Musk email: "Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor."
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Musk emails remaining Twitter staff to find “anyone who actually writes software”
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The Onion has been in charge of running reality for years, if not decades now
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You know what valuation is? The total of all outstanding stock. I was replying to someone who said Tesla's stock is down because of Musk's antics. It might be down but it's still a lot more than GM who has a lot more revenue than Tesla by a lot.
And someone has paid that price for Tesla. It's a publicly traded company. People buy and sell it at that price all the time.
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Hey, in just two weeks he's moved on from printouts to screenshots. If we're lucky, by next Tuesday he'll be sending out memos saying "have you guys heard of this thing called 'CVS'? Might wanna look into it!"
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Ha! Maybe when Musk promised the people leaving on Thursday 3 months worth of severance, it wasn’t a lump sum - he just figured 3 months was how long it would take them to figure out who was still on payroll.
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Actually, Twitter has been pretty good for me when supporting journalists at one newspaper job some time ago (even though they didn't source any confirmed news from it the first place, it was good for catching up on rumours). It's been outright invaluable to developing citizen OSINT initiatives like @Bellingcat, who did a great job showing just how the Russian misinformation or even assassination (Novichok) campaigns operate. It's been invaluable during some of the various citizens' uprisings in authoritarian regimes like Egypt, Iran and others, at least for a while. It's been really nice for keeping up to date on Russia's invasion of Ukraine with some very carefully vetted sources there as well.
All the while, watching this whole shit‑show and implosion in accelerated real time just makes me sad. Sure, there's been some really bad things in there, like with any other social media, but also some pretty nice things...
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sjlongland
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
Musk is now bitter
because Twitter is in the shitter.
He's turned his cash to litter,
and now he wants an arse kisser.
because Twitter is in the shitter.
He's turned his cash to litter,
and now he wants an arse kisser.
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And who other than a hack has a favorites list of mere screenshots full of their code? "I am particularly fond of the ordering of this case statement."
Personally, code is fractally awful, even when written by great coders. If you're zoomed down to a few lines of it, there's probably something you're embarrassed you ever wrote in there, at least if you write and maintain actual production code for a living.
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He would probably mean the pharmacy because he found some kickass cough syrup there.
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There are comments I'm proud of, but actual code?
I generally work on the assumption that if a piece of code feels really elegant, it's probably too clever by half and I won't understand it when I come back to it later.
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I have encountered a manager who was more self-sabotaging than Musk, but only once. He'd acquired a small software company in the 1990s, because he liked the product. The staff had been gradually leaving because he was such a pain. I was doing tech writing and support, and was the last technically literate person, so I was fired.
His plan was to have all the software work done in India, so he got all the .c files copied off the last developer's machine and sent to his contractors. There was no network or source-management because the boss thought they were not needed. A few weeks later, I got a call from him, asking about the declarations of the data structures. I explained about .h files. He'd discarded that last machine after copying the .c files.
Musk hasn't quite reached that level yet. But he's working on it.
His plan was to have all the software work done in India, so he got all the .c files copied off the last developer's machine and sent to his contractors. There was no network or source-management because the boss thought they were not needed. A few weeks later, I got a call from him, asking about the declarations of the data structures. I explained about .h files. He'd discarded that last machine after copying the .c files.
Musk hasn't quite reached that level yet. But he's working on it.
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I don't think you followed the quote thread very well. I commented that Musk does understand how to play to the public and used the price of Tesla's stock as evidence of that. Someone pushed back that the stock price was lower because people were figuring him out. To which I replied that they've figured him out so well Tesla's market cap is still 10x GM. What I was trying to say is that showman Musk managed to create a perceived value of Tesla beyond what's logically warranted.
I will push back as to what something is "worth." The market capitalization is an objective fact. It is not an opinion. Tesla's market cap is 10x GM's. That's not up for debate.
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Well, generally speaking your flowcharts, dataflow diagrams, and high level pseudocode are great, right up to the moment you actually implement them. Then, whether they have any resemblance to the working product is somewhere between questionable and LOL. MAYBE, if your designers knew how to estimate time properly (a rare and treasured talent), there was sufficient resources left at the end of the development cycle to true up all that documentation, but even then, give it to devops for a few months and ... good luck.
That said, reviewing of a small number of lines of code by management as a way of checking a developer's bona fides is idiot talk. You will learn absolutely nothing other than that the people who produce the nicest-looking slides are probably asshats who take credit for other people's work.
