Tesla devs at Twitter misunderstand Slack privacy; leak fire lists based on LOC
twitter.com
twitter.com
Not a locked down electronic toy with what appears to be a vehicle attached to it.
"i used to work for tesla writing infotainment firmware and backend services - all of which runs in a single bottom tier Datacenter in a single location on the worst VMware deployment known to man."
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=38...
I have been working for a long time in the industry, and I have no former coworkers that are good that work there. Like 0.
In this case you have B players trying to decide who is a good engineer at Twitter, and predictably they are using the dumbest metric possible.
Huh? It's still vaporware. AFAIK they haven't even pretended to start production yet.
Like the pope.
I'm the most productive 10x software engineer ever: I just fixed CRLF inconsistencies on several large code bases. Literally touched every line on hundreds of files.
Next up: fixing the arbitrarily mixed tabs and spaces.
So it's probably true.
https://improbable.com/2011/05/30/robust-goodness-from-rando...
I'm busy reducing the number of screens my app requires, and that is not easy.
Would it not be reasonable to take into consideration a employees LOC as a metric?
If you're an engineer and made very few code contributions without a solid justification of why, I'd expect you to be on the chopping block...
These headlines are misleading and people are jumping the gun making assumptions as always.
You can also just write a ton and not actually need it if you’re trying to game the system or if you’re inexperienced.
Commit count would be a little more accurate, but that also is just an analog for who saves the most. It doesn’t really tell you who made any impact with or without code.
Finally, a lot of senior work is just convincing other teams to allow you to do what you’re trying to do. Most code features are trivial to write, but a nightmare to get approved.
At a company of Twitter's size you generally expect the junior and mid-level engineers to be writing most of the code and the more senior engineers to be implementing the trickiest bits, managing stakeholders, and writing design docs.
At the extreme end, engineers working to optimize performance might spend months painstakingly optimizing a single hot loop to save the company a few million a year (I've seen this happen).
Given this reality LOC, is so wrong for more senior engineers as to be a waste of time to even consider.
And then there are usually senior positions where producing code is just part of your responsibility - compliance, analysis, negotiation, architecture, operations, troubleshooting shooting.
There are countless teams and examples for it being a horrible metric to solely fire on.
I just think it's not right to jump to conclusions like Dictator Elon fires engineers with low LOC.
All we have to go off of is they had review meetings where they had to show off the code they contributed and Elon "suggested to query for lines committed."
Well that sort of logic requires you review the logs. It doesn’t have to mean you set up some arbitrary “anyone under ckloc per week is fired”
No body knows unless real leaks come out. Did they do it strategically? Or by numbers across the board like people are implying?
Whether your counting lines changed, number of commits, etc, you can easily catch out the people who do jack shit. Cross reference that metric with their other duties and it is easy to find a lot of slackers. The people who should be coding a lot, but just don't have any work to show.
> Elon’s engineers were given instructions to follow: they did. It’s how Elon’s companies are operate apparently.
Maybe I've worked different comments to everyone else, but if I was told by my boss to do something like deactivate X, change something to Y, or in this case, fire X% of people, do people really expect employees to not follow it?
This is much more than stupid, people who do educational workshops, training, assist others with their problems, SREs and performance engineers, database maintainers, people who delete code by adding functionality are one of the biggest investment in corporations like Twitter. Firing based on LOC is probably why self-driving Tesla is coming next year https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7oZ-AQszEI
The implication is that their instructions were much more detailed than "fire X% of people" and included using LoC as the metric, which nobody questioned.
(Any quantitative measurement of code quality will have too many outliers to be fair. LoC? Of course not. Number of closed PRs? You can't say much without knowing their complexity or severity. Etc. But they had to be quick, not fair.)
That’s probably the bit people find unusual.
Honestly, shouldn't Musk have a lawsuit coming from Telsa shareholders, since he's doing stuff like that?
Tesla's employees must be used to make Tesla successful, not to help the CEO on on some personal investment/project of his.
There are many reasons why in many engineering fields there's a licensing process and exam, but one of the most important ones, from the employee's perspective, is being able to say "No, I can't do that, I would lose my license".
I have tried to learn from my for-real licensed engineer friends what the profession means and emulate them. Without the safety net of a license or a code of ethics, it's mostly a self-indulgent exercise in what might be.
They may disagree and push back, but I am sure I won't be punished. Side effect is that they are used to argue for what they won't and completely ridiculous decisions (like judging by loc) are avoided.
