OT: Elon Musk and Tesla engineers doing Twitter code reviews using printouts?

bujji1402 · Nov 17, 2022

The Scoop: Turmoil at Twitter

Overnight, Twitter has gone from one of the best working environments in tech, to one of the worst. What is happening, and why?

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

I find this hilarious.

On Friday, they were told to print out their code for Musk and Tesla engineers to review it. Tech journalist Casey Newton – who is also a fellow Substack writer – reported how events panned out, in Platformer:

“On Friday, though, some engineers began to receive requests from Musk’s intermediaries. He would like to see the most recent software code that they had written, the engineers were told. And he would like them to print the code out and show it to him.

According to four current employees, engineers spent Friday afternoon at Twitter dutifully printing out their code in anticipation of meetings with Musk and some of his senior engineers from Tesla. Other engineers were told to prepare for “code pairing” with Musk, in which they would sit with him and review code together.”

Employees dutifully – and no doubt incredulously – printed out reams of code. Any software engineer knows printing code makes no sense at all. Reviewing code is done on the computer because it’s more efficient, because you can jump between revisions, see who made which change, and so on. Printing it loses all this metadata. Anyway, here’s a Twitter employee with a printed selection of her code written over the preceding 30 days:

Happy Friday all. pic.twitter.com/Rk9m1v1hmu
— Leah Culver (@leahculver) October 28, 2022

Then, a few hours later, new instructions came from the top: stop printing and shred all documents with the code!

I have since talked with several software engineers. Not one of them had their printed out code reviewed, not by Musk himself nor anyone else.

bujji1402 · Nov 17, 2022