Or, given Twitter’s internal politics, he could model the org chart as a minimax tree and alpha-beta prune, giving a space complexity of only O(bd) :)

we all know that the org chart is an untrained neural net

Only if the employees are already accurately sorted by value.

Again, he has a genius method:

  git log --author="$EMPLOYEE" -p | wc -l

git log --pretty=%ae | sort | uniq -c | sort -r

sort -nr

That's more correct, also I realize I just counted number of commits rather than lines added. Close enough though, not like anyone would make any decisions with this list right?

Easy

  pip install git-fame

  cd twitter

  git-fame

It does seem like this is basically what they are doing. The messages employees received did not include the actual paperwork, which the messages say will come in about a week. It could be interpreted as a strategy to "terminate" aggressively but with the option to walk it back a bit if the place falls apart within the week. It's a clever-sounding approach on paper. But there is a human element when dealing with people's livelihoods that might not have been sufficiently considered.

Scream test for human beings.