That said, there are lots of bugs in Twitter now, today, when they presumably had the benefit of being in stable mode for a long time. For example, Twitter regularly refreshes and loads new tweets while I'm reading them, pushing the tweet I was in the middle of reading out of view. That seems like a pretty silly bug to exist in a mature product. I regularly reach a state where I have to kill the app and relaunch it because all of the "back" commands just minimize the app instead of taking me back to the timeline. I could go on.

But regarding the bugs, I’m totally with you. Same here. I use Twitter only in the browser. Browse long enough and the page reloads as if it ran out of memory.

By flowing from many people think it's bloat - I'll tell you what's really going on to tiny team of 1~3 built whole infra for critical component.

I'm not really trying to make commentary on whether or not Twitter engineering was bloat, or whether or not I think it'll hit problems in the future. Just commenting on the fact that the article broke my expectations a little bit as a reader.

There's no doubt that OP built a great and stable automation layer on top of Mesos for caching workloads. But there are numerous other types of workloads on top of Mesos (including, I presume mission-critical database deployments that need well-disciplined draining protocols to shift between nodes), as well as administrative needs for the Mesos-to-infrastructure level, and things running on bare metal below the Mesos level. These things all needed dedicated SREs, and the absence of these SREs could result in a scenario like the one mentioned in the Twitter thread I linked - two obscure mutually-dependent components expire and cannot be re-provisioned using documented tools.

I also think an important meta-point is that when Twitter was bringing in substantial revenue from advertising, every minute of downtime would have significant costs - costs that could make it easily worthwhile to "over-provision" SRE talent. With advertisers pausing engagement, perhaps Twitter loses less money from a day-long outage than it would save having the right talent to turn a day-long outage into a minutes-long outage.

Twitter is only judged by its profitability (namely, Musk's ability to service debt without selling more Tesla stock than he already has), while most other tech companies (both public and private) are judged by both profitability and revenue growth. If you want both, larger SRE teams, to say nothing of feature development and regulatory compliance teams, start to make a lot more sense.

what circles are those? I cannot seem to find any references to the term beyond this year.

> for large tech companies it has seen a resurgence.

it seems more like a bad attempt at insulting people who are trying to make work less shit. i will save my opinion at whether those attempts are more or less useful, but seems entirely another dumb culture war

My senior PM, who has experience in several big companies, and was well aware of our team stll took a couple weeks to get up to speed with how everything worked etc.

I don't think her onboarding day counts to call Google an adult day care. And seeing things like free lunch and a treadmill desks are just tools companies like google use to keep you longer in the office and maximise your time not things to take care of you. Its more work, but mango flavoured.

Work is work, but the same way we think of weekends as normal, or 8 hours as a normal amount of time we could think about 4 days, or having a gym next to our work as work. Being sad at work isn't a feature in my opinion

Also note that I never personally said Google is adult day care, I was simply pointing to a culprit in the trend.

perhaps we jsut have different definitions of adult day care. But that girl had a coffee and some snacks in the office. Which seems entirely reasonable. Being able to work from the rooftop might be a bit "fancier" but tbh I have seen dudes take work calls in rooftop bars for years and no one calls Morgan Stanley an adult day care.

I thought the adult day care was more related companies having talking sticks and mental health days. Which sure some do, and I can find it silly sometimes, but who knows how dysfunctional that team was and whether that works for them. I am sure if I explained to my parents what Agile is, they would also laugh in my face. Our work can look silly to others but work for us.

She didnt show any of her work but i dont think a video of her adjusting roadmaps and having a call with the stake holder of the API team their deadline is blocked by would really make for good instagram content.

I have a friend who was a mechanic, and he used to always do a drive around the block when a hard job (like an engine change) was done to make sure it was all alright. He would tell you about driving a nice car etc, but I didnt just imagine he didn't work the rest of the day, that was just the part he shared. Same reasoning with that PM. (Funny that both of them were PM thought).

idk the whole "adult day care" seems needlessly antagonistic for how people make work be less garbage. Specially holding against them things like free food which are "perks" only offered to keep people working longer

Your choice of wording suggests that you find the phrase or concept offensive, which would be understandable. But attacking the phrase as a talking point is shallow.

dont try and be sherlock holmes...

also please do not concern yourself with my feelings. We do not know each other.

> But attacking the phrase as a talking point is shallow.

The performative language of culture war vocabularies is interesting to point out, specially when talking points get virality quicker and quicker.

> the orthodoxy of the week.

funny wordchoice when being questioned about using the phrase du jour.

If you don't mind me asking what are this parallels between children care and big tech companies that have appeared over the years?

This can be something as silly as fan groups of a certain tv show, or as dangerous as propaganda from a foreign nation.

That's an entity that specializes in RISK ASSESSMENT.

It looks like you can post entire movies to 2 Minutes per clip onto Twitter right now. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/users-uploading-entire-movies...

How many millions are in a billion?

the power law applies to any big organization. 20% of the people do 80% of the work, whilst 80% of the people are just there for "support".

whatsapp was run by a team of like 20 people or something when they got acquired for $20 billion. for a simple software product, you don't really need that many people. in fact, more people often means bad software. you just need a small group of very talented engineers to run the product and add new features when necessary.

big (and especially public) companies often times need to hire a lot, just to look like a real company.

now that twitter is private, elon has no responsibility to public investors and can focus less on looking like a real company and more on doing what needs to be done to cut bloat/costs and improve product

https://twitter.com/IlluminatiGanga/status/15946097904324444...

new members joining in 1970. hmmm.