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So it’s probably time to stop following the particulars of what Musk is doing to Twitter. What I’m curious about now is how it ends. What does bankruptcy for twitter look like?
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And those news organizations probably got multiple copies of the same email from multiple anonymous sources.
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Does he run SpaceX and Tesla this way? Maybe the employees are beaten down so much, they don't dare leak how bad it is to work at SpaceX/Tesla.
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Well...
Rumor has it the sink is planning to cash in on the 15 minutes of fame those viral videos gained her. She's apparently in discussions with the local Lowe's to be their new front-center floor model.
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Who would have thought that the actual wickwick event would be Musk detonating Twitter?
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I know. Twitter could certainly bruise one's feelings. But, there was a huge amount of really important and really valuable information and interaction there. The musk incompetence and destruction show is certainly entertaining and full of I-can't-believe-he-did-that guffaws, but overall this is just really sad.
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What I find fascinating with all of the Elon stories is the regularity with which comments are rated "XXX (YYY / -1)". An enterprising writer could try and track down this industrious Mr/Ms "-1" and ask them for a comment.
Or are these all coming from Elon's account?
Or are these all coming from Elon's account?
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My wish would be a queue of employees, stretching around the entirety of the 10th floor, each with a sheaf of paper, grasped in their eager hands. All are printed at 6pt in pale grey, on high gloss paper, double stapled in the bottom left corner.
In turn, each drops the proof of their coding craft on Ol' Musky's desk, then scamper for the exit. One by one, all do the same, leaving a pile of paper on his desk that reaches the ceiling. At the stroke of midnight, the last employee leaves Ol' Musky's office and the CEO sets about his self appoined task.
Ol' Musky, his eyesight failing, struggles to decypher each and every sheaf of tiny low contrast print, under the glare of the ceiling lights, only to reach an unexpected 11th page, which screams in bold, black 24pt.
"Fuck you, I quit!"
In turn, each drops the proof of their coding craft on Ol' Musky's desk, then scamper for the exit. One by one, all do the same, leaving a pile of paper on his desk that reaches the ceiling. At the stroke of midnight, the last employee leaves Ol' Musky's office and the CEO sets about his self appoined task.
Ol' Musky, his eyesight failing, struggles to decypher each and every sheaf of tiny low contrast print, under the glare of the ceiling lights, only to reach an unexpected 11th page, which screams in bold, black 24pt.
"Fuck you, I quit!"
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The majority of his career now has seen him in fantasy land.
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Possibly he thinks that if he can pivot Twitter into a company that produces a killer app of some sort, as in a piece if software, he won’t have to care what advertisers, users or other assorted annoying “activists” have to say.
He strikes me as the type who dreams of positioning himself such that people are forced to put up with his garbage personality. Much of his celebrity seems rooted in this ambition.
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I would like to submit my top code for the Twitter Code Olympics of 2022. It is a very salient and high-impact piece that I call "Hello world."
Can I has senior engineer job?
Can I has senior engineer job?
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I sent a manager a link to a poorly documented procedure with an explanation of why it was a problem and a suggested solution. He asked me for a screenshot.
This was a clear indication that I was working for an idiot.
That’s who asks for a screenshot.
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I don't think that's an XKCD about programmers but more about EMACS
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I'm guessing Musk had already fired security and he's now trying to fire the cat.
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I think you missed the point - there's often this elitist attitude in coding that using a convenient IDE is somehow less "hardcore" and that "real" coders don't need things like syntax checking or colored markup, they use crusty plain-text tools like VI and notepad. This XKCD was just taking that to the absurd.
It's the equivalent of some crotchety old carpenter yelling about the yutes using nailguns and circular saws when they built whole houses with just a hammer and a handsaw.
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Well, you have to buy antacids from somewhere to quell that stomach-churning feeling.
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I fear that the only path for survival for Twitter is for Google or Amazon to buy it after Twitter files Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Meta would have antitrust issues buying it. Why would Apple want it? That does not fit with its business model. Google wanted to get into social networking with Google+, but failed. This might be Google's chance for success in social networking. This would not fit with Netflix's business model, either. Amazon might buy it to try to mine it for sales leads, and since Bezos owns both The Washington Post and a big chunk of Amazon, maybe use the WaPo to help mine leads for news stories and slap disinformation sources with tags denoting such.
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