Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said | Hacker News Reader

Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

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607 pointsperihelions1,662 comments

I don't at all object to code reviews/evaluation, but the thing I wonder about is this: I rarely open an empty file and write some big block of code. 98% of the time I'm fixing bugs in legacy code or shimming in some new feature. It would be trivial to produce the diffs I generated in the past 30 or 60 days, but the volume of code isn't really a great metric for my productivity.

There may be some three line change that was the result of eight hours of debugging and analyzing how to best fix the bug without disturbing the stuff that is working. Is that more or less productive than someone who cut & pasted a 100 line routine they found via google?

I once reviewed code for a company that got purchased. I took less than a few hours to reach conclusion. There were 7 developers and in 2 months only one was writing code. The entire team but that one developer was fired. Twitter has grown a reputation for being slow and a rest and vest haven. Won't be surprised if they are looking for people not writing code.

On a different note, If you're in a large org and all you are doing is fixing bugs, you are doing yourself a disservice and so is the org in the way they are treating you. Unless you are the original author of that code. When people don't fix their own bugs, they tend to repeat it in other places. When people tend to fix code they didn't write nor have the proper context on why the code was written like that, they tend to turn it into a mess. IMHO, Developers should be writing new code and maintaining their own code. Never reward developers by giving them more new code and stopping them from maintenance.

And if you indeed make "more lines!" the guiding metric for developer performance, you're setting yourself up for a world of pain because they will sure as hell find out and start gaming the metric. This will lead to a feedback loop of rising expenses and tech debt.

I think this is true and an big problem when artificially separating the top 10% from the top 20%, or top 1% from top 5%...

... but in practice, I think you will find 0 overlap in raw lines of code produced between the top 10% developers and the bottom 10% developers. Especially at a notoriously unproductive organization like Twitter, the bottom tier simply does nothing.

If Musk is trying to cut 60% of the org, he's going to have a problem doing it this way. If he's trying to cut 20%, I honestly don't think it's going to misfire much of the time.

"Making chalk mark on generator $1. Knowing where to make mark $9,999."

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-stein...

I would imagine this fact is obvious to any Tesla engineers reviewing code. I would imagine they look at more factors than simply lines of code.

I don't think the code review involves counting the lines. A reviewer can distinguish hundreds of lines of boilerplate from a non-trivial few lines change.

I 100% object to code reviews in this way. If you have dignity as a developer you’d quit swiftly.

I work in a regulated sector. If I need to know the priority of a PR, it’s the speed from code review to integration.

Exactly, more code isn't better

I love being able to fix a bug with a one line change.

I worked at Facebook and remember what it was like to first face the total complexity of the system.

It’s really hard for me to imagine myself working at a company that deals almost exclusively with machine-generated data (as Tesla does) and being assigned to judge a social platform’s engineering qualify in one day. Cars and spaceships on a closed network are fundamentally “clean” compared to having hundreds of millions of people who produce dirty and often adversarial data.

But I guess the point of this exercise isn’t really to judge code quality, but to drive fear at Twitter.

I suspect it’s less a complete review and more an interview of the senior technical manager, to get a sense of whether they are up to par. Do they think about observability, alerting, refactoring, service architecture, etc. reasonably well? Are there issues with how they motivate their teams or when they give them responsibilities? Are timelines challenging but doable?

“Code” is most likely “architecture” and “architecture” is code for “management”.

> drive fear at Twitter

Auditing what you just bought is about as smart as taking the used car you just bought to the shop to get everything checked over and tightened and lubricated.

I utterly fail to understand how this would yield anything other than.

Ooh they use tabs here rather than spaces! And that experimental code over there contains an unused variable! This A/B testing pipeline has minimal test cases! They ship in a day without a Q/A pipeline.

All of the above would happen if any company were acquired by any other. The code style will be different, and the dev practices will be different. Companies optimized to ship quickly will appear low quality to those who optimize for quality, optimizing for quality will appear as a slow moving dinosaur to those who move fast.

Yes, software is typically more complex than a laymen would expect once all of the edge cases and layers of legacy code or “guano” are implemented. However, I doubt that these outside developers are expected to understand everything in a single day.

There are legitimate questions regarding how certain sections of the Twitter code operate as it relates to censorship, which is a primary reason Elon purchased Twitter. Given the activist mentality (and possibly hostile to new ownership) of a certain number of developers, it seems perhaps prudent to analyze the code and evaluate the existing developers immediately upon purchase of the company.

My guess is this would be a very high level look at their architecture and maybe a closer look as some specific portions. Like you said these systems are so complex that you wouldn't be able to figure out what is even happening in a day.

I don't agree that it's to drive feat at Twitter, as just about any engineer will know what I just said. What I think it's about is driving the headlines, "Tesla engineers are doing a code review at twitter" sounds very important to the lay person.

My guess is that at least part of the reason to bring in these devs, is to make sure none of the code or git histories (or their backups) are tampered with.

Hahahaa

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428775/twitter-fake-em...

A great attempt to dodge vesting schedules and escape doling out severance. Even if they convince many engineers to quit willingly, one presumes that the next step is rounds of layoffs with cause.

California is at-will, but notoriously anal regarding mass-layoffs. My serious question is, regardless of with or without cause, surely some employment attorneys are licking their lips at the stack of prospective cases they're about to have, right?

If I was a Twitter engineer, I'd be trying to figure out how to maximize my severance package right about now.

> If I was a Twitter engineer, I'd be trying to figure out how to maximize my severance package right about now.

Absolutely. This is how I would spend every minute of my workdays until the eventual layoff. It’s a degrading experience for sure, but it could pay off big.

> I'd be trying to figure out how to maximize my severance package...

How would one go about doing that? Is there a way to have influence on that?

Twitter is a private company now. There are no more stocks to vest, so the idea that this is to dodge vesting schedules doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

I dunno why any Twitter engineers would be really trying that hard right now.

Passively destroying Twitter from within by not trying, and trying to make a billionare lose 44 billion dollars is a significantly more fun and interesting challenge than making Twitter a better product.

Comments like this makes me lose faith i humanity.

If I were a engineer at Twitter, I'd do my absolute best up to the minute I have to leave the premises. Because I would care about the company, my colleagues and most importantly for the >200m people who use Twitter for fun, educational, business and those who depend on it.

But it's probably because I'm an old beard, who value being honest and ethical, to be the better person even if I'm in a room of degenerates.

If these numbers are right and they're laying off 50% the workforce, half of me wonders how much Parag could raise to build a new Twitter from scratch and just hire 500 - 1000 talented folks off the street for the venture, I mean if Travis K could raise almost a billion for his shitty ghost kitchen venture I'd have to think they could get enough runway to get something launched pretty quickly.

There's so many "What we should do" moments that are too expensive or deviate too far from the core business that don't get developed in most enterprises that could be pursued when starting from a blank slate.

Anyway, just a thought experiment.

Because they don't have a union so they were excluded from all the big-boy negotiations at the sale, and they've no way to resist the demands of their bosses. They can put up, or shut up. Or just complain pathetically.

See also: Tumblr losing Yahoo/Verizon nearly a Billion dollars with it's own implosion.

The new owner knows this, that the whole company is itching to self sabotage and crash twitter if they can..

Maybe try for a month, get stock to vest, then take off.

