Also does he really have that many at Twitter people whom he trusts? And are there many who trust him?
To be fair I can't tell if your post is sarcasm or not.
At any rate, I think you'd be mistaken to believe that there aren't top-notch software engineers at SpaceX and Tesla. They both have front-end tools, massive backend systems, data pipelines at huge scale, metrics and analysis systems, and so forth.
I doubt this could have a significantly different outcome than just firing people at random (or using some bizarre metrics like lines of code committed). That's probably irrelevant if Musk's goal is to simply drastically cut the number of employees at Twitter one way or the other.
But this thread is missing the forest for the trees: take my coworker for example.
He's become such a pivotal player because he stayed at the company much longer than the average tenure in our industry.
Why did he do that? Well, my hunch is the fact no one sweats him if he needs to pick up his kids from school, he can work from home as needed, he's not expected to work 80 hours a week... all play into that.
So it doesn't really matter if you realize he's valuable, fire half the company and start talking about extreme work hours and he'll rightfully leave.
People like him such experts at the specifics of their jobs that even 30 hours of their work is worth more than 80 hours of some loyal Elon drone who might have all the zeal in the world, but can't magically recreate 6 years worth of being deeply embedded in a company.
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We already saw Twitter employees saying Elon has fired people who fit in this category.
And to add fuel to dumpster fire, those people tend to have stayed due to a bond with the job. Start shaking it up by getting rid of people they build camaraderie with and doubling work hours and they'll leave.
After all, having a resume showing years of executing at a high level in a company like Twitter is a huge boon. Money was raining from the sky until very recently and these people ignored it and stayed put. You can't find people like that easily in our industry.
A more reasonable explanation is that he just wants the employees to self select. (Sane) People who are unwilling to take this process seriously will just leave and only those who'd fit in the environment he's creating would stay.
He was asking them to print our their code and show it to a team of his engineers, that didn't exactly leave time for in-depth discussions about non-code impact.
His entire mantra has been code-is-king and claiming people's non-code work was cruft from over-engineering, so it's not exactly like he'd accept that excuse anyways.