It’s fitting that the mass exodus of Twitter engineers coincided with the death of Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month. There is no more influential book about software engineering, and I really can’t say enough about how Brooks influenced my thinking about my chosen profession. The key insight that everyone repeats from the book is that adding engineers to a project won’t make it go faster, and might make it go slower. For me, though, one of the big lessons from the book is how Brooks takes an obvious fact — some engineers are far, far more productive than others — and tries to use that insight as a basis to form software teams. Brooks used the analogy of the “surgical team” where one surgeon (the best engineer) performs the most critical work, to try to leverage this disparity in ability.
Last night, a bunch of surgeons left the building at Twitter: this Twitter thread of Twitter engineers signing off is full of people with multi-year tenures. There is no recipe for building a major real-time system like Twitter, and there is no off-the-shelf software that can be purchased to keep it running. Every long-tenured engineer leaving the building is leaving with some special knowledge of a bespoke system. In normal times, those engineers would have been replaced and the rest of the team would educate the new engineer on the ins and outs of whatever system they’re maintaining. Yesterday, entire teams left. The knowledge they took with them is irreplaceable, in this context.
Like every big tech company that’s been around for years, I’m sure Twitter had more than a few senior engineers who were phoning it in. Being constructively lazy is one of the important characteristics of a good engineer, but some of them just build a sinecure and collect their big paychecks. So, over time, an owner of Twitter who had clue fucking one about software engineering might have undertaken strategic layoffs to lean down the organization without losing too much knowledge. Musk’s ultimatum: be hardcore or take three months’ severance, was a stupid, hamfisted effort to selectively cull the lazy that turned out to be a no-brainer for pretty much anyone who isn’t restricted by a visa or an absolute need to have a paycheck.
I’m not going to make predictions about when or how Twitter will fail. We may see major outages, or maybe Musk will hire enough contractor troubleshooters to keep it limping along. But the simple fact is that a man who died yesterday wrote a book almost 50 years ago that encapsulated everything that Elon doesn’t know about software, and we’re all going to see how violating those rules turns $44 billion into a tiny fraction of that number in less than a month.
Eunicecycle
I am serious with this question: Is Elon trying to destroy Twitter on purpose? I just can’t imagine any competent, sane person doing the things he’s been doing. Maybe I just answered my own question.
Tom Levenson
@Eunicecycle: No. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, which has long been true, and in particular doesn’t recognize that a startup culture is not something to be created by fiat in a mature company.
Another Scott
You’re right that some good engineers phone it in, and right that that doesn’t mean that you can get rid of them. The prototypical story is Steinmetz visiting a Ford factory.
Elon’s going to discover that nobody knows where to make the chalk mark anymore.
Cheers,
Scott.
Wapiti
@Eunicecycle: I’m guessing he’s nuts at some level, and has over the years removed from his circle anyone who might serve as a guardrail.
Destroying Twitter to prove he can, or to please his Saudi partners might have some merit, but it flags him to Tesla and Space-X investors as a very loose cannon.
jeffreyw
Musk and Trump have similar habits for solving problems: Musk throws engineers at the problem, Trump does the same, using lawyers. They are finding themselves in the same positions now. Neither can command sufficient numbers of competent practitioners. The smart ones refuse, and the rest can’t help.
Keith P.
It’s definitely up there. I still keep that book and reference it 20+ years after college, whereas I was glad to ditch the Gang-of-Four book. K&R could be more influential, depending on how you calculate influence.
Geminid
@Eunicecycle: Musk’s egotism comes with an amount of irrationality. The course of this deal from April to October also shows a reluctance on Musk’s part to come through on his fat offer. I wonder if there is some dynamic akin to passive-aggression at work.
scav
@Eunicecycle: I’d lean towards option 2 as well.
Plus, expand the rule about inherited irreplaceable corporate knowledge to non-techy types. There are generally near retirement Madges in accounting who are the only one(s) who can explain why overflow tax information is now coded in the ZIPCODE field of the office address form and only Bob (No, the other Bob: Bob K not Bob R) in Facility Management can get that back cupboard open where the supplies needed once a year during print runs reside.
ETA. Plus, years of running lean and cutting the Holy Fat from teams only accelerates the probability that only a single person on a team knows how to do something. Lean teams are brittle teams: backup and nets have been pruned away.
BenCisco 🇺🇸🎖️🖥️♦️
@jeffreyw: They’ve been handed everything from birth and never been told no with the ability to make it stick. Ignorance and arrogance is one hell of a combo.
John S.
@Wapiti:
These are merely side effects of the root cause. Like so many other “masters of the universe”, Musk is a one trick pony suffering from an epic case of Dunning-Kruger.
MattF
It’s a fact that Twitter, as a corporate entity, had several major problems. From what I’ve read, there was a consensus that it was over-staffed, that it had not found a path to profitability. Musk is attempting, however stupidly, to remedy those problems. They may not be fixable, but we shall see. (Narrator: they are not fixable).
However, Twitter, as a social network, has/had enormous value, which is now being destroyed. Alas.
$8 blue check mistermix
@Keith P.:
My take: K&R is a great book but it is about technique. Brooks’ is about strategy. Both were influential in their own way.
gvg
I hesitate to diagnose as a non expert but even rich people can become mentally ill. For the last few years, he has been acting odder and more off from a distance. I know that the super rich can be raised in such a protected way that they can be unaware that they are violating all kinds of social norms, but I would still expect his class to be aware of good investment sense, tax laws, contract laws, things like that. He used to make good investments and make fairly good moves with them apparently. Lately though, his personal behavior has been stupid and not just about twitter. People don’t usually start mentally ill. It happens over time, and I don’t think there is anyone who can stand up to him and cares. Wives seem to be temporary. No mention of relatives alive.
narya
@scav: a Madge checking in here . . .
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
All tweets of peoples laptop/badge/desk tchotchkes as they sign off made me tear up a bit.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Eunicecycle: Martin last night was arguing rather convincingly that the problem is Emmo Musk there bought into all the Alt Right Conspiracy theories so Musk is purging Twitter of the libertards to reclaim it for Economically Anxious Americans like him.
Sister Golden Bear
If you want predictions about all the potential ways Twitter’s technology may fail in the near future, this site reliability engineer — the folks who keep things running, has a very long list of failure scenarios. (Duplicate links for redundancy.)
scav
@narya: Nah, database techy desperately searching out the irreplaceable Madges before they left. I was facing down the ZIP codes. And if you’re Team Madge, All Hail!
Geminid
@Wapiti: Are the Saudis really big partners? So far as I know, one Saudi prince holds a $2 billion stake, ~4% of ownership. This is Saudi sovereign wealth money that the prince rolled over from his stake in old Twitter. Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund has a smaller stake.
I have not seen reports of other investment by Gulf Arabs. I believe Musk put up $25 billion, and seven big banks lent $13 billion. The remainder was invested by various private outfits like Sequoia Capital and the Qatari fund and the Saudi prince. This info is from an October 28 CNBC article titled “Elon Musk-Twitter purchase: who is financing the deal “
UncleEbeneezer
sab
@gvg: Elon Musk has lots of relatives alive, including parents and several siblings.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
And the NYTimesPitchBot
RSA
Not relevant to Twitter, except maybe metaphorically1, but another lesson I learned from Brooks was the second system effect. You build a system, and it’s fine and good. Your next release has the goal of adding functionality, stretching beyond some bothersome limitations, fixing bugs. It is a failure, in part because of increased complexity but also because while you think you understand the “real” requirements, you really don’t.
1. Metaphorically, this is exactly what Elon is doing.
UncleEbeneezer
@Sister Golden Bear: Gah, was just sharing that link. We must have been typing simultaneously :)
Most of it is completely indecipherable to me, but figured others here can appreciate it and it’s very relevant for this post.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I’ve never seen anything like the way Musk has stomped all over twitter. It makes no sense.
Layer8Problem
Damn, I’ve had Brooks’ book on my shelf for years. Too many smarty-smart managers have ignored it for longer. Ironic that he went out in the midst of Musk’s self-sabotage job.
justawriter
I see a reality series looming: We take a multibillion dollar company and in the last episode, trade the entire company for a paper clip and feel we came out ahead on the deal.
John S.
@gvg:
Maye (mom) is very much alive and well, and quite active in her own business circles as a former model and dietician. Errol (dad) is still alive, but not much is out there about him.
