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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

I get the strong impression that many (most?) of the people fired from Twitter are just like the overrated person described in the article.

People love to act like Elon is some sort of mouth-breathing man child who stumbled into the CEO position through nothing but luck and connections.

Meanwhile, if I was to take over a company that's made up of thousands of developers, the first thing I would ask for is examples of the code written by those developers.

Don't tell me how fantastic and important you are. Show me the commits!

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I might believe that to some extent except that not all development jobs lend themselves equally to cranking out commits. Sure, if you're working on a well defined feature with all dependencies already built, you can really crank stuff out. However, those also tend to be the easiest jobs filled by junior developers. Solving the less well understood/defined problems often generated fewer commits per day but often generates more value.

Do you really thing a company of that size has snippets of code that are reasonable to sift through and make that determination? You realize you'd have to parse through millions of lines of code.. Furthermore, Elon Musk cannot code himself. Having known quite a few people who have worked (and who know him well), he is the definition of overrated. Where is Elon's github? Why should he judge anything?

I get the strong impression that you‘ve never led a multi-billion dollar organization.

Don’t show me the random code you built that makes a users like history load 500 milliseconds faster, talk to me about how to make the product better/more engaging/monetized!

> Don’t show me the random code you built that makes a users like history load 500 milliseconds faster, talk to me about how to make the product better/more engaging/monetized!

Honestly, if I were the CEO, I would ask for the former if I were looking for the good programmers to keep since these are the things that make the technological base of the company run.

The answer is of course likely different if I were looking for the managers to keep ...

I mean, again, $44bn is on the line here and 'well functioning app' is not why things are worth that much (what share of YC's value is Hacker News for example?).

Companies release financial statements for a reason.

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