To be fair this undermines my trust in tesla workers. No only because the nature of their work is radically different but not having the guts to tell ellon off for firing people based on loc tells me they probably cut other corners at tesla just because their boss tells them. Lack of integrity and two ton vehicles are not a good mix.
If this is the event that makes you feel like they cut corners at tesla, vs the many, many more that has been public in the news about the cars themselves, I have a bridge to sell you.
I kept hoping and didnt want to sound like that grumpy old man shouting at clouds. Tesla to me looks more like an mvp with good batteries. I think it will go downhill as more ev makers enter the market and tesla cant compete with them in making actual cars. Elon spent 44 billion on a bloody troll platform and is heavily distracted by it.
The requirement to drive with auto-bright headlights, coupled with the auto-bright system’s complete inability to detect incoming traffic, is all you need to know about the importance of quality at Tesla.
Not adding LIDAR and playing this ambiguous marketing game of not really self-driving vs “you can just sit in the back and enjoy whatever you want” makes their whole business a scam.
Have you seen this thread? No idea if it's legit, take it with a grain of salt.
"i used to work for tesla writing infotainment firmware and backend services - all of which runs in a single bottom tier Datacenter in a single location on the worst VMware deployment known to man."
I don't think they have enough autonomy to even try actual decision making. In an environment of controlling authoritarian boss, you it is just not possible no matter when you private opinions would be.
> Deleting 50k lines of code still counts as lines of code changed...
I'm the most productive 10x software engineer ever: I just fixed CRLF inconsistencies on several large code bases. Literally touched every line on hundreds of files.
Next up: fixing the arbitrarily mixed tabs and spaces.
I just deleted a bit over 76,000 files in one of our repos. GitHub shows it as "Infinity files changed", and refuses to display even a list of the files.
A simple IDE assisted refactor could inflate your line count by a few thousands.
You can also just write a ton and not actually need it if you’re trying to game the system or if you’re inexperienced.
Commit count would be a little more accurate, but that also is just an analog for who saves the most. It doesn’t really tell you who made any impact with or without code.
Finally, a lot of senior work is just convincing other teams to allow you to do what you’re trying to do. Most code features are trivial to write, but a nightmare to get approved.
> If you're an engineer and made very few code contributions without a solid justification of why, I'd expect you to be on the chopping block...
At a company of Twitter's size you generally expect the junior and mid-level engineers to be writing most of the code and the more senior engineers to be implementing the trickiest bits, managing stakeholders, and writing design docs.
At the extreme end, engineers working to optimize performance might spend months painstakingly optimizing a single hot loop to save the company a few million a year (I've seen this happen).
Given this reality LOC, is so wrong for more senior engineers as to be a waste of time to even consider.
Juniors do most code, seniors less. Those who work on easy tasks produce most code, those who work on hard ones less.
And then there are usually senior positions where producing code is just part of your responsibility - compliance, analysis, negotiation, architecture, operations, troubleshooting shooting.
No. I DO believe lines of code was used as metric. It's a fast way to protect the top code contributors. I just don't think it's the only thing taken into consideration like people are implying...
There are countless teams and examples for it being a horrible metric to solely fire on.
I just think it's not right to jump to conclusions like Dictator Elon fires engineers with low LOC.
All we have to go off of is they had review meetings where they had to show off the code they contributed and Elon "suggested to query for lines committed."
Is believing in both of those things is somehow a contradiction?
"I haven't seen a good proof that he fired based on LOCs and even if he did that would not be stupid anyway"?
Just because you take something into consideration does not mean it becomes a criteria. But I think we can all agree that it would be a mistake in a mass layoff to accidentally fire the top 10 contributors to a given project if the 11th contributor only ever made 3 contributions all just updating comments right?
Well that sort of logic requires you review the logs. It doesn’t have to mean you set up some arbitrary “anyone under ckloc per week is fired”
lmao, and what about teams that focus on, say, security, or privacy, or devops, or numerous other areas that require reading and auditing code/systems, as opposed to writing new code?
I agree. I viewed those as "a solid justification of why". Also, I'd expect there to be some grouping or consideration of job titles and organizations.