Kimbal (brother) and Tosca (sister) are also part of the Musk clan. He made a bundle selling Zip2 to Compaq back in the day, and is now primarily a philanthropist. She is in film, and founded Passionflix, which is a streaming service for pulp romance novels turned into movies.
VFX Lurker
@Eunicecycle:
If killing Twitter was the goal, he would have shut down the site on Day 1, laid everyone off or try to absorb them into SpaceX/Tesla, and given a press release.
He might have kept his tech bro glow that way.
Me, I think he’s a rich idiot. 🙄
Eunicecycle
@VFX Lurker: well he’d want plausible deniability of course!
kalakal
@Keith P.: K & R would get my vote
Keith P.
@$8 blue check mistermix: And to a large extent, K&R is obsolete….it’s the basis of a lot of languages out there today, but they’ve moved way beyond the core C language.
TMM is still very pertinent and very hard to overstate the importance of its concepts.
narya
@scav: I am, in fact, a Madge. I share knowledge as best I can, but . . . and I am paying off the mortgage in the next few weeks, and the spreadsheet tells me I can bail in the next few months. I’m torn between April Fool’s Day and May 1 (workers of the world unite . . . and leave).
John S.
@narya:
Definitely go with April 1st.
I resigned from the worst job ever many years ago on April 1st and submitted a resignation letter with a coded message in it (the first letter of each line read vertically spelled out “fuck you”).
Most fun I ever had quitting a job.
Matt McIrvin
Generations of engineering managers heard the bit about how some software engineers are far, far more productive than the rest and just thought “God damn, why can’t we find some way to just fire all those deadweight guys and only hire the 10X or 100X engineers? We’d be rich!”
I can guarantee you this is what Elon Musk has been thinking.
Somehow, it never seems to work out that way. Partly because in some organizations the super-producers are that way because they’re impeding everyone else.
Carlo Graziani
Looks like the smart money is still on the head of lettuce, then.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@gvg: Elon was also raised (like Trump) in a very over privileged environment. I don’t know if he had the same behavior issues as Trump did, but it’s probably likely that no one bothered to tell him no, or to explain and make it stick, that other people have valuable information and you should listen to them. Or and this is a big one, being rich or smart, does NOT give you license to scream, throw things, and abuse people. But Elon believes it does and when thwarted he tries to ruin people See also: the man who led the successful rescue of the Thai kids, or the woman who worked for him and informed him of serious safety issues with the design for one of the Tesla models. He tried to destroy those people for telling him he was wrong.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I think the thing I am going to miss about Twitter is all the weird stuff I am following. The politicians and new personalities will be back on something else ASAP.
mrmoshpotato
Hahaha! So good!
Soprano2
@scav: I’m one of those people at my job. I’ve been here 29 years, all of it in the same department. I do a lot of things that no one else does, and no one else knows to do them or why they should. They’re going to cry some after I’m gone for sure.
MattF
An attempt to start a new social network, Post.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Matt McIrvin: Or they write code that has a bug that was not found in testing and they use that same module in a BUNCH of other programs, and when the issue is pointed out ignore it or blame the users…..just for example.
trollhattan
Twitter cratering (is there enough mass and force for it to pass all the way through the planet?) on the day of Elizabeth Holmes’ sentencing means…something.
MisterForkbeard
@MattF: Twitter absolutely had issues with profitability and may have been overstaffed, yeah.
There are responsible ways to work on those things! Announce when you come in that while it’s unfortunate, he’s got to right the ship and get Twitter profitable again and that will mean laying off some folks in a few months after a careful consideration of company priorities and plans. And then develop offboarding and etc.
And he didn’t do any of that.
Call_me_ishmael
@John S.: Dad’s been in the news lately, when he admitted in an interview to fathering a couple of children with his stepdaughter(!) He apparently thinks its a great idea to have as many kids as possible too, probably for white supremacist reasons.
That may explain a few things about Elmo, come to think of it.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@narya: Oh April Fool’s Day! Do it!
Steeplejack
Cf. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel et al.
Eunicecycle
@MattF: I can’t believe it’s overstaffed THAT much. There’s no one he could have made thoughtful decisions about who to lay off in a week or two. He used a sledge hammer instead of a knife.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Matt McIrvin: Going by what my sister the programmer has told me, the programmers who are productive and those who look productive are most of the time two different groups.
trollhattan
@mrmoshpotato: Man, they just linger and linger. Just bought a pair of concert tickets with a face price of $150 yet managed to pay $225. Thanks, Ticketmaster.
I’d ask what “handling” is being charged in addition to the TM fee, but it sounds too Catholic-priesty to ponder.
kindness
I would have thought that watching Elon light half his fortune on fire and jump in it would have been more entertaining. But it’s more sad than enjoyable and I didn’t even use Twitter.
kalakal
@Eunicecycle: He has spent so long inside a bubble where all he hears is how brilliant he is that he has come to believe in his own bullshit. In his mind he isn’t failing, he is being failed. It’s literally unbelievable to Musk that the underlings at Twitter, or anywhere else, might know more about anything than he does, he genuinely thinks that he’s making all the right calls here, but the fools around him can’t see it. He’s experiencing what Iain Banks’ Culture calls an ‘Out of Context Problem’.
He never was the smartest guy in every room, right now that would include an empty room.
In the parade everyone is out of step except for him
PaulB
I have to say that much of my 34-year career in the high-tech world was spent fighting senior managers who simply never learned, or refused to believe, the lessons that Fred Brooks taught. It really is amazing to me just how often (purportedly) intelligent people tried to ignore basic software development precepts, instead “creating their own reality.”
Of course, the *real* reality always won in the end. Sadly, the people who had pointed out the problems, who had tried to bring reality into the picture, were all too often held responsible for the failures that they themselves had predicted. I’m getting PTSD symptoms and flashbacks from what I’ve been reading these past few days. Horrifying.
Matt McIrvin
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: In the Mesozoic Era of software development, they tried to measure productivity by KLOC (1000s of lines of code). Any software developer with any competence will tell you this is a hilariously bad idea, but it sounds like Elon was doing something like that in his initial firing sweep.
narya
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: @John S.: HAH! you are enabling me. The big thing, really, is health insurance: not eligible for Medicare until next summer, so The Spreadsheet tells me what it will cost to quit on this day rather than that, as well as how much I will have saved up, etc. But April Fool’s Day is soooooo tempting. JohnS, that coded message is awesome. And the thing w/ April 1 is that I can be convinced to make my last day May 1, rather than April 15, say, if they also pick up my health insurance for June. If not? April 15 it is!
TerryTime
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: The movie Office Space was a documentary.
Feathers
@Matt McIrvin: Worked at a business school and what one of the professors said was that you have to have the balance. What the insanely productive programmers can do and what the merely very good programmers can do are very different things. Also, if you don’t take as much off the plate of the insanely productive people’s plate as you can, you won’t have them long.
The other issue is that there is a huge bias towards “natural” talent. This leads to hiring only geeky dudes, thinking that because Bill Gates is awesome, dweeby nerds are the best programmers. A story I remember is of a company where a software company was in trouble (less than a third of projects were successful) and wanted only to keep the “superstars.” At the meeting, one of the first people the power brokers decided had to go was one of the few women programmers. Not a rockstar. Someone piped up from the back that she was the only person in the company whose projects had all been successful.
Companies tend to be very bad at realizing who their actual talent is.
@Geminid: Best theory I’ve heard on the Saudi’s is that they are investing in Twitter with the hopes of ending up with a chunk of Tesla.
Carlo Graziani
@Keith P.: The beauty of K&R was that it reflected “the C core language”: a small book for a small language. But what expressive power! What compact, readable, maintainable elegance!
When I moved to C from F77 for my own scientific work, within a few weeks I felt positively ashamed of the years of code that I had developed, and coud barely read or understand without considerable effort. Just moving to little functions that took up no more than a screenful — an impossibility even in “modern” Fortran — was so refreshingly clean, and the least thing that I learned from that book.
I once tried to approach C++, and was actually so outraged and offended by how bloated it was compared to C that I walked away, and pigheadedly kept OOP at arms length out of spite (admittedly to my own loss) until Python came along.
trollhattan
@PaulB: Working with and around engineers (not software) the last few decades has convinced me the profession attracts and yes, grooms a certain personality “type,” the hallmarks of which the best must work hard at shedding in order to be effective, not to mention play well with others. As the good professor well notes, more typical is not knowing what you do not know.
pat
@gvg:
I have to agree.
