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> "I wrote heavy duty software"
> "I interface way better with engineer who are able to do hardcore programming"
In 20+ years of developing, I've only heard non-technical (or well past their prime technical) folks use the terms "heavy duty" or "hardcore" to describe programming.
I've heard technical people use those terms when they're talking down (or up, depending on your perspective) to management.
"heavy duty", "hardcore", "falcon heavy", "cybertruck". Those terms relate. I guess he means appreciating programming down to the electron, photon millisecond when debugging a lost rocket launch three times in a row burning his money in the sense of physics and not some kind of marketty arbitrary opaque name for flavor of framework, platform package container combo.
How much "photon millisecond" level rocket debugging has Elon personally done?
The name falcon heavy is a direct riff on the name delta 4 heavy. ULA just slaps 3 delta 4 first stages side by side and that's the heavy variant. Falcon heavy is the same thing but with falcon 9.
I don't think it has anything to do with heavy duty.
Agreed. I'd expect the average HNer to emphasise with those terms as we all work in complicated and intense industries, but I guess there will always be disappointment as non-Conservatives join the World Wide Web.
This is probably more common than the context suggests. CEO/CTO that both claim deep technical skills while not having touched code in decades, one demanding to talk to engineers, the other claiming he's deep in the codebase and knows what's going on. The best executives I've worked with are the ones that freely admit they don't know about the code, the worst are the ones that insist they're "technical" and keep bringing up stuff from 20 years ago with no bearing on the current problem but believing they're sharing their technical expertise
Here's a sequence of events that led to me quitting a job:
- The owner/CEO of my company met with another local business owner and sold them on us doing some custom software work for them. He gave them an estimate during the meeting, and made a handshake deal.
- Owner tells a PM at our company about the project. Usual project kickoff stuff happens where the PM organizes a team and schedules a meeting with the client, etc.
- PM sends a meeting invite to a dev (me), a designer, and a QA, to meet at the client's office for the meeting.
- The owner of the client company does a similar thing, and at the meeting is 3-4 employees who know a lot about their business and the needs of this project. We talk for 2-3 hours and have a pretty good idea of what they need.
(details: The company operates a fleet of temperature sensors. They currently subscribe to a service that alerts them when a thermometer reports values too high or low. They don't like the software and don't want to keep paying for it, and want us to build them a replacement. Basically to collect a bunch of data from devices in the field, parse and store, send sms/email based on rules configured on a web app, and also have some really basic reports viewable)
- The team (4 people, including the PM) play agile games for a few hours, coming up with narratives and points.
- I get to work. Get access to the data, find a japanese manual online for the devices that describes the format of the data, set up a web app, database, user management, data download/parsing, a polling and alerting service. Lots of parts unfinished, but it's technically functional. Less than one week has passed (and my time is split across multiple projects).
- Project is put on emergency hold. Client found out how many hours we had spent, and was pissed. Apparently the person writing the check was told by our owner that it would be like 10-20 hours of work. That was never communicated to the employees at either company. The requirements gathering meeting exhausted the budget all by itself, unknown to everybody present.
- The PM is fired.
- The owner schedules a 1-on-1 meeting with me, where he spends 40 minutes describing the concept of database tables and rows. His thinking is that if I had only known how to store things in a database, the project wouldn't have taken me so long. Fortunately he gets a phone call and abruptly leaves.
- The client was apparently paying $20 a month for their monitoring software.
Lol, I always find it funny when people pretend that Parag is some clueless "management type". I graduated the same year as him from the same school, and he is a ridiculously sharp engineer who has risen up at Twitter the old-fashioned way. It's painfully obvious that Musk just wants sycophantic yes-men around him and was pissed off that Parag wasn't willing to kiss his ass regarding all his "revolutionary" suggestions.
I read it more as CTO was protecting the engineers.
Look at Parag’s work history. He’s been coding recently enough. “Decades” is totally wrong.
Parag Agrawal joined Twitter a mere 11 years ago as a software engineer. He went from that to first CTO then CEO in a few years, at a big tech company. I have no doubt he has deep technical skills.
So you’re saying Musk is worst executive, no matter his track record?
Elon apparently used Tesla engineers to review Twitter code: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-27/tesla-eng...
Do Tesla employees work for Tesla or are they Elon's personal staff? How is acceptable when employees can be fired for moonlighting?
I stopped trusting Bloomberg’s reporting after they refused to retract their “The Big Hack” which turned out to be bogus. Are there other sources for this?
Apparently, SpaceX has used Tesla engineers in the past, to help them evaluate/integrate Tesla parts into SpaceX designs. If Tesla is okay with doing consulting for one of Musk's other businesses, why not another?