Maybe the user facing site, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

There are plenty of internal/backend/restricted systems to support and/or monetize this part.

And that's not counting the huge number of support people & moderators needed.

And a website is easy. You could do it with 1 person.

But Elon is such a machine, he could keep it running by himself.

I mean, a mediocre complexity app doesn't need more than one developer for a "slow improvement mode".

How many bug reports do you think the Twitter site and apps get each day? How many employees do you think it takes just to triage them?

You still have to read them to work out that user X saying they can't log in is the same as user Y saying authentication is failing at A stage, issue is present on B and C platforms version D.E

Further the issue of 'site using the wrong font' is not equally as important as 'site is exposing private user data'. And you're likely to get many people reporting the former, and maybe only one reporting the latter, so a sample isn't likely to catch the really important stuff.

The point I’m trying to make is that it takes some effort (beyond just the plumbing) to create an experience that folks actually want to use on an ongoing basis

Mainly the project manager.

> What about user testing and customer development?

Testing could be done by everyone, mainly the project manager, although you could perhaps add a tester to the team. Don't know what customer development is.

> By “graphic design”, do you mean User Interface design? If so, who is responsible for the user experience beyond just UI?

Yes, UI design. The graphic designer would be primarily responsible for UX, but also the project manager and developers.

This is based on my experience with mobile app development. Right now, it's a fairly complex product, users often say that it's much better for many use cases than the alternative by Google, which I guess may be developed by a 10x larger team.

Rode map is just: keep it working, or whatever EM twitted about hour ago :)

But I agree it's way to optimistic number. You need at least a few for each platform, just because of bus factor, you also need people to keep in touch with Apple/Google reps etc., making sure bills are paid etc.

I imagine it will mostly be just minor tweaks and no major features, you can easily do both mobile targets by cca 10 people, not working crazy hours. There are plenty of successful apps with smaller teams, that make it work.

Eh, tossing the direct comparison to Twitter out here because they seem to have gone too far the other way, this is much like saying "I can make 1,000,000 screws a day, so assembling at least 100 cars a day should be easy".

I am not saying that writing twitter like app is easy, but writing it and keeping it running are two different things.

If you are not adding new features, you are just mostly keeping up with Android/Apple platforms, which can be annoying, but not that difficult.

> also need people to keep in touch with Apple/Google reps etc.

You certainly don't need people specifically for this task.

It is so incomparable in scope I don't know why people bring it up.

Is there a reason to integrating ads into WhatsApp would require more than another 50 people? Twitter ads are certainly do not appear very complicated. The most complicated thing about Twitter is scale, which is why the comparison is made with WhatsApp.

> recommendations,

Does Twitter have recommendations? From what I understand, the front page was actively curated - that is, a human chose stories to put there. I guess you could count the god-awful default feed ordering as "recommendations", but there is nothing advanced about it.

> bots

If WhatsApp doesn't have bots, it's the only social media/chat app I've ever heard of that doesn't. What is needed for this other an an API?

> had to provide tooling for governments, regulators, content moderators etc.

I'm sure at least some of this exists for WhatsApp. Nevertheless, how many additional employees does this have take?

I am not sure why there is so pushback against the idea most companies are overstaffed. For the most part, yes, everyone has "work" to do. But most of the work is fundamentally unproductive. It's this way throughout the economy, but a few tech companies probably do represent extreme cases. I think the best argument for their case is that most of them are very profitable anyway (not Twitter, somehow), and they might as well throw money at thousands of people to do stuff in case one of them accidentally does something that ends up being wildly profitable. I am fairly neutral on the whole thing; I strongly dislike Elon, but I also think Twitter was horrifically mismanaged. While I doubt Twitter will come out better than it is, the idea that firing most of such a large organization would necessarily result in the immediate collapse of a mature product does not say much about the people that were fired.

I'm more sympathetic to the idea that it would get even worse over time, but I don't think there's anything necessary about this. You could focus on resolving longstanding issues while pausing most new work and probably come out perfectly fine.

You see a couple of ads mixed in your feed; behind that there's a big machine selling that space to advertisers and mixing it into the timeline of every user based on whatever profile Twitter has created for you. Then the advertisers want to know how their ads are doing, or they'll stop buying them…and you'll probably need to have salespeople to get them to put money into your ad system in the first place.

> I guess you could count the god-awful default feed ordering as "recommendations", but there is nothing advanced about it.

Just because you don't like the ordering doesn't mean it's not advanced.

> I am not sure why there is so pushback against the idea most companies are overstaffed.

Twitter could be overstaffed. In fact it probably was overstaffed. But it's not overstaffed in the tune of of "it should be 10 people working out of a garage".

This is not crazily complex, bleeding-edge tech. This is something fairly well-understood and at any rate done by a lot of teams in a lot of places. (Twitter's ad profiling also seems awful. Maybe I am hard to pin down.) Probably the most complicated part is coming up with data to make advertisers think their campaign is working. (I am extremely skeptical most ad spend is actually worthwhile.)