Steeplejack
@mistermix:
Seconded on The Mythical Man-Month. A great book, one that I had occasion to reread several times during my own software career. Brooks offered a higher-level perspective that was rare in the flood of “here’s how to do stuff” plumbing manuals. It’s hard to think of another book that had as much theoretical influence. Probably Donald Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, although that had tons of “here’s how to do stuff” in it. Maybe Niklaus Wirth?
narya
I’m not a software engineer (though I think I would have been good at it, tbh), but I am putting this book on my list to read. I’m always fascinated by these analyses, and it would have been a resource/part of my second book if I had (a) gotten a job as a professor and (b) published the dissertation/first book.
lee
My prediction is Twitter will die when it has a major outage that lasts more than 6 hours.
Baud
Y’all will feel foolish when Twitter becomes more valuable than Apple thanks to Elon’s genius.
trollhattan
@Matt McIrvin: I remember contracting for typesetting, before desktop publishing took hold. The poor typesetters, housed in an open office, sat at their consoles, each of which had a clock on top. They’d hit the clock (like a player at a timed chess match), transcribe their marked up text into the system, and hit the clock when done. Pick up the next job, rinse and repeat. For eight hours.
The system collected metrics of course, and the too-slow women would wash out and be replaced.
It seemed so dystopian to me.
Matt McIrvin
@Feathers: As much as I loved and (as a coder) emerged from the home-computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, it probably did more than anything else to reinforce the “whiz kid” archetype in the industry, which in turn was a key element in driving women out of the business, because those whiz kids were overwhelmingly boys.
I think the deep connection between video games and home computers had a lot to do with that, because the videogaming culture of the time was even more overwhelmingly male than it is now, and the big hook for getting into programming was that if you were really good you could write games.
Major Major Major Major
I feeeel like Twitter will be fine, on an operational level, for most end users. But there are a bunch of small-but-they-add-up risks from losing all the people who’ve been keeping the lights on. Computers work, for the most part… until they don’t… and with a system like Twitter you can’t just turn it off and then on again. Presumably they have self-healing architecture but that only gets you so far.
“We didn’t deploy anything for a month so the production servers filled up with log files and crashed” is a common failure mode… if they make it that far…
Like, one of our major products would become useless if we didn’t have this one (1) guy around to keep a data warehouse in sync through minor tweaks every week. He took paternity leave for a quarter this year and we had like three major crises about this. No, this isn’t how things are supposed to be, but, well, life. No number of enthusiastic junior engineers could have fixed it. We barely managed with four seniors.
J R in WV
@UncleEbeneezer:
This guy mentions CEI being posted as highly inappropriate, even illegal. No clue what the F it stand for. Someone help me with the definition of the acronym.
Regarding “The Mythical Man Month” — it was a textbook, a slim one, that taught me so many lessons about systems development and planning.
If you have a very small staff with a great deal of institutional knowledge, and need to build completely new systems for a highly complex organization, you have to staff up fast and use existing staff to lead and manage the development of the new system.
Think environmental protection partly based upon COBOL — IMS mainframe systems barely helpful because not completely implemented, otherwise running on notebooks in people’s hip-pockets. With Y2K coming to boot.
We ditched the mainframe and sent with windows based distributed systems and a Oracle database. Was cutting edge technology, finding experienced developers was really hard. We got most of them from India, young people with good degrees and lots of talent. Was a miracle we pulled it off. Management gave us the support we needed, also hard to believe.
Mr Brooks, RIP~!!~ Thanks for all the clear thinking you gave systems development people all over the world ~!!~
Ken
I’ve distilled every techbro reply to any tweet critical of Musk’s mismanagement of Twitter. You can thank me later for all the time I’ve saved you.
NO YOU ARE ALL FOOLS WHO DO NOT UNDERSTAND HIS GENIUS — HE KNOWS MORE ABOUT SOFTWARE THAN ALL THE TWITTER ENGINEERS COMBINED, AND MORE ABOUT EMPLOYMENT LAW THAN EVERY LAWYER ON THE PLANET — HE IS WORKING TO A PLAN THAT YOU SIMPLY CAN’T COMPREHEND, COME BACK HERE IN A MONTH SO I CAN GLOAT AGAIN AT HOW WRONG YOU ARE.
Sister Golden Bear
@kindness: Last night on Twitter was a very strange farewell to thee experience with lots of heartfelt goodbyes and “if this is my last post” posts. It was a bit like a reverse Christmas Eve experience with people staying up late because they knew Reverse Evil Anti-Santa would be delivering a dump truck full of coal in the morning.
I don’t want rehash yesterday’s thread, but I do want to say if Twitter isn’t your thing that’s fine, but for a number of people, in particular from minority groups, Twitter despite its many faults has been extremely valuable places where we were able to connect with others in ways that weren’t possible in the same ways previously. Especially in serendipitous ways. So — speaking in general, not anyone in particular — please don’t shit on those of us who are mourning the loss of that right now. It doesn’t cost you anything to keep your mouth shut for the moment.
trollhattan
@TerryTime: Hey, have you finished your TPS reports? Uh, yeah, I’m gonna need you to come in over the weekend and get those done, m’kay?
kalakal
After K & R the book that probably influenced me most was K & P(ike) The Unix Programming Environment. There’s a lot of how to in it, but it’s a brilliant insight into the construction of systems
Major Major Major Major
@Eunicecycle:
Industry consensus is that he’s on drugs, something stronger/weirder than just snorting ADHD meds. Opinions differ as to whether this is awesome or the stupidest management decision ever.
He’s very clearly fully bought into the alt-right internet culture war, also too, so he actually believes in his ‘mission’ to ‘save the web’, on top of his usual megalomaniacal belief in himself.
$8 blue check mistermix
@Steeplejack: Another good book is Code Complete by Steve McConnell- it is a general set of good principles for coding that are transferrable to any language.
Nettoyeur
@Eunicecycle: Better might be: chainsaw
Sister Golden Bear
@J R in WV: CEI = kiddie porn.
FWIW, he added a glossary of abbreviations at the end of the thread — although obviously it would be better if it were at the top.
Matt McIrvin
@$8 blue check mistermix: I love Steve Maguire’s “Writing Solid Code” and its sequel “Debugging the Development Process”. They were hugely influential in my thinking about what I do.
Major Major Major Major
@MisterForkbeard: All medium-large tech companies stuffed themselves full of unnecessary engineers over the last two years because everybody else was doing it, even if they had no product vision that would necessitate it. Of course they were overstaffed. (Not by 90%, of course.)
$8 blue check mistermix
@Matt McIrvin: I do a lot of database work and I’m still searching for a good short database best practice book. I recently worked a gig for a startup to look at their database and the really smart programmer, who I’m sure wrote nice clean code, had no idea how to design a database, and it sure showed.
narya
@Feathers: That is a perfect story. It reminds me of a friend who worked in the field who had to deal with folks who used the nightly build to find errors in their code, and no one seemed to think that was a problem. The ones who broke it most often were regarded as superstars, somehow.
$8 blue check mistermix
@Major Major Major Major: Meta and the fucking Metaverse is example one of hiring a shitload of engineers for no good purpose.
Sister Golden Bear
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Definitely. Giant Military Cats, Quokka Every Hour, Liminal Spaces, the lists goes on and on.
Already some of them like “Cats of Yore” — historical photos of cats — have announced they won’t be moving to other platforms.
All this will be lost, like tears in the rain.
Eunicecycle
@trollhattan: I have people skills, damn it!
MazeDancer
@Call_me_ishmael: Supposedly, Elon has fathered 10 kids of his own.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Matt McIrvin: yes, this, my sister has a story about one collage who the bosses just wubbed because he would spend eighteen hours a day spewing out garbage code the rest of the team would end up having to fix.
divF
@Carlo Graziani: Unfortunately, our sins persist. There is F77 code I wrote 40 years ago still floating around in the ether and being used. I’m sure that the same is true for you
ETA: TMM has been a lodestone for me since I started getting serious about writing mathematical software in the 1990s.
Brachiator
@Eunicecycle:
I am serious with this question: Is Elon trying to destroy Twitter on purpose? I just can’t imagine any competent, sane person doing the things he’s been doing. Maybe I just answered my own question.
Musk never learns. He keeps trying to be the king of CEOs and failing miserably. From a previous thread…
He has a record of alienating employees and being ousted as CEO.
He has stubbornly refused to learn from his mistakes. And yet he has still been able to profit from his stupidity. A good deal of his wealth comes not from investing, but from money made when his companies were bought by others.
