At first I thought him trying to engage the community as a whole for technical contributions was good and upbeat. But it also makes me question- then what is he bringing to the table then? His celebrity, to engage those people? Is his internship to be a technical manager? Is he actually going to credit these contributors, let alone ask Musk to give them internships? It's not managing if these people are just random volunteers he's using ad hoc.

Passionate hackers love to solve technical challenges, sure, but it does feel weird that he posted this open-ended call to action. I'm not saying they must be paid, as per the free work detractors, but even in FOSS you get credited and on Stack Overflow you receive karma.

> did anybody expect Hotz to sit down and write search from scratch in complete isolation?

Based on his reputation, people sure act like he is some sort of supercoder polymath who is able to pick up on any stack.

Regardless of all this, this kind of job "interview" is better than 99% of all tech interviews I have given.

Ask me to prototype something that I would use in the actual job. Don't ask me random algo question. Don't ask me why I am so excited to work for your stupid company that I hadn't even heard of before applying

I'm pretty sure if a company asked me to implement a feature for them as part of the interview process and didn't offer to pay me I would know up front that it's a bad company. Maybe you have a point that it is a good "interview" since it flags the place as a crap hole.

Hotz is an intern not a manager. Interns are generally expected to take on these sort of "heads down" coding tasks, not hire other interns.

Okay, sure, let's go with intern. Are interns not expected to ask basic questions on day one?

Why is he not asking other Twitter employees, and if he’s going to ask the dev community, why frame it as an interview to be an intern- to an intern?

If he was merely asking for help it would be less controversial.

Is there a "team" for him to lean on or did they all get sacked? The yacht is still on fire, after all...

Did Hotz ask a basic question? No.

He made an job offer while acknowledging that he doesn't know if he is allowed to do that and he stated that the interview for it is to do free labor for him.

> Looks to me like he might recognize the scope of the problem (...)

I find it very unlikely that search, of all features, has problems where UI development is remotely relevant, let alone the solution. UI-wise, search consists of firing dumb requests to the backend and just update the UI with the results.

Exactly. It might require some work - but only a small part. shouldn't be the place to start.

In this case he seems to be either unwilling or unable to (it becomes more clear in one of the tweets further down the thread) to even implement Does the query begin with "from:"