Musk Reportedly Slated Meeting With Twitter’s Software Code Engineers Amid ‘Review of Tech Stack’

Elon Musk, who took over as Twitter's chief executive after buying the company last month in a deal worth $44bn, has unleashed a rollercoaster of change on the platform which - to put it mildly - is not to everyone’s liking.

Twitter's chief executive Elon Musk reportedly summoned all engineer staff engaged in writing software code to meet him at the company's headquarters in San Francisco.

The billionaire Tesla boss and chief engineer of SpaceX said in a media-cited email that the engineers should report to the meeting at 14:00 EST (19:00 GMT) on 18 November.

"I would appreciate it if you could fly to SF to be present in person," the tech guru told the social media platform's staff in another message, informing them that he would be waiting for them at the aforementioned office until midnight Friday, and returning on Saturday morning.

The employees were requested by the South African billionaire to send him, via email, summaries of what their software code had "achieved" over a span of six months, "along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code."

"There will be short, technical interviews that will allow me to better understand the Twitter tech stack," Musk reportedly added.

The "tech stack" refers to the technologies a company uses when constructing and running an application, consisting, typically, of such things as programming languages, frameworks, database, etc. Earlier in the week, Elon Musk revealed that Tesla engineers had come on board to offer assistance in "evaluating" Twitter's teams of engineers, adding that this was being done on a "voluntary basis" and "after hours".

The reported summons of Twitter engineers comes against the backdrop of reports that hundreds of the social media firm's employees opted to grab their offered three months' severance pay and leave after being slapped with a succinct Thursday deadline from Musk that called on them to sign up for "long hours at high intensity" or quit.

An email cited by US media on 16 November showed Elon Musk warning employees that if they were not prepared to work harder and longer than before and “be extremely hardcore”, they had no future in the company.

“Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade,” Musk underscored.

This did not go down well with Twitter staff, setting off a trickle of departures, with some tweeting their farewell using the company-promoted hashtag #LoveWhereYouWorked. Bearing in mind that earlier this month Twitter announced that it was cutting about 50 percent of its staff, the fresh exodus of company workforce amounting to anything between 1,000 and 1,200 fueled fears that the firm now consisted of a "skeleton staff". There were also reports that Twitter had told employees it would close its offices and cut badge access until Monday.

Amid the wave of departures, many were starting to speculate whether the site could manage to continue to operate smoothly, with some not ruling out more dire scenarios, such as a technical breakdown. Tech experts predicted everything from outages and slower uploads to hack attacks.

However, to all appearances, Musk has remained defiantly upbeat, tweeting that as "the best people are staying", he is "not super worried".

The best people are staying, so I’m not super worried

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022

pic.twitter.com/rbwbsLA1ZG

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022

Elon Musk's management skills have come under fire since he took over Twitter a few weeks ago. He has since:

As for what lies ahead, the billionaire tweeted on 18 November to ask his followers about the company's next steps.

What should Twitter do next?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022