> Twitter could be overstaffed. In fact it probably was overstaffed. But it's not overstaffed in the tune of of "it should be 10 people working out of a garage".

I agree 10 is too low for anything but bare-bones keep-the-lights-on-this-month maintenance, but it seems likely you could have a great and functional Twitter run by ~200 employees. I've seen more done with less.

There are very few teams doing advertising at the scale of Twitter, saying "done by a lot of teams in a lot of places" is accurate just like "programming is done at a lot of places so why is programming hard".

looks like actual numbers don't agree with you

(hint: for TikTok it's Douyin + TikTok)

https://imgur.com/a/HvyynTI

https://imgur.com/a/xLgSTzW

The claim was very few companies do what Twitter does at that scale, truth is Twitter is not a big fish in that space.

Since you are at it, do GDP of countries where they operate too.

I reckon a $ million in ad revenues in India is harder to come by that the same amount in USA.

That doesn’t mean your AI system performs better than a simpler one. Or that the system is useful in the first place (recommendations.) I’m not saying they were sitting around twiddling their thumbs. I’m saying the vast majority of Twitter staff were not actually improving the Twitter product noticeably to users. They were doing highly complex, cutting-edge engineering that was make-work.

If Twitter tech was so advanced, why were they losing so much money?

Advertising is a hard problem that not many companies have solved at the scale of Twitter, that is what I am trying to get at. There are not too many social media networks out there which have hundreds of millions of users and billions of data points, and it's very misleading to say that work done in such a scenario is "something fairly well-understood and at any rate done by a lot of teams in a lot of places", when literally they're the only ones with Twitter type data outside of a couple of other Chinese social networks.

Yes, this is my point. All this incredible AI engineering did not actually make Twitter a better product. They could have just as well not spent the money. The work was ultimately futile for Twitter, even though it might have advanced our understanding of AI and have incredibly practical applications elsewhere. Conventional measures worked fine.

>provide tooling for governments

What tooling do they provide for governments?

No, they had 30M:

https://www.vox.com/2017/4/9/15235940/facebook-instagram-acq...

This right here is why you can discount most replies on HN right off the bat. The "I can make software X in a day" posts are 99% bullshit because the posters making them have idea what business reality look like. If their program gained any popularity they'd be in a panic the first time the FBI dumped a warrant in their lap and their full stack developer is now spending a week with the lawyer trying to figure out how to untangle their data while the customers that paid for ads are yelling the metrics API went down 2 days ago.

IG 13 employees at 30m users. Couldn't find # of servers.

FB had 10k servers in 2008 and 100m users, 850 employees.

I believe Doubleclick had ~500-1000 servers for ~10b daily impressions in mid-2000s.

Those numbers are all on circa 2010 hardware, so.. divide by a decade of performance doubling every 2 years (conservatively), or ~5x fewer servers in 2020.

The government takedown stuff, from personal experience, is tiny on the systems side; much more about moderators and expensive legal staffing.

These are very rough estimates, but I've heard 250k servers for Twitter.. that's much more on par with Goog/Amzn/Msft serving clouds at ~1m+ machines. That's a mystery to me.

so you mean that 50 people could run Twitter, if only they removed the bloat and focused on their core business?

> or had to provide tooling for governments, regulators,

nobody did back in 2014.

Since then WhatsApp has grown a lot, doubling its size to around a hundred employees.

What's their core business? Losing money on a platform where people can post racist comments?

Or do they have to earn money without getting sued for being used to spread CSAM and being a platform for harassment?

Because the first is very easy with 50 people. Elon can keep sinking money into it and never earn a dime (see Truth Social, they seem to be doing well!). The last is a lot more complicated and requires an ad platform, ad sales, content moderation, documentation writers, support agents, management, scrum masters, SREs, purchasing, et cetera.

IT people are really good at ignoring everything but the tech stack. Like tech is the only thing needed to run a profitable business. (It is... But not to run a 40B valued profitable business... And Twitter wasn't even profitable at all.)

they've been running the same exact business for years now, if what you say it's true, maybe the answer is yes?

I never heard of Twitter making profit, so maybe their core business was "Losing money on a platform where people can post racist comments"

There was abundance of both, AFAIK, long before Musk

Remember when Dorsey tweeted nazi propaganda and then said his account was compromised? (which if true it means at Twitter they don't know what they are doing, if false, well...)

Remember when journalists wrote articles titled "Twitter is a Nazi haven for the same reason its CEO claims no bias" because Dorsey never actually distanced himself from the worst of the worst the platform hosted? Fearing he would be labeled as "too liberal"?

Remember when he started spamming crypto-bro propaganda?

Remember when a spy from Suadi crown worked at Twitter helping to uncover activists using the so called "free" platform and after he was discovered and reported to authorities, Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal bought 4.61% of Twitter shares?

Did the situation got better with more and more employees or it just revolved around banning prominent accounts? (not that I necessarily disagree with the reasons behind it, but if that is the best solution they've found, after years of fine tuning, they could have done it before with much less people involved)

> Or do they have to earn money without getting sued for being used to spread CSAM and being a platform for harassment?

it's easily provable that the 7,500 employees did not improve things on that front.

> IT people are really good at ignoring everything but the tech stack

that's a really odd proposition.