No body knows unless real leaks come out. Did they do it strategically? Or by numbers across the board like people are implying?
In these threads, we're all pretending that finding evidence of non-performance in VCS history isn't common practice across the software industry. Because fuck Elon Musk, he's just the worst.
Whether your counting lines changed, number of commits, etc, you can easily catch out the people who do jack shit. Cross reference that metric with their other duties and it is easy to find a lot of slackers. The people who should be coding a lot, but just don't have any work to show.
Firing based on LOC is stupid, but I don't understand this comment:
> Elon’s engineers were given instructions to follow: they did. It’s how Elon’s companies are operate apparently.
Maybe I've worked different comments to everyone else, but if I was told by my boss to do something like deactivate X, change something to Y, or in this case, fire X% of people, do people really expect employees to not follow it?
This is much more than stupid, people who do educational workshops, training, assist others with their problems, SREs and performance engineers, database maintainers, people who delete code by adding functionality are one of the biggest investment in corporations like Twitter. Firing based on LOC is probably why self-driving Tesla is coming next year https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7oZ-AQszEI
Well, if I'd tell my employees to do something stupid, I'd expect them to tell me why it's a stupid idea. But I also wouldn't fire them for talking back to me...
Definitely. And likewise, if my manager told me to do something I thought was stupid, I'd feel totally comfortable telling him (politely of course) why I thought it was a bad idea. Either I know something he doesn't, or he knows something I don't, but either way we want to not do dumb things.
if I was told by my boss to do something like deactivate X, change something to Y, or in this case, fire X% of people, do people really expect employees to not follow it?
The implication is that their instructions were much more detailed than "fire X% of people" and included using LoC as the metric, which nobody questioned.
(Any quantitative measurement of code quality will have too many outliers to be fair. LoC? Of course not. Number of closed PRs? You can't say much without knowing their complexity or severity. Etc. But they had to be quick, not fair.)
It reads like Elon believes his employees work for him personally, hence reports of people who work for Tesla suddenly being told to work on something related to Twitter.
> It reads like Elon believes his employees work for him personally, hence reports of people who work for Tesla suddenly being told to work on something related to Twitter.
Honestly, shouldn't Musk have a lawsuit coming from Telsa shareholders, since he's doing stuff like that?
Tesla's employees must be used to make Tesla successful, not to help the CEO on on some personal investment/project of his.
What if the employee knows the action, or results, violate the law? What if the employee is part of an important community or organization in the field that has ethical standards that would be violated and result in the employee's ejection from that community?
There are many reasons why in many engineering fields there's a licensing process and exam, but one of the most important ones, from the employee's perspective, is being able to say "No, I can't do that, I would lose my license".
I never refer to myself as an engineer, it's mostly a job title that's been bestowed on me by industry trends. (Remember when "web developer" was a job title?)
I have tried to learn from my for-real licensed engineer friends what the profession means and emulate them. Without the safety net of a license or a code of ethics, it's mostly a self-indulgent exercise in what might be.
With my team leader, or architect and also higher mangar like CEO I am free to say "I don't think we should do it this way, issue is ...". Or just "sorry not task for me".
They may disagree and push back, but I am sure I won't be punished. Side effect is that they are used to argue for what they won't and completely ridiculous decisions (like judging by loc) are avoided.
The idea behind hiring someone to do something is they're supposed to know how to do the thing. Dictating stuff like this is micromanaging, but he should at least have the good sense to listen if they come back with a reason it's not going to work. These aren't school children talking back because theydonwanna. These are professionals who likely know better.
Not disagreeing, but I'm assuming they did it this way because they wanted some quick and objective way to make the cuts. Given those priorities, what's the best way to accomplish that?
This is not an objective way. You will fire most valuable people (those who knows how stuff works) and you will keep junior grunts who type code by what seniors tells them.
Correct approach would be understand why there are so many people, figure out what is their job and then start removing those who are deemed unnecessary.
i.e. Imagine that you would come to new codebase and start throwing out code which does not appears to do anything and then be surprised that it is not possible to compile or you can't deploy or whole application will start crashing at random intervals.