Correct approach would be understand why there are so many people, figure out what is their job and then start removing those who are deemed unnecessary.
i.e. Imagine that you would come to new codebase and start throwing out code which does not appears to do anything and then be surprised that it is not possible to compile or you can't deploy or whole application will start crashing at random intervals.
The wrong mental model will turbocharge your LoC but not your business.
I can just see the remaining devs frantically running everything through code obfuscation tools. Double the size of everything! That’ll look great!
I definitely agree with that. I left Twitter myself this week, and I've increased my blogging and started a Slack. But it's difficult, because a lot of people are still on Twitter, and they refuse to leave. By leaving, I've decreased my own reach, unfortunately. We'll see what the long-term consequences are.
The catch is that Twitter is full of people who never write their own content, aside from tweets. If they leave Twitter, they silence themselves. They can follow RSS, newsletters, etc., but they don't have a voice outside of Twitter. And to be frank, maybe they don't have much interesting to say, but they're still the primary audience for creators.
> Regardless, this thread wasn't posted on his blog or newsletter
I can't say whether or not it was in the newsletter, as I don't subscribe. It might have been there too?
The average front end developer probably writes 10x the LOC of the best backend developers, so it may actually get rid of the majority of your best engineers.
Or should we pretend that everybody at twitter is a hard and honest worker?
Much like how we are asked to assume the best of posts here on HN, and presume innocence of those on trial for crimes, yes, that seems like a good place to start from.
Just as I assume that a vast majority of people on bicycles in NYC aren't thieves.
And even in that bracket, I will give harder tasks to more capable junior ... leading to them producing less code. I will also help less to more capable junior and help more to weaker one - leading to more capable junior spending more time figuring stuff independently. That is super useful for team productivity (he is not hogging senior).
Seniors have also huge differences due to doing different tasks. A go to guy for stuck out issues produces less code then someone on greenfield module. And loc has zero with productivity.
Unclear analysis and requirements are another source of low LOC. You produce less of them when you are spending a lot of time reading convoluted sentences or calling people for clarifications.
Seriously, are you all working on repetitive web shop tasks that you think loc has anything to do with productivity? Or not coding at all?
Fire everyone under 10000 lines and give this fellow Autoformatbot a $10 Starbucks gift card. He’s employee of the month!
I am very smart. This will go great.
An engineer who writes no code but contributes a lot of value is an outlier.
So yes, you will miss these two outliers if you go by LoC, but sometimes that is acceptable as long as you are handling the majority correctly.
It's almost like this is the problem.
The post title is misleading.
If you want to fire 3500 people you obviously don't care that much about false negatives.
I would not be surprised if it turned out that it's much more economical to fire based on LOC and then rehire a few good people than to go through thousands of conversations and try to do it "the right way". Especially since Elon can be sure most of the Twitter workforce is hostile to him anyway.
They are not any kind of prey. They are more thousand of white rabbit who are going to compete in the next few months to find job when all major Company in the industry are holding recruitment or even worse are also firing their own employee.
That'll cost you dearly. If the guy you're jerking around like that has any sense of pride, he won't come back for the same salary he was satisfied with before getting fired.
I’d be more interested in how many lines of code someone prevented.
But I guess if these groups had the impossible goal of choosing how to rate engineers they don’t know then you need to find something objective to point to.
(Maybe in future jobs we should commit tons of code and write a bot to delete it a few minutes later.)
To all of you that think this is a fair way to fire engineers, please reconsider.
In those circumstances, I do believe that it is a decent metric to consider. You got a better plan?
I don’t think so. The performance reviews are more than likely self-congratulating BS and to be ignored.
Taking more than 3 days instead of rushing such an important decision.
It also reveals a lot about the mentality of the person making the decree.
I would not get myself into that situation in the first place. ;-)
And yeah, Mr Elon has a LOT of fans and if you’re a professional, you need to be concerned that someone in your line of management might be getting inspired by this!
And perhaps they're smart enough to take the absolute value of additions and deletions?
I regularly topped that “SLOC touched list.”
But there were a heap of much more talented engineers than me.
“Query for lines of code” can get interpreted multiple ways.
They are at-will employees. Their employer can fire them for any reason as long as it is not for an illegal reason.
Firing even 100% of your employees, just because you “don’t like their vibe”, is not illegal. Just make sure they get their required notice and wages depending on company size before firing.
If anything, the leaked public discussions provide proof that employees weren’t fired for an illegal reason.
In some (many?) countries it is in fact illegal.
Well, if you ignore the fact that 7000+ people would suffer.
Tiny bit surprised that anyone is surprised about this? Seemed pretty clear to me that his is a very top down type style