“Reportedly, Elon stack-ranked Twitter engineers by LoC and fired the bottom X%”
twitter.com
twitter.com
“He […] had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.
He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000“
So I went through the main pages and rewrote much of the logic as single SQL queries, admittedly rather complex ones, reorganized the code and broke it out into functional modules. The resulting code was about 1/3 of the size of the original.
About a month into the task, I got dragged into management where a very confused project manager asked me why my LOC was negative. I told them "Because I actually know what I am doing". The guy seemed unconvinced until I showed them the original code and mine, and the benchmarks of the two. So I ended up the only guy in a team of 30 coders excempt from their idiotic LOC rules.
And then a month later the 2007 stock market crash happened and that company almost immediately curled its toes and died. Possibly for the best.
- @mcmillen
Netflix allows 4 (four!) subtitle languages to be selected from by users, essentially saying "fuck you" to anyone who would like subtitles in the other 50-70 languages that are available. It's the opposite of "accessibility".
Someone at Netflix came up with this system. A designer designed the UI for it. A programmer coded this up. Someone budgeted for it, tracked it, and approved it for go-live.
Wait, it goes on: Someone had to write the tech support page for this, train support staff to lie to customers and say that this is for "copyright reasons" (it isn't), and so on. Literally hundreds of people had to be involved to actively reduce accessibility.
Managers like Elon look at organisations like this and see nothing but fat that can be cut to make the organisation leaner and more capable.
I think you're judging a little harshly without appreciating the nuance that's gone into deciding what to surface to users:
“The less code, the better! 1 point for adding a line of code, but 2 points for deleting a line. Bloatware is the devil.”
If this is true then Elon is truly not an engineer.