This obviously has nothing to do with evaluating a developer's quality; this is a classic move dictators do to determine who has chugged the kool-aid all the way (who are the most loyal and subservient underlings willing to demean themselves to this level). Nothing more, nothing less.
I'm sure he'll succeed in building it. The game industry manages it, for example. You can abuse and burn out engineers if that's what you really want.
That said, I wouldn't say abused engineers are particularly more productive. He can work them 9/9/6 while he's at it, I don't think that'll help Twitter succeed.
But damn that's a lot of money to burn just to chase frogs away.
There's some very interesting things to solve and achieve at a platform like Twitter but I doubt very many people have had them as life long targets for themselves to achieve.
Twitter allows hot takes and racism, not exactly comparable.
Although he's often held up as a paragon of free market capitalism, it looks like a lot of his business ventures are actually the result of crony capitalism.
Twitter's now second largest investor and likely cash backer of Elon's shares is Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz. Twitter was a huge enabler of the Arab Spring and leaders of oppressive regimes around the world would love to see it shuttered.
If your conspiracy theory has motive truth, it's more likely Saudis want what china has in TikTok or others: the ability to monitor it.
Unfortunately, just like the other far right clones, this plan only works if it's popular.
I don't buy this as he's doing it in a way that makes him look like an incompetent fool.
According to The Gervais Principle[1]:
"The Peter Principle states that all people are promoted to the level of their incompetence. It is based on the assumption that future promotions are based on past performance. The Peter Principle is wrong for the simple reason that executives aren’t that stupid, and because there isn’t that much room in an upward-narrowing pyramid. They know what it takes for a promotion candidate to perform at the to level. So if they are promoting people beyond their competence anyway, under conditions of opportunity scarcity, there must be a good reason.
"Scott Adams, seeing a different flaw in the Peter Principle, proposed the Dilbert Principle: that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to middle management to limit the damage they can do. This again is untrue. The Gervais principle predicts the exact opposite: that the most competent ones will be promoted to middle management. Michael Scott was a star salesman before he become a Clueless middle manager. The least competent employees (but not all of them -- only certain enlightened incompetents) will be promoted not to middle management, but fast-tracked through to senior management. To the Sociopath level.
"And in case you are wondering, the unenlightened under-performers get fired."
[1] - https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
After that it’s about “scope” and “impact”. Looking at the git blame tells you nothing about the skillset it takes to be successful at any large tech company at a senior level.
100%. I don't care who has "scope" or "impact" or is "senior". I want to sit next to the developer I can ask about the pro/cons of any web development framework, that can help me analyze a heap dump, or explain why some transitive dependency is getting pulled in at compile time.
These are the ones I'm successful finding with git blame. They're the ones that can help me get stuff done.
This “code printout” talking point is just… obnoxious.
I hire this way - I don’t care about a coding interview, I care about how you think about my your work and your ability to speak to it.
I have yet to see concrete evidence of malfeasance here and yet… the circle jerk continues.
I guess we have different definitions of what's actually demeaning.
Not too many years ago, I was a fan of Elon. If I were a 5 year software veteran I might be a little different, particularly if I didn't personally know any VC's in the valley. It would literally be the opportunity of a lifetime.
Unfortunately, I think this era of the "Big Ego" (Trump, etc) has been very detrimental to leaders, much in the way the Jobs biography was to leaders about a decade ago.