Legally, Musk has to pay Tesla for this, and someone very senior at Tesla (the board or the senior executive team) has to approve – without Musk being in the room. But, why wouldn't they say "yes"?
So I don't think this story is fundamentally implausible. (As I pointed out in a comment on another post, the "code review" was probably actually an "architecture review", but it is easy for non-technical people to elide the difference.)
What "heavy-duty" software did Musk write for a 20 year period? I can't square it with the career section in his Wikipedia bio.
I can assure you Mr. Musk was not involved in writing code at x.com. Though he was a very decent product-manager-type guy and generally more technical than most PMs. I believe he can understand many issues with code-bases, but he absolutely did not understand why we did things the way we did in the crypto(graphy) code at x.com.
He forced PayPal to switch to windows. Opinions differ as to the wisdom of that move.
There is none. The only thing anyone has referenced is some pre-PayPal code that got scrapped and rewritten in the merger and some games when he was a kid.
He made x.com, which was a financial service company that got bought by paypal. THen I think he worked at paypal for a while. Then he did spacex. Then he did tesla. All of those are very engineering heavy and he has been known to get into nitty gritty on all of them.
He worked in the video game industry at one point and wrote some low level code there.
Rocket flight control? I'm not sure that was 20 years in a row or how much he really does of it, but that's my guess.
> [...] I won't let this fail and will do whatever it takes. It's too critical to humanity.
It's really hard for me to not be disgusted by these people thinking that a web platform whose main purpose are shitstorms is critical to humanity.
This is so absurd.. it could be a Monty Python script.
On this website you have loads of people claiming that Twitter is an utility and should be regulated and even funded from taxes instead of running as for-profit company... I don't agree with this, but I think it's not so clear cut to be disgusted - many intelligent people think so as well...
Jack and Elon discussing future protocol:
https://www.twitter.com/TechEmails/status/157558827770002636...
This is really interesting, and for me it highlights the problem of tech/business people trying to solve a social problem. In their mind everything can be solved by tweaking the software architecture or monetisation model. Nothing is proposed to change how users actually interact with each other on the platform, which (IMHO) is the main problem.
I love the "can I call" texts he sends. It's neat to see boomers all act the same about texting.
So many HNers thought the deal wouldn't go through.
If you thought Elon was a genius, you figured he was just trolling the world and would weasel his way out of what seemed like a stupid deal.
If you thought he was a troll first and genius second, and paid attention to the analysts who read the fine print on the offer, you probably expected he was going to be hoisted by his own petard.
Because his 44billion dollar investment is worth 12 billion when the ink dries
And so many thought it would.
Predicting the future is an imperfect science, as it turns out.
4D chess on how to lose $30B…
I remember those threads, the confidence with which people were claiming 'Musk is just lying and will never ever go for it". Just tells you most people are susceptible to emotions even if they are otherwise rational. In this case, visceral contempt for Musk being against censorship.
Elon did try very hard to stop it.
I believe that Elon plans multiple routes to account for possibilities when he does business. I believe he colluded with other parties to depress Twitter's share price through legal drama, firstly so they could profit by knowing the moves in advance, and secondly so he could try and force the valuation lower to save his own money money. I believe he has tried several strategies to get the US government to intervene and cancel the deal.
Maybe all that is wildly out of band, but we've seen him operate for years now. He routinely lies; that is, creates a message he wants a certain market to hear to achieve a certain effect, and in a couple of moments, despite his massive wealth, has demonstrated that he has a keen interest in acquiring more wealth.
I'm honestly not sure I'm more shocked it went through or more shocked he thought he could get out of that contract.
Exactly. Hence why so many HNers are extremely annoyed and angry that it happened and that they will still use Twitter regardless. I guarantee you that they won't move or close their accounts down due to this and will continue to peek or use links from Twitter.
I don't care what happens since I'm laughing at the whole mess and chaos.
Don’t forget the texts that triggered his offer to buy Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575598387335901190?s=...
Damn. I could be wrong, but the texts with Bret makes it look like Elon's ego was hurt, from texting with Parag.
how does Parag Agrawal come out of this looking "in the right"?
When Musk inevitably makes insane changes to Twitter, Parag gets to point at them and say "those are the thing I wouldn't do as quickly as he wanted."
he comes out of this quite wealthy, and, the man who made elon kneel, so I think he'll be all right.
This confirms that Jack Dorsey will be back on top
I hope he does not. Jack Dorsey endorses decentralization, I don't believe Elon would. Jack is best left out to pursue his own products which will be more decentralized.