...to keep the app running? New devices, new standards, a lot of things change that you need devs to keep up with.
Also, what's up with people saying twitter is stagnant? They've added Spaces, Twitter Blue and Crypto Profile Pictures - all 3 massive features added to their product. They're all trash, but that's besides the point.
This is entirely anecdotal, but from the little I know from his couple months there, Twitter has no idea what to do with the huge amount of engineers they employ. This is by no means an endorsement of Musk, but the company could use some new direction I think.
I feel like public discourse has increasingly been more and more polarizing and anecdotes and hearsay are being leveraged to create further divisions.
To the GP: we all understand that your experience isn’t the same experience of everyone, but it is AN experience, and would be useful to us who don’t have any experience.
I wonder why I keep getting LinkedIn and email notifications about engineering jobs at Twitter.
No, that's exactly the point. Just because you make something doesn't mean it was progress.
We're talking about a simple platform of people relaying updates of 140 characters with a comment section and a feed algorithm to aggregate the content to everyone with a focus on prolonging everyone's engagement time while also following guidelines on what's "politically correct". There's only so much you can do, unless you venture out into manipulating public discourse, or striving to become a nation-state (or at least its propaganda machinery) or taking over the world (with all the imaginable internet services provided by you - email, storage, encyclopedias, news etc).
At some point you should stop and think about your core business. And at some point you should realize that the law of diminishing returns applies. And at some point you should realize that it's fine to provide a stable service to a stable amount of users with a stable amount of features. Not that much R&D required.
Or, rather, this is how our society would have to work in order to stay healthy. Living on a planet with finite resources while using them up like they're not is a sure-fire way to doom. We already know enough about farming for example to make it sustainable. We just don't know how to do it in a way where we don't cut down production considerably and starving a lot of people in the process. Not a nice topic to bring up i your election speech.
But it's nice to ride the train since things seemingly move forward thanks to rising inflation (which is due to the problem in the first place) and the price of your product can go up.
Oh, I might've misunderstood you as well.
/remindme 20 years
Provide females around the world access to education, birth control, and opportunity in the job market and this problem will fix itself. To do that, however, would mean allowing the kind of discourse that Twitter is inclined suppress and many of its more vocal users would call "racist" i.e. being able to criticise cultures that don't give females these opportunities.
And we're back to Twitter and free speech.
like RSS?
Twitter does a fair amount of OSS, though I can't see a lot of contributions that probabilistically out of Spaces.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your take, but for tax accounting, a lot of “stupid” programming counts as R&D.
But more importantly, stupidity is in the eye of the beholder or hindsight, or both.
e.g. I would have called a streaming service for gamers to be watched by adoring fans utter stupidity. Maybe that’s also why I’m not rich.
Is Discord profitable yet? Reported revenue and users is up significantly post-covid, but that does not necessarily mean there are profits. Your instincts may be under-estimated.
However, releasing every half-baked misfeature that comes out of R&D is useless.
I guess, and I imagine at their size they probably run pretty inefficiently. It just seems like a surprisingly big team. From all fronts really, not just development but design too, does it really take that much effort to keep Twitter "twittery"?
> Crypto Profile Pictures
Straight out of a satire piece, I had not heard about that.
I think your definition of "massive" is different to mine.
Spaces is at least a new medium. The other two are incremental features that a small (<10 person) team would ship in a few months at another FANG company.
I know he's controversial, but I wish more politicians would make themselves more accessible through Twitter (and I'm not a Trump fan, I just think he used it more effectively than other politicians).
But so does Instagram and Facebook and other socials. Politicians doing live QAs on facebook was happening a decade ago already, since live streams were a thing.
The downside is that we don't teach critical thinking to children in school.
So you end up with adults that believe whatever tv tells them or will buy any compelling argument without trying to debunk it first.
Better powers of discrimination, higher IQ, are illusory when it comes to inoculating yourself against propaganda.
In industrial economies money is credit and countries issue their own money by setting up a banking system to lend it into existence on security of domestic tangible capital to promote wealth formation and create liquidity for domestic employers to make payroll. Since the early 1700s western governments have known how to create stable money from nothing without any gold, private banks, or external investors by lending it into existence through land loan office system.
It looks like El Salvador didn't create its own money before and was just using US Dollars sent back by emigrants though.
Speaking out of experience, most engineers in big tech are bike shedding on internal tools that don't do anything useful. A small minority deliver the majority of the impact. On top of that at companies like Twitter and Google some of those useless employees spend their time complaining about social justice initiatives rather than doing work.
Instagram is still pretty lean from what I’ve heard.
