Hacker News Reader

Comment by erulabs | Hacker News Reader

I think people miss the point with the "tell me what code you've written in the last 6 months" task. The idea is hopefully not to qualitatively quantify anyones work - the idea is to find folks who have nothing whatsoever to show, and yet have titles like "staff software engineer". Anyone who has worked at a large enough company knows there is a solid 10-15% of folks doing nothing. The new leadership probably asked the infrastructure team if they could keep the site online if all development stopped, and they probably said "easily". I don't think twitter is in any risk of disappearing - the real question is if velocity can be regained or not.

View on HN

> the idea is to find folks who have nothing whatsoever to show, and yet have titles like "staff software engineer".

Shouldn't that have been the idea *before* they laid off half the employees?

How fucking idiotic of a leader do you have to be to lay off half the company and *then* try and figure out who is producing literally nothing of value?

Remember how he became leader: he bought the company while waiving due diligence, only to later cry that he hadn't done due diligence after the deal was signed. "Move fast and break things" taken to its logical conclusion.

First one was a loyalty/chump test.

Is this similar to the "I throw half the resumes away to avoid hiring unlucky people" concept?

QED: (1 AM):

https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FFh70jwKWAAQd_WI.jpg

Yeah, I read this as a stunt to sift out the people who are confident in their abilities and contributions from those who just kind of show up and do some minor edits.

I have no idea how many people get through the code interviews at Big Tech and then think they've proved their value and just phone it in, but I guarantee it's not zero.

If I have any particular concern it's that this sort of thing misses some real unsung heroes in any big technical project, i.e. the people who write good documentation and the people who chase down bugfixes. This is important work, but won't be captured by screenshots of code very well. "Here's a screenshot of where I fixed an off-by-one error, but it took two weeks of unraveling 137 microservices to find which RPC was guilty." Important, but not exactly impressive in the way one might think.

Elon isn’t an idiot who has never been around real world software development. He will happily accept:” Here's a screenshot of where I fixed an off-by-one error, but it took two weeks of unraveling 137 microservices to find which RPC was guilty.”

Not to mention, it plays into his perception that twitter architecture is too bloated to be productive.

He is likely looking for people who have zero or less than 10 things to show.

I bet you could squeeze by with one big thing to show and nothing else if it is explained.

This sort of net would catch lots of zero screenshot responses for multiple reasons- I doubt there will be any scrutiny applied.

> He is likely looking for people who have zero or less than 10 things to show.

If this were actually the goal, he could just find a couple hardcore coders who know how to use git and ask them to produce a list of commits by developer for every repo he cares about.

It's hard to tell if he actually thinks he can evaluate people via code screenshots or if this is another dumb hazing ritual, but I can't believe he's really trying to figure out who writes code from this.

"Anyone who has worked at a large enough company knows there is a solid 10-15% of folks doing nothing"

In my experience those do-nothings tend to be near the top of the pyramid.

At the engineer level it's harder to get away with doing nothing because you're constantly being told what to do and then you get evaluated to see if you actually did what you were tasked with doing.

As you go higher up the food chain, some can get away with claiming they're doing everything while taking credit for other people's ideas and work, while the only thing they actually do is order people around.

I've been the lone guy seriously working in a team of do-nothing.

You can definitely get away doing nothing as an engineer if the project manager is too busy or does not care. Also works if your direct manager is himself a do-nothing, or a developer that for promoted and actually does not have any management knowledge or experience.

Of course the real problem is that the whole organization is dysfunctional, but there is no right or easy way to fix this problem, except try to identify the honest guys and fire everyone else. Because most of the alternatives ends up with the minority of productive guys quitting.

A staff software engineer wouldn’t be showing impact writing code. When I was a senior developer at a much smaller company when I was responsible for the overall direction of the infrastructure and processes, I would spend weeks with little code under my own name while working with other developers, customers, being the tech person on pre-sales calls, etc.

No sane infrastructure team will answer „easily“ to that question. Things break, all of the time. And infra will need developer input to figure out some of the breakage, let alone fix it. And that‘s not even considering deliberate attacks, fixes for critical security/stability issues etc.

I disagree strongly, and I currently run an infrastructure team. Things break because of changes to the system. Assuming the entire infrastructure team wasn't fired, it should be dramatically easier to keep the service online assuming all development has stopped.

That depends entirely on the status of the stack when the code freeze happened.

If it was unstable, then I'd want several bottles of whisky on hand, because I'd have to work around the stinky pile of dung I'd been left with.

Given reports of debug and dev builds in production just before everything was frozen, I'd probably want to start stocking up on whisky.

Changes to a system can come in many ways, e.g. we had a noticeable increase in our db size because of a new customer data, what was ok. before wasn't after. Of course it's different for twitter. And what about security? Update to libraries, dependencies...?

Anyone remember the leap second?

Of course but this is also twitter, not a startup in its infancy. I'm not saying new stuff won't happen (etc), but they have a very mature infra org.

Do they? It's hard to tell where these cuts are happening and how much thought is going into them.

And almost no one left to manage it.

Not during the code freeze. Using the same container image that worked before for a while doesn’t need dev input.

I‘ve had stuff break because of required kernel updates, software that needed to be patched, hardware breaking and no exact substitute being available, database sizes crossing critical thresholds, … - it‘s definitely less risky to run something that is well understood and no longer getting substantial amounts of updates, but every complex system has known and unknown deficiencies that are just a butterfly’s wingbeat away from being triggered. As long as you‘re on the happy path, everything will look fine. But if something pushes slightly and moves you to the unhappy path, you can find yourself very quickly in a position where you need someone with a deep understanding of some obscure component of the system that is misbehaving - and that someone is unlikely to be the infrastructure team.

Yes, we all know that the bigger the software creature's title is, the more lines of code the creature must leave behind. Jeff Dean is well known for changing hundreds of thousands of lines a day! he has a whole team of reviewers just following him around and LGTMing his mighty trail.

I get the sarcasm but Jeff and Sanjay actually code quite a bit even today with their senior fellow titles: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...

I wonder if there is a U-curve in the "code produced vs seniority" graph where once you get senior enough you have people under you who can deal with $immediate_situation for you?

This sounds good, and it would be a fine goal. The problem is that the very-very short deadline contradicts any good reasons, and he handles the whole situation terribly. I don’t think that there is any competent developer, who didn’t resign, or started to search a new job after the past few weeks (except who are religiously blind Musk fans, and people on visas). Even if only half of the stories are true. I did quit jobs for way less.

The goals which you wrote can be achieved with far superior tools, which wouldn’t have alienated developers, whose skills are really-really valuable on the market. In such environment, as what Musk created, they are the first who will abandon the ship. They have every possibility to work in any kind of environments what they want.

> solid 10-15% of folks doing nothing

Where are you getting these numbers? You got any real studies or data to back this up?

That's more reasonable.

Microsoft once had an internal rule that anyone in engineering who supervised less than 100 people had to code. Is that still the case? This looks like a way to find the people who aren't doing that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com