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Comment by aaronharnly | Hacker News Reader

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?

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Musk is reportedly looking to cut deadweight before Nov 1st when equity vests -- with layoffs possibly happening over the weekend. He might already have a basic idea of key teams and for non-key teams he might be looking to cut very fast.

I absolutely have done things like this when acquiring companies - sat with people, asked them to basically interview for their own jobs while showing me the most important thing they wrote in the last quarter. I've done this at a much smaller scale, one on one at the employee's desk, because the companies I've done this with have been 1/10 or 1/100th the size of twitter.

I can see why it might make sense to just tell people to print stuff out to demonstrate competency, if you're otherwise planning to cut their entire department. Everyone gets a quick conversation with an engineer to talk about the code and gauge basic competency. If you don't suck, you stay. Seems not super crazy.

It especially makes sense if you've locked out everyone aside from previously identified key personnel to prevent sabotage.

Do you understand why people who aren't making lots of money from it might be angry and upset about this process?

The ability of the process to prune dead weight and the emotions of the people affected are kind of unrelated. It's a business not a charity.

We should not celebrate sociopathy.

Or short term thinking. Maybe take... I dunno, a couple of weeks to assess people's value? Instead of potentially firing people you actually should have kept around and spending 35% more on salaries for replacements and God knows how much in lost domain knowledge.

Not ethical, not rational.

I'm fine with the argument that its not rational and not a good process because the outcome will be bad (firing people that you should have kept). I'm only pushing back against the idea that a business should put protecting peoples feelings over the wellbeing of the company. Sure do it humanely. Give a nice severance. But if people aren't producing the company has no obligation to keep them.

> asked them to basically interview for their own jobs while showing me the most important thing they wrote in the last quarter

This is builds the same dysfunctional system's that causing so many problems for Google - the people maintaining the vital systems won't have anything cool to show, but they will be the ones that made sure the bills kept getting paid.

> I can see why it might make sense to just tell people to print stuff out to demonstrate competency

All they are demonstrating their is their ability to sell themselves.

You're assuming this is the only process they have in place -- and there's no rational basis for that assumption.

Look, we all should know how this works. We're viewing selective aspects of their process through the warped perspective of the national media. You're not hearing about any of the reasonable things they're doing because none of those things are interesting. You're only hearing about elements which can be presented as shocking, to get your eyeballs on news bites.

Take a step back and think about perspective.

We can only discuss the information given to us. Sure, the other processes may work, but the process that I'm addressing, your claimed process (so you could give us more information if you wanted) seems DEEPLY dysfunctional.

Would you like to talk about my process? I'm happy to share details.

All kinds of information is exchanged in an acquisition. The acquirer probably has an idea about how the company functions, which departments are key, which employees are key, and so on. They'll also have an idea about which employees or departments have been problems.

I am thinking of a specific example where my large company acquired a small startup. It had a sysadmin team of three people. This team had been identified as a point of conflict within the company - holding up projects and refusing to adopt automated process. It was already decided that the manager would be fired. My job was to determine the extent to which the employees were contributing to the dynamic, to determine whether they were open to change, and to assess their general competency. We needed to know how much of the existing team could be kept on to help.

I flew onsite for a few days. The story was that the acquiring company was gifting me to help their team, because they had been long complaining about needing headcount. I asked to be shown what people did day to day. I asked why it was done that way and I suggested new ways of doing it (how it would probably be done, post acquisition) and listened to their answers. I participated in their daily work routine.

As I recall we decided to keep all the employees. They had been marginalized by a bad manager and they ended up doing quite well helping out with the transition. The information I gathered helped structure the layout of the new team. Their old (fired) manager had not done a good job of assessing their skillsets or giving them latitude to move their platform forward.

Other times, I have identified people that needed to be let go. Sometimes it is clear that someone doesn't have the necessary skillset, isn't making meaningful contributions, or has some kind of personality conflict. I think we have all encountered someone like this in our careers at times.

