When the company I worked for was in the process of being acquired, our codebase was frozen as well. I'm pretty sure this is just standard practice, no?

My previous experience of this was:

1. No user facing feature releases for the time being the deal being agreed and becoming effective (plenty of backend systems, performance optimisations, etc. still got released)

2. Don't touch anything on the day of the deal, in fact, take a free day off.

3. No major feature removals for 3 months after the deal.

I imagine they are still writing code, just not shipping it. And there’s an exception for fixing things, which this would definitely fall under

Code freeze and 'legal documents freeze' are 2 different. There is no way to prove that any traces of biased decisions taken over the past few years were gotten rid of immediately after those decisions were taken.

Look at any FAANG/MAANA and ask the same question.

If I had to guess, most of them have so much cashflow that mid and senior level managers are able to do engage in organizational silo-ing by hiring a large amount of expensive engineering talent without much pushback.

If this is the case, there's likely a large pool of talented and highly compensated employees doing work that doesn't touch on either a profit center or high-impact research & development. And what work is being done is likely influenced by Parkinson's Law.

Whatever engineers do when their company is acquired in such a fashion: Loitering around the cafeterias and coolers after sending their resumes and scheduling their interviews.

Presumably you could still apply some changes. If there was a critical vulnerability Twitter could make the changes necessary. If those changes are allowed, maybe not so critical changes could be made as well.

I am curious what all those twitter engineers are doing as well. Presumably it's secret in some way?

But who is guarding the guards?

The only question is raises is how incompetent is this journalist. the source code is locked. It's not everyone is committing stuff...

What I'm learning from this how little anyone posting shit on the internet actually knows. Misinformation from incompetence or just trying to be a know it all everywhere.

So please explain to us how it does work!

i don't really have an incentive to do that, i just wanted to comment on how inaccurate this was written and share a thought about our "news" based off my knowledge. The author shouldn't have written this if they don't understand what they're writing about. Or cant verify their leaked information.

Probably most news is misinformed if you think about.