Musk asked Twitter programmers to write a weekly report

Twitter’s internal emails showed that the company required technical employees to send emails to CEO Elon Musk every week, introducing all their work this week, in order to enable rapid innovation.

On Monday night, the mailbox used by Musk and his leadership team sent an email to Twitter programmers saying that Twitter will adopt a new method to track their work progress. Starting this week, all Twitter employees who work in programming or technology are required to submit a weekly job summary of what they've done, what they hope to accomplish, and the number of lines of code they've written.

The email read.

In order to innovate quickly in software, we must understand what everyone is doing and who is writing what code.

The email was signed by the Twitter Engineering Department led by Musk himself.

A few hours before the email was sent, Musk had just held an all-hands meeting at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. He said at the meeting that he is not planning to continue layoffs and will not move the company's headquarters to Texas. According to reports, Twitter currently has more than 2,000 full-time employees, only about one-third of the 7,500 people who were just acquired by Musk at the end of October.

Employees have to submit emails separately and include what projects are working on and what are you trying to achieve and include code samples/links to Phabricator for code written this week. Phabricator is a software development platform where submitted code is actively reviewed.

Employees will need to revise their weekly submissions based on the specific type of work they do, the email said. "We look forward to building Twitter into the world's best technology software company," the email concluded.

The following is the original text of the email:

Sender: Twitter Engineering Department

Topic: Software/Technology Weekly

fellow twitter,

In order to innovate rapidly in software, we must understand what everyone is doing, and who is writing what code.

From now on, every Friday (this week is Wednesday), please send the weekly report to xxxxxxxxx@twitter.com. The format is as follows:

- Subject: "Weekly, Name, Department, Date (Example: Weekly, John Smith, SWE, 11.20)"

- Message body:

What project are you working on (eg Blue Certification)

What are you trying to achieve (like reliably collecting $8 payments)

Code samples / Phabricator links to code written this week

This weekly update applies to:

All managers/engineers of SWE and ML

All the people who should be writing code in other departments like SRE and networking

For technical roles that don't write code (such as network/database administrator), please replace the above "code sample/Phabricator link to the code written this week" with "job summary"

For technical roles that do not write code but do analysis tasks (such as data scientists), please replace "code samples/Phabricator link to code written this week" with "analysis summary and results"

If you have any questions or unclear matters, please send an email to xxxxxxxxx@twitter.com.

We look forward to making Twitter the best technology software company in the world.

Twitter Engineering