Twitter’s new chief, Elon, is probably on a hiring spree after firing close to 4000 employees. Musk’s recent hire is George Hotz, the man who rose to instant fame for hacking into an iPhone in 2007. He was the first ever person back then to unlock an iPhone.Hotz, who was once associated with Musk’s SpaceX, has now been roped in to fix the search option on Twitter. Hotz has 12 weeks to fix a flaw that most engineers could not do in years.
“I’m down for a 12-week internship at Twitter for the cost of living in SF. It’s not about accumulating capital in a dead world, it’s about making the world alive,” Hotz said in a tweet. Musk responded to his tweet with an offer to talk. Hotz said he does not want to join the company for a long duration. He said that he is diving into complex codebases. “I could help document and clean up some of those 1000 microservices in 12 weeks. Reverse engineering,” he said. Hotz also clarified that he is an intern at Twitter and he has been hired to fix Twitter’s “broken search”in 12 weeks.
Enquiring about Twitter search, Hotz asked his followers if they would use Twitter Search in place of Google Search.”How do you feel the quality of Twitter search is? What would get you to use Twitter search instead of Google?” A user replied saying that it is still bad.”If I’m searching for something and I’m even 1 character off I straight up don’t find what I’m looking for,” he wrote.
Hotz agreed with his observation and said that he would look for easy ways to improve the flaw.
As far as Hotz’s background is concerned, he is a computer science graduate from Carnegie Mellon University. Hotz has interned with Google, Facebook, and SpaceX. He was the CEO of comma.ai from 2015 to 2018.
On a related note, Twitter has parted ways with close to 4000 employees in the past one month. Some employees voluntarily resigned after Muks’s hardcore work culture reached them. In the email, Musk asked the employees to commit to an arduous work culture. Employees failing to do so also had the option to leave with severance pay. And most employees chose to leave with severance pay.
