General Rants

As a developer who has 20 years of experience writing code and doing IT-stuff professionally, I cannot begin to explain how difficult it would be to make this story have any reasonability behind it. The CNBC report referenced by multiple stories like Yahoo says that Musk has employees from Tesla and some of his other companies reviewing Twitter’s codebase noting that the engineers are being asked to work in a language they don’t have much experience in.

So what would it take for this be a “reasonable” idea? In general, it would require a whole host of things but a good start would be not having your current Twitter staff be in reasonable fear of being laid off due to rampant rumors like the movie “Office Space“.

At Twitter, Musk is counting on his lieutenants and loyalists to decide who and what to cut or keep at the social network. — CNBC article

The first requirement to make this “reasonable” would be having an achievable goal. Is Musk’s purpose to gain a very general understanding of a humongous codebase without having to go through the code himself for months? If so, then “code reviews” (looking at the code with Twitter’s dev team and discussing it with them) is not actually a bad idea at all. Unlike the Office Space scene where people feel like they are trying to justify their jobs by answering, “What would you say you do here?” a code review is when developers explain to each other what the code does. Often that does include critical feedback on how to make the code better but very often it reveals bigger issues in development.

So, if you’re not a developer, I can explain that most professional developers worth much of anything, can actually pick up new languages with decent speed although it does follow a typical learning curve. That is to say, that there is a rapid increase in understanding followed a by a tail of acquiring “expertise” that is quite long. In general, most languages follow very similar patterns.

So the reason code reviews could be good is that even if the devs Musk has pulled in don’t know the language they are reviewing, they would understand a developer’s reasoning but more importantly their frustrations. If a Twitter dev says, “Well, I had to do it this way because we have this legal requirement …” the new folks can discover issues that may have persisted for years but don’t get talked about by people who deal with them every day. Coders often complain but they don’t like beating dead horses — in general. I mean, we get paid to make computers doing boring things quickly so humans don’t have to do them. Nothing is more boring than beating a dead horse.

The biggest way I can see this going wrong is if the quote from the CNBC article is true. If Musk is going to attempt rapid change at an extremely large IT organization based on what developers doing code reviews say, well, let’s just say the potential for the building to get burned down becomes very high. But unlike the character Milton from Office Space doing it, it would be Musk himself. The best idea in an Atlantic Article on Musk’s takeover addresses this point perfectly.

“These sites—no matter how talented the engineering organization—are often held together by a series of fragile, legacy systems, the precise functioning of which is only truly known to a few people,” Jason Goldman, a member of Twitter’s early team, a former board member, and the company’s former vice president of product, told me.

If you think democracy, your finances, your love life or anything else is being held together with tape and prayers; I can tell you the quote above is insanely true. Literally I have seen multi-billion dollar organizations have mission critical systems being run on a 10-year-old computer stored under someone’s desk. If you randomly check the comments in code for any big organization, you have a 9/10 chance of finding a phrase like “I don’t know why …” or “DO NOT DELETE THIS” and the reason why that code works or is necessary is a mystery. (There are good reasons for this which I’ll tackle later in another post, but trust me, it happens.) There are websites and tons of posts on social media dedicated to the these kinds of issues in legacy code.

While Mr. Musk has had a great deal of success in his life, it doesn’t seem likely that these code reviews are going to be a reasonable thing. After rumors about mass layoffs and all the changes that have been “floated” in the last week alone, I think Mr. Musk is going to have a difficult time with Twitter. It’s not to say it will all be bad, gloom and doom nor do I think he’s the simulation’s savior who will “rescue” Twitter: I just don’t think this is gonna be like the hot takes people have been bloviating about the last week.

So on the topic of this whole blog about why “smart” people do dumb things, just what the fuck makes a “smart” and rich person like Elon Musk want to buy Twitter? Like, who needs that??? And if anyone thinks democracy’s success or failure stands on the stability and rules of Twitter, I will remind you of MySpace, Ruby On Rails, or back when getting on the front page of Digg.com meant you server would crash (colloquially known as getting “Digg-fucked”) and any number of other things that have come and gone. I just don’t understand why anyone, no matter how rich, would want to own Twitter. Most of it’s a hot mess of the stridently partisan “owning” someone variety that buries nuance and facts under a 10-ton dead horse carcass. It’s like politicians: if you want to be a politician you have already failed the first test for being a good public servant. It’s not a job any sane or reasonably intelligent person should want. It doesn’t pay anywhere near the pain it would cause for well-adjusted human beings and success in that field too often requires behavior that should be shameful.

No matter how this turns out for Twitter or Musk, I for one, cannot wait for the documentary likely to surface in the next 3-5 years where a vocally masked and blurred out insider named Milton explains how he tried repeatedly to warn them of the dire consequences of shutting down that one computer that only blinks once an hour that Jane explained to Milton when he was hired but she left and he was new and didn’t really grasp what she was telling him and figuring out what that computer does is still in the backlog after 9 years.

While I remember being a “handful” as a child, my parents recollect that I was basically born an adult in a baby’s body. My father told me about an insurance commercial where a kid comes in to his parents’ bedroom while they relax in bed at night, confesses to a small fender bender, tells them he’s called the insurance company and then describes his “punishment” while they calmly listen without having to tell him to do anything. My father said that was me.

To that end, I am not sure why it surprises me how irritated I get with supposedly smart people doing really dumb stuff or just putting out work that demonstrates a deep lack of studiousness belying their position in the culture or their job. Maybe it’s because I don’t feel like I am a middle-aged man (save, of course, the random noises my joints make doing normal things like urinating or yawning — seriously, I’m barely moving and you can hear my joints crack in another room?).

Maybe its because I am normally not a grumpy person. I soothe myself in the car driving when people go slowly by reminding myself those drivers might be older folks like my parents or a new driver. I make a conscious effort to be grateful for all the things I have and recognize that not everyone has my advantages.

But what the fuck is up with gigantic tech corporations like Apple and Microsoft — relatively reputable companies — who make billions in profit putting out some of the most insidiously inane garbage one can imagine and actually advertising their half-solid fecal detritus as if it were “one more thing“. Like, I remember getting upset about some things Apple did when Steve Jobs was around … but not like the last 10 years and not with the same frequency. And when Microsoft announced they would finally kill Internet Explorer, I was only mildy upset that it took until THIS YEAR for them to finish the job. Yet somehow, Microsoft created AzureDB. It’s like they heard of some vaguely surprising flavor combination (say cheese and honey) and decided: We should promote people eating honey with EVERYTHING! Between Apple trying to gaslight loyal users by removing MagSafe (one of the singularly most useful and elegant innovations for laptops ever created) from their entire lineup for YEARS and then adding it to iPhones as if to tell MacBook Pro users to go fuck ourselves; between that and realizing that somehow a huge portion of the population decided it was entirely OK to PAY for devices that are constantly listening to us: I don’t even know where to start.

So that’s why I started this blog. I have a horrible tendency to just “go off” on a topic in not-entirely-appropriate situations and while many find it entertaining, it does not purge the demons of hate and anger boiling up inside me. Maybe this will.

Putting the (Chief) Twit back in Twitter

Why You Should Get Off My Lawn