Looks to me that Twitter was in bad shape already, despite thousands of non tech employees, Facebook it's in no good shape either, despite tens of thousands of them, basically the only thing still working as intended in those companies is the tech stack.

I guess the real question you're asking is "why non IT people are so bad at doing their job"?

Not my opinion though, I never said IT over other departments, I simply said nobody is able to explain what makes WhatsApp so special that a hundred people can run it while Twitter requires 75 times that and still doesn't work as well.

They are entirely different technological challenges.

ok, so this must be the hardest problem in the World, given that

- WhatsApp had 55 employees at the time of acquisition

- Twitter had 7,500 full-time employees at the end of October

But still, you can't compare apples to oranges.

right, because WhatsApp is a small company that makes very little money and has virtually no users and it mostly does not work nor scale...

We could all write that in a single weekend, if only we had no family to spend time with.

It's interesting how the prospective shifts when people are told "yeah, that's impressive per se, not very impressive compared to what the others are doing"

It's like discounting Sputnik 1 because the Russians did not employ an army of people selling ads, but just the people necessary to launch a satellite in orbit, which is actually the real achievement.

Anyway, from the news: Nearly 1200 software engineers left Twitter last week

Suddenly the Twitter engineering team sounds not so capable, which clearly is not the truth, the truth is that if you have hundreds of managers, you'll end up with hundreds of small teams competing to boost the ego of the manager, usually wasting thousands of man hours on miniscule returns (if not losses) while those power point slides will help someone else to get promoted for the new project that nobody uses.

Been there, done that, I don't know why a demographic so well versed in the dichotomies of the tech industry such us the users of HN is so baffled by the claim that 2,000 engineers for a single company that does what Twitter does is a complete waste of human potential.

Elon Musk is a person I would never work for and I think he's not even a good entrepreneur, but one thing he does right: he calls the shots and then executes them.

He said he would fire people and he did, many helped him by leaving on their own, which left Musk with the responsibility of proving he was right.

If Twitter will still be up and running in a year time, we can be sure that there were 1,200 engineer too many working there.

because, honestly, who really believes that the "influencers" will actually leave for the fediverse, where they'll have to work hard and compete with mere mortals, while they could keep cashing from advertisers to promote shit to their already established audience?

nobody believes that.

Also because the fact that Twitter will sell less ads in the next future doesn't mean that advertisers won't spend that money on Twitter, they will simply not pay Twitter, but the Twitter users. For them it's exactly the same thing, for Twitter celebrities it's a giant opportunity.

So twitter can afford to deliver those tweets with higher maximum latency than WhatsApp.

And it's scaling when you need to keep low latencies, that really kills you, at least in my experience.

Twitter’s latency stems from calculating what tweets should show on a given request. Even if you try to show tweets from 1 minute ago, it’s hard to cache that stuff using traditional systems because of the fan out. If an account with 50 million followers tweets, you need to update 50 million timelines. How do you do that quickly?

And you would have to define maximum latency, is it seconds, minutes, hours? because you can’t have the timelines be inconsistent for too long as that leads to some people getting news faster than others.

now you have to deliver them, exactly one time, to each recipient or groups of recipients, through different network topologies, with different challenges and vastly different bandwidth and latency guarantees, in exact order, while also keeping track of who is online e who's not, and distributing that information in real time, only to the edge nodes that should know about it, all of that fully E2E encrypted but stored (indefinitely?) in case the recipient is currently offline and unless that recipient blocked the sender.

let's agree that both companies solve hard problems and that it's not the technical difficulties that make the two companies sizes so different.

This is because you don't see the complexity. What you see as a Twitter user is a fraction of what's actually there.

You have to build a platform for ads. Not just serving ads, but allowing advertisers to prepare their collateral, preview them, get their results, and be billed. So that's an entire content and invoicing platform separate from your main feed.

And since your platform is all user generated content, you've got to build a moderation pipeline. A place for users to make reports, but also an interface for your content moderators to view content and make decisions. Oh, and while you're there you'd better build a portal for law enforcement to make data requests, along with your DMCA takedowns. Oh yeah, DMCA - that's another whole thing you've got to worry about.

Then the EU comes along and needs you to build something to support your GDPR obligations. Then India wants something similar, but only for its citizens. Your users also want verification, so better build that platform for securely verifying accounts and awarding checkmarks.

It snowballs. Was Twitter's engineering group bloated? Probably. Most large companies are. Could you run the whole Twitter tech stack as it exists today with a hundred people? Absolutely not.

Separately, some commenters here are flatly delusional about the effort to ship a site, android and ios apps, internal mod tools, help docs, support, and legal docs in 34 supported languages. Not to mention obeying laws in all the countries that implies.

Or image and video hosting! With recoding of videos, resizing of images, and the management of what is surely petabytes of images and videos with very high reliability! That is not a 1, 2, or 3 person job to do well.

Anyone who has used Twitter, have you seen any evidence they do this beyond extremely basic geographical targeting.

Like people keep listing off all this stuff when we’ve all used the site and can see if it does have a team working on it then they’re not doing it to the levels of their competitors.

https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data/twitter_inter...

>> "These are some of the interests matched to you based on your profile, activity, and the Topics you follow. These are used to personalize your experience across Twitter, including the ads you see. You can adjust your interests if something doesn’t look right. Any changes you make may take a little while to go into effect."