I think the most valuable work in applications development is the ontology work to figure out the mental models. If that is right the code is much easier to write, shorter, and less buggy. In fact it often works right the first time.
The wrong mental model will turbocharge your LoC but not your business.
I still don't get how he can make employees from a different company he owns come over and do this. Twitter belongs to musk personally, not tesla, correct?
I assume it's something like this: Musk asks Tesla if Tesla would be willing to contract out some employees to Twitter to help with some stuff. Tesla says yes because nobody wants to get fired for telling the CEO "no, that's stupid". Some shareholders think it's a stupid idea but by and large won't do anything because if you are a Tesla shareholder you own Tesla stock fully knowing that "Musk occasionally does stupid things" is just what happens. If some decide to sue it's going to maybe lead to some small-ish settlement and don't actually change anything.
The key idea here is that managers of a company have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of the company, and not to work on their own side projects. He certainly could make employee do what he wants, but it's not legal and is why people are unhappy.
You have gone to the mat, arguing with industry professionals, while evidently having little or no industry experience, and making obviously incorrect statements like “the CEO can make employees do anything.” Like, come off it man, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You just want to be oppositional. It’s not working, you aren’t winning the argument.
That's exactly how it works. There's nothing illegal about employees of one company helping out another. If Tesla shareholders don't like it - well, they can vote out Elon at their next meeting. I'm sure that will work out great for them.
Larry take your team of coders, we are going to construction site of my house, I need some free help there and don't want to pay for workers. Sounds odd hmm? Really this is not how it works.
Corporations have a fiduciary duty to all shareholders, including minority shareholders - not just the majority. The issue isn't it being "illegal" for "employees of one company helping out another". It's that Elon Musk is an employee (CEO), not the full owner (only a partial owner), of Tesla, and doesn't have the legal right to treat Tesla resources as his personal property.
From what I understand, they used some past period's (-30 days to -60 days?) results so that people could not optimize for the stated goal. They might in the future, if they believe that remains the number 1 metric, but who knows.
I'd ignore it unless it was given out as an official metric of success. People would optimize for it, making it useless as an indicator, and I'm pretty sure Musk and his team are smart enough to have considered that.
I think Musk wants to start over, and a first step is to cut drastically. That’s a new management plan and is not the responsibility of the employees, who were delivering on the goals of the old plan. It’s a layoff, and requires notification of employees, unemployment benefits, and usually some severance package, too. It’s really dirty pool to invent a reason to fire people in order to avoid those obligations.
Does it not seem ironic to anyone else that all these scoops and news about Twitter are communicated using... Twitter? Is there really no other way besides Twitter to publish and communicate news and information? Maybe others are bought into Twitter, but I'd really like to stop consuming information on the Twitter platform, especially if it's about... Twitter. I know it's passe to complain about Twitter threads as a means of communicating, but there's a reason why people complain - it's a truly awful way of consuming content that requires any amount of depth. I hope the industry can find a better way to complain about Twitter and communicate other valuable information without using Twitter.
And yet, on HN we post the Twitter thread instead of the blog post. It just seems to me there's some entrenched user behavior that will be very difficult to change. Regardless, this thread wasn't posted on his blog or newsletter, so there's only one way to consume this information, and that's on Twitter. Twitter is entrenched for sure.
> It just seems to me there's some entrenched user behavior that will be very difficult to change.
I definitely agree with that. I left Twitter myself this week, and I've increased my blogging and started a Slack. But it's difficult, because a lot of people are still on Twitter, and they refuse to leave. By leaving, I've decreased my own reach, unfortunately. We'll see what the long-term consequences are.
The catch is that Twitter is full of people who never write their own content, aside from tweets. If they leave Twitter, they silence themselves. They can follow RSS, newsletters, etc., but they don't have a voice outside of Twitter. And to be frank, maybe they don't have much interesting to say, but they're still the primary audience for creators.
> Regardless, this thread wasn't posted on his blog or newsletter
I can't say whether or not it was in the newsletter, as I don't subscribe. It might have been there too?