Compaq acquired Musk’s first company Zip2 for $307 million in cash in February 1999, and Musk received $22 million for his 7-percent share.
Musk is amazingly blind about his inability to be a good leader. Unfortunately, he has enough wealth to indulge his pigheadedness for quite a while.
BenCisco 🇺🇸🎖️🖥️♦️
@TerryTime:
@trollhattan:
I posted for YEARS that it wasn’t supposed to be. Sadly…
trollhattan
@MazeDancer: I can see he and Walker teaming up for something, in the future.
scav
And for GSD’s sake coders, Talk To Madge! There’s a reason the tax information ended up in the ZIP field. Also, ZIP FIELDS SHOULD BE TEXT!!! Leading zeros matter. (Sorry, hit a nerve there. Everyone seemed to get ZIPs wrong.)
MattF
@Sister Golden Bear: World Bollard Association!
TomV
>>There are generally near retirement Madges in accounting who are the only one(s) who can explain why overflow tax information is now coded in the ZIPCODE field of the office address form<<
Succinctly explained by a colleague of mine, "Always ask, 'Who does the doing?' ".
trollhattan
@BenCisco 🇺🇸🎖️🖥️♦️: We’ve since leapfrogged to “Idiocracy” as documentary. Except President Camacho was smarter than Trump.
Carlo Graziani
@Major Major Major Major: Day-to-day, agree. However it seems to me that a lot of the hard stuff about Twitter becoming Twitter was not primarily about engineering, but rather about striking some balance of social/cultural/legal/political/economic norms relating to speech boundaries, and embedding those in relatively non-awfully engineered code.
That expertise was bespoke, and is now gone. Twitter needed it to put out some fire or other, of various degrees of seriousness, a few times per year. Next time some new political or cultural or property-infringement etc. outrage blows up in a new way that current content moderation (such as may still exist) can’t handle, it seems pretty easy to predict that the fire will rage out of control.
Roger Moore
@Tom Levenson:
My gut feeling is he’s done most of his work in startups, and just sort of assumes that the startup way of doing things is the right way. A lot of what I’ve heard about the way things work at Tesla sound like they’re Musk trying to keep startup culture in a company that needs to transition to being a mature company.
Burnspbesq
Another trait that Musk and Trump share is a tendency to listen to the wrong people. In Musk’s case, listening to that idiot Spiro is going to get him in deep, deep shit with every Federal agency that has jurisdiction over any of his companies, starting with the FTC and SEC. You don’t just blow off consent decrees, fool—and your claims of duress will get you exactly nowhere.
kalakal
@divF: I sincerely hope the F77 and COBOL code I wrote decades ago is no longer used
MattF
@Burnspbesq: Including those persuasive voices inside their heads.
J R in WV
@Sister Golden Bear:
Thanks, Sister, I thought so from the way he talked about it, but who knows? Google was no help at all… Guess I bailed too soon, was an interesting thread, tho. So many varied ways to crash big complex systems~!
We had a lot of trouble with our network admin folks, who couldn’t believe that new network code needed to be tested against the systems we developed to track the activities of the agency. Couldn’t be bothered to talk to the software team.
So the morning after new Netware code was introduced, the desktops couldn’t attack to Oracle. But email worked, that was all that counted to the network guys, who were unbelievably arrogant!
System developers just didn’t count in their world, even though those were the mission-critical apps to literally everyone else. Including the boss of the network geeks… Happened over and over, every few months.
Major Major Major Major
LMAOOOO
My most salient pull request of the last year was thousands of lines, but I guess if asked I could send a screenshot of somebody bumping the package in question to version 3.0.0.
MattF
@Major Major Major Major: x := x + 1;
$8 blue check mistermix
@Major Major Major Major: And Twitter HQ is closed today because they invalidated all keyswipe cards. He’s such a numpty.
divF
@Brachiator: He has learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.
BenCisco 🇺🇸🎖️🖥️♦️
@trollhattan: YUP
Jackie
Katie Porter keeps her seat!
GrannyMC
@Eunicecycle: I don’t believe Elmo is trying to destroy Twitter on purpose. His ego won’t let him.
Southern Goth
@scav:
Coders don’t talk to Madge. Coders aren’t allowed to talk to Madge.
Do you think the coders or Madge are capable of grasping the Company Vision?
Coders are agilely sprinting through a punchlist determined by the management steering committee where the requirements have been filtered through multiple games of Telephone and serially translated through at least four different languages.
Steeplejack
@$8 blue check mistermix:
Code Complete is very good, but in my memory it’s definitely a “second generation” book. It didn’t smack my gob like the early milestones.
. . . Just looked, and even Code Complete is almost 30 years old. I wonder what’s in the current syllabus.
On a related note, what’s the current “mainstream” language, now that almost everything is Web-based? Is it Python?
frosty
@Sister Golden Bear: OMG that list of potential failures that require experienced staff to be on top of everything! Twitter won’t last beyond the first day of the World Cup. And people will probably die when their info isn’t secure any more.
I’ll miss all of AL’s feed. She read Twitter so I didn’t have to.
M31
Fred Brooks was at Duke the same time my dad was (very unlikely they knew each other, dad was in law school then, but I’m going to ask him), and it was the height of Jim Crow, and my dad, the child of eastern european immigrants was completely bewildered by it. Like he went to a Durham Bulls game, and then snuck into these better seats in a pretty empty area, only to have people come up and tell them to leave, it was the “colored” section. He and his friends were like, but no one is here? but nope they were breaking the rule.
Chief Oshkosh
@Eunicecycle:
And more than Twitter. We have four friends who bought Teslas in the last two years. They enjoy them. My wife and I are on the verge of replacing both of our 20+-year-old cars, likely with EVs. For many reasons, we’re probably going to buy from the same manufacturer. I’m much more of a motorhead than the friends who bought Teslas, so I’m more aware of their faults, but still, we had been leaning pretty hard towards Tesla. Not now. Until Tesla can no longer be influenced by this jackass, it’s just not a good bet.
divF
@Steeplejack: I’m on the hook for providing both expressiveness and performance, so various dialects of C / C++ is where I live. Definitely YMMV.
Carlo Graziani
@Brachiator:
I’d have to say, based on how hard he tried not to buy the company, that the consensus opinion is probably correct: he’s just incompetent and way out of his depth. He evidently had no idea that he was dealing with sharks when he signed that agreement with the Twitter board, and instead of having himself a light lark he wound up lashed to the whale he thought that he was only pantomime-hunting.
Whatever his qualifications to run an electric car company or a space-launch enterprise, he at least chose to enter those businesses, and had some vision and plans for them. He has not the first clue what to do with Twitter. But he can’t admit it, can’t shut up, can’t put his damn phone in a Faraday cage, apparently can’t choose competent deputies or delegate responsibility. So we have the cheerful sight of a crackling bonfire of Tesla preferred stock certificates. Did you bring marshmallows?
GrannyMC
@Major Major Major Major: Like Elmo could read the code. Even if he knows the programming language, which he almost certainly doesn’t, after 16 years of maintenance hacks and “upgrades” done by hundreds of programmers, not all of whom are going to be “hero” quality, the source code has to look like a 10,000-liter drum of cooked spaghetti dumped on the ground and run over by a tornado.
TomV
The same colleague I referenced above, related an amusing story: A certain company was has having a problem with accounting transactions posting to the wrong account. I happened randomly, no pattern could be discerned. Finally the researchers ended up in the basement with the Madges in accounting. The head Madge explained, “Sometimes transactions reject with the message ‘Invalid account check-digit’. I pull out the manual where it explains how check digits are calculated. I calculate the correct check-digit and resubmit the transaction and it always goes through”! Always talk to the people who do the doing…..
Ken
Musk: “That’s all?”
MMMM: “No.” (Forklift with palette of paper beeps through door.) “These are the changes we had to make before moving from 2.39.17 to 3.0.0. Bastards changed their API, again.”
scav
@Southern Goth: Ok, that’s an easy leap to make: so many managers are clueless. Especially managers without any topical information but merely taught to manage. All the same, I’ve seen too many projects where ease of coding requirements and abstract theories of database design elegance took precedence over building what the users, task and data required to let pure techies off the hook entirely.
lee
@Steeplejack:
That is a loaded question. It really depends on what you are doing. I think the ‘hot new’ language right now is Python (it’s not really hot or new but you know what I mean).
With ‘full stack development’ with externally accessible web sites JavaScript has made a resurgence.