Isn't Peter theil launching a competing product. Maybe he tricked musk into buying twitter so this happens

I wish Elon Musk all the best handling whatever this is with a skeleton crew of people who hate him on Tuesday: https://xeiaso.net/blog/openssl-3.x-secvuln-incoming.

`git blame`

>Passively destroying Twitter from within by not trying

A code review? TL;DR; LGTM, straight to prod!

You are a psychopath.

Twitter engineers already aren’t trying, unless you’re counting under flow or something HN meta to increase output while reducing effort.

This is pretty standard procedure when a company gets bought. The new owners will conduct a review and decide who to keep and who to get rid of. They have probably been given a target of how many people they want to lay off and are evaluating who is worth keeping.

It’s not worth staying at a company that gets acquired, you’ll either get laid off or be asked to do the same work with less people, and awful morale.

You say "the new owners" but Tesla is not the new owner. Is it really standard procedure for employees from another company of the same CEO to do labor on the CEO's new company? And is printing out code really standard? Like, if you have the prerogative to review company code, why wouldn't you rather just use code tools on a computer, such as Git?

I wouldn't be quick to dismiss the idea that this is a show.

Respectfully, very little of this seems to be operating by standard procedure. Have you seen the incoming CEO ask people to bring printouts of their code, ever?

They were asked to print their code and typically this is done as part of diligence _before_ closing. This is not sop. It’s Elon making a show of things.

I think what you’re saying is not untrue. But this isn’t that. There would be an entire process performed over many months (some of which should have happened during due diligence.)

Imagine if Elon bought an airline and asked them to line up all the planes on the tarmac for review.

You're talking more about standard procedure after an acquisition. The new owners come in and look for redundancies and try to cut there.

This was a change in ownership, not an acquisition. There's an assumption about a lot of dead weight at Twitter. There certainly may be, but it's not simple redundancies (ie, you don't need 2 accounting depts.). Instead they'll have to figure out if Twitter really needs that many people.

My guess is Twitter isn't as over-staffed as people think. Content moderation and multi-country policy likely require a lot of staff. To quote Scott Galloway on his attempted company take overs, "I often find out I'm not as smart as I thought I was, and the existing management isn't as dumb as I thought they were."

agree, the reason he wants it "printed on paper" is strictly so he can gauge output by lines of code measured in pages. Basically the dumbest metric in the world for judging the effectiveness of a programmer.

If someone completely new to my codebase came along and tried to evaluate my code I'd laugh. You can't jump in and "evaluate" without knowing context and being familiar with the features.

What’s more funny is how people commonly believe like this their code is so special or different than everyone else’s. Reverse engineering a large code base is not anywhere as hard as most software engineers somehow believe. I was tasked with analyzing a large code base from a company that my employer had been an investor in and as part of their investment had been given IP rights, the company employees were floored when our team, lead by me had ripped apart their system into multiple components and reused them in way they hadn’t. Trust me if one is experienced enough they can understand your code perfectly fine, it’s definitely not as special as you think it is.

I don't think Elon is trying to evaluate the code. It seems to me he is trying to evaluate people.

> You can't jump in and "evaluate" without knowing context and being familiar with the features.

Yes you can, it's called an audit and there is nothing wrong with that. The company you work for should have regular security audits for instance, ideally done by a third party rather than internally to eliminate bias. This isn't a "code review".

New people regularly join our company and evaluate our code. Why do you think you couldn’t do that without joining?

Eh, if you're competent, then sure. But some people have obvious code smells. You'd be surprised. A quick glance and it's obvious they're not competent. 6 layers of inheritance. Composition loops everywhere (A is in B, B is in A, A and B are in C, C are in A and b).

I'd argue you've done a bad job if a new person reading the code can't follow it.

Do you not think you could sit down with somebody and explain it?

I don't think the goal here is code review. They're trying to gauge a few things: 1) are you competent? 2) are you coasting or genuinely contributing? 3) are you actually dedicated to improving the product or more concerned with office politics and inserting your ideology?

A quick interview and a little demonstration of contribution can help assess these things significantly, you don't have to understand the codebase that much to do it.

Of course I first read the documentation to understand a code base, but then just usually jump in to the part that I’m interested in. If it’s not spaghetti code base, it’s not that hard to do that.

In this case, it would be your new boss asking to make a short presentation of your work, and he has trusted software devs who can smell bs a mile away.

Yes you absolutely can. If there are obvious mistakes that would be caught by linting or review, you can know that the standard isn't high.

All of this is so funny in general. It seems possible that Twitter might go the way of Tumblr in that goofy policy changes alienate the core userbase. I couldn’t imagine betting billions of dollars on a property that could basically just become a valuable-ish domain in the future.

It seems almost inevitable it will go the way of Tumblr, Friendster, Hi5, Bebo, MySpace, Orkut, Google+ and soon Facebook.

Social networks don't have a particularly long life expectancy.

Slight difference: Tumblr's core userbase were edgy teenagers and porn consumers, Twitter's core userbase appears to be press people, marketing professionals, celebrities and politicians. I think this userbase will be less inclined to just move on to Mastodon and more to make demands to Musk instead.

Nah, there’s nowhere else for cable news to pull hot takes from social media.

Comparing Twitter to Tumblr is laughable. The same thing that happened to tumblr cannot happen to twitter.

For a variety of performance car nerd related reasons, I’ve not paid too much attention to Tesla. But iirc, there have been a couple threads here and elsewhere about Tesla making “expedient” choices in Eng, with a lot of horrible bodges around critical components. It definitely left me with an impression that Tesla was a place with low engineering quality — though again, I have no source at hand here, and don’t feel bothered to do the searching.

Anyone know the articles / blog posts I’m talking about?

FWIW, I don’t think the idea of Elon having his own folks do some internal reviews egregious. Id bet the comm and positioning around it was suboptimal though, atleast given Elon’s personality.

>Tesla was a place with low engineering quality

SpaceX has had a somewhat similar reputation (at least early, it may have changed for the better).

For example, they had a spectacular failure related to bad material quality in a strut.[1] It's common practice in aerospace quality to have "coupons" kept, tested, and traceable for these types of critical components. Apparently, SpaceX wasn't follow this procedure and they changed their policies after the mishap to do so. There have been some other deviations from standard practices that may lead one to raise an eyebrow.

I've sometimes wondered if these are examples of an attitude of "move fast and break things" creeping into other (generally more conservative) safety critical domains.

[1]

I know of this Twitter thread, but not sure of the authenticity.

https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376

Take a random sample of Tesla vehicles, more than four but fewer than 10, and the panel gaps are obscene for the vehicle price and mystique- it’s clear proof they have low standards.

Tesla Model S owner here. The software on iOS and car is several years ahead of the competition. It embarrasses luxury German automakers. It’s made with the user in mind, it is elegant, and it is innovative in many surprising ways.

For balance, there have been bugs - the linking of key fobs to driver profiles has always been glitchy, and Tesla’s decision to use an inadequate eMMC chip was shortsighted given the volume of data logging. This caused issues for a few owners when the chips started to degrade over time. But to Tesla’s credit they later offered a free chip upgrade to all owners, and even covered the costs of those (like me) who got a third party replacement.