The twitter process sounds chaotic and driven by a crazy timeline for sure. The scale is far larger. But, the steps they're taking to attempt to achieve this goal don't seem inherently wrong. Asking someone to bring a real sample of their work to discuss in an interview is a great tactic. If you asked me to design a process to hold these kinds of interviews at scale I might do the exact same thing.

What is going to happen to people's stock vests? There is no public company any more. Can they just hold the stock or do they get a cash value?

I believe the stock still exists (still has an active ticker/cusip) but trade volume is at 0. At some point it will be delisted and shareholders will just get cash. I assume grant vesting is still meaningful until that point.

They get a cash value at the same $54.20/share as current holders get. They may be allowed to instead vest shares, but that would be a new agreement. The merger document converts it to cash.

>I can see why it might make sense to just tell people to print stuff out to demonstrate competency

Review of work based on your last 30 days of code that’s printed out on 8.5x11s is nonsensical. I’ve never heard of anything like it in my software development career and can’t think of any reason one would do it except to encourage people to quit.

What a ridiculous viewpoint. I spent two days last week to write a single line of code. It cuts the startup time of the app in half with no downsides. I had to make sure it works in all flavors, on all OS builds, benchmark it to show it works, cherry pick it into various release branches, talk to people about it, etc

If you ask me to print my code and defend it in a meeting, I will instead skip the meeting and respond to one of the dozens recruiters who reach out every week in my inbox. You can keep the engineers who wrote the slow code in the first place. I'm sure they'll have thousands of lines of code to print.

It's just a demeaning process meant to assert the dominance of the new owners.

Congratulations on your good work. ISTM if you could evangelize the improvement to all those different people, you could also evangelize it to one more person? Sure, your assigned Tesla auditor could be an idiot (although that seems less likely for a Tesla person than for a twitter person), but would it hurt to try?

> If you ask me to print my code and defend it in a meeting, I will instead skip the meeting and respond to one of the dozens recruiters who reach out every week in my inbox.

Isn't that his goal? Reduce headcount before vesting bonuses on Nov. 1st? It seems like you would be just the sucker that Musk is trying to get rid of before one last milestone cash payment.

On top of which, why couldn't you defend that line in a meeting? "I changed this one line cutting the loading time in half for the program. It took 2 days of profiling to find where to change and another week to ensure that it works across all build targets and work on a deployment timeline."

> 's just a demeaning process meant to assert the dominance of the new owners.

It is in fact a bit of that. Employees who quit are cheaper than fired employees or continued-to-be-hired employees. doing something unreasonable to make them quit seems reasonable, even if that might skew more towards the better employees.

But it's also a rough attempt to identify deadweight who cannot explain why they did anything of value in 2 months.

Your comment basically sums up the entire goal and strategy of this exercise - it's surprising how many smart people here seem to have missed the point, gone down rabbit holes about how you can't traverse functions on printed paper, etc etc.

It's about identifying the most extreme offenders and pushing out people like the GP who will rage quit without severance.

I'm at a point in my life where I value what I do more than I value money, because I don't need more money to sustain my lifestyle.

Then bluntly but respectfully, join a startup (or a non profit like archive.org, Mozilla, Signal etc). Don't hang out at Twitter.

Not sure if you personally are a Twitter employee but Twitter fits a certain demographic of employee who wants to traverse that fine line between not wanting to risk an early startup for potential huge upside but also doesn't want a boring cushy job at Salesforce or Google or whatever.

If you value your time and not the money, there's better places to apply your talents and labor than Twitter (pre or post Elon)

“ If you ask me to print my code and defend it in a meeting”

Its not about “defending”, its about explaining. Even from your reply one can feel the instant defensive position you take when asked about (your) code. I think ability to disassociate from your code and just be able to discuss it (not defend) and explain what and why (tradeoffs) and how was done is very valuable in developer, and in anyone actually if you extend it beyond the code.