They're not good at identifying interests and making them targetable, but they try.

Making it globally available and legally compliant, that's where the next few thousand folks come in.

The people shouting loudly about how Twitter must have been so bloated are really just shouting their obvious inexperience working at global scales or their localized ambitions.

Could there be too many employees at Twitter? Sure. Most companies have dead weight. The number who were "extra" is probably not 9/10ths the employees though.

It takes an army of engineers to build a resilient architecture at Twitter's scale.

And why are we even talking about "keeping the lights on"? Elon is claiming he's going to build a better video platform than YouTube, complete with better tools and for creators, for crying out loud.

SpaceX is an interesting result, but it is starting to look more like a fluke than what we'd expect from him. Perhaps rocket scientists "get him" and understand the stakes better, after all, if you screw up a rocket you could die in the aftermath.

Tesla is certainly similar stakes -- except one mistake can kill every passenger on the road instead of your fellow employees. Twitter is basically 0-stakes, and is unlikely to take itself that seriously. If they screw up, maybe a bad government won't get overthrown somewhere, or trolls will take over the internet. But mostly, people will survive -- or rather, the outcomes are far more abstract.

He doesn't seem like a good fit for this kind of environment.

Likewise, bringing in Ad money would be a few more hundreds, because you need to chase leads in all countries.

Getting the Ads to work? That's tech and I'd be surprised if it was less than 100 people, too.

I subpoena telcos all the time. My sense is that the number is closer to 2 to 3 dozen.

Please tell us in detail about the Twitter stack.

Because I always find it fascinating how people think they can estimate the effort to maintain it whilst having next to no understanding what so ever of the tech stack.

1. A single person can run a mastodon instance in their spare time. Spinning up some containers for the app, a background worker and a database is quite simple.

2. Modern devops tooling makes it fairly trivial to spin up 10k instances of a container instead of 1, by just altering a number in a k8s manifest somewhere.

3. Ergo, a single person equipped with modern tooling (and sufficient funding) could spin up any number of mastodon instances.

4. Twitter is just a big mastodon instance.

5. Now that keeping everything up is sorted, add another 99 devs for feature development and you are done.

Now this is obviously faulty logic because points 3 and 4 are very false, but they look reasonable enough at first glance.

15 database admins

10 linux sys admins

5 kubernetes specialists

10 windows tech support

25 front end developers

15 back end developers w/ Scala

10 machine learning experts

Whether that makeup could or couldn't do it is a different question, or whether it would be a different mix; all of that is up for debate, but the 1/99 ratio is just one very specific, extreme, and laughable mix for anyone who has supported a system of any real size.

Creating a husk of an app that looks vaguely like Twitter and supports hundreds of users is a weekend project for anyone with a modicum of talent; building a platform that supports billions of users and is monetized well enough to support itself is an entirely different beast.

As though you can just add more database or add more servers like it's a startup using the cloud.

But please by all means educate us on which database you would pick to run Twitter.

These can make for a massive hairball of complexity that can swell the number of people needed to support it.

This reminds me of a talk I once saw by a Netflix SRE, who showed a crazy convoluted mess of a diagram with thousands of crisscrossing lines going everywhere, and him screaming "No one understands Netflix!!!"

Yes, using open source code built and maintained by 732 contributors: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/graphs/contributors

Source: Wikipedia pages for both

Internal sources only, but topics like regionalization, localization, bespoke caching implementations, hardware-level optimizations, content moderation, policy adherence (e.g. GDPR, CCPA), long-term monetization (especially if supporting advertisers as a direct customer), 3P support, public APIs, documentation, SRE (a fledgling product doesn't need 5 9s), analytics (internal and for advertisers and 3P partners) and for the most part, security, are non-exhaustive examples of things you can mostly ignore when your product supports 10M users that are unavoidable when your product supports half of the US, a good chunk of the rest of the world, and other large businesses that consume you at large business scale.

I'd definitely like to hear more about the scale differences. So far at best, you've accounted for one order of magnitude. How do you explain the second?

So increasing your user base by one order of magnitude requires increasing the number of employees by more than two orders of magnitude? Rate of employee acquisition should probably never outpace rate of user acquisition, so I think that's a pretty clear sign that something was off.

As for sales staff being good at selling themselves, agreed, so maybe Musk's ruthless firing spree will end up as a good thing. Maybe.

No, that just results in those businesses and brands leaving you, unless you can provide them a LARGE revenue stream that is impossible to get anywhere. A large brand will absolutely give up a little money just to spite you and your company for not treating them like god.

It was also pathetically unprofitable, and had serious problems with inappropiate child photos, gore etc.

Some of those problems require man power, there is no 10 man team who are very good at devops who can solve that.

And moderation requieres humans but also a big tech team regarding bots, known offenders, etc.

it's not exclusively a tech problem but in a tech company tons of those responsabilities will be handled, addressed and solved by product and tech teams. And on 10 people, no matter how smart, they got no chance

I have no reason to distrust her and can't see any reason for her to lie about it.

0: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-says-child-sexual-... 1: https://twitter.com/elizableu/status/1595109108608544768

Obviously it's "top priority"! Is there any other acceptable answer? This answer means nothing except that he saw the question.

