In my experience leetcode has surprisingly low correlation with programming ability and most definitely software engineering.
It's not just Blind either. I've been surprised how many young people aspire to "work at a FAANG" as a goal, and software is just a convenient way to get there.
This is really about two things. 1) Twitter can't afford the debt burdens Elon put on them and 2) Elon really resents being forced to buy a company he does not want and is sticking it to people in the most asinine way possible.
If the departures are such that for each team, 1 competent senior engineer remains who can keep that domain running, then Twitter could be unaffected with 1/5 of its workforce. They might not be building new features, but the current site could function, which is reasonable since the current site is arguably feature complete.
But in reality it won't be as clean as that. If the whole localization team quits, suddenly the site won't be translated to other languages. If the whole mobile release team quits, suddenly the Twitter app might disappear from the app store. Or the security team is gutted and suddenly everyone's passwords are leaked.
By all accounts after the layoffs, voluntary resignations in response to layoffs, and people who refused the ultimatum and so probably consider themselves laid off, it's not clear Twitter even has a skeleton crew
But the current reports are in the vicinity of 60% to 90% of the companies employees.
Obviously it’s extremely hard to get accurate numbers because one minute it’s reply yes to this or your gone, the next it’s report to this room, then batches are getting rehired because they are essential to operations and it’s jumping around like the staff head count graph has arrhythmia.
Someone at Twitter knew what they were doing. Let's hope they didn't get swept up.
Side note: do we know how much Twitter Sr. Devs make for sure? I know the term "400k for 5hrs a week" keeps getting thrown around. However, that doesn't seem incredibly well researched and has some triggers baked in
If someone had 10 people cleaning a small apartment every day, you'd question what were they actually doing. That wouldn't make sense.
There's no doubt that Twitter could be leaner than it was as of September, but haphazardly firing employees at random and alienating the most employable of the remainder into resignation is not the way to go about it. He could have spent a few months getting to know the place, but deliberately chose not to.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/whatsapp-bought-for-19-b...
Did it have to moderate content?
Twitter is vastly more complex than Whatsapp when it comes to functionality and platforms it had to support.
The argument is not that twitter can't be ran leaner, it's that the current process of leaning twitter is bad.
TBC, talking about the code part.
There's another Twitter, which is not code, but guest and resident services. Your example holds there.
That's a fine question to ask -- it's clear that plenty of those engineers aren't contributing real value. They're working on passion projects, or side projects like React or Docusaurus, or pie-in-the-sky next-gen products, or reinventing the wheel in-house, or infrastructure, etc. Many are working on similar projects in separate silos of large companies, completely unaware that they have "twin" teams elsewhere in the org solving damn near the same problem, but not in a generalized way.
The big problem is that Elon has no idea what the fuck he is doing. I don't mean to disparage anyone, but jeez... the guy has fired thousands of people in the last few weeks and looks like he's on the cusp of running a company that's been around for over a decade into the ground in the next few weeks. Over the holidays. And who's going to deal with the issue? Oh yeah, the H1B visa holding employees who can't escape. He's officially a jerk, and that's not even counting the times when he called innocent people child molesters, or spouted lies about crypto, or tried to manipulate Tesla stock, etc. etc.
TL;DR: Elon is an idiot trying to use internet wisdom to run a company. This whole situation reminds me of when some rich person you know tries to run a small business, like a coffee shop or an ice cream shop, and they screw up just about every piece of it... because they don't get the fundamentals. Elon does NOT get the fundamentals, based on observations of him over the last few years. It's clear he's just a lucky rich kid with a big ego and lots of confidence who loves smoking weed and ruining other people's lives.
What do you base that on? There's no evidence to point the company is going downhill or improving at the moment. You seem to be basing this on a personal hatred for Elon and nothing else.
I submit that people who make this type of comment should be prepared to offer up not only what evidence they have that criticism of Musk (or whatever is being discussed) is insincere, but what sort of evidence they would need in order to accept the criticism.
Reports indicate the internal beta build Twitter instance has slowed down significantly this week -- a sign that services, code, or other essential infrastructure is being neglected.
Musk fired half the company and drove two-thirds of the remainder to quit. He's asking the remaining employees to print out their code contributions to prove their worth.
These things might not be explicit signs of trouble in the company, but I sure wouldn't read them as positive. A shakeup could be a good thing in the long term if the company has stagnated... but there's no guarantee.
I raised multiple explicit examples in my previous post; here's some more. I think Elon is a complete dunderhead, because it's hard not to think so based on his behavior. I still think Twitter is at a very high risk right now of collapsing. With him making such dramatic moves as CEO, isn't it impossible to separate his bad behavior from Twitter's future?
Your goal isn’t one cleaning person, it’s the right amount
That's the way it works. Maps aren't uploaded to production so they fail to load for you.
""Support your favourite people on Twitter for bonus content and extra perks.""
He's trying to decimate the workforce on purpose, although it's not going as smoothly as he hoped from outside appearances. He wants huge numbers of Twitter employees to quit, and he has been very clearly laying out the terms for behavior for the type of people he would like to run Twitter with. He's intentionally shaking the tree violently. He's hoping that the types that remain will be his types of employees. He's going to try to rebuild the workforce starting from those, so it's his company in ethos / function.
He thinks Twitter can run with far fewer engineers, and drastically fewer staff overall, than what it was operating with previously. He knows the value of engineers, he has made that part clear: he plainly said that engineers are most of what is important about Twitter, not the rest of the staff, he said it should be an engineer heavy company.
Also so far he has displayed very little understanding of what engineers actually do (the bring you screenshots thing and the way he responded to one of them correcting him on Twitter and a bunch of other cases don't paint the brightest picture).
I don't think he can run Twitter very effectively out of San Francisco going forward, after his behavior. He'll try to run it out of Texas instead.
I assume he already laid off most h1bs, who would say and do anything to not get deported but might not be the best engineers.
Still, the people that claim to work 'hardcore' might just say that. They might survive for 3 months, which is how much severance they are forfeiting.
He will move the Twitter HQ, within 12-24 months I'd guess. He'll move it to Texas. Most likely he has already begun preparations for that and we'll see an announcement within six months.
Not the first time this has happened: https://twitter.com/NilsIRL/status/1479065003684765697
not sure if this is normal but tons of resources link to ton.local.twitter.com which NXDOMAINs against quad-8
also you're totally right; none of the JS is minified!
Btw, a dev build is in prod right now. Or someone forgot to minimize the JS. Tons of import map issues.