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I think people are looking at this the wrong way. It's not so much about the code as it is about establishing an authority. Musk takeover is often regarded as b

• dboreham 4y ago
  It's the same thing riding a horse.
• kibwen 4y ago
  Only incompetent managers (and executives) think that "authority" is interchangeable with "respect". Fortunately for Musk, incompetence rarely disqualifies billionaires from anything.
  • Kamq 4y ago
    There's no way Elon would have any respect yet, there hasn't been nearly enough time (respect is earned). There are going to be power games for a couple of months, until the new management identifies a subset of the old staff that they can trust (or, more cynically, exploit), and then that subset will be elevated above the rest. The losers will either back down, quit, or be fired. Source: Seen a couple management changes before.
  • lake-view 4y ago
    I'm not a fanboy, and there are many things you could call Elon Musk, but incompetent isn't credibly one of them.
    • mathieuh 4y ago
      How many times has he tanked his own company’s stock with ill-advised comments? Do you think this Twitter saga demonstrates competence? In my experience, outside tech bro circles he is unanimously regarded as an idiot and not someone to emulate.
      • ralusek 4y ago
        I'm not sure you want to use "value of his companies due to things he says" as your marker for incompetence. Many of his companies are seriously overvalued precisely because the things he says drive up the value far beyond where it should be.
    • bandyaboot 4y ago
      Someone can be incompetent at some things and not others. We know with 100% certainty that Elon Musk is incompetent at purchasing Twitter dot com in a way that is most financially optimized for himself. We know with 100% certainty that Elon Musk is exceptionally competent at procreation.
  • ratsmack 4y ago
    Respect really doesn't have a lot to do with it, being a professional at your position does.
  • throwntoday 4y ago
    It's painfully obvious your disdain for Musk prevents you from making an observation worth taking seriously.
• ratsmack 4y ago
  Every company I was with when it sold had lawyers come in and inform everyone that all processes are frozen, no equipment can move or be transferred while inventory is taken, everyone involved with computers surrender their passwords to their incoming engineers... etc, etc, etc. It is standard practice and there is nothing nefarious about it.
  • bagels 4y ago
    Tesla didn't buy Twitter, as far as we know though. Seems grossly inappropriate.
    • ratsmack 4y ago
      I can see where people that get a sense of entitlement, for whatever reason, would have a problem with it.
      • kalkin 4y ago
        What you call entitlement sounds to me something more like self-respect. If I was asked to show the last 30 days of my code to a random engineer from another company to prove I deserved my job, I'm pretty sure I'd quit on the spot. (Though if I'd worked at Twitter I'd have gotten out months ago; I imagine the people staying through today have fewer options for whatever reason.) Luckily there's still plenty of work for programmers at companies that understand that impact isn't usefully measured in lines of code.
      • cactusplant7374 4y ago
        If Tesla engineers are at Twitter who is working on FSD? It’s supposed to be finished this year.
      • bagels 4y ago
        My comment was more about spending Tesla money on Musk's personal projects. I also think it pretty insulting to have to justify your job to some random engineer from Tesla.
• lupire 4y ago
  Why would anyone take him seriously when he is making a massive embarrassment of himself on his first day on the job (after doing the same for months leading up to the takeover?) Musk didn't know the bio of the CEO of the company he was buying (who was also former CTO, engineer, Stanford PhD (thesis topic: making decisions under uncertainty), IPhO gold medalist, top tier Indian tech student) and called him a non-technical "manager type" and refused to ask him any technical questions. I am also excited, because I think Twitter needs to end and Musk is the perfect person to destroy it.
  • moralestapia 4y ago
    >Why would anyone take him seriously [...] Well, they should, he is their boss now.
    • seattle_spring 4y ago
      The incoming CEO of the last company I worked for had a similar opinion. Everyone left and he was left floundering.
    • AlexandrB 4y ago
      I think respect is earned, not an entitlement due to someone's ability to buy a company. There are plenty of bad bosses who should not be taken seriously.
      • OccamsMirror 4y ago
        Whether they respect him or not they should definitely take him seriously.
        • dragontamer 4y ago
          The opposite. Technology is famous for inverting the classic boss vs lackey relationship. Without an engineer, the boss cannot build what they want. Engineers are your eyes and ears, they're the ones who can tell you if an idea can or can't work... and ultimately are the ones who will build the products. Twitter engineers are the ones best positioned into knowing what is or isn't possible with Twitter's codebase, for whatever the heck Elon Musk wants to do with the code. If Elon thinks he can just walk in with a bunch of Tesla engineers and have his trusted Tesla programmers figure things out, he's gonna be in for a surprise. Programming doesn't work like that, it often takes 6+ months for a set of engineers to reach competence with a codebase. --------- There's a myriad of stories about how "bad bosses tell engineers what to do, instead of listening to them" around here. Why? Because we're largely a set of programmers / hackers on this discussion site. We all know how bad management can be. What Musk is doing right now? Obviously and clearly bad management. Musk has no trust over the Twitter engineers at all.
• Skywing 4y ago
  I suspect that not much will change for users. The folks who want to continue tweeting will do so. The folks who do not want to tweet won't. Everything else is office politics.
• aclatuts 4y ago
  Yeah, I don't see the problem. Tesla investors benefit from SpaceX material science expertise solely because Elon owns SpaceX and allocates the time and resources. I don't see Tesla investors complaining about that. I would view it as a way for Tesla engineers getting paid to go to a software conference. It is definitely possible to learn something during the code review to take back to Tesla.
• bandyaboot 4y ago
  This week Musk sure sounded like someone who was a bit concerned over the potential of losing advertising revenue.
• gwbas1c 4y ago
  > I don't think they can get a clear picture by looking at last 30 days of code I can very quickly spot developers who are mediocre or worse by looking at their last 30 days off code. (As long as it's a language I have decent experience in.) I suspect he's trying to access the team's technical competence.
  • bamboozled 4y ago
    No you can't because being a good developer isn't always about smashing out code, I've easily spent 30 days with great developers talking about planning and implementation before much code is written. Hopefully it's not you who is the mediocre developer?
    • gwbas1c 4y ago
      Err, there are very obvious "beginner" mistakes that don't have to do with "smashing" out code: Things like: State in strings instead of properly defined enums / data structures. Magic numbers instead of constants. Dangerous error handling. Compiler warnings. Missing or incomplete input checking. Anything vulnerable to SQL injection, or similar. Significant copy and paste within the same codebase. When a developer with more than a few years experience writes code like that, (except in throwaway situations,) then there's a clear problem. More subjective signs of a poor coder are: Super long methods, (or too many sort methods.) Passing around a single value but always picking a new variable name. Inconsistent naming conventions. Sleep statements to fix race conditions. Unnecessary special cases. Incorrectly using an ORM. Code that is many orders of magnitude slower than need be. (IE, sucking the entire DB into ram for just one value.) Some language specific warning signs: Lots of "unsafe" (pointers) in C#. Lots of unwarps in Rust. Bounds issues is c/c++.
      • bamboozled 4y ago
        This is all assuming that a coders job is to just code...and make code better, which IMO it rarely is. Honestly, the most lucrative code bases I've worked on are generally considered terrible, annoying, incorrect, frustrating but they are functional. The most recent example I can think of was a startup I worked which sold for billions of USD, it was considered by everyone as terrible. A large part of our job was understanding complex requirements and integrating with other companies poorly implemented APIs, wrangling XML etc, so we didn't code a lot, we planned a lot. Fundamentally I think we're just talking about different aspect of the job and we disagree that being a "coder" is about lines of code. In my current job, I've been helping my team, especially new comers understand complex systems and business logic which we didn't have a lot of time to document because of the insane growth our company went through and the insane amount of stress we were under to deal with demand with only 2 engineers. I've not written more than 20 lines of code in 4 weeks, really just mentored and guided people, should I be fired?
• duxup 4y ago
  Seems like an extreme step if he feels after a few days he isn’t being taken seriously enough. That’s not a lot of time.
• sangnoir 4y ago
  > It's not so much about the code as it is about establishing an authority I think there's a simpler explanation: he intends to fire people under the pretext of poor performance and play games with layoffs/severance and/or create a hostile environment to encourage employees to resign (no severance either). > You have to understand that Musk isn't after the big dollar here but rather he is experimenting which has a lot of chances to fail Musk wanted out of this purchase, but discovered the Delaware Court of Chancery far less malleable compared to other regulators he's dealt with before (looking at you, SEC). Tesla is going to be a learning experience for Elon.
  • matwood 4y ago
    > I think there's a simpler explanation: he intends to fire people under the pretext of poor performance and play games with layoffs/severance and/or create a hostile environment to encourage employees to resign (no severance either). Based on the reports that came out after your comment that he doesn't want to pay the execs their severances, I think you're spot on.
• deleted 4y ago
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