The reason for distrust is that the Q people have been insisting that Trump was secretly engaged in an enormous battle with pedophile rings, and using the typical, constant, and normal arrests of pedophile rings as proof. Now, another claim of a right-wing hero bravely picking up the sword and vanquishing the forces of evil, but again, no evidence! No proof at all. We just have to take her word for it, eh?

Of course, she can't give out the hashtags and allow independent verification, yet somehow hordes of pedophiles already know these hashtags? (How are they publishing those to each other, and if they have such a channel, why aren't they using that instead of Twitter?) So who is she keeping the hashtags from then?

So I remain super skeptical.

the answer means nothing, yes, the supposed good action that triggered the question is the important thing. The only relevant part of the article is them claiming to have verified it, so it's Business Insider's word added to hers.

I'm not even going to touch the conspiracy theory madness, it's irrelevant, and the person in question has zero signs of being afflicted by it, her entire existence in the platform seem to have been focused on actually working against the issue.

Its also been pretty widely publicized twitter's issue with CP[0][1][2][3], and given how hastags are the way you find things in the platform it's natural that's the way they'd do it.

> Of course, she can't give out the hashtags and allow independent verification, yet somehow hordes of pedophiles already know these hashtags?

She is giving it out to journalists and apparently they are confirming it, it's not a tragedy that someone does not want to amplify possible child abuse, actually teaching even more pedophiles how to find it.

> How are they publishing those to each other, and if they have such a channel, why aren't they using that instead of Twitter?

Twitter is protected by its sheer scale, is huge making detection harder than dedicated sites, and is far far more stable, safe and accessible than some darknet website they'd have to run themselves on average.

> So who is she keeping the hashtags from then?

From the general public to not further humilliate the victims, from other pedophiles because its not some hivemind, the list goes on.

Not everything is about Trump, and you're falling for the same level of conspiracy if behind all this out of all this you see pizzagate Qanon.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-brands-blast-tw... [1]:https://nypost.com/2021/01/21/twitter-sued-for-allegedly-ref... [2]:https://www.theverge.com/23327809/twitter-onlyfans-child-sex... [3]:https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/child-sex-abuser-twitter

For me, such a story is totally meaningless. It conveys no information about reality either way. The chances of truth or falsehood are exactly equal.

We have different epistemologies.

> from other pedophiles because its not some hivemind

Did you think critically about this? If so, for how long?

How are the pedophiles teaching the sooper-seekrit hashtags to each other? Is in the manual "So You've Decided to Become a Pedophile" that they send to new members of the vast conspiracy?

The problem with these conspiracy theories is that any inspection of how they might actually operate, day to day in the real world, is always neglected and handwaved away.

The whole point of a hashtag is that they spread virally, or are obvious terms. The very idea of a secret hashtag is an oxymoron.

THEY could probably do it with 100 people, YOU cannot.

100 people is most likely within the ballpark for a group of people whose sole purpose is to write and maintain twitter's tech stack. Unfortunately, that is not NEARLY the sole purpose of most people in businesses and that adds all kinds of productivity hits.

What happens is that people like yourself become convinced that's the only way to operate.

"20 with cloud, 40 without. So much overlap between iOS, Android, and the web, three people can do all three. More for the backend." https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159371372367535718...

>Their moderation

Above I assumed their moderation team was probably larger than their engineering team, and mostly contractors. Thus I kept my estimate to the size of their engineering team.

Have you implemented a system which stores hundres of billions of pieces of media content and makes different slices of them immediately available to hundreds of millions of users?

Where’s the 1000s of engineers for Postgres? Most stuff that works is made by a handful of people. Look at io_uring it’s basically one guy at Facebook…

Not tens of thousands at any one organization supporting postgres and clickhouse.

No single organization needs even hundreds of people to support these apps. You just need a good architecture and a handful of dba's, developers, and sysadmins... maybe.. depending on your scale. At many smaller orgs you can probably get away with one.

You're comparing Postgres to Twitter?

If some of the people making comments like this actually work in tech, then yeah, maybe there is a lot of bloat to be cut.

https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/04/20/analyzing-postgres...

It provides a house for your clicks, then you sell the clicks from your house.

In twitters case I would recommend they use checkhouse which will help them monetize their checks. Tumblr is already way ahead of them.

I'm currently the first and sole architect on a product that was built by only devs. I really know why I exist.

That's how it couldn't prove the claim.

It's not like Twitter was bug free before. How many times it annoyingly refreshed the timeline while I was reading something, or when it shows notification that it failed to send the DM, and when you retry it says "you've already wrote this", or you open the reply dialog, but it freezes, has no send button at all, so you have to re-open it. All of this was happening to me pretty regularly long before Elon came along.

As we all know, just hiring more people is not necessarily the solution to every problem, and to me it seems it was exactly what Twitter tried to do in the past. Now they deconstructed it to the bare bones, which will clearly show what are the core problems and requirements. They basically turned Twitter back into a startup. And from that new starting point they can hire again to cover the needs as they arise. If they succeed it will be a huge success as they'll end up with far more optimal team (and huge savings), and of course, if they fail to catch up with problems it will be a huge failure. We'll see how well Musk can manage it...

Anyone thinking "huge success" is unrealistically optimistic, IMO.

It's going to be another MySpace/AOL/Bebo, added to the list of dumbest purchases ever.