Yeah I checked to see if it was posted on his newsletter (they give you a free issue preview on substack) before I posted the above, and it's not there... yet. I think the main thing that motivates Twitter behavior is that it's easy to quickly post stuff including pictures and gut reactions without having to compose a more well-thought out article. As such, Twitter unfortunately still fills that gap of short-posts that are aimed to get high attention. This area is need of (decentralized) innovation.
LoC isn't a perfect metric by any means, but it's also not a completely irrelevant metric as people always keep claiming. Especially if you showed up at a new company and had to fire 50% of the staff with zero context. There are too many tenured employees at Twitter, Google, Facebook and everywhere else who stopped writing code a long time ago and spend their time trying to seem as busy and important as they can while doing basically nothing. Firing based on LoC will definitely get rid of a few great engineers, but it will also correctly identify the 40% useless engineers.
> Firing based on LoC will definitely get rid of a few great engineers
The average front end developer probably writes 10x the LOC of the best backend developers, so it may actually get rid of the majority of your best engineers.
Juniors produce more code then seniors. Easy tasks produce more code then hard tasks. And the distribution of tasks is not random either, some people do more of easy ones others hard ones.
Judge seniors as seniors, and juniors as juniors. You say that juniors are probably writing a ton of code.. well some of them aren't doing that. Some of the juniors are slackers who are coasting on their social skills and office rapport. Looking at LOC changed can help you identify these people. Confront them with this data and give them the opportunity to explain themselves. Some of them may have good excuses for why they don't have much code but have certainly been working hard. Many of them won't.
Or should we pretend that everybody at twitter is a hard and honest worker?
> Or should we pretend that everybody at twitter is a hard and honest worker?
Much like how we are asked to assume the best of posts here on HN, and presume innocence of those on trial for crimes, yes, that seems like a good place to start from.
Assuming that any particular worker is competent until proven otherwise is fair. Assuming that all workers are competent is just naive. You may as well assume there are no bike thieves in NYC.
We're discussing 50-75% layoffs - terminating the employment between 3,500 and 5,250 software engineers... people. I feel it's completely fair to assume that a vast majority of them are competent.
Just as I assume that a vast majority of people on bicycles in NYC aren't thieves.
I did not said probably. I said, Juniors systematically as a rule produce more code.
And even in that bracket, I will give harder tasks to more capable junior ... leading to them producing less code. I will also help less to more capable junior and help more to weaker one - leading to more capable junior spending more time figuring stuff independently. That is super useful for team productivity (he is not hogging senior).
Seniors have also huge differences due to doing different tasks. A go to guy for stuck out issues produces less code then someone on greenfield module. And loc has zero with productivity.
Unclear analysis and requirements are another source of low LOC. You produce less of them when you are spending a lot of time reading convoluted sentences or calling people for clarifications.
Seriously, are you all working on repetitive web shop tasks that you think loc has anything to do with productivity? Or not coding at all?
At my job juniors dev write a lot more code than needed, having 12y of experience I know how implement same things with much less code.
So, from my point of view, LoC is really a stupid metric.
The point isn't to compare those who wrote 10K vs 11K lines of code, it is to compare both of them with someone who wrote no code in the last 6 months.
Top seniors at my job almost write no more code. They mentor, teach, design, troubleshoot etc. By Musk metric, they should be fired even if they basically run company systems.
Fire that person and their manager for not doing anything about it. Either way its still a terrible metric. I wrote shit loads of code and was still beat out by the worst member of our team because they were given oddball tasks like copy all of this code into a new area, or even worse when they accidentally force merged a different repo into another, good grief.
Typically, someone who wrote no code in 6 months was doing different position for those 6 months. Analysis, infrastructure or whatever, usually without formally changing position. That is significantly more common then imaginary coder who produces no code.
I don't think it rises even to 40%, because I think an excessively productive idiot is way harder to deal with than a person who just doesn't write enough code. Cutting based on LOC biases towards retaining excessively productive idiots.
The thing is, in my experience, the people who write a ton of LoC often need more effort to review, introduce instability, and slow down the rest of their team because their stuff needs bugfixing or is difficult to parse.