When take over a company ant talk with people and they take defensive position thats a red flag for me. (I take over companies in my head only so far)

That’s a ridiculous position. I would expect good engineers to laugh at the entire process and not see a future in that company. There is no way that engineers can be accurately assessed on code output.

It doesn’t matter if it’s about defending or explaining. Either one is an absolutely absurd situation to find yourself in where you have to explain stuff to people with zero context to save your job.

If I was given these instructions I’m out.

why do you think that explaining something is ridiculous? i have been to meetings multiple times with representatives of other departmens and openly asked them to explain to me things that i didnt knew and needed to get understanding to implement some functionality. why its ridiculous when its other way arround and someone asks to explain what and why is this code doing? again, it looks like ypure taking it personally.

It’s ridiculous because this is not genuine interest in someone’s work but a way to sieve out at scale.

(I don’t have a horse in this race. I don’t work there. So not sure why you think I’m taking this personally)

> not genuine interest in someone's work

That's your threshold for asking employees to summarize what they've been doing recently?

Management must have some profound interest in the feature being delivered and how it was implemented?

Question: have you ever managed people? And if so, how many?

Intention and context matters. The goal here is clearly to significantly downsize the operations with the least amount of severance to be paid.

I won’t go into your ad hominem.

Your anger with what's going on is coming through clearly. It sounds like you don't approve of any of the steps being taken because it's a downsizing.

While you're entitled to your opinion, it doesn't seem particularly relevant in discussions about whether or not this process is effective.

On the contrary, I'm more than happy to discuss my code with my colleagues, because their intent is to understand the code. In the hypothetical scenario, the new owner's intent is to evaluate my worth, not my code.

is there something wrong to evaluate your worth? and explaining your worth through the things that you have done (recently) is in my opinion one of most direct ways to do so.

no one wants your code just for fun of it or it beying extra nice and smart. code is neded becauae it creates value.

In general? No, because I agreed to yearly evaluations. Randomly asking me to prove my worth like my time so far didnt matter? Yes, there is, and the company being sold is a random event from my point of view.

The question itself comes from a place of authority, and the employee has nothing to gain, only to lose. Best case - I keep my job. Worst case - I get fired. That introduces stress into my life unnecessarily.

The new owners can go and read past evaluations instead of boiling the ocean. But, of course they won't do that. It's much easier to assert your authority and stress everyone out, to make sure they know that they are just resources churning out code.

If you step out of the soulless business mindset for one second, I'm sure you'll understand why asking me to prove my worth out of the blue is insulting.

"Prove your worth to the new gods, employee #1337!"

No, thanks.

> No, thanks.

Not sure from which perspective you're saying "No" from?

If you were a Twitter employee, that means quitting. But apparently from what you just said you don't want to lose your job. (There's no stress if getting fired is something that doesn't bother you)

Or from a management perspective? In which case I think vincnetas did a good job explaining why management might want to do this if they wanted to downsize.

Basically you're saying the concept of laying off people is a ridiculous viewpoint because it makes employees feel stressed. Sure this is just a discussion forum and we're all free to express opinions, but realistically, what makes you think an employee can say "No, thanks" to this?

"There's no stress if getting fired is something that doesn't bother you"

Sure there is, long painful meetings where you go over your work for the last 30 days sounds miserable regardless of if you care about the outcome.

You also might lose your severance package.

While you can't say no thanks, if put in that situation by my employer I'd do the bare minimum and start lining up interviews with the tens of recruiters that message me daily (as I'm sure is the case for anyone with twitter on their resume)

> "What a ridiculous viewpoint. I spent two days last week to write a single line of code. "

Sure, I've done the exact same thing. What's stopping you from bringing that line of code to an interview and talking about it?

> "If you ask me to print my code and defend it in a meeting, I will instead skip the meeting and respond to one of the dozens recruiters who reach out every week in my inbox. "

When you interview with your new employer, won't you be discussing notable achievements such as the single line of code you wrote that cuts app startup time by half?

> "It's just a demeaning process meant to assert the dominance of the new owners."