If it is an internal only web site, Microsoft’s C# running on its .Net Framework is probably the most popular.
narya
I want to thank all of you–this post and comment thread have educated me, given me a reading list, and is giving me great joy.
GrannyMC
@Chief Oshkosh: I’m guessing (I honestly don’t know) that at least some of the bankers whom Elmo bullshitted into investing in Twitter are also critical to financing Elmo’s other plans for Global Domination. The wool may or may not have dropped from their eyes, but if it has, and they now see what he really is and that could have profound knock-on effects in his other pursuits.
Matt McIrvin
@TerryTime: I watched Office Space again recently and the movie is an extraordinarily accurate depiction of what tech industry was like in the late 1990s, with only mild comic exaggeration. The vibe has changed since then but a lot of the same stuff goes on.
lee
@Carlo Graziani:
The President and COO of SpaceX gets all the credit for its success and her name is Gwynn Shotwell (I think I spelled the first name correctly, the last name is perfect for her job)
Philbert
@TomV: Reminds of my 3AM phone call which was the eventual result of a year-old retirement of the guy who unbeknownstly manually updated one exchange rate in one weird little place.
Mike E
@Dorothy A. Winsor: a capital crime case, Musk is committing premeditated murder in broad daylight! Mitten’s pronouncement of “corporations are people, my friend” can now, finally, be put to the legal test. Heh.
$8 blue check mistermix
@Steeplejack:
By usage? I’m going to guess PHP.
Python is now the standard “learning language” from what I’ve heard from CS people.
sdhays
@Major Major Major Major: So much of Elmu’s cluster-f*ck seems to be centered around him trying to prove to everyone around him that “he’s an engineer too, the best engineer”.
I don’t think anyone “reporting to the 10th floor at 2pm” is going to be convinced.
BruceFromOhio
I’m curious what will happen to reams of Balloon Juice posts when the twatter goes splat.
C Stars
Well, he’s certainly getting a lot of attention, so that’s a W for him (clearly he’s similar to my nine-year-old in that any attention is good attention).
I thought I would be sadder about Twitter dying, but now I’m just kind of sick of hearing about it.
Frankensteinbeck
@sdhays:
Musk just said in court (yesterday?) and had his best friend back him up, that he is the engineer primarily responsible for every advance Tesla and SpaceX have made.
Matt McIrvin
@lee: Yes. SpaceX, for its faults, actually seems to be good at lot of things and I’ve always assumed Shotwell is responsible for that.
I wonder about the Starship program, which seems like Elon-driven craziness of the Hyperloop/Boring Company variety. I worry that NASA picked a derivative of it for the Artemis lander. Granted the lunar lander doesn’t actually depend on Starship’s ability to handle reentry and landing in an atmosphere, which is the big deal with it.
narya
@scav: In the mid-90s, I decided to build a relational database to manage some stuff at the agency where I worked, using the tool available (Access). It was profoundly not my job, but I thought it would be useful for me and others. I built a smaller one, first, to solve a different set of problems and as a learning experience, then tackled the big hairy one. I constantly went back to the folks who would be using it most frequently to understand what they were doing and how things should/not be connected. They organization used it for YEARS after I left, and the people who used it loved it, which I took as a sign of success, and it really helped ME learn a little bit about how to think about solving that type of problem. It is completely unrelated to anything I do now, but it continues to inform the way I think about problems, nearly 25 years later.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Musk’s demand that people show up with docs is insulting. Anyone who can leave is certainly doing so. And the people who can get jobs elsewhere easily are not the ones you want to go.
The Moar You Know
@Chief Oshkosh: THE YOKE. OMG what a bad idea the yoke is. And that’s not an option: you get a new S or X, you’re getting the damned yoke. It’s horrible to drive with and I suspect a safety issue waiting for an opportunity to fuck you over.
My parents had a 2013 Model S. Great car. They bought a new one. Not nearly so great. I was quite surprised. The last one was a quality vehicle. The new one really doesn’t strike me as a quality vehicle at all
When I finally have to bite the bullet and go electric, I suspect it will likely be a GM product.
BruceFromOhio
@mrmoshpotato:
LOLOLOL That is hilarious. Kelsey McKinney at Defector wrote about her experience with Taylor Swift tickets, and its high time TM is targeted as an anti-competitive monopoly.
Spanky
I left on the Ides of March. I figured I had a better sendoff than Julius Caesar.
Tom Levenson
@Major Major Major Major: Is that as ludicrous as this non-coder (last programming–1978) thinks it is?
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@John S.: Didn’t Musk’s father Errol have a child by his former step daughter not too long ago. Which is some next level WTF
tybee
@Sister Golden Bear:
that was great. some of those scenarios still wake me up at night and i’ve been retired for several years…
RSA
I don’t know if it’s in the same category, being on the surface somewhat more specialized, but when I was in grad school everyone knew Sussman and Abelson, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
Steeplejack
@lee:
Yeah, I figured Microsoft C# for (what I think of as) “corporate” apps.
@mistermix jogged my memory with his mention of PHP. In retirement I occasionally think about doing some hobby coding, and one thing I return to is WordPress and extensions thereto. I believe that’s all (or mostly) written in PHP.
pieceofpeace
@Another Scott: I’m thinking DDT (Dangerous, Dumb, Divisive, Difficult, Dcriminal, etc) could help him out based on his creative forays into marker pen usage.
sdhays
@Frankensteinbeck: It’s amazing Tesla and SpaceX bother with their engineering teams. Seems like a lot of waste there.
Tom Levenson
@Chief Oshkosh: Our next car (hopefully 2 yrs from now) will be electric. It’s overdetermined that it won’t be a Tesla. First off-the ~50% price increase over the last 18 months or so on the one we’d most likely buy (long-range Model Y) makes the competition that much more desirable. Second-reliability and safety issues. Third-design choices that I don’t like, especially around the unlockability of doors and the all-screen interface. Fourth and enough on its own, Musk.
If we had to buy tomorrow we’d probably get a Bolt EUV. Not an earth shattering EV, but a solid and cheap choice. If we our 10 y.o. plug in Prius holds up a while longer, we might be able to look at some of the non-Tesla near-luxury options.
Major Major Major Major
@$8 blue check mistermix:
If that’s true, it’s only because WordPress powers so many things.
On GitHub the dominant language has been javascript/typescript for a while. It even ate server-side coding.
ETA python is the dominant language for machine learning, which is probably the only reason it’s held its position.
@Tom Levenson: Saw a tweet that summed it up nicely for non-programmers: this is like an editor asking for your ten best sentences.
Steeplejack
@RSA:
That was a good one. Jeez, lots of books coming back to mind that I haven’t thought of in
yearsdecades.Kelly
Any big IT org needs a bunch of different specialists. Nobody is good at everything. I’m a retired IT guy. My career was IBM mainframes and mostly COBOL. You wouldn’t want me designing your database. I wrote good code but I was slow. Very good at training the the young folks for our systems. Found my most comfortable niche keeping krufty old systems alive. The bright young MBAs left me alone in my backwaters. Made a lot of people very happy during the Y2K cleanup. I was the hero when the system failed. Very good understanding of diagnostics. I had an IT manager that would get a little pissed off when he’d assign someone else to a problem and the accounting boss would call to ask if Kelly had looked at the problem.
Steeplejack
@Major Major Major Major:
Thanks for the language info.
Tom Levenson
@Major Major Major Major: Ah.
My top two would be:
“Fuck you.”
“Strong reply to follow.”
Not original, of course, but sufficient unto the circumstance.
Jackie
@BruceFromOhio:
It’s Taylor Swift’s fault!
“Reality is it’s a function of the massive demand that Taylor Swift has,” Greg Maffei told CNBC. “The site was supposed to be opened up for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift Fans. We had 14 million people hit the site.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/live-nation-chairman-taylor-swift-ticketmaster-sales-demand-1234632312/
lee
@Matt McIrvin: I’ve got a Musk fanboi as a friend. He keeps harping on the fact that NASA went with a single use rocket to go to the moon instead of reusable. He doesn’t grasp the difference between putting something in low earth orbit and going to the moon.
No one has a reusable rocket that reaches the moon and probably won’t for a decade or more.
LeftCoastYankee
So, this the chapter in which “Musking it” came into use….
Next up, the final Twit at Twitter….
Spanky
Unless someone’s still running VAX75s I think I’m safely obsolete.
Matt McIrvin
@lee: The SLS program is definitely a weird, misbegotten political creation, but the whole problem with reusability is that you’re fighting the Tsiolkovskii equation every step of the way, and the more delta V you need, the harder that gets. I’m amazed that SpaceX has been able to do as much with it as they have.
