law attacking the inner mecanism of family structure viability. Therefore blocking all possibility of collective intelligence from it.
The religious structure has been totally destroyed by instillating all kind of memetic virus such as new-age bullshit to sabotage all the core mechanism of religious structure to offer any fertile environment of collective intelligence.
The only allowed space is the business and company. In such paradigm, every company is an experiment of collective intelligence, group dynamic, and complex system.
Twitter, or any kind of social media have a special place in this experiment. As far as their main business is collective intelligence itself, (introduction of recursion principle).
So for all peoples asking themselves why Musk made this purchase. It's seems pretty logical. As far as the efficiency he demonstrated to design very fertile environment for the emergence of a outclassing collective intelligence, demonstrates that he is well aware of the topic. And purchasing twitter will only (i hope) allow him to enter the metalevel of collective intelligence experiments.
So yes, any company leader is somewhat similar to a cult leader.
Cult were never about a vertical relationship between individuals and ethereal entities.
Cult are basically mechanisms to link and glue individuals and create cohesive and consistent group to allow emergence of collective intelligence.
Companies are not anymore worshipping God of bible to build group, but companies are just church of Mammon.
Compagnies management are just the clerical structure of Mammon cult.
"The Bene Gesserit have been at work here" - Lady Jessica Dune 1965
Elon Musk may have questionable attributes but hiring or assessing engineers poorly isn't one of them.