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georgemcbay

And he's Tom Sawyering others to do the job for him, without any access to the actual backend:

https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159527086740295680...

2022 is so weird.

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Good lord. I can't imagine bragging, taking a job, then immediately asking other people how to do it.

You can't imagine being a manager?

Hotz is an intern not a manager. That's why people are surprised by the audacity of the post.

I mean if we all want to be realistic, he's neither an intern nor a manager nor a real employee.

He's a prominent person in the industry who got given an ambiguous role in the company by tweeting the CEO. I doubt there's much strict definitions towards roles and responsibilities in the company right now, other than to try and satisfy Musk.

An undergrad spending a summer at Twitter is an intern. Hotz is not an intern.

> Good lord. I can't imagine bragging, taking a job, then immediately asking other people how to do it.

This. What a public announcement of incompetence.

It happens a lot in software, especially in the last half decade or so.

I'm confused - isn't he supposed to be an AI genius, who can "fix Twitter search" in 12 weeks - and he's asking for help that amounts to ~10 lines of basic JS to process the search results and display them differently? (based on some of the tweets with solutions he commented on)

Maybe modern web development is just that bad

Maybe hacking and front-end dev are very different skillsets, and being gifted at one does not automatically make you even competent at the other.

Agreed. Guess he's dipping into the social engineering aspect of hacking by getting actual FE devs to do the work for him.

Social engineering by loosing face.

this

The reason so many coders think coding bootcamps are viable and a CS degree is not a good fit or not useful for a dev is because they are all javascript plumbers and haven't seen good code in their life.

If plumbing was done with the same skill level, talent, and rigor as most websites, your average bathroom would look like the pipes screensaver.

> Looking for a one liner I paste in my JavaScript console to enable good "from:"

I don't really see how this would make sense or even be possible purely from the frontend, I think you'd need to modify the typeahead service unless I am misunderstanding the requirements.

I’m honestly wondering the same thing. I’m convinced I’m misunderstanding the requirements given the constraints.

Exactly and with any modern frontend a solution "purely from the javascript console" can only be a terrible DOM hack. The actual code driving the UI is encapsulated from the global variable namespace that you can potentially modify from the console and in any case is typically transpiled as well.

Especially after coming from a "move fast and break things"/startup type of place this is slightly embarrassing.

So, I'm all about dunking on Musk's yacht-crashing antics... but did anybody expect Hotz to sit down and write search from scratch in complete isolation? Looks to me like he might recognize the scope of the problem, and he wants to hire some people to help. Briefly: are you using "Tom Sawyering" to describe "management?"

Hotz is an intern not a manager. Interns are generally expected to take on these sort of "heads down" coding tasks, not hire other interns.

Okay, sure, let's go with intern. Are interns not expected to ask basic questions on day one?

Why is he not asking other Twitter employees, and if he’s going to ask the dev community, why frame it as an interview to be an intern- to an intern?

If he was merely asking for help it would be less controversial.

Is there a "team" for him to lean on or did they all get sacked? The yacht is still on fire, after all...

Did Hotz ask a basic question? No.

He made an job offer while acknowledging that he doesn't know if he is allowed to do that and he stated that the interview for it is to do free labor for him.

At first I thought him trying to engage the community as a whole for technical contributions was good and upbeat. But it also makes me question- then what is he bringing to the table then? His celebrity, to engage those people? Is his internship to be a technical manager? Is he actually going to credit these contributors, let alone ask Musk to give them internships? It's not managing if these people are just random volunteers he's using ad hoc.

Passionate hackers love to solve technical challenges, sure, but it does feel weird that he posted this open-ended call to action. I'm not saying they must be paid, as per the free work detractors, but even in FOSS you get credited and on Stack Overflow you receive karma.

> did anybody expect Hotz to sit down and write search from scratch in complete isolation?

Based on his reputation, people sure act like he is some sort of supercoder polymath who is able to pick up on any stack.

Regardless of all this, this kind of job "interview" is better than 99% of all tech interviews I have given.

Ask me to prototype something that I would use in the actual job. Don't ask me random algo question. Don't ask me why I am so excited to work for your stupid company that I hadn't even heard of before applying

I'm pretty sure if a company asked me to implement a feature for them as part of the interview process and didn't offer to pay me I would know up front that it's a bad company. Maybe you have a point that it is a good "interview" since it flags the place as a crap hole.

> Looks to me like he might recognize the scope of the problem (...)

I find it very unlikely that search, of all features, has problems where UI development is remotely relevant, let alone the solution. UI-wise, search consists of firing dumb requests to the backend and just update the UI with the results.

Exactly. It might require some work - but only a small part. shouldn't be the place to start.

In this case he seems to be either unwilling or unable to (it becomes more clear in one of the tweets further down the thread) to even implement Does the query begin with "from:"

It would be less weird if people would apply even the tiniest amount of good faith. But no, everyone is so eager to dunk on people trying to build things. All this is going to do is discourage him and others from being transparent and building in public. Everyone trying to tear George down for this comes off as completely miserable. It's fucking sad.

> haha of course you can’t ship this, which is why the “free work” comments are so odd.

> But if someone can build a half decent experience with no source and nothing, imagine what they’ll build with access. It’s who should be hired to build it in prod. https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159546777671332249...

> Re: actually getting hired at Twitter, this is not a real interview, only do it if you find it fun! https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159529448151060480...

> Sadly I'm awful at frontend, hoping someone here picks it up. https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159518142440699494...

> if I just get rid of the pop up I still consider my internship a win. I have a chrome extension on my laptop to block it. reminds me of the guy who got a job at Apple, made Wallet automatically delete your expired boarding passes, and quit the next week https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159490847387517337...

But what is the point of this entire exercise? Was he actually asking for React help? Is he actually hiring an intern team? Did he just want to engage the community by presenting a technical challenge? Is he signaling that Twitter is going to open itself up and invite greater developer interaction? It's all very strange.

> All this is going to do is discourage him and others from being transparent and building in public.

He's a celebrity hacker, he's used to it. He is not fragile, judging by his public persona.

Do you have the backstory?

George was kinda fanboying over Musk's "work harder" memo. Someone kinda mocked him. He said fine I'll intern myself to prove my point.

So, Musk hires him apparently specifically to fix search.

Then George makes a post asking how to fix search, under the guise of hiring them(as an intern) to do it.

What is he bringing to the table at that point?

> Everyone trying to tear George down for this comes off as completely miserable. It's fucking sad.

Still less sad and miserable than billionaire bootlickers calling other people sad and miserable

He got hired to do a job. Rather than doing the job he was hired to do, he tried to farm out the job to someone else publicly, on Twitter.

This is the kind of incompetence you've said that Twitter is filled with. Why is it okay when it's George Hotz then?

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