And that's still going to be true if the point was to destroy the original community and replace it with a different political orientation.

It's amazing to me how many people following the Twitter saga, some familiar with or actually working in technology, thought that Twitter would crash within days of the engineers being fired. And because it didn't, the job cuts are justified.

Because they work for companies where the product would fail within days of them being fired themselves.

I worked at a company where everything hinged solely on one guy working from another country. When he left, loss of institutional knowledge took about three days to show real effects as things also came down crashing.

I worked hard to make _myself_ replaceable for when I left, it was a pretty good exercise, but me having that degree of freedom was symptomatic of the problems of the company.

The truth in retrospect is that it was my fault (and my upper leadership's) that I wasn't replaceable. I created a knowledge silo around myself since I wanted to move fast and figured I could prevent the team from being bogged down in complexity if I just handled it myself and while that worked in regards to delivering out-sized results for the available bandwidth, it also was a risk that materialized as described above. So while I do believe that everyone should be replaceable and it's their responsibility to be, it's not always the case and products can live and die by it.

That said you can replace people and build back that institutional knowledge -- both loss and gain take significant amount of time.

For the type of jobs at hand here, One of the things I learned is that nobody is essential. Even that person you think is essential.

Of course it could go either way but the jury is currently out. It’s entirely possible that severe company-impairing technical breakdowns are already in progress and unrecoverable.

Or maybe not.

With that said, there are differences between internal systems and something like Twitter on the public internet. I assume that Twitter is a system under constant attack. What happens when the next log4shell level vulnerability comes out?

The car analogy is amusing, but how much does it really hold up? Have we ever seen another major social media company drop this much of its staff in one go? I certainly can’t think of an example. I think we’re in somewhat uncharted waters here.

A driverless car won’t last long, we know that for a fact. I think it remains to be seen how long a bloatless twitter can last. I’m personally optimistic.

Company soft killed the product, everybody left, they didn't hire anyone to replace. We went from 20 engs to 3. Worst codebase ever made by ex FANGs hotshots who thought they understood something about system architecture. Very "clever" and complicated. Data consistency issues happening everyday, likely due to misuse of messagging queues. Chargebacks being ignored and mailed in physical letters every month. A couple of millions going through the platform every year.

My task was to run a team of mostly juniors maintaining and adding features to that mess.

I had no clue what that codebase was doing. We just left things as they were, fixing fires as they came. Nothing too bad happened. Slowly built a leaner replacement for some components. We simplified things over time and we even rebuilt some of the knowledge of the old platform, which helped with the daily outages.

The issues started happening not as often. Eventually. I moved on from that company, removing again a big chunk of knowledge. Over time I've heard tales of other people coming in and rebuilding that knowledge, over and over.

The platform is still standing.

I call these sort of folks (very) smart juniors. Probably can whip leetcode or whiteboard tests like few others (after some preparation). Then you let them roam wild on your product, because they're of course experts. Then some period passes, and/or they leave, and you can only cry. Complex hard-to-grok approaches to simple problems that have tons of caveats/edge cases, no documentation of work done and why it was done as it was, because they are oh-so-cool and such lowly tasks are for peasants.

Either they have no clue how long term sustainable company looks like or they don't care, in any case not a good fit.

These days I go in opposite direction as probably most here - FAANG type of company (or cargo-culted startup) is a big fat warning sign when hiring. Unless I would be working at some wannabe another FAANG startup, which I am not, I would sure as hell make sure the person can actually deliver long term improvements for everybody and not just upp their CV with another bleeding edge technology and move, leaving more damage than added value and making everything worse.

https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...

It's a tricky one, because on one hand it increase my trust that their system was built robustly, but at the same time the passage of time would increase the chance of unseen/unaddressed "wear an tear" (bot figurative and literal) that might be going unaddressed, or under-addressed. But we have no view into that.

We won't really know until they suffer a major problem whether or not they have enough staff yet to keep sufficient maintenance going that such an event doesn't cascade into something much worse and/or whether or not they will be able to recover from it in a reasonable amount of time.

Horrible systems can survive, but often they survive through sheer luck.

What happens if someone like Bytedance decides to launch a Twitter clone that does everything better?

Meta takes a lot of criticism for being Meta but you have to hand it to them, they've copied every other innovative social media feature that has shown up in competitors' products.

Does Twitter have enough staff to launch a major new feature?

The problem is that Twitter is now saddled with debt. It can't make investments in new products, and it likely can't even make investments in the sales staff needed to maintain advertiser relationships that pay 90% of its revenue. [1, 2]

That's exactly what happened to Toys R Us, which slid into liquidation due to the debt saddled on it by its private equity firm rather than a fundamental issue with its business.

In 2021, Twitter had a net loss of $221.4 million, and in 2020 they lost over $1 billion. Revenue was around $5 billion in 2021, about 90% from advertisers. [1]

The company (not Elon) is now loaded with $13 billion in debt. [2]

> Last year, Twitter’s interest expense was about $50 million. With the new debt taken on in the deal, that will now balloon to about $1 billion a year. Yet the company’s operations last year generated about $630 million in cash flow to meet its financial obligations. > > That means that Twitter is generating less money per year than what it owes its lenders. The company also does not appear to have a lot of extra cash on hand. While it had about $6 billion in cash before Mr. Musk’s buyout, a large portion of that probably went into the cost of closing the acquisition. > > That gives Mr. Musk little wiggle room, Mr. Pascarella said. “They are essentially going to take all the financial resources of the company and just pour it into servicing the debt,” he said.

I personally don't see how Twitter gets out of this without bankruptcy. I think Twitter can go the next 5 years without an infrastructure outage and still likely ends up bankrupt.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-elon-musks-twitter-faces-mo...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/technology/elon-musk-twit...

Take a look at Twitter's Income Statement from 2021: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TWTR/financials/

I think the income statement shows that it would be difficult for Twitter to find $2-3 billion of expenses to cut and still remain a competitive, functional company. You're talking about cutting total expenses by over 50%, including expenses that are not salary.

2021 total expenses of $4.8 billion on a revenue of $5 billion. $1.8 billion cost of revenue, $3 billion operating expense. Out of the operating expense, $1.175 billion is in Selling & Marketing Expense. $1.25 billion in R&D.

Let's say Twitter cuts R&D to $0, that's a $1.25 billion savings. How long can a social media company remain competitive putting $0 into R&D? Are there any examples of any software-adjacent company surviving that spends $0 on R&D?

If they cut SG&A, that will impact revenue negatively. Activities like marketing and sales have an ROI. You spend money to make money. Twitter was spending $600 million a year on SG&A in 2014 when they had less than half their current level of daily active users (DAUs). Twitter has a product, its daily active users. If they can't sell that product to its customer (advertisers) because it doesn't have enough sales staff to physically make the required phone calls (yes, they do that sort of thing with large advertisers), they risk entering the death spiral.

Cost of Revenue: I don't think this line item can be cut beyond a certain level. This is the direct cost of delivering the product. Anything that isn't employee salary can't be cut very easily. Twitter can't turn off servers and sell off data centers without impacting the product.

Twitter had more than 7,500 employees in 2021.

If they cut 80% of staff, that's 5,000 employees gone (and don't forget that those cut employees will still count as 1/4 of an employee for the next year due to the severance payment).

If each employee represents $300,000 in total expense (a very generous estimate), that's only $1.5 billion in savings, and for the first year the savings is only $825 million due to the severance payments.

Okay, maybe Twitter can raise revenue with Twitter Blue. They'll need to pick up a smidge over 15 million paid Verified users in order to cover the $1 billion interest expense. Twitter currently has 400,000 Verified users, ~240 million DAUs, so they need 6.25% of their global user base to purchase a subscription at $8/month. Out of Twitter's DAUs, you'll need to omit most users from countries that won't generally pay $8/month, like India, Brazil, and Indonesia. [3]

For reference, Spotify costs $1.46/month in India.

We could make a rough guess at this by assuming that the 155 million people in the US, Japan, and UK will pay $8/month for Twitter Blue, so you'd need close to 10% of the affluent user base paying for Twitter Blue.

For a benchmark, Discord makes almost all of its revenue from Nitro subscribers. In 2020 it had 14 million DAUs, with $130 million in annual revenue, which means with the $99/annual fee Discord had 1.3 million paid subscribers. In other words, about 10% of Discord users are paid subscribers. [1]

If Twitter can get the same subscriber rate with Blue, it'll reach $1 billion they need to pay off their loan interest, assuming Twitter Blue incurs no additional cost.

The problem is, it can't do that without that pesky R&D that we were talking about earlier. Discord is built around the concept that Nitro offers tangible benefits to paid membership. What features can Twitter build with a skeleton crew that will convince 10% of their users to pay for the service? Twitter Blue currently represents very basic functionality. [4]

I haven't even talked about the fact that I'm just talking interest payments for the debt, and the fact that Twitter wasn't profitable to begin with!

[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/discord-statistics/

[2] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-...

[4] https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-blue-featu...

This made me laugh. Twitter Blue will have to be great for people to pay. Out of all your numbers, I wonder how many of those 155M users in the US actually post anything that would find value in Blue? My guess is that we're seeing Pareto in action where 80% of the Twitter content comes from 20% of the users.

I heard an interesting take today from someone in the social space. Basically as soon as they heard the price paid for Twitter, they knew it was over. It's just too much debt to both get out from under and move the company in the right direction.

I've started to come around that maybe it is that simple. Musk saw the debt payment and just cut the most easily cuttable expense in the short term - people. Bankruptcy seems inevitable.

The leaked company communications are damning. Here's your brand new owner, richest guy in the world, implying the company might not survive another year or two, for a company that's been public, mature, and stable for years. It's completely insane.

Like I alluded to my comment, Discord's revenue story is essentially a best-case scenario type of benchmark. It's very unlikely that Twitter or anyone else in the social media space can replicate Discord's paid user share. Discord has been designing their product around a specific niche and optimizing for non-advertising revenue since inception. Twitter is designed for advertisers. It was never intended to be a paid product. They'll be lucky if 1% of their users bite.

A friend of mine tried to tell me that Elon had some type of new computing technology that would let them turn off most of their servers because they could fit all of the tweets in less space.

He blocked me after I told him he had confused Elon Musk with gzip.

But's not. Twitters product is ad inventory and their ad placement platform, and the engine driving engagement that boosts their ad inventory by reordering the timeline to keep people scrