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A comment on Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said. Parent comment

Re:Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staf... by pclmulqdq on Sunday October 30, 2022 @09:12AM (#33394198)
At some point, the curve definitely bends negative. I used to work on a team adjacent to one of the most "productive" programmers at G by that metric.

My team, and at least 4 other surrounding teams, had one full-time SWE cleaning up after him. He would go around making changes assuming things that he thought were safe and breaking tests, then his manager would argue with you that because you didn't make a promise that what he did wasn't safe, you have to fix the test breakage.

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Re:Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staf... by cdavid on Sunday October 30, 2022 @09:21AM (#33394273)
Yes, there are large negative externalities to a certain type of engineers who write a lot of code of dubious quality. Even after ignoring all the trivial cases of "artificial code stuffing", etc.

I used to work in a very dysfunctional org where the main "architect" was writing lots of broken code that kinda works, and the 20+ people in the team around it would basically be full time in fire fighting mode. The architect was a very smart guy but ironically enough without any sense of architecture: his level of abstraction for network was pushing bytes through a pipe, and for loops for calculations.

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Re:Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staf... by pclmulqdq on Sunday October 30, 2022 @12:10PM (#33395676)
That was similar to this guy - he was a good IC who ended up being over-promoted to an "architecture" role (L7). He didn't really know how to architect things, so he went for creating externalities while resurrecting old, dead projects that past people had designed for him.
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