I rate Tesla’s software engineering. I’ve had years of issue-free OTA updates and sheer pleasure from driving the car. And having access to the car via an API is cool too :-)

The most bizarre aspect of this was when Twitter engineers were told to print out their code on paper.

There is literally no good reason to do that. At best it is staggering incompetence. At worst it is an intentionally pointless and expensive exercise that serves purely as a loyalty test.

The text messages that were published as part of the suit to close the acquisition showed Musk discussing "return to office" as a way to naturally trim some of the workforce by having the dissatisfied remote workers quit on their own.

My take on the paper printing is that it is a similar strategy to get people to quit by themselves, because they think it's stupid.

> At worst it is an intentionally pointless and expensive exercise that serves purely as a loyalty test.

The engineers would have used company's resources. I wouldn't be bothered if I am forced to do this. It is a 1 minute of work to print something.

I don't think this part is true. It is likely fake. The source for the print out story is so shaky. Leah Culver tweeted obscurely which is hard to tell whether it is a joke. Casey claims to have screenshots but refuse to show the redacted version of them and end with "subscribe to read"....

The code review part might be true but it is not a spicy story.

It's easier than giving source code access to all the outside staff that are coming in to actually read it. But it doesn't really sound like it's a meaningful review, since "last N days" of work isn't useful without context, and only people on the team can give them that.

It's truly bizarre.

Were they? The article said they were told to "stop printing". As in "stop the presses", perhaps. Still sounds weird, though - maybe the author of the invite is not a native English speaker?

Maybe this is a way of asking engineers who have zero pages to print to walk out?

Or maybe this was to set the expectation that only those who care enough to bend to the whimsies of the new management should stay?

Or both?

Nah paper is still more efficient than computers in quick meetings. You can imagine many seconds being wasted if they were on a laptop and the engineer needs to find his files.

Paper the UX is perfect and instant.

>There is literally no good reason to do that

Or simply Elon is more unstable than Dogecoin and wanted to show new employees who is the boss, it was a really pathetic power move.

Musk is a seller above all else. Every day he finds a new way to draw attention to his projects. The news about Twitter give him even more distribution and by nature more sales towards Tesla and his other companies. Tesla engineers on site for interviews is a great idea for Twitter and for Tesla as both get more PR than before. A lot of people have lost interest in Twitter for more than political reasons and I’m excited to see what he does with the product, specifically introducing more alternatives to advertising and showing social products can monetize as agents of their users, not just parasites of attention.

Maybe. But is all of this PR worth $44 billion?

I don't see what the big deal here is. I feel like it's the obvious move. He wants a no nonsense review of the current state of things at Twitter, and isn't wasting time. I'm assuming these engineers he trusts and wants an objective review instead of some bs from folks too removed.

The big deal is that Tesla didnt buy Twitter, Musk did. Based on the Tesla engineers doing due dilligence on a non-Telsa acquisition seems like a conflict of interest.

Exactly! There is too much hate here on anything he does. It just makes sense that he’d want to get people that he trusts looking into this.

I worked at Twitter.

That place is full of folks who are truly of a "rest and vest" mindset. They are also very political (left leaning) and biased. Which really affects moderation and the so called "open" culture. That "open" propaganda they push on their career website is really based on incrowd psychology.

There are a few gems but the really good ones left already. Now it's just the last leafs waiting to fall off the trees which are still standing. The bird has been resting and vesting on leafless trees for a long time. I would be weary hiring a developer from there knowing their record.

It's full of people trying to justify their roles to themselves and their peers with unecessary rewrite schemes for a long time.

The bird needed to migrate for a long time. I am happy it has finally sought a better climate.

However winter is coming.

Musk has extraordinary capability of extracting every bit of potential a person can deliver. Either you work crazy at your 200% or you are worthless and the company is not for you. Twitter will see lots of layoffs, massive restructuring - some unknown people being promoted for top roles, but end result will be better financial. I am not sure Twitter will remain the same as it is. Lots of people think Elon is not good at dealing with public perspective or government, but if you see most of his businesses, his expertise is dealing with governments, contracts and policies makers. On PR, he really doesn't care. And it works for him

>Musk has extraordinary capability of extracting every bit of potential a person can deliver. Either you work crazy at your 200% or you are worthless and the company is not for you.

You are simply paraphrasing exploitation.

>but if you see most of his businesses, his expertise is dealing with governments, contracts and policies makers

Looks more like brute force and public shaming to me.

> Musk has extraordinary capability of extracting every bit of potential a person can deliver. Either you work crazy at your 200% or you are worthless and the company is not for you

I can see people working themselves to the bone after buying into the missions of SpaceX and Tesla ("fuck yeah, space!" and "AI-powered electric cars saving the world" respectively) - but not for Twitter. Musk may find himself with less eager employees than he's used to. If he cuts too deep, I suspect Twitter will enter a downward spiral on talent.

Nailed the government connection.

Mike is his handler for SpaceX, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career

> Elon is not good at dealing with public perspective or government

Really? I thought opposite. Tesla growth was helped a lot by EV subsidy. SpeceX was made thanks to space industry privatization, and get launching tasks from govt. Boring Company is something like for public transport infrastructure.

To be fair, in the time he created a company that pushed electrical vehicles to be mainstream, and made reusable rockets a possibility and not just a dream which is helping push mankind to again explore space what exactly has Twitter accomplished?

The big difference between this and all of Musk's other ventures, is that this is performing a wheel change whilst you're still driving the car. Everything in Tesla and SpaceX has been more or less built from scratch, and involves the release of new products, which can slip. If Twitter's servers fall over, or some Nazis manage to co-ordinate assinating Nancy Pelosi whilst he's at the wheel, or he accidentally endorses an anti-free speech authoritarian regime that hack up journalists with bonesaws... he's going to be in trouble. Because anyone with any sense will leave, and network effects go both ways.

Once upon a time at Tesla, Elon brought SpaceX staff in to weed out the undesirables.

The autopilot team didn’t like being quizzed on basic c/c++ questions and that was the first time almost all of AutoPilot quit.

Or so I heard.

If people developing a system that controls two-ton death machines get their panties in a twist about having to demonstrate basic competency in a memory-unsafe language… it’s probably good that they quit.

Airline pilots don’t quit in a huff because they have to demonstrate basic competency annually.

As much as I dont like Elon, I wonder how much of them quit since they couldn't answer those questions.

Probably I will get tons of downvotes, but there is this strange myth here (and on reddit) that there are no incompetent programmers.

When in reality there are tons of incompetent programmers, just like there are incompetent people in any other job.

Look how well all of that ended...

I was thinking the "30-60" day time window may be a somewhat subtle way of catching out engineers who haven't written a thing in that amount of time. that would be one way to identify low-performers.

not unproblematic by a long shot, but quick, and probably somewhat effective. and it wouldn't require any deep knowledge of twitter's codebase on the part of the reviewers.

Any slightly competent software leader would know that you can track every character of code written by any dev using version control.

Printing it out as a mark of honor/shame is something a petty, arrogant tyrant would do. Musk has been around people who are afraid to say no to him for too long.

Are we back to measuring performance in klocs? I can get you a bunch of incompetent devs that change hundreds ofines of code a day. All you need to do is change indentation and eols or just rewrite basic stuff too lazy to understand.

right, they'll fire the gurus who know how everything works and barely write a line of code anymore, and things will be pretty hilarious when they have their next outage.

