Shouldn't that have been the idea *before* they laid off half the employees?
How fucking idiotic of a leader do you have to be to lay off half the company and *then* try and figure out who is producing literally nothing of value?
I have no idea how many people get through the code interviews at Big Tech and then think they've proved their value and just phone it in, but I guarantee it's not zero.
If I have any particular concern it's that this sort of thing misses some real unsung heroes in any big technical project, i.e. the people who write good documentation and the people who chase down bugfixes. This is important work, but won't be captured by screenshots of code very well. "Here's a screenshot of where I fixed an off-by-one error, but it took two weeks of unraveling 137 microservices to find which RPC was guilty." Important, but not exactly impressive in the way one might think.
Not to mention, it plays into his perception that twitter architecture is too bloated to be productive.
He is likely looking for people who have zero or less than 10 things to show.
I bet you could squeeze by with one big thing to show and nothing else if it is explained.
This sort of net would catch lots of zero screenshot responses for multiple reasons- I doubt there will be any scrutiny applied.
If this were actually the goal, he could just find a couple hardcore coders who know how to use git and ask them to produce a list of commits by developer for every repo he cares about.
It's hard to tell if he actually thinks he can evaluate people via code screenshots or if this is another dumb hazing ritual, but I can't believe he's really trying to figure out who writes code from this.
If it was unstable, then I'd want several bottles of whisky on hand, because I'd have to work around the stinky pile of dung I'd been left with.
Given reports of debug and dev builds in production just before everything was frozen, I'd probably want to start stocking up on whisky.
In my experience those do-nothings tend to be near the top of the pyramid.
At the engineer level it's harder to get away with doing nothing because you're constantly being told what to do and then you get evaluated to see if you actually did what you were tasked with doing.
As you go higher up the food chain, some can get away with claiming they're doing everything while taking credit for other people's ideas and work, while the only thing they actually do is order people around.
You can definitely get away doing nothing as an engineer if the project manager is too busy or does not care. Also works if your direct manager is himself a do-nothing, or a developer that for promoted and actually does not have any management knowledge or experience.
Of course the real problem is that the whole organization is dysfunctional, but there is no right or easy way to fix this problem, except try to identify the honest guys and fire everyone else. Because most of the alternatives ends up with the minority of productive guys quitting.
Where are you getting these numbers? You got any real studies or data to back this up?
Microsoft once had an internal rule that anyone in engineering who supervised less than 100 people had to code. Is that still the case? This looks like a way to find the people who aren't doing that.
The goals which you wrote can be achieved with far superior tools, which wouldn’t have alienated developers, whose skills are really-really valuable on the market. In such environment, as what Musk created, they are the first who will abandon the ship. They have every possibility to work in any kind of environments what they want.