Too rotten for words

I really don't want to dwell on Elon Musk, but he does tend to keep popping up. And like a mole in Whack-a-Mole, once that little heady pops up, I just want to whack him (metaphorically) with my black mallet (virtual). 

There is just so much, but this one particularly sticks in my craw.

A Twitter engineer was laid off in the first post-Musk blood letting, when he got rid of - what?  - 75% of his employees.

The severance package was reasonably good. Three months. Even in a faltering tech market (there have been major layoffs at Facebook, among other giants of the industry) someone should be able to find a new job. 

Within weeks, the engineer was called back. His work was too important, he was told. His presence was essential to the operations of the platform. Et blah-di-blah-blah.

The engineer was relieved. He was on an H1B visa, which he'd lose if he didn't find a job during the 60 day grace period that H1B visa-holders are allowed to find a job before being forced to leave the country. 

Our H1B engineer was back working. Then Elon Musk decreed that everyone who wanted to stay with the company had to sign a pledge to work long hours, at high intensity - Twitter Hardcore! - or leave the company. Many employees quit. I haven't seen any breakdown of the demographics, but I'm guessing that a larger portion of H1B holders took that pledge than those who didn't risk deportation if they didn't have a job.

But Mr. Musk figured he needed to do more to cement his reputation as an HR nightmare.

He issued a mandate that engineers would need to submit samples of their key lines of code for his review. Send him some screenshots. He, along with a tribunal of trusted code reviewers from Tesla, would look through and deliver a thumb's up or a thumb's down.

I hung around tech long enough to think that this is ridiculous. There's more than one way to write code and while some code is clearly better than others - more parsimonious, the techies I knew used to say - just because yours is different than what Elon Musk thinks is good doesn't make yours wrong wrong. Or Elon Musk's right right.

Coding is created in a context. And often coding is a team sport. 

Coders were also asked to submit some bullet points on what they were up to, but evaluating code should actually be pretty simple. And it's not done by panel reveiw. The ultimate test: does it work?

The thought of this panel of Tesla engineers combing through snippets of Twitter code and passing judgement strikes me as absurd. Make that ABSURD with a capital A-B-S-U-R-D.

The first image that came into my mind was the Salem Witch Trials. I saw Goody Proctor dancing with the devil. 

I'd say that they should be ashamed of themselves, but they're probably all caught up in the Cult of Musk. 

Hope the H1B visa engineer who was just laid off - with a paltry 4 weeks severance package rather than 3 months - finds a job quickly. 

Elon Musk. Too rotten for words.