Amir Khalid
@BruceFromOhio:
There’s a reason Eddie Vedder has been calling them Ticketbastard for the past three decades.
Matt McIrvin
@Tom Levenson: Hyundai has issues of its own, but, damn, that Ioniq 6 they recently unveiled is a beautiful car.
Baud
@Jackie:
Oh now they’ve got bad blood.
Roger Moore
@Matt McIrvin:
One of the points Brooks makes in TMMM is that the stuff those whiz kids cranked out was qualitatively different from what you expect from a professional software development. His point is that a big part of what makes a professional project professional is that it’s properly documented and designed to interface well with other software. He estimated that there was a 3x increase in development effort for the documentation and a 3x increase in development for the interoperability. The net is that it’s almost 10x harder to make a really professional product.
What those whiz kids produced is almost always in the first category, not the final category. The really toxic part of the whiz kid attitude is that it tends to treat the first product as what’s really important and discounts the ~90% of effort required for documentation and interoperability. You may not need the same degree of documentation and interoperability for projects that are purely internal, but they’re still substantial effort. When people knock the productivity of engineers at a place like Twitter, they’re often complaining about the effort that goes into that polish.
Major Major Major Major
@Tom Levenson: per my last email.
Origuy
@Ken: “Bastards changed their API, again.”
Oh, you work with VMware, then.
Matt McIrvin
@Origuy: “They’ve gone back to metric again without telling us!”
TheronWare
AG Garland to appoint special counsel to oversee tRump investigations!!
RSA
Me too!
dm
@Carlo Graziani:
This was pretty much my reaction, too. Of course, the implementation of templates at a time when memory was still expensive and still sometimes measured in kilobytes, didn’t help. It wasn’t really until the Standard Template Library came along that C++ struck me as being worth the candle, and that wasn’t OOP
@RSA:
That is a book that I really, truly, regret not reading when I first picked it up, and instead waited almost thirty years before reading it. I would have been a much better programmer. I still recommend it to people starting out in programming (certainly more than K&R, which I did read when I first picked it up).
CaseyL
Alas: Frisch has conceded to Boebert.
Per Twitter:
Damn!
Steeplejack
That Mosquito Capital thread is hair-raising. I can read only a few entries at a time. It triggers my software PTSD.
Steeplejack
@TheronWare:
Goddamn it. That’s going to slow things down even more and cause a lot of duplication of effort. At least that’s what I heard from a reputable legal eagle on MSNBC earlier this week (when it was hypothetical).
The big question is why? Why is it necessary? I’m sure Merrick Garland will explain it to everyone’s satisfaction.
JPL
@Steeplejack: Delay Delay Delay
Matt McIrvin
@Steeplejack: Javascript, believe it or not, has become one of the big ones–not just for the in-browser scripts it was designed for, but as a server software language. The node.js environment for back-end software is built on it, as are various user-interface packages for Web apps. In many situations it’s replacing Java (to which it is largely unrelated aside from having C-based syntax and an intentionally similar name).
Microsoft’s Typescript is a Javascript variant that fixes a lot of Javascript’s egregious issues; you can use it in most of the same contexts.
Anoniminous
@Steeplejack:
E. F. Codd’s publications.
Tom Levenson
@Matt McIrvin: Yup. There’s the Kia version of that vehicle that’s been parking around my neighborhood. It’s pretty nice too.
But I have to say that while we’re a one car family now (my e-bike is our second car), a convertible Fiat 500e really tempts me as a non-insane late-midlife-crisis car.
Captain C
@J R in WV:
I think it stands for Child Endangerment Imagery (or something like it). At the end of the thread he has a glossary and describes it as “CEI: child sexual/abuse imagery”
RSA
One of my academic colleagues had a similar comment looking at gender parity in computer science undergraduate programs. (A chart something like this one but from an academic source.) Starting a little before 1970, the percentage of bachelor’s degrees awarded to women was rising steadily to a peak slightly less than 40%, but since then it has dropped off drastically. The inflection point is around the time that home computers (or possibly more explicitly PC and PC-compatibles) started to become available.
Starfish
@John S.: Kimbal also owns restaurants.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: Yeah, the archetypical 1980s whiz-kid product was a wad of undocumented machine code designed to run in insanely optimized fashion on a particular piece of low-powered personal-computer hardware. You might be able to port it to another personal computer built on the same CPU. Good luck doing anything else.
These people weren’t good at working in teams or building large complex systems. Their code wasn’t that reliable because it didn’t need to be–if a video game had glitches in it you’d just mention them in the manual as evil alien interference or whatever.
Steeplejack
@Roger Moore:
Not to defend the “whiz kids,” but a lot of microcomputer software development in the ’80s and even into the ’90s consisted of stand-alone programs, especially for small business. I supported myself for a number of years doing business database programs in dBase, FoxBase, Access, Turbo Pascal, etc., when somebody’s homemade departmental spreadsheet-as-database got overwhelmed. There often weren’t other programs to interface with. And a lot of the programmers—including myself—were self-taught.
Totally agree about the need to change the approach when interoperability finally arrived.
Layer8Problem
@JPL: I’ll wait for Omnes to explain why it’s never as simple as a imperiously delivered “SEIZE HIM!“
HumboldtBlue
O/T
Steeplejack
@Matt McIrvin:
Thanks for the info. I was mildly surprised to see JavaScript mentioned above. I’ll have to read up on it and TypeScript.
Baud
@HumboldtBlue:
But not the insurrection? Interesting.
dm
@Steeplejack:
Simple: House Republican Monkey Caucus insurance.
@Steeplejack:
There’s a book “Javascript: the good parts” that is probably worth checking out, despite its age in dog-(and computer documentation)-years.
Steeplejack
@Anoniminous:
Yes! Codd was the author I couldn’t remember for databases stuff.
StringOnAStick
@trollhattan: Your experience working with engineers matches mine, including dealing with my father, also an engineer. Very few work to shed those personality issues, ever.
Major Major Major Major
@Steeplejack: if you have to write JavaScript (and you do) it’s a nice way to do it.
Cacti
@HumboldtBlue: So after two years of dithering. Garland decides to punt.
Gutless and useless.
Dan B
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: Muse is on the spectrum my fanboy partner tells me. It also seems he has malignant narcissism which explains the desperate need to destroy his critics. Both seem to be getting worse. I worked for a professional acquaintance whose wife was a malignant narcissist. It took a dinner conversation about her with a dinner guest who was a therapist to explain that. The therapist stated that the only way to deal with a malignant narcissist was to get away. I did.
HumboldtBlue
@Baud:
It’s there — as well as key aspects of the Jan. 6 probe
JoyceH
ARGGH re Special Counsel! Going to add at least a year to the whole thing, while Trump swanks around sure he’s above the law. And come on, is there ANY honest non-partisan lawyer with the requisite knowledge and experience who does not already think Trump should be charged with multiple felonies? But still – more ‘bringing up to speed’, more hoops to jump through, on and on and on, just to preserve that insane level of appearance of impartiality. When you KNOW that Trump and his crowd are going to call it a partisan witchhunt anyway!
Captain C
@Ken: So, the techbro Musk fanbois are basically like Dennis Hopper’s character in Apocalypse Now, updated for the Internet age.
Baud
@HumboldtBlue:
Thanks. Reading fail.
Steeplejack
@Major Major Major Major:
You mean TypeScript, I presume.
Major Major Major Major
Layer8Problem
@Captain C: In re Musk, that movie’s the gift that keeps on giving:
“The heads. You’re looking at the heads. Sometimes he goes too far. But… he’s the first one to admit it.”
sdhays
@HumboldtBlue: So…announcing you’re running for President doesn’t make your Federal legal troubles disappear? Someone’s going to be painting the walls at Mar-a-Lago with ketchup today…
Brachiator
@Captain C:
Thing is, Musk says something like this to himself while staring at himself in the mirror.
To everyone else he is just a clown indulging in chaos and destruction.
HumboldtBlue
@Cacti: @JoyceH:
MSNBC analysts are split, Rubin thinks it’s a terrible idea and Litman thinks it may work. But it sure feels like the clock is being run out.
livewyre
Lest we forget.
Anoniminous
Word on the Tech Grapevine is the entire Twitter payroll department has quit.
invisibot
@$8 blue check mistermix: Agree with Code Complete as a great book for devs to read after having a few years under their belt. For me personally Deitel/Deitel was the book that got me through high school and college even though I was going through my bachelors at the time that everyone had hopped on to the Java train. I have happily stayed off those tracks for most of my career. For algorithms I continue to go back to Introduction to Algorithms often.