Are interviews demeaning? In a sense, sure. Sounds like you're doing it one way or the other, though.

> Sure, I've done the exact same thing. What's stopping you from bringing that line of code to an interview and talking about it?

GP's answer is essentially "sure, but what stops me from not doing that instead?":

>> I will instead skip the meeting and respond to one of the dozens recruiters who reach out every week in my inbox.

I have to say, I agree. Why stay around for the circus when you can leave and make an honest living as a respected professional instead of playing post-acquisition hunger games as a pawn in a rich boy's ego trip gone awry?

> "GP's answer is essentially "sure, but what stops me from not doing that instead?":"

Nothing of course -- and this is always true, every second of every day.

> "I have to say, I agree. Why stay around for the circus when you can leave and make an honest living as a respected professional instead of playing post-acquisition hunger games as a pawn in a rich boy's ego trip gone awry? "

If you see it that way then it seems in everyone's best interest that you leave the company, which means the system worked exactly as intended.

As to the question of whether this makes sense, it would seem we all agree that it does, then.

> that you leave the company

I don't and have never worked at Twitter :)

> As to the question of whether this makes sense, it would seem we all agree that it does, then.

My comments are mostly about the likely future of Twitter, which is almost certainly atrophy and death.

Of course you don't. You were speaking in the first person as if you did, though, so I did as well.

> "My comments are mostly about the likely future of Twitter, which is almost certainly atrophy and death. "

This was already their future, so I guess we can see if they improve at all.

>I absolutely have done things like this when acquiring companies - sat with people, asked them to basically interview for their own jobs while showing me the most important thing they wrote in the last quarter.

That a pretty bad method finding the bad apples, more of the opposite. Someone like Musk who claims to have Asperger's should know this.

It's a crazy thing to do

Just shut the company down and start over, don't turn people's lives into a living hell for weeks or months

Being asked to summarize your recent work is "a living hell"?

Have you ever done manual labor for a living? Or worked a service job? Or taken care of a relative who needs round-the-clock care?

Would you really characterize as "summarize the last few months of coding at my software engineering job" as a living hell as compared to those things?

Things like this are always context sensitive or it becomes a race to the bottom where only the people in the worst condition have the right to complain.

You think manual labor is hard, try living in a Ukraine war zone, you think a warzone is bad, try living as a forced prostitute etc.

And according to Dante there are seven circles of hell and if someone t plunges your future into uncertainty it's a valid kind of hell, just not the worst kind.

Have my boss' boss' boss' boss summarize what his teams are up to. Don't call everybody in and glare at them in a small room over the course of weeks like in "Office Space"

I have enough perspective, savings, and self confidence that there's nothing a little prick manager can do at a job that will ruin MY life. But there are a lot of honest, hard-working people out there who just want to do their best and make enough to keep on top of their $7500 mortgage payments and don't need someone putting a boot on their neck

He's planning on laying off people without even letting their next equity tranche vest? I'm sorry but what an absolute piece of human garbage.

That sounds awful. Interviewing sucks and is one of the main reasons I don't move elsewhere for a pay-rise if my employer wanted to nitpick my work and make me justify my existence at the company why would I not just move on to a place that isn't insane?

Makes plenty of sense if said employees no longer have access to source code by the time the interview takes place. Red Wedding silicon valley edition

Do you have any references to this printouts of code? I saw this mentioned on another thread too. I asked about it and was mocked for asking about it.

Is this something that literally is happening? Where can we read about it?

edit: Apparently referring to this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-27/tesla-eng...

I have definitely seen them replace whole systems without ever looking at or evaluationg the code.

Doing that seems like an improvement.

A Twitter engineer walks into a programming interview.

Interviewer: So this is just a quick question to warm up with. Imagine you have to write a program that is supplied a number n and prints out, for each number in order from 1 to n, the string Fizz if it is a multiple of 3, the str-

Engineer: Okay, so first I'll install cups. What model of printer am I using?

you don't like comedy?

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