That’s a ridiculous position. I would expect good engineers to laugh at the entire process and not see a future in that company. There is no way that engineers can be accurately assessed on code output.

It doesn’t matter if it’s about defending or explaining. Either one is an absolutely absurd situation to find yourself in where you have to explain stuff to people with zero context to save your job.

If I was given these instructions I’m out.

why do you think that explaining something is ridiculous? i have been to meetings multiple times with representatives of other departmens and openly asked them to explain to me things that i didnt knew and needed to get understanding to implement some functionality. why its ridiculous when its other way arround and someone asks to explain what and why is this code doing? again, it looks like ypure taking it personally.

It’s ridiculous because this is not genuine interest in someone’s work but a way to sieve out at scale.

(I don’t have a horse in this race. I don’t work there. So not sure why you think I’m taking this personally)

> not genuine interest in someone's work

That's your threshold for asking employees to summarize what they've been doing recently?

Management must have some profound interest in the feature being delivered and how it was implemented?

Question: have you ever managed people? And if so, how many?

Intention and context matters. The goal here is clearly to significantly downsize the operations with the least amount of severance to be paid.

I won’t go into your ad hominem.

Your anger with what's going on is coming through clearly. It sounds like you don't approve of any of the steps being taken because it's a downsizing.

While you're entitled to your opinion, it doesn't seem particularly relevant in discussions about whether or not this process is effective.

On the contrary, I'm more than happy to discuss my code with my colleagues, because their intent is to understand the code. In the hypothetical scenario, the new owner's intent is to evaluate my worth, not my code.

is there something wrong to evaluate your worth? and explaining your worth through the things that you have done (recently) is in my opinion one of most direct ways to do so.

no one wants your code just for fun of it or it beying extra nice and smart. code is neded becauae it creates value.

In general? No, because I agreed to yearly evaluations. Randomly asking me to prove my worth like my time so far didnt matter? Yes, there is, and the company being sold is a random event from my point of view.

The question itself comes from a place of authority, and the employee has nothing to gain, only to lose. Best case - I keep my job. Worst case - I get fired. That introduces stress into my life unnecessarily.

The new owners can go and read past evaluations instead of boiling the ocean. But, of course they won't do that. It's much easier to assert your authority and stress everyone out, to make sure they know that they are just resources churning out code.

If you step out of the soulless business mindset for one second, I'm sure you'll understand why asking me to prove my worth out of the blue is insulting.

"Prove your worth to the new gods, employee #1337!"

No, thanks.

> No, thanks.

Not sure from which perspective you're saying "No" from?

If you were a Twitter employee, that means quitting. But apparently from what you just said you don't want to lose your job. (There's no stress if getting fired is something that doesn't bother you)

Or from a management perspective? In which case I think vincnetas did a good job explaining why management might want to do this if they wanted to downsize.

Basically you're saying the concept of laying off people is a ridiculous viewpoint because it makes employees feel stressed. Sure this is just a discussion forum and we're all free to express opinions, but realistically, what makes you think an employee can say "No, thanks" to this?

"There's no stress if getting fired is something that doesn't bother you"

Sure there is, long painful meetings where you go over your work for the last 30 days sounds miserable regardless of if you care about the outcome.

You also might lose your severance package.

While you can't say no thanks, if put in that situation by my employer I'd do the bare minimum and start lining up interviews with the tens of recruiters that message me daily (as I'm sure is the case for anyone with twitter on their resume)