Roger Moore
@scav:
IMO, this is one of the most important points that has been completely lost in modern management culture. It’s much easier to teach someone with industry knowledge to be a manager than to teach industry knowledge to someone who’s only trained as a manager. If you look at a successful, mature industry, the vast majority of high-level managers are people who have been in that industry for most of their career.
To put it another way, nobody should go straight from their undergraduate degree into a MBA program. The goal of a MBA should be to help people move from line work into management, and they need to have some experience in line work for that to make sense.
Captain C
@Major Major Major Major: Please tell me this is parody.
Also, if I were a Tesla stockholder and hadn’t dumped it yet, this might tell me it’s time to do so.
Timurid
In other news, Merrick Garland just kicked the can into orbit…
Cacti
@Timurid: Omnes will be along shortly to explain to us why Garland needed two years to decide to punt on a case.
Matt McIrvin
@Steeplejack: One that seemed like it was up-and-coming several years ago, and that I was using professionally for a while, was Go aka golang, a compiled language that came out of Google. It incorporated some interesting ideas. It still comes up on lists of most popular languages but I’m really not sure how thoroughly it caught on.
There was this whole category of more memory-safe compiled system languages emerging around that time, like Go, Rust, Swift and Julia, that all seemed to be trying to displace C/C++ for performance-critical applications, but they don’t seem to have taken the world by storm.
Anyway
@Wapiti:
His Saudi partners are epitomes of people who had a huge fortune and cushy life handed to them due to their parentage and never had to work for anything. They bought their way to MBAs at fancy schools and by dint of their vast fortunes are sought after by hedge funds, vulture capitalists, Disruptors and the like.
Matt McIrvin
@Timurid: I think I’m gonna stay off LGM for a little while.
Layer8Problem
@HumboldtBlue: I was given to understand that naming John Durham as special counsel investigating the FBI’s investigating of TFG was a “brilliant” move since a special counsel can’t just be fired even if the administration changes.
trollhattan
@Tom Levenson: The spousal SUV is getting up there in miles and will begin shedding and breaking things, soon. At that time we’ll look at EVs and given it’s a Volvo, Polestar will get a gander. I expect we’ll have a flood of choices within the next two years; luckily, the California charging infrastructure is coming along.
Meanwhile, we just inked a contract to install heat pump HVAC in January—the 30 YO gas-electric system has become very costly to keep running. The efficiency ratings of the new systems are boggling.
sdhays
@HumboldtBlue: Why would it slow things down? The same people are still running the investigation, right? It just isolates the investigation more from the appearance of political interference.
Major Major Major Major
@Matt McIrvin: The go devs refused to implement generics for years and it basically allowed the language to wither on the vine, sustained only by small executables and early adopters.
Great standard library though.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Steeplejack: let me suggest Principles of Database Systems, by Jeffrey D. Ullman. I admit I haven’t studied it fully, still I can recommend it.
Steeplejack
@Mr. Bemused Senior:
I read Ullman back in the day. Another memory retrieved.
Matt McIrvin
@Major Major Major Major: Yeah, I recall that being a real problem for me actually.
The single greatest thing about Go was that it eliminated all holy wars about code formatting standards, bracket placement, tabs vs. spaces, etc. by saying “just run everything through the gofmt tool with default settings, that’s the standard.” Fucking brilliant. They’d build the gofmt tool right into IDEs. You might not have liked or agreed with the resulting standards but at least everyone could stop arguing about them.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Roger Moore: You need to understand what the hell the workers are doing and why they are doing it that way at least a little if you are going to manage them. They brought in someone a few years ago to manage one of the departments here. I think they came from a finance back ground. We are health care. Good person, but it was a bad fit. My husband’s current manager has no IT back ground. My husband does desk side support…sigh
Roger Moore
@Steeplejack:
I didn’t mean to dismiss the “whiz kid” software, just to point out that Brooks discussed the difference between quick, one-off software and a fully developed and documented program. That said, I stand behind the point that a lot of the toxic culture comes from those self-taught whiz kids not appreciating the difference between what they made and the fully developed version Brooks was talking about.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@trollhattan: Lucid makes EVs and was started by a former Tesla exec. I know nothing about them except that they make luxury sedans and starting next year, an SUV. Way out of my price range though…
Steeplejack
@Roger Moore:
No argument here. I was just recalling the perspective from the untamed frontier of 30-40 years ago.More “solo practitioner” than “whiz kid.” But times change, and the “whiz kid” approach is not such a good fit now.
Origuy
I’m learning Go now as it’s one of the languages used for Hashicorp’s Terraform cloud product. I mostly write Java these days, with some Javascript. I worked on Fortran and Cobol compilers and I was on the ANSI Cobol standard committee for a while, although I never wrote much Cobol other than test programs. Done a little bit with Python, but not much. Some C++ plus a lot of proprietery languages that aren’t used anymore.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Dan B: I suspect Musk is a malignant narcissist, it seems obvious to me. I just get so frustrated by people who handwave his and other peoples abusive, destructive behavior because “he’s a genius” or “he’s on the spectrum. I have friends and relatives on the spectrum, if they miss social cues or inadvertently hurt someone’s feelings, they expect and want to have it pointed out so they can avoid doing it in the future.
Not being able to get along, or work with other people, or take ANY kind of criticism seems like someone a reasonable person should run away from, not go into business with…
Kelly
I used to have arguments about why the code I threw together at 4 am after a 3 am phone call was not an adequate production patch.
Roger Moore
@Matt McIrvin:
My impression is that Rust is starting to pick up some real momentum. It’s designed for systems programming, but it includes some ideas about object ownership and object lifetime that allow it to make promises about security that languages like C and C++ can’t. Mozilla invented it for use in Firefox, and now large parts of Firefox are in Rust. It’s moved on from there, though, and the Linux kernel is now starting to include Rust as a second language. That’s a big endorsement. Linux Torvalds notoriously refused to allow C++ into the kernel, so bringing in Rust is something of a statement.
invisibot
@Matt McIrvin: I’ve been coding in Go for about 4 years and still loving it. Getting over no templates was a pretty minor hurdle for me but gave a lot of people something to complain about. Now I’m worried what the code is going to look like since the consortium gave in and implemented them.
Matt McIrvin
@Major Major Major Major: I do think it’s kind of a scandal that C/C++ are still as dominant as they are because, well, we live in a corrupted world in which people have great capacity for evil, and memory-safe programming seems like an important thing in a world like that.
Code analysis and testing tools can help a lot, but any language in which that’s all on the programmer’s constant vigilance seems like a bad idea. Regardless of how much my skill at chasing down arcane memory-stomp bugs made me look like a hero back in the 90s and early 2000s.
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
I was surprised when a shopping center near me recently installed a bunch of Tesla superchargers. I walk by every morning on the way to the train station, and they’re usually at least half full, so the demand is apparently there. I think we’re ether at or past an inflection point, where charging infrastructure goes from being exotic to expected.
Paul in KY
@narya: Boy would my code be extensively commented. Also
IF CODE-1 = ‘A’
THEN
MOVE
CODE-2
TO OUTPUT-1
END-IF
.
MobiusKlein
@Major Major Major Major: Twitter will be fine until the next major library vulnerability pops up, and they find out that they have 100 apps they need to update in a week, and the builds for 40 of them don’t work because the infrastructure is broken too. So many don’t get updated, and one is open to the internet, and gets eaten up by State Actors – and not just China and Russia, but Jordan, Brazil, and Estonia. The hackers fight each other for control of the system, and everything dies.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Something else about Elmo Musk’s Twitter antics’ this is all what every Wingnut fantasies about to doing to High Tech and the rest of American society for decades now; swagger in and scream “Fuck you, it’s my way or the highway.” to everyone. It’s turning into a complete cluster fuck, and you know the Right will just ignore it all and come up with excuses why it didn’t work. I imagine it’s only a matter of time before the Freemarket conservatives start demanding Biden bail Twitter out.
Dan B
@The Moar You Know: VW EV’s are looking really good. My partner is a “gearhead” and watches every YouTube about EV’s – half a dozen a week for four or five years. KIA is also good but the entry level, relatively affordable model line has been dropped.