Quick! Force push branch with fake historic commits from everyone in the team!

20pt font sizes goes brrr!

Twitter's core operation is running a massively distributed database, as I understand it, where concurrency issues are pretty important to get right. See Data-Intensive Applications (2017), Part II: Distributed Systems (Replication, Partitioning, Transactions, etc.) for an overview.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensiv...

Just guessing, you'd think Starlink would be more experienced in that area than either Tesla or SpaceX? I suppose there are things like remote software updates and internal working databases to manage at SpaceX and Tesla, but it seems managing satellite traffic is a closer match.

Who knows, they might be, I really don't trust WaPo reporting anymore.

Tesla stores an absolutely silly amount of captured training data. They are very familiar with large distributed databases.

What makes Manhattan special (Twitters internal database) isn't it's scale (FB, Google, etc operate DBs which much higher scale) but it's multi-engine paradigm and other cool features.

The Tesla folk that are there probably aren't even DB specialists though, they are likely just there to evaluate the lay of the land and start the process of working out which teams are pulling their weight and which aren't.

Everyone thinks that these Tesla engineers are going there to “evaluate” but nobody is really considering them going there to “steal” code to bring to Tesla.

The suggestion algorithms are more of a technical challenge than concurrency, at Twitter scale. Tesla does a lot more ML than SpaceX.

(and let's be honest, Twitter hasn't solved the concurrency issues, so I'm not sure there's much to review)

I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the “Tesla engineers” brought in are former social media company engineers in the early days. It’s an incorrect assumption that all they’ve done is program for cars.

What code is he reviewing? And why is he reviewing it? There must be millions of lines of code. Also, why bring in Tesla employees? Twitter employees are also his own, they could do they review for him. Just shows how musk feels about Twitter and the people there. Such disrespect.

They are not reviewing code, they are reviewing people. And doing a terrible job at that if it really involves code printouts and short interviews. This is likely a fishing expedition to collect data to disguise layoffs as performance firings. He's not interested in accurately tell if they are capable or not, he's likely just trying to gauge who to "obviously" maintain and get rid of the rest since he already stated that in his view 75% of the company is redundant.

Agreed, it feels like a severely degrading and unnecessarily hostile act.

He doesn't know the Twitter employees. Seems reasonable to ask employees you know to give you a technical read on how things stand.

Article clearly says per employee code written in last 30-60 days

> some engineers received a calendar invite Friday, telling them: “Stop printing, please be ready to show your recent code,” a reference to engineers being asked to show the code they had written in the last 30 to 60 days on their computers.

> The note continues, “Please come prepared with code as a backup to review on your own machines with Elon.”

It seems to me that some engineers are being evaluated for their suitability to being in those positions.

Maybe it's an engineer review, not a code review.

Reminiscent of the Elon message to the former CEO: "What have you got done this week?"

To which the reply would be "cut the bullshit, we both know you don't give a shit about code, so just show me which demeaning hoop you need me to jump through and what I'm going to get for doing it."

And then just hope it isn't quid pro quo sexual harassment.

Musk sounds like a nightmare to work for. Why would any self-respecting developer stick around under these conditions? I expect an exodus of talent from Twitter in short order.

Have you looked at the Tesla share price history, or SpaceX valuation?

Elon makes his equity-compensated employees rich. You don't need complex psychology to explain the appeal.

Cult of personality.

Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates etc. were all a nightmare to work when they were younger.

For there to be an exodus of talent there must be first be talent.

From what I can make out Twitter's workforce are predominantly average at best and I suspect we'll see at least 2,000 or so people cut in the next 6 months.

This assumes Twitter has serious talent. The company that implemented "undo tweet" with a setTimeout[1].

[1] https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1513301310434529288?s=20&t=Q...

I think people are looking at this the wrong way. It's not so much about the code as it is about establishing an authority. Musk takeover is often regarded as banditry and I wouldn't be surprised if the employees didn't take him seriously in the beginning. This is his way of saying, "I don't trust you, I don't know what you have been up to but things are going to be different so better get used to it."

Using Tesla engineers is just to get everyone talking. I don't think they can get a clear picture by looking at last 30 days of code but they can use this as reason to lay a lot of people off. Not that Musk needs reasons, obviously.

In my mind I think Twitter is going to go on a very, very different direction than we all expect. You have to understand that Musk isn't after the big dollar here but rather he is experimenting which has a lot of chances to fail. Twitter could become extraordinary or it could become utter trash, we'll have to wait and see. Personally, I am quite excited to see where this goes.

Why would anyone take him seriously when he is making a massive embarrassment of himself on his first day on the job (after doing the same for months leading up to the takeover?)

Musk didn't know the bio of the CEO of the company he was buying (who was also former CTO, engineer, Stanford PhD (thesis topic: making decisions under uncertainty), IPhO gold medalist, top tier Indian tech student) and called him a non-technical "manager type" and refused to ask him any technical questions.

I am also excited, because I think Twitter needs to end and Musk is the perfect person to destroy it.

Only incompetent managers (and executives) think that "authority" is interchangeable with "respect". Fortunately for Musk, incompetence rarely disqualifies billionaires from anything.

Every company I was with when it sold had lawyers come in and inform everyone that all processes are frozen, no equipment can move or be transferred while inventory is taken, everyone involved with computers surrender their passwords to their incoming engineers... etc, etc, etc. It is standard practice and there is nothing nefarious about it.

> It's not so much about the code as it is about establishing an authority

I think there's a simpler explanation: he intends to fire people under the pretext of poor performance and play games with layoffs/severance and/or create a hostile environment to encourage employees to resign (no severance either).

> You have to understand that Musk isn't after the big dollar here but rather he is experimenting which has a lot of chances to fail

Musk wanted out of this purchase, but discovered the Delaware Court of Chancery far less malleable compared to other regulators he's dealt with before (looking at you, SEC). Tesla is going to be a learning experience for Elon.

> I don't think they can get a clear picture by looking at last 30 days of code

I can very quickly spot developers who are mediocre or worse by looking at their last 30 days off code. (As long as it's a language I have decent experience in.)

I suspect he's trying to access the team's technical competence.

Seems like an extreme step if he feels after a few days he isn’t being taken seriously enough. That’s not a lot of time.

I suspect that not much will change for users. The folks who want to continue tweeting will do so. The folks who do not want to tweet won't. Everything else is office politics.

This week Musk sure sounded like someone who was a bit concerned over the potential of losing advertising revenue.

It's the same thing riding a horse.

Yeah, I don't see the problem. Tesla investors benefit from SpaceX material science expertise solely because Elon owns SpaceX and allocates the time and resources. I don't see Tesla investors complaining about that.

I would view it as a way for Tesla engineers getting paid to go to a software conference. It is definitely possible to learn something during the code review to take back to Tesla.

I'd be pissed off if I were a TSLA stock owner. Is Twitter paying Tesla to contract out these employees for their work? Otherwise, it's tons of thousands of dollars Tesla is pissing away on behalf of the CEO's side-hustle.

You'd arguably have a case that Musk is not acting in the interest of Tesla and is using his Tesla position to enrich himself rather than the Tesla company. Exactly what the "CEO is supposed to serve shareholders" is all about.