Pre-revenue that is possible. Post revenue, you'd need at least lawyers and accountants in each country you operate in. Then you need systems to respond to subpeonas and legal requests, that is a hundred people right there.
IG was 13 employees when you had a fraction of the images and they didnt have to be profitable, rather just grow by burning $. Now consider scale and profitability and you need even more people to grow tech cost consciously.
This seems intuitively false. Adding more people to tech domains can actually decrease effectiveness with more expense, resulting in lower profits. Obviously, there is a sweet spot, but Twitter is a basic product regardless of how many countries it operates within.
Suppose you are Twitter and operating in, say, {Ghana, Russia, Korea, Mexico, and Pakistan}. You're served with subpoenas and legal IP requests in each country. If you dont respond in time, your license to operate may be revoked. Each request is in the native language. How do you "scale" this technically? Can one lawyer handle these across the world? How?
Furthermore, developing tech for managing this is likely to be unnecessary as there are existing software packages already out there. Doing business across the world and handling legal issues is not unique to Twitter.
I generally agree with your response, but note that you've just converted FTEs to contractors/outsourcers and "reduced" FTEs that way. You'd have to do the same with accountants and many other country-level positions. But w2-->1099 isnt really a "win".
Comparing to Instagram seems pretty unfair too as it's newer, it was even-more-featured-limited for a long time, is now part of a much larger behemoth and had much lower scale than today's twitter when it was acquired, and my guess would be that it's an easier scaling problem too (lower on post frequency, more read-heavy workload).
Why the need for layoffs?
They did make Twitter Spaces and so far, that move alone has shadowed Clubhouse even though itself is not doing well. Also built discontinued Fleets.
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” - Edward Abbey
> Abbey also left instructions on what to do with his remains: Abbey wanted his body transported in the bed of a pickup truck and wished to be buried as soon as possible. He did not want to be embalmed or placed in a coffin. Instead, he preferred to be placed inside of an old sleeping bag and requested that his friends disregard all state laws concerning burial. "I want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree," said the message. For his funeral, Abbey stated, "No formal speeches desired, though the deceased will not interfere if someone feels the urge. But keep it all simple and brief." He requested gunfire and bagpipe music, a cheerful and raucous wake, "[a]nd a flood of beer and booze! Lots of singing, dancing, talking, hollering, laughing, and lovemaking."
Putting Desert Solitaire on my reading list.
Be warned about his views of democracy and the US. He opposed the consumerism of the US and sees democracy as "me, me, me" politics, where people vote for what they want now (or what they're told they want) rather doing the uncomfortable thing today for the sake of tomorrow.
The stock has gone nowhere since its IPO and Twitter has never paid a dividend. It has revenue of $5bn but cannot seem to turn a meaningful profit and is not growing.
So far it has been a massive failure for shareholders, who are the stakeholders that the board and management are actually there to serve.
This is a terribly short-sighted and impoverished definition of stagnation. If Elon shakes things up and Twitter generates 2x the profit and 2x the social destruction as Facebook would you call them a vibrant and successful concern?
Is Twitter currently generating twice the profit of Facebook? No. Pretty straightforward.
In the real world, Twitter is a public company. It has existed for a long time and has barely every made a penny. It fails in comparison to other high growth networks (Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube).
And it's not an armchair comment. Twitter's own PMs have openly admitted to some of its flaws, it's failure to appeal to the masses. They're self-aware about their own incompetence.
Last I checked not even half the US population is on twitter, not even close to half. Who is this "all" in "they all use it?"
I'd love to know which variant of the English language treats "all" as analogous to not "insignificant".
We're not even over half in this case. If this person actually believes most people are already using twitter, it's clearly a problem when it comes to informing a judgement of stagnant growth.
I agree with you on this, but I think the parent commenter was implying that if you're going to be employing thousands of engineers, you ought to have something to show for it.
It's fine to move into a "steady state", but your engineering team should eventually reflect that reality.
But Twitter and twitter employees want the company to grow. But they fail to do so.
However, in a competitive environment, and with proof that the market is expanding (Newer generation of kids are using social media), if it fails to capture the market, the company will die out.
So, there is this need to focus on user number growth.
I am sure that if the company was only adding older people, the stock would be punished inspite of growing numbers.
Though, twitcasting has more monetization options and Twitter only has super followers which nobody actually uses yet.
Why must every company sustain boundless growth and 24-hour engagement? Change and growth for their own sake can be cancers.
Twitter does what it does and people like it (as seen by the fact that they all use it), yet armchair generals cry out that twitter's refusal to turn into "not twitter" is somehow a failure of engineering and management, or some form of incompetence.
So, I disagree, I guess.