There's an easy way to validate these assumptions. Go to any repo in your company's GitHub and open the contributors section. Tell me who you'd rather fire - the 10 people on the top of the page or the 10 people at the bottom?
The 10 people in the bottom are people whose primary job is not to code. I don't actually want to fire my team leader nor the guy who often helps analysts, I actually think they do good job.
Some teams (accessibility, diversity & inclusion) were fired because Elon doesn't give a shit about those areas. That has nothing to do with lines of code.
Reading the article, they assumed Slack channels were private by default (coming from MS Teams), one dev floated the LOC idea, and another dev linked to a fire list.
I don't get how hung up on the LOC firing people got.
If you want to fire 3500 people you obviously don't care that much about false negatives.
I would not be surprised if it turned out that it's much more economical to fire based on LOC and then rehire a few good people than to go through thousands of conversations and try to do it "the right way". Especially since Elon can be sure most of the Twitter workforce is hostile to him anyway.
If you fire people based on LOC just because it's convenient for you (the employer), the good employees won't come back. They'll take a better-paying job at a place that doesn't treat them as disposable or try to screw with their lives.
If they find better paying works. For what I know they have been fired, therefore they are not in a dominant position to negotiate anything, esp if they have student/home loan monthly and family to feed.
They are not any kind of prey. They are more thousand of white rabbit who are going to compete in the next few months to find job when all major Company in the industry are holding recruitment or even worse are also firing their own employee.
I don't think the plan was to re-hire good people from the same pool that got fired. And I honestly don't expect Elon's Twitter to have any problem hiring good new people (even in the absolute worst case scenario there is a huge untapped pool of non-left-wing programmers who would previously never work at Twitter because of the culture of that place).
That'll cost you dearly. If the guy you're jerking around like that has any sense of pride, he won't come back for the same salary he was satisfied with before getting fired.
If you're some midsized average company it's probably fine. If you're one of the tech giants scraping for top talent, it's going to be a massive dent in all your future hiring.
That’s ironic considering one of Elons main principle is to remove parts and requirements. The best part is no part and all that.
I’d be more interested in how many lines of code someone prevented.
But I guess if these groups had the impossible goal of choosing how to rate engineers they don’t know then you need to find something objective to point to.
(Maybe in future jobs we should commit tons of code and write a bot to delete it a few minutes later.)
If they weren’t being measured on LOC before, it might be a decent metric, since they wouldn’t have been trying to “game” it. Now I know as well as anyone that LOC is mostly bullshit, but I also know a lot of developers who slack off. For example, if John Carmack was at Twitter, I highly doubt he’d be anywhere near the firing line.
tbh I wouldn't be surprised an engineer with the technical scope, prowess, and responsibilities of John Carmack is bottom 50% of actual LOC. His behaviors would actually be in boosting the LOC of other developers through mentorship, code review, technical mtgs, and pair programming sessions!
And even if he was doing (mostly) programming, he would probably be assigned harder jobs than most, and may have spent the last months researching some gnarly bug, experimenting with all kinds of code variants, but committing not much yet.
It's absolutely ridiculous that the firings were allegedly done using LOC. This is especially true when Twitter has certainly had performance reviews which could be used as much better firing criteria than freaking lines of code.
To all of you that think this is a fair way to fire engineers, please reconsider.
If I am Elon, that would require that I think Twitter, and prior management, did objective and honest performance reviews. All the while knowing I’m taking over and everyone is trying to save each other’s skin.
I don’t think so. The performance reviews are more than likely self-congratulating BS and to be ignored.
Why does the timeline need to be so dramatically short? It doesn't need to take years or months, but executing such a change almost instantaneously with a new purchase is careless, crude, and risky.
It also reveals a lot about the mentality of the person making the decree.
Well, first of all, spend more than three days, obviously. If, for some reason, that was necessary (it clearly is not) use historical performance reviews.
The fact that so much of this conversation has turned into “well he has the legal right to do this, even if it’s bad” shows how far standards have fallen.
I gotta believe that this culture is not also present at Tesla. These cars are drive by wire and I am feeling very very concerned that people writing. code to control these 2ton hulks are optimizing for lines of code written.