There is a lot of cross pollination between his companies, that’s is fine:

- new materials from SpaceX make it into Tesla cars

- productions techniques from Tesla goes into SpaceX rockets

- Semiconductor teams from Starlink probably connected to Tesla

It mean the best engineers get even more opportunities. win-win

Less red tape, more work get done. I think we should all embrace that.

Our goal should be to make things better first and then to make money second to help us out make things even better at larger scale.

It would be reasonable for Twitter to pay Tesla for the audit work, because otherwise it would be a misuse of Tesla resources to only benefit the Tesla CEO.

I'm not pissed and I am a stockholder.

To me it makes a lot of sense. I doubt they are reviewing the entire code base. It seems like Elon is particularly interested in the automated systems that control content and detect bots. To that end, Tesla has a lot of expertise in AI systems.

I’m a TSLA holder and I don’t mind at all. The everyday minutiae don’t concern me as long as the big picture for Tesla is in focus and with in reach

Once Tesla bought Solar City, Musk's cousin's company, it became clear that he's prone to this sort of misuse of resources. I agree that he shouldn't use Tesla resources like this, but it's not out-of-character, either.

Totally valid opinion. Tesla needs to be focused on delivering cars and software. They can't be distracted. This also hurts the banks who are looking at Tesla stock as collateral. By lumping their activities, both companies are now at risk.

You’d only be pissed off if you had a predisposition to dislike elon and then why would you be a TSLA shareholder?

This is a tiny amount of money compared to the daily cost of running TSLA and would have zero actual impact to shareholder value. If it isn’t being accounted for correctly, there will be a tiny investor lawsuit and a tiny amount of money changing hands.

This is latching on to just anything to complain about and really detracts from the ability of elon critics to be taken seriously because it’s just complaining about a few pennies worth of shareholder value.

I am surprised this is the top comment. Yes, I am sure they have done the paperwork for these "tons of thousands of dollars." I think it is unlikely that many shareholders are concerned about this exercise

It would be better to find out more details before having an emotional reaction.

Maybe they're Tesla engineers, but they're moonlighting on Twitters dime?

Whos to say that these TSLA engineers didnt take PTO time and Musk is paying them a consulting rate?

He did it with SpaceX too and had to reach a settlement:

> The arrangement alarmed some longtime investors in SpaceX, including its largest outside backer, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, some of the people said. The investors learned in recent months that despite the diversion of SpaceX resources and staffing to the fledgling Boring startup, it was Musk who was in line to receive almost all of any future profits, these people said.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-questions-over-elon-mu...

> In early 2018, The Boring Company was spun out from SpaceX and into a separate corporate entity.[27] Somewhat less than 10% of equity was given to early employees, and over 90% to Elon Musk. Subsequent concerns by SpaceX shareholders resulted in a December 2018 reallocation of 6% of The Boring Company's equity to SpaceX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company#History

Basically he tried embezzlement.

As an actual TSLA stock owner, I'm ok with this. It's a pretty trivial amount of work in the grand schema of things and it will probably be compensated to Tesla in some way.

Love him or hate him, without Musk Tesla would have been dead in the water as a company and its shares would have been worthless by now. Those stock owners knew what they did when they got into TSLA.

Huh? Free national press time for tesla for a few thousand bucks of dev time send like a good deal, no? The fact we’re sitting here talking snot it pretty much proves that….

Musk has made TSLA stock holders fabulously wealthy over the last decade. He's gonna get a long leash from TSLA shareholders.

Would you also be outraged if those engineers were given an extra day off instead?

This is true, yet Musk has proven to be asynchronous. It could have second order consequences that actually benefit Tesla in the long term. Of course that's hypothetical but there could be some game theory here the truth is we don't know.

I’m sure it’s not reported (because it lessens the impact of the story), but I guarantee Twitter will compensate Tesla if Tesla resources are used. However, I bet it it’s contractor engineers that are used who might have also worked at Tesla.

Been there, done that.

It's perfectly plausible to believe that Elon Musk paid them to take vacation days off for this purpose. I wouldn't jump to any conclusions.

When you invest in a company like Tesla, you're investing your money and your trust that ultimately there will be a return.

Would you be angry if he gave everyone a 2 week vacation as recognition for doing something good? Part of what motivates engineers is recognition, and being asked to work on some project outside the company for a few weeks is recognizing that your input as an engineer is that valued.

Like you assume ALL the engineers at Tesla are on site at Twitter or what? Maybe it's like 4-5 principal engineers for a couple of days.

Maybe it’s an opportunity to spot Twitter employees who could be adding more value working at Tesla instead?

How do you know Twitter or Musk aren't paying for those contractors to come and assess the code?

> Is Twitter paying Tesla to contract out these employees for their work?

Eh, there are marketing synergies between Twitter and Tesla.

Normally this sort of thing can be reported through the ethics hotline.

Tesla can bill Twitter for the work at a fair market price.

Aren't you also pissed that Elon works on spaceX ?

> Otherwise, it's tons of thousands of dollars Tesla is pissing away on behalf of the CEO's side-hustle.

Seems like a drop of water. For something to be legally relevant it has to be significant.

Um... free PR for TSLA which helps with recruiting for both organizations?

Why do you care enough to comment as a non stock owner? Got an axe to grind?

They should be happy. Get your engineers out and about for a bit, dump on some disposable soon to be ex Twitter developers to boost their morale while at it. Genius.

If this sort of thing concerns you, you should already be pissed because it's not the first time it's happened.

Remember SolarCity? SolarCity was one of Elon's companies. SpaceX had bought a large number of solar bonds. One interpretation of this was to keep the company afloat. A court disagreed [1]. When SolarCity became insolvent it was bought out by Tesla.

So one of Elon's companies bought out another of Elon's companies to save the third Elon company.

There is this myth that exists of Elon being some kind of tech deity but there's a much better case to be made that he's simply a highly privileged technocrat who has quite successfully failed upwards his entire career [2].

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/27/elon-musk-wins-shareholder-l...

[2]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-many-failures-of-elon-...

I think most are missing that this is a code review + loyalty review.

For sure a software engineer from Tesla, or even a manager, can get an idea of how valuable/productive a coder is without fully understanding the code in detail. How many PRs? What does the code do? How was it reviewed? What value does it bring to stakeholders (users, business revenue)? Sure enough this way you can get a rough idea of how much work somebody does and if it is of any importance.

The loyalty part is in the timing: 30-60 days. A period with a lot of uncertainty for Twitter employees. The Musk takeover in the air but even if that would not follow through, there were already severe job cuts in the pipeline by Twitter's board.

If under those conditions you kept your head down and kept coding like a stoic, then you're a keeper.

I think that is actually a terrible way to measure the qualities of an engineer.

The most valuable engineers to me are the ones that can bring a thoughtful, elegant, well-implemented solution to a business problem. And typically that doesn't translate to lots of PRs, often is not appreciable from non-engineers and can not be easily judged in a few days. But their work almost always stands the test of time.

Before hiring/firing people it would seem prudent to me to at least spend some time getting to know the dynamics in the team, the challenges facing them and then evaluate who deserves to be there or not. I really don't understand what the big rush is here.

Number of PR's means very little with overall productivity. It's a vanity metric.

