No decent coder would use a metric of how many lines of code someone has checked in and then fire everyone under that level, which is what he did at Twitter. Heads up, removing lines of code is almost always better than adding lines.
eta: and it’s mostly the best programmers who will be doing things like refactors that simplify things and eliminate code and even when doing new features, the more skilled programmers will be working on harder problems that take longer to implement.
Pretty clearly he was immensely lucky and exceptionally good at something. What is that thing? It’s not being an engineering genius and that would hardly be necessary for the CEO anyway. He had some good broad ideas (not that they were original), probably worked extremely hard, and sold his ideas to enough people to get them off the ground. And he sold himself of course. Perhaps it’s accurate to call that genius, but it’s promotion and marketing more than technical. Technical geniuses like Ken Thompson aren’t the people who become famous.
Dennis Ritchie died the same week as Steve Jobs. Jobs is worshipped. Ritchie? Who’s he?
New York City finally gets a taste of immigration.
Jamie Papademetriou sucks.
Using changed lines of code as a metric might work once. But then programmers will start gaming it, to the extreme detriment of the code base.
You can definitely look at github commits and get a decent idea of how productive I’ve been on a week by week basis. But when they’re low it’s because they don’t give me enough to do and I refuse to make work.
But there are much easier ways to come into a place and find out who the key developers are. Just ask the other devs. Everyone knows.
It’s better, but you still have the problem of anyone doing anything that is harder is going to change less code. Better not take that ticket debugging something.
Right. It only works once, when no one’s expecting it. Then it goes downhill fast.
I think the key is to use it, but never let on that you’re using it.
One of the people at our small company came from Twitter post-Elon. It’s as bad as you could possibly imagine.
they didn’t talk to anyone.
Well yeah because Elon is a paranoid nutcase.
no he didn’t
yeah didnt he just BUY both of those things and upscale them?
It sounds crazy, but people really will insist that he’s too dumb to do a high-school calculus problem even though he has a degree in physics from an Ivy League university. It’s crazy stuff, but it’s true!
Tesla was founded in 2003. Musk bought in in 2004. He became CEO in 2008. The Model S came out in 2012. Before that, their cars were a conversion of a Lotus.
He was a founder of SpaceX.
Musk’s correct insight to the electric car market was that a production electric vehicle needed to go from zero to sixty in 2 seconds. Joe Rogan got that. Einstein wouldn’t have seen that one coming.
Musk’s genius
It’s cool I guess, but Musk saw how real men made fun of Priuses and Nissan Leafs and put out a manly man’s electric car and now there’s (what he thinks of as) a manly man’s electric truck. And he intentionally made his rockets look more like penises! Genius!
i mean, that’s fairly common sense in america though, no?
it’s like what they say about public transportation. that it starts to grow in popularity after people see it passing by cars on the road.
It obviously worked. I don’t know if the major automakers were really even trying to succeed in electric cars 15 years ago, but they were aiming for efficiency and not drag strips.