In the future (5-10 years) it may be the SONO Sion solar EV at $25 – 30 K that is a winner. Fingers crossed, they’re a very small startup and based in Europe so no tax credit or subsidy until they manufacture in the US. There’s a new You Tube. In the sun in LA it can generate 250 watts. Dull looking exterior but great interior and handling.
I’d love to have an Aptera for fun and turning heads. Also future – 2-4 years.
Marc
The Mythical Man-Month was published at a time (1975) of ideological conflict between the computer scientists/programmers and the new software engineers. It was influential in pushing the concept that software could be “engineered” and therefore properly managed like any other engineering project, by educating engineers (generally male) to follow rote rules in constructing their systems under the guidance of their managers. This never really worked out as expected.
Prior to the mid-70s programming was considered more of an art/science than an engineering discipline, so it tended to attract people with more diverse backgrounds, electrical engineers (who mostly focused on the hardware), but also mathematicians and musicians, thus more women. My first full-time job starting in 1972 was working on embedded realtime systems on minicomputers (mostly in assembly language). Over half of the programmers in that office were women (two with PhDs in mathematics), and this was not unusual at the time. By the mid-80s, the “software engineers” were mostly men. Funny how that worked.
Influential books still on my bookshelf: the first 3 volumes of Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming (there are better sources of algorithmic info these days, they’re mostly a signifier of guild membership), Abelson & Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Aho & Ullman’s Principles of Compiler Design (the dragon book), Foley & Van Dam’s Fundamentals of Interactive Computer Graphics, Date’s An Introduction to Database Systems. I’m still programming, mostly in C++, Python, and JavaScript.
trollhattan
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: Have seen a couple on the road–they look a bit like earthbound spaceships–and curious, looked up their website. Holy hell, you can spend the lion’s share of $200k if so inclined. Some do sneak in under six digits, but still….
It’s okay, I’m eager to see them available in every market niche, competing head to head against traditional models. Tesla, whatever becomes of it, has made EVs normal.
RSA
@Marc:
That’s an excellent selection. A couple of recent textbooks are also worth mentioning, because I think they’ll stand the test of time: Russell and Norvig, AI: A Modern Approach (AIMA) and Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein, Introduction to Algorithms (CLRS).
Kayla Rudbek
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: Lucid has a storefront in Tyson’s Corner mall here in Northern Virginia. I agree on the price, but I thought that they looked pretty slick.
Matt McIrvin
@Marc: Foley and van Dam was my graphics algorithm Bible for a while there. I also used the later, thicker edition that I think was called “Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice”.
Dan B
@trollhattan: We got a Ductless Heat Pump installed twelve years ago. We love it and thought we’d use the AC the one day per year of 90° weather in Seattle. We used it for weeks this summer to keep us out of the heat and then the heat and smoke.
We’ve leased Nissan Leafs for six years. Our first had 85 mile range and it was a game to go places at distance like over the Cascades. We ended up at casinos and resorts we would have driven past as well as outlet malls. Many were quite fun and now I know I have no need to ever visit an outlet mall and casinos can have great food and scenery. Now we’ve got 150 mile range and much less need to stop on trips. On longer expeditions it’s very good to stop for food breaks and stretching legs.
Ken
Though the real signifier is if you have the first edition of Volume 2, with the polynomial-time algorithm for prime factorization. It’s very rare due to the destruction of most copies in the early 1970s, which we know know (due to the declassification of Clifford Cocks’ work in the 1990) was at the behest of the UK government.
dnfree
@Keith P.: I read the mythical man-month in the 1970s and again in the 1990s. Probably should read it again. The points were succinct and insightful.
dnfree
@Matt McIrvin: I worked at a company that aggressively adopted the A/B/C employee model at one point. First they fired all the C employees at once (they weren’t all Cs in reality); then they had a meeting with the shell-shocked rest of us and told us we should all be As or we were next. As the HR person explained, we should all swing for home runs every time at bat. The baseball fans among us were gobsmacked.
Later there were articles about how B employees are the most reliable. They’re not spending time scheming about how to get the next promotion. Better team players.
Ohio Mom
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: Thank you for pointing out that Musk’s observable behaviors are not consistent with autism spectrum behaviors.
As an autism mom, I have no patience with famous people who think it’s somehow cool or hip to self-diagnose — remember that week Jerry Seinfeld declared himself autistic and then walked it back?
If you want to claim autism, please show us the diagnosis letter from the qualified medical professional where your pyschological test results and the professional’s observations are summarized and compared to the DSM criteria.
There is probably a page in the DSM that describes Musk but it isn’t in the autism section.
Chief Oshkosh
@The Moar You Know:
Yep. As we’re heading into retirement, we have a need for a jellybean for around town and we have a need for a pickup for the retirement property. GM offers both (but damn, as good looking and functional as it is, that truck is expensive). We’ll see.
dnfree
@kalakal: My Fortran code was Fortran II and Fortran IV.
pluky
@Matt McIrvin: If you’ve got a great super coder, you don’t need another one. You need a good business analyst to shadow the coder and document like hell what, how, and why the code is doing what it does.
Matt McIrvin
@Ken: I thought the Laundry suppressed the secret volume about algorithmic summoning of eldritch entities from beyond space.
Doug R
My wife and I are so hardcore that when we were fired after a corporate takeover, we reported them to Labour Canada. They ended up getting audited by Canada Revenue Agency and now the CRA has a multi-question test to determine employee vs contractor.
You’re welcome.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: I messed around with computers from an early age (field trip to the IRS in Atlanta where I got to load a tape in an IBM tape drive – spin it around 15 times!), I messed around with a time-shared teletype (paper tape!) in a math class, my dad got me a ZX81 for home, etc. It never really clicked with me. “Yay I can calculate prime numbers by brute force. So what??” My father joked that he should get my step-mom (a COBOL programmer) a home computer so that she could organize her recipes…
But I tried to keep up with what was going on in the business over the years and to have some familiarity with BASIC and Pascal and C. And loved the idea of efficiency of “Spontaneous Assembly” (a package of well-debugged, fast, assembly language routines for DOS).
But there was a lot of weirdness back in those days. And it looks like some of it continues – The International Obfuscated C Contest… People who are insanely great at that probably aren’t great at writing clear, well-documented, interoperable code in the trenches…. ;-)
It takes all kinds – fortunately, because there are all kinds in this big wonderful world of ours!
Cheers,
Scott.
J R in WV
@Doug R:
Thank you for that hard work — I know it was hard, Wife was a union elected office holder for a national local. They treated her like shit after her election. Eventually she filed for and received total disability.
She should have recorded some of the behavior of management, it could have resulted in being independently wealthy, they were horrid. When they discovered that she had a concealed carry permit they about shit their pants…
To everyone who contributed great information about IT work, thanks so much for that. I worked in IT from 1985 until my retirement in 2008, and I still learned a whole lot here today. I was good at data analysis working towards relational databases for scientific and regulatory information, less so at actual coding. Loved the work tho.
Matt McIrvin
@dnfree: Of course, the way they usually do that is stack ranking so that there are fixed percentages of As, Bs and Cs; it is mathematically impossible for everyone to be an A, since you can only become an A by pushing someone else out of an A slot.
The original purpose of that whole scheme was so Neutron Jack Welch could fire a consistent fraction of the workforce every quarter.
Ruckus
@Chief Oshkosh:
Tesla is not a bad car, it just seems to me that there are other, better EVs out there. That also do not cost what they cost. It’s like he’s trying to claim exclusivity over good engineering. And yes they have gotten better in equipment and engineering but at a much higher price And I just do not think it’s worth the cost.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Matt McIrvin: ah yes, Jack Welch. Notice what happened to GE the moment he left. The company still hasn’t recovered.
Whereaway
@Sister Golden Bear: The Link to the SRE’s tweets had fascinating information. Before retiring, I did a few ‘all hands on deck’ exercises.
I’m grateful I’m not a direct Twitter user at this point but will miss the links like the one you provided if/when Twitter fails.
PaulB
That was pretty much the case at Amazon when I worked there, with the goal of firing the bottom 10% of people in the company every year. I’m hearing conflicting stories as to whether that is still the case (i.e., it’s no longer “officially” the case, but the reality in some groups is that they still do it).
The 70/20/10 rule, as practiced by Microsoft and Amazon when I worked at those respective companies, was the bane of my existence as a manager. Regardless of the actual talent on your team and how they performed in any given year, you still had to declare 70% of them as meeting expectations, 20% of them as exceeding expectations, and 10% of them as needing improvement. That, and the lifeboat rankings, which were even worse, made my life miserable.