  I think most are missing that this is a code review + loyalty review.

I think most people realize that it's more than a code review, in fact I suspect that it's such a transparent loyalty review is exactly why so many people's feathers got ruffled.

  For sure a software engineer from Tesla, or even a manager, can get an idea of
  how valuable/productive a coder is without fully understanding the code in 
  detail.

Yeah, maybe. But Musk is asking SWEs to print 50 pages of their code so he can personally can review it. Any halfway competent manager or exec should be able to see this is not a good way of reviewing performance in earnest.

https://twitter.com/caseynewton/status/1586127052767318016

> How mang PRs?

For a junior engineer sure this is probably a reasonable gauge of your productivity. As you become more and more senior number of PRs and LOCs becomes a worse and worse measurement. This is basic software engineeting.

> What does the code do? How was it reviewed? What value does it bring to the stakeholders

These things are impossible to accurately assess without a lot of context. Context which outside engineers are entirely lacking.

If the accounts of what Musk is doing are an accurate reflection of his leadership -- and based on accounts we have heard from Tesla and Space X in the past it sounds like they are -- he is a terrible leader and his companies are successful despite that deficiency.

The other part of it is Musk probably has good rapport with his engineers from Tesla. There's that trust vs. twitter engineers at the moment may be seen in the eyes of Musk as an unknown, undoubtedly everyone has their guard up because of all the uncertainty.

"The note continues, “Please come prepared with code as a backup to review on your own machines with Elon.” Later, people inside the company reported that Tesla engineers were in fact reviewing the code."

Can anyone verify this story?

Or you can command a senior position somewhere else and you were interviewing and ready to bounce after vest.

There’s one more thing: Elon uses interviews of people to learn about the code base / product. He surrounds himself with people who can answer the technical details, that’s why he knows so much.

Galileo’s interview at SpaceX shows his thinking and way of working quite well.

Tesla is a hardware company not known for stellar software. Both its self-driving/driver assist capabilities are suspect, and the functionality of the giant tablet UI could be better. You hear a lot of requests to be able to use Apple CarPlay in Teslas.

Teslas are probably better than the vast majority of car companies, particularly the UI of the touch controls and system, but it still seems weird to me to have engineers from a company perform a review in an area that they aren't known for. Honestly, I would assume Twitter has better software engineers.

For those who don't remember, one example of just how badly they can fuck up their software, the operating system on Teslas for a number of years was based on a default Ubuntu that wrote logs which destroyed the SSD. Exceeded the total write wear leveling endurance after just 1-2 years of use of the car. Required total motherboard replacement on a great number of cars, because of course the ssd was permanently soldered down.

“Better software engineers” to anyone who does software engineering is a joke. It’s an totally unquantifiable measure, and some people use dumb metrics like leetcode capabilities as some IQ test.

Some Tesla engineers will be better than Twitter engineers and vice versa, but the Tesla engineers aren't there as a bastion of better software engineering.

They're a "trusted" external party that Elon can use to get an unbiased assessment of what's going on internally at twitter and get a better picture of what's valuable and what's not. If you ask a senior engineer at Twitter the same questions you'll get a very different set of answers, not necessarily wrong answers but a different perspective. Unless Elon's an idiot he'll be doing both.

I think they are there to figure out "the lay of the land". I don't think they'd be assessing code line by line. Just there to figure out how everything is connected, what the ongoing projects are, what is on fire etc. done by people Musk personally knows and presumably trusts.

Absolutely, I don’t view Tesla as a place top tier talent goes. Twitter much more so.

I can only imagine how bad this is for morale. Out of the blue code review conducted by an external company means total lack of trust.

Isn't this kind of thing standard for takeovers?

what a waste of everyone's time. as a manager, I can tell you that even my smartest engineers go through highs and lows in their career and there are days when they push out code like there's no tomorrow and days when they don't push out anything because you know there's life outside of work that affects them (their dog passed away or their wife filed for divorce or their daughter is sick and was taken to ER etc). An arbitrary 60 days look back makes no sense.

It's especially dumb _after_ buying a company to be acting like the developers are so incompetent across the board that they could be judged on this criteria. Elon just bought all this IP -- now he's going to make extremely rash decisions about who is contributing and who is not based on this very flawed methodology?

I bet there was nothing happening in the last 60 days that would demotivate people on twitter. All was well.

I once reviewed code written by an outsourcing place in India. That is when I realized the difference in quality between the hemispheres. It was riddled with hard coded unescaped SQL strings. Old habits die hard for many of us. Especially if we are here on H1B's.

The client then hired an American .NET shop to recode their flailing PHP code to feel trust and safety with respect to their products offering.

Let's just say I am not surprised at this code check. It is the right thing to do, especially with Twitters performance. They all just got complacent. Happens to all the big and stuffy companies.

Meta also needs a shake up. Bezos should come out of retirement and take the helm from that child who is running it now. Before he sinks the total ship.

I don’t think it’s about the hemispheres, but about outsourcing. The developers I know who work for outsourcing companies are the less skilled devs I know. Also the pay is lower and the conditions are worse. Zero incentives to become better at your job. Working for a product company is a game changer.

Working as a coder in a non-tech industry for a multinational, I appreciate that someone so high up cares about something as “rudimentary” as code.

Famously, Bill Gates would review both code and low-level technical architecture decisions of flagship products.

This shouldn’t be the exception, it should be the norm.

I can always tell which company sells products the CEO doesn’t use and has likely never even seen.

I think so too, I'm impressed that he wants to personally look at code at all. His ability to evaluate it deeply is not relevant, one thing is for sure: he can ask deeper questions than if he had no code to talk about. That alone is a big bonus when you need to do an evaluation of a person, having something concrete to talk about.

Isn't there some violation of fiduciary duty here? IIRC, Musk personally bought Twitter, but he only owns 17% of Telsa. Isn't having Tesla engineers work on his personal project a lot like a middle manager assigning his subordinates to work on a personal side-gig project of his?

Can anyone verify this story?

we already have "Pranksters posing as laid-off Twitter employees trick media outlets: ‘Rahul Ligma’"

https://nypost.com/2022/10/28/pranksters-posing-as-laid-off-...

What makes me smile is the idea that Google searches related to "How do I print the code I committed in the last 60 days" must be shooting up on Google Trends.

What makes me chuckle is my memory of spending 2/3s of my time on a coding project in college to find a syntax colorizer I liked for the printed submission of an assignment... and I spent $1.50 printing the code out on a color laser printer with some pretty fancy paper.

Don't forget `how do I hide the code I've deleted in the last 60 days`.

As another pointed out, I would expect Musk's crew to be looking for ways in which TWTR people put their thumbs on the scale to benefit the "correct" viewpoints/ideologies/mindsets over others.

Thread is insane; he's checking to see who's doing actual work.

Exactly… it was published that many engineers at Twitter haven’t been doing anything useful/sitting around for a long time now. Time to cut the fat. Moreover, seems like a bash Elon thread

The weirdest of the many, many crazy takes is that using TSLA people to review TWTR code is a "conflict of interest". As obviously stupid and blatantly "I'm going to us a phrase that I've heard but don't understand" as that is, I've seen multiple people make this claim.

Someone probably told elon to look into the 'plumbing' of twitter. He brought a sink just in case.

