Do you remember the "code review" debacle after Elon took over Twitter? Of course HN thought it was genius[0] but outside of the Elon hugbox the premise of being told to print out the last 30 days of code you wrote to justify your job is absurd and clueless. It's the sort of thing someone who's trying too hard to appear clever would do.
Do you really think Elon is like that with Twitter - not just an idiot on it but according to all evidence also while running it - yet somehow doing in depth high-level technical reviews of his own spacecraft like he's Geordi LaForge? Looking at the blueprints while sipping coffee and telling the engineers that if they only invert the polarity of the neutron flow, the engines could get another 10% efficiency by harnessing negative energy from the Casimir Effect or some nonsense?
He's smart but it should be obvious he's not nearly the world class polymath billionaire playboy inventor he's been hyped up to be. His companies work because he surrounds himself with people smarter than he is, and because those people create cultures that route around his tendencies (which culture doesn't appear to exist at Twitter.) The man brought a fucking sink to Twitter for the sake of a pun like it was the funniest thing ever.
Don't forget the story said an assistant wrote the memo. It's very possible Musk said "print" in the programmer sense - like "print to console" - and the assistant misunderstood.
That doesn't seem likely given his ego and personality and apparent tendency to micromanage.
The problem is the premise that one can effectively decide the value of an employee's work by counting LOC or reading their output in that manner at all. It's dumb whether it's done with a REPL or a stack of paper.
You can find the lowest performers in an org pretty easily through a combination of reviewing what they’ve gotten done the last year (via self reviews, manager reviews, a recap writeup etc) and looking at their commit history and docs or other artifacts created.
High performers challenge this notion because they say “I have very difficult bug fixes that required little code.” But high performing engineers just don’t realize how little (shockingly little) output actually comes out of low performers. Like, a slow trickle of trivial code, and tasks that stretch for weeks for no good reason besides their inability to overcome obstacles
>You can find the lowest performers in an org pretty easily through a combination of reviewing what they’ve gotten done the last year (via self reviews, manager reviews, a recap writeup etc) and looking at their commit history and docs or other artifacts created.
Yes but that isn't what happened. By all accounts no such process took place at Twitter.
Do you really think Elon is like that with Twitter - not just an idiot on it but according to all evidence also while running it - yet somehow doing in depth high-level technical reviews of his own spacecraft like he's Geordi LaForge? Looking at the blueprints while sipping coffee and telling the engineers that if they only invert the polarity of the neutron flow, the engines could get another 10% efficiency by harnessing negative energy from the Casimir Effect or some nonsense?
He's smart but it should be obvious he's not nearly the world class polymath billionaire playboy inventor he's been hyped up to be. His companies work because he surrounds himself with people smarter than he is, and because those people create cultures that route around his tendencies (which culture doesn't appear to exist at Twitter.) The man brought a fucking sink to Twitter for the sake of a pun like it was the funniest thing ever.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33379578