And yeah, Mr Elon has a LOT of fans and if you’re a professional, you need to be concerned that someone in your line of management might be getting inspired by this!
Even if you need to cut headcount, why burden your employees with the job to cut the livelihoods of other employees without the necessary business context in which to do so intelligently? Now Musk can blame the engineers making the cuts if Twitter starts to fail-over from missing domain knowledge, because he explicitly set these people up for failure.
In my recent job, I committed Jupyter notebooks to Git, and they tend to be giant JSON files. I had 10x SLOC of anyone who did not commit Jupyter notebooks.
If this is true.. then all those people that were let go now have a lot more ammo to use in court. Basically they publicly discussed their termination strategy of making up reasons to fire people.
They are at-will employees. Their employer can fire them for any reason as long as it is not for an illegal reason.
Firing even 100% of your employees, just because you “don’t like their vibe”, is not illegal. Just make sure they get their required notice and wages depending on company size before firing.
If anything, the leaked public discussions provide proof that employees weren’t fired for an illegal reason.
You're forgetting his previous statements that employees wouldn't be fired without good cause. Also, his reasons stated publicly are different than what is being said in the chat logs. This is both a breach of implied contract and implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing that can be argued.
I rarely see this sentiment when it’s anybody else under discussion.
When articles about outrageous corporate behavior are shared on here, I never see “well if this is what the shareholders want, they own the business, so it’s their right.”
You have ethical responsibilities that extend beyond the bare bones of legal obligation. I’m not just going to shrug when someone messes with thousands of livelihoods just because legally it’s their right to do it.
What if those employees have gained the hatred of well over half the nation; and set up a system where they can do nothing but drink wine and attend yoga classes for half the day?
I applaud you for being honest in a way that many commenters aren’t: you are just happy to see people you don’t like being punished.
People have been embarrassing themselves trying not to directly say this (“actually making engineers print out their code changes on paper is good management”, etc.)
If you take a look at Twitter’s employee lifestyle before Elon took over, it is not that I do not like them.
They had, quite literally, objectively, built a system where they could do almost nothing, their platform didn’t need to innovate in any way and could continue losing money indefinitely, and they could (as stated) drink wine and do yoga all day.
In which case, they had it coming. Sorry, not sorry. You can’t continue losing money and handing out unlimited wine forever at the bar. Cry me a river when that inevitably had to end.
Any Twitter employee should have been able to figure out that a business can’t have crazy perks, almost no new features, declining market share, and constant financial losses, without something having to give.
It sounds like your problem is that you’re not treated as well as old Twitter treated it’s employees, and there think everyone should be treated as poorly as you are.
I would suggest that you get a job at a better place. I suspect you’d feel better about yourself.
Is it possible to have this discussion without calling him a grifter and con man? Why have people decided that it’s okay to bring the Twitter-style tone of discussion to HN?
It could do without the downvotes so lazy people don't get a dopamine hit reward by simply clicking a down arrow to suppress conversation, without adding anything to it - nor proving they deserve that power to downvote a specific comment.
I’d invite you to take a look at the what he has promised with Hyperloop. Just from an engineering perspective, his plans are completely infeasible. He sold the public (including governments) on fancy sci-fi renderings.
Isn't the issue here that you're putting such a weight or strong conviction on Elon as any promises he makes are gospel, the problem is you're putting him on a pedestal and under unreasonable expectations?
And I'm familiar with the Hyperloop: an almost vacuum tube system [vehicle on a skate that accelerates] that can travel up to 1,223 kmph. You're aware of Tesla and his success with SpaceX, that he's an engineer, and that they put out a 30+ page white paper on the Hyperloop outlining their math - and I'd trust math by a team who's running SpaceX, no?
So what specific claim and logic can you put forward that outweighs the proven expertise/competency of Elon, SpaceX et al? Anything? Or you just simplify things down to "grifter" and/or "conman" and that's satisfying enough for you?
Honest to gods I do not understand how you can think like this. Elon is not a medieval King. He can not just do what he wants. There are laws. Elon isn’t operating in a full-on cartel environment quite yet.