The joke was “Let that sink in”.

Hopefully they can find that one last use-after-free that's the root of all of Twitter’s problems.

Tesla software engineers still have not managed to get their FSD shit working, I don't see how this would help Tesla nor Twitter.

I think FSD is a couple magnitudes more complex than Twitter

It is a stupid action. We do the code review all the time, but we do review the commits on Github. It is unreasonable to print it on the paper. I believe it is just a marketing tactic of Elon.

You don't just look at the code, you do a "git blame" and see who wrote it and then discuss the code with them. The Twitter engineers are likely being interviewed to see if they should keep their job. Evaluating engineering staff first hand is an important step to evaluating a company's portfolio of products upon taking it over.

People said the acquisition would be bad, but it’s already given us so many innocent laughs.

This is a very stupid thing to do. First, code is not the issue. Code can be rewritten in not a lot of time, when you have clear what to write. Twitter is not something so complex, in principle, thus it shouldn't be that difficult (a team of 10 good programmers in a month can probably rewrite everything).

The thing where is 99% of the complexity and you can't redesign in a month is the infrastructure, how data is stored, how the various components communicate together, how everything scales globally, and all the related components. Things like Twitter are not complex for the application (that is trivial to implement) but for what it takes to run that trivial applications with that kind of numbers.

Looking only at the code is stupid, since code is fairly trivial to rewrite, while doing infrastructure changes is something difficult, costly and in some cases even impossible.

> a team of 10 good programmers in a month can probably rewrite everything

unless you scope-down "everything" to the point of triviality, that is ludicrously underestimating the intrinsic complexity of twitter's product surface, and all the plumbing and necessary tools that lie beneath

Here’s just what Twitter has open-sourced: https://github.com/orgs/twitter/repositories

Laughable that you think 10 people can rewrite all of this in a month. It would take longer to scope out the design docs alone.

Its not stupid because he knows and trusts his engineers at Tesla. He knows nobody at Twitter. Hes probably trying to get an understanding of whats going on without relying on a bunch of employees who might not like him. It takes a while to build an employee base you trust, certainly in his situation.

Just the iOS app is 2.5 million lines[1]. Good luck writing tenth of that from scratch in a month.

[1] https://twitter.com/bhcarpenter/status/1585834343766773761

I agree, I made my own google docs implementation using a `<textarea>` and it was super easy.

> (a team of 10 good programmers in a month can probably rewrite everything).

Is this satire?

As someone who has always thought Twitter is stupid, I'm glad Musk bought it and is shaking things up. Both possible outcomes are interesting - either Twitter finally becomes not stupid, or even the worlds richest man and greatest tech entrepreneur couldn't make Twitter not stupid.

I think the goal here is to get people to quit voluntarily by doing the most ridiculous things possible.

With the obvious problem that all the valuable people know their worth, and are just sending CVs to Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Meta right now.

Interesting, wasting Tesla resources and engineer time to review code from an unrelated business just for Musk... Tesla's board is ok with this why?

I'm curious as to how existing Twitter employees get compensated after the sale. Do they have to stay for some amount of time to collect payouts on their shares?

These actions only make logical sense if the goal is to make life unpleasant for employees, and get a lot of them to quit.

Anyone holding stock just got a massive bump above the market value(3-4x?) after Elon overpaid for it. If an employee already sold all their RSUs, well, they probably got nothing.

How Tesla engineers are relevant into evaluating Twitter code.

Does Twitter have a large, observable quality problem. If there is one, I never noticed it myself but I’m not a particularly active user.

I think their main problem is they thought their role was thought shaping via sneaky algorithms. I think the main thing Elon should be looking to remove is those that fundamentally do not believe in free speech, since the culture of the company has changed so materially.

Twitter is the platform where world leaders, celebrities, billionaires and famous politicians can insult and threat each other.

That is valuable and is not going away.

Did the Twitter engineers get any kind of retention deal? If I were there, it'd take a lot to convince me to stay with this kind of thing going on.

Sounds fun on both ends, and I don't mean that sarcastically, assuming as a Twitter dev I get the chance to defend my code. But in the end I think this will just point to the same thing devs always holler about which is technical debt.

I'd be more interested to see the difference between the code and the engineers signaling technical debt in areas via email or chat. No idea how to quantify that though.

Ah yes, you see it’s really quite simple. You start with the file “twitter.rb” and just start following the function calls from there.

I have no insight into the Twitter codebase, but I presume it is vast. I would think so just based on how many programmers they employ. I wonder if their auto moderation system has a larger code base than the main product.

I dont see how programmers can audit / evaluate / review the code in what the article seems to me to state it was done / will be done fast.

I don't they're doing code reviews to understand the quality of the code. I think he's getting a few people he can trust to know their way around the architecture, so tomorrow if some employee decides it's a righteous cause to down the service, they still have some semblance of control and are better prepared to troubleshoot.

Tesla engineers need to look at their own code, the app is a total nightmare. Try chatting with customer service on it sometime.

Just a note for myself here, Interesting HN is showing 1210 comments in a single page. I think this is new.

tech stacks, especially of this magnitude run on processes, some machine some human some rube goldberg taped together combination of the two. Code is simply an artifact. 'Evaluating the code', sounds like a rather strange way to appraise the state of twitter's tech.

They are making people work all weekend on this shit. All in order to save Musk the Nov 1st vest money.

Maybe Musk is planning something completely different with the Twitter tech. Intercar / Interplanetary communication? https://app.finclout.io/t/A3lkgnE

So the developers from Tesla are engineers, but the devs from Twitter are just "workers". So is also "on-site code evaluation". Interesting word choice from the Post, whose owner is a known critic/competitor of Musk.

Consciously or not, this is meant to humiliate people at Twitter, make them live in fear of their new boss, and either flee, or stay and bow to their supreme leader.

I wonder if the main goal of doing this isn't to judge people by "who has the most PRs" or "who's contributed the highest number of LOC", but to see who can explain what they work on vs who can't

That's probably what it is, just bc someone who's new to a codebase probably won't figure it out overnight, but the clarity of an IC's explanation could indicate their involvement

I don’t quite understand why everyone here is so defensive about what seems like a pretty common practice in a takeover.

Do all developers have equal skill and productivity?

Should developers pulling down FAANG-like salaries be given infinite slack? “Oh I see you’ve only attended meetings and haven’t written a line of code for a month. I’m so glad the company I invested $44B into is paying you $50K a month!”

It’s not uncommon in the wider industry to have to re-apply for your own job.

People fail and aren’t rehired because all too often they weren’t actually that productive.

That could be their own fault, or the organisation’s fault for over hiring.

Either way, they’re dead weight and the only way to profitability is to make them redundant.

It’s tough, but this is what capitalism is all about! Work is not a charity…

Twitter will somehow benefit from Tesla FSD vaporware

Now, English is not my first language. But.. I cant read the article. The prose is a mess of quotes, maybes and feels like a mess.

Honestly, this seems like the second best time for twitter engineers to unionize. Best time would have been a couple weeks ago.

How quickly could a Tesla engineer get up to speed on Twitter’s code in order to make any kind of useful conclusions?

The “idea of Elon being flanked by his Tesla engineers reviewing Twitter code is laughable,”

Laughable indeed. I suspect they're more valuable judging the skills of the developers because if they were actually evaluating the code that would be the most absurd part of this while affair.

>Inside Twitter, in a highly unusual arrangement, engineers from Musk-led Tesla were examining the company’s code as the tech executive sought the input of his technical experts he trusted.

I would have expected they already did that prior to the acquisition.

It seems the acquisition was a blind buy.

Comments are just full of people who want to bring down Musk for the most trivial things without acknowledging the amount of good he has put forth.

FYI, I don't own a Tesla or own their stock or own any stock in Musk owned companies. I don't even follow his twitter account.

Musk isn't an average Joe and not dumb, unexperienced or something like that.

The point to accept here is:

He is outstanding in what he's doing. In everything. He is a business man and doing everything for getting the most out of that.

No matter if it's his "who pay for Ukraine/Starlink" -> he didn't get the 20th of millions from the government, but he tried it and in the end getting more funds from others.

Or his "lay of 75 percent" - he try to save some money which Twitter is burning ever since. He tries, with the help of his engineers, to find out whether it's possible to lay of so much and still having the company running..

So, the best would be here to ask why this way and not another? All the guys and gals are knowing what's happening. They are the best what could happen to Musk. So, this will be profitable in 6 weeks.

Didn't Musk get rich solving complex problems? The ink isn't even dry yet and there is a rush to judgement, speculation, and wild assumptions that are simply shameful.

How many cars did Tesla sell on the day after his investment?

Was the code printed on paper?

I would guess it is not so much an indepth architecture review as it is a review on specific topics such as business rules implemented for content moderation and bot detection algorithms.

Tesla is a public company right? Why does it sound like Musk is directing resources from an unrelated business to do work on his personal investments.

If those engineers worked on the distributed services that Tesla uses, this makes sense. But if Elmo just picked a handful of rando engineers to flank him, it makes no sense at all.

Next up, twitter's engineers to evaluate Tesla's code

I don't see anyone discussing what seems, to me, the most likely explanation.

Printing off the code and reviewing code are complete side-shows to construct a narrative in the media. You know, his forte as a full-time twitterer (in between smoking dope, playing computer games, jerking off, and impregnating women with whom he is at the other end of a power gradient).

Then he's going to purge all the disloyal people and people who are doing stuff he's not interested in, so he can lower the payroll and establish political control of the corporate structure. His other forte as Mr Sociopath McMoneybags... (although in fairness he had no chance, when his parents christened him with that name, nominative determinism and all)

Twitter has always been somewhat, let's say not tech IQ in code and tech infrastructure.

I am sure many of us remember some Twitter higher-up claiming Ruby was all they needed only to be let go after they changed the backend to stop using ruby as the back end!

And keep in mind Elon has to answer the US Congress questions about security issues which does in fact require an outside code audit in the first place. It's a good indicator of Elon's true intentions to get a more safe twitter for everyone.

I wonder if the claims of printed code are true.

Elon is definitely not a luddite when it comes to code, it seems like a very uncharacteristic request.

Tesla has very mediocre computer vision AI. I am not an ML engineer, but how does that skill set translate to probably a series of ML programs optimized for very specific problems - for account take overs, for spam, for hate speech, for bots, for profanity, payment frauds, identity frauds. It’s not like computer vision suddenly makes you an expert on what features will maximize precision and recall for a spam detector

They are probably just trying to see if they should transfer some engineers to Tesla instead of firing them.

Tesla code is pretty bad. If anything, a Twitter engineers should be evaluating Tesla staff.

Kinda makes me sad. This is all so far from the Web 2.0 fun back in the day.

Kind of insulting but understandable coming from an owner that just bought a new toy. He should have done it before he bought it.

It's interesting how much publicity this whole situation is getting. Musk must be loving it.

Will the new bots be fully self-driving?

Phantom braking coming to Twitter?

Well, they must know a thing or two about bots, they're working on the AI for self-driving cars... makes sense to me.

It's a text messaging platform (that needs to load like 50MB just to show you some 100 characters) ...

From the company that gave you "cars that crash themselves and hit kids on bikes" comes a review of software from a company that gave you "disinformation that can topple governments".

What could possibly go wrong.

This is really a drama a publicity stunt , what it really is a deal bankrolled by the right wing / ultra conservative class that is ok with and even desires to put down other human beings based on their race or religion and do it freely without getting banned.Twitter is the battleground where this played out.

> One former Tesla engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe the matter but was not involved, said Tesla engineers would have trouble capably assessing Twitter’s code. Distributed systems, the large-scale and spread-out network that Twitter is composed of, are not the automaker’s specialty, the person said.

> The “idea of Elon being flanked by his Tesla engineers reviewing Twitter code is laughable,” the person said.

It is laughable, and it's just another signal that Elon has no clue what he's doing. Imagine how farcical the whole thing felt to anyone involved who isn't him.

I went in assuming that this was going to be a hit piece. It's not quite that bad, but there's elements like that. I have no idea who this "former Tesla engineer" is or what their biases and motivations are, or how the article authors found them.

It seems perfectly reasonable for Elon to bring in some people he knows he can trust to help evaluate how Twitter actually works. I presume he's competent enough to do any necessary i-dotting and t-crossing to make it legal. I don't see anything wrong with printing out code either - IMO sometimes it's a handy way to be able to explore lots of code with complex interactions, since you can have a bunch of pages at once and arrange them however you like.

It's pretty clear to me that there are elements of the elite media-political complex that are terrified of Elon purchasing Twitter because he's not part of their crowd and they won't be able to control him and through him what is and isn't allowed on Twitter. IMO all articles about this should be read with that in mind.

What a fabulous time for security researchers.

Hello IT? This is Bob from Tesla here. I require full access to audit data and source code per Mr. Musk’s request. You hadn’t heard? That’s because Mr. Musk fired your boss this morning now add my personal email to the system.

I’m honestly baffled with the obsession with Musk. Many folks here seem to despise him. But we can’t stop obsessing with the guy. At this point, to me it feels like envy. Musk, despite however he is as a person, is wildly successfully across several verticals. Rather than being a suit and tie corporate person, he literally posts memes, and has a IDGAF attitude. Does he owe this crowd anything? Twitter and its board moved forward with this deal, no? Are we surprised Musk is being Mush?

Surprised how sceptical all the comments here are. Dick or not the guy has a talent for building companies

I’m still looking for a concise term for “someone who claims to be an expert but immediately reveals beyond any doubt that they have no clue what they’re saying, simply by opening their mouth on the subject.”

Having Tesla engineers over to review Twitter code is definitely that. It’s ridiculous.

While Musks men from Tesla are reviewing code he's partying in Romania with Angelina Jolie, Peter Thiel and other 140 celebrities and billionaires.

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/musk-celebrates-expansion...

Tesla = Elon. Dont delude yourselves

The software in Tesla cars is terrible. Twitter actually works pretty well in comparison.

So Twitter’s C++, Java and Scala will be redone in Tesla Python.

This will be awesome.

Oddly enough Twitter employees can work from home forever. Guess Tesla employees just raided the snacks.

Lol musk is overemployed and actively stealing from Tesla. I don't think anyone will blink an eye as its a cult at this point. Both employees and shareholders are part of it and given the track record noone will complain.

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