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.
In my experience, outside tech bro circles he is unanimously regarded as an idiot and not someone to emulate.
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.
Well, they should, he is their boss now.
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.
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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.
If only Elon Musk knew as much as you do about managing engineers!
Disclaimer: Self-employed so I don't have to deal with that.
Twitter is just a social network, it can be used for good or for bad, based on who one follows. That people think it needs to end for whatever reason (or maybe they're only used to the bad parts, or have even never used Twitter which is quite a many people in my experience who talk trash about Twitter) is misguided.
No, I do not need to be informed about X person who said Y thing on Twitter of all places, told to me from talking heads I've never heard of, that want me to be outraged for all the reasons they hate X person or Y statement.
Maybe it's not Twitter's fault, rather people using it as a tool to foment hate on principal. It's certainly not from being well informed via the platform or the news media. Thank God IRL people don't work that way.
I use Twitter and I think it needs to end - at least in its current form. It has a very low signal-to-noise ratio and doesn't offer the users adequate control over what they see. As an example, you may not want to see (re)tweets on Baseball from the prominent Web Dev space folk you follow, or the off-topic comments by trolls in replies.
> Twitter is just a social network, it can be used for good or for bad, based on who one follows.
...and the people that interact with them. There need to be more receiver-side controls. Blocking tweets by words is a first step, they should have opt-in filter by subject and raise the bar on replies that ride the coat-tails of authors authority.
Though, people can be super smart and yet so stupid at the same time. It doesn't have to be binary. (Who am I to judge though!)
Still needs corroboration.
And after the dust settled, it was just a couple of oddball blokes exchanging insults like children. The diver who started the fight, got greedy and wanted $190 million in damages over the pedo comment. Jury deliberated for less than an hour, and he got nothing.
In the end, the Thai Navy got a free mini sub they said could be used in future rescues. I don't see the Twitter incident with the diver as any final verdict about Musk in general, other than he can get emotional and doesn't hide behind corporate speak. The Diver-guy's initial attack really was the first foolish action in that whole saga.
Mike is the ringleader but he's only useful when Republicans are in power.
So not as foolish as he seems, but it's unclear his ploys will pay off. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
> 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.
Is there some news report you’re referencing or some non public information you’ve been privy to?
https://twitter.com/techemails/status/1585804674170355712?s=...
Well, maybe because he’s the richest man in the world? Or maybe because he’s the CEO of several of the most valuable public or private companies in the world? Maybe because he practically single handedly willed the electric car industry into existence? Or maybe because he’s revolutionized the rocket industry? Or…or…or…
Elon hasn’t whiffed on any business venture in decades. Nothing but net.
But you wouldn’t think that listening to all the “I am very smart” people on this forum. This guy, one of the most successful people in all of human history, is apparently an idiot and no one should take him seriously. He will surely run Twitter into the ground because… because… because reasons.
These takes are outright comedy. Fine if you don’t like the guy, I surely don’t, but good grief you’d think he was pissing into bottles like Howard Hughes.
You say “successful” but I assume you mean wealthy.
There are other forms of success that Musk falls woefully short of, such as “not being an asshole”…
Just about no one took Musk seriously with his vision of reusable rockets or electric cars. And yet, here we are.
…with armchair internet warriors saying he’s a joke and sure to run Twitter into the ground.
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.
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.
Hopefully it's not you who is the mediocre developer?
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++.
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?
I also haven't reviewed your code!
But if you are specifically writing code that has the kind of errors that I describe, or are continuing to "add fuel to the fire," I would set very clear standards and expect that you meet them. I understand that you can't fix every problem overnight, and that you have to pick and choose the things you fix carefully.
But if you continued to, for example, write code that was vulnerable to SQL injection, after I made it clear that this was no longer acceptable, yes I would fire you.
The code is C# and involves heavy reflection; but if the person who wrote it used a simple lambda, it would be fine and easier to maintain.
In such a situation I'd make it clear that reflection is inappropriate in this situation. If the developer continued to use reflection when simple lambda statements were appropriate, I would make moves to fire the developer.
Again, I would set clear expectations first.
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.
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.
Using Tesla engineers is just to get everyone talking. I don't think they can get a clear picture by looking at last 30 days of code but they can use this as reason to lay a lot of people off. Not that Musk needs reasons, obviously.
In my mind I think Twitter is going to go on a very, very different direction than we all expect. 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. Twitter could become extraordinary or it could become utter trash, we'll have to wait and see. Personally, I am quite excited to see where this goes.