Yeah that's wild, so you have like maybe 80-150 lines per shot to prove your worth. What is he looking for, algorithm interview tricks like a quick sort or graph traversal? He's in for a shock when he learns most coding isn't what is done in interviews--I bet most Twitter engineer's best work would look like some ugly tangle of complex syncronization logic to allow highly parallel processing. Fast, efficient code isn't always nice to look at or read.

> What is he looking for, algorithm interview tricks like a quick sort or graph traversal?

This is so obviously not the point of the exercise that it feels like bad faith. I doubt he's firing anyone at this point. Just looking to see how does what and talk with them about their impact. The code examples are just to get the ball rolling. Basically everyone in leadership at twitter is gone, Musk needs to figure out who can be trusted to keep things from collapsing, not who to fire.

It’s probably more of a filter to see who can’t even come up with 10 examples of work they’ve delivered over the course of a year.

I do a lot of code reviews, and it’s very obvious who on the team barely churns out useful code —- even just from the low density and volume of their code.

run a git blame on any file and you're likely to see a dozen or more people touching it. You would need a large chunk of freshly-written code unmolested by your coworkers. And what's that even going to prove? You're not inventing any novel algorithm. You're going to write whatever code your PM wanted written to support whatever stupid features or A/B test they wanted done. And Elon's going to sit there and judge the worth of that? Based on what metric?

While fully acknowledging that Elon is a jerk…

Most engineers should be able to run “git log -p —author=myname —since=‘12 months ago’” and find 10 examples of non-trivial code.

And those that can’t, should be able to provide a good explanation of what they contribute instead.

It’s surely this. Unless he’s even more clueless about this than I think he is…. this is his feckless way of figuring out who does what.

I’m guessing the screenshots themselves will be less relevant than their owners’ description of what the depicted code actually does.

This is all very dumb and I’m not defending the way he’s doing this.

It must be amazing to have such good will that even batshit crazy behavior is rationalized as somehow reasonable. Elon's going off the deep end.

The primary role of leadership is to feed tasks and guidance to skilled people who your organization has selected based on known temperament and skillset.

If you run a software company and don't know you employ who can code you are at titanic slipping beneath the waves status still calling on skilled ship designers.

It's done he burned 44B by being a bad leader.

Plus he could just search for that code in the repo to get the overall context, he probably has access :)

Musk is the guy who couldn't figure out how to run a python script not so long ago so it's doubtful.

Also it's really not something a CEO in a company of such size should be doing...

Running a python script is hard if you're a dev but not a python dev. I got into all varieties of dependency hell on macOS last time I tried to stand up a simple python project I git cloned.

Using git might be hard as well if you hadn't done any actual development in the last 15-20 years. Understanding Twitter's codebase without having worked with it all would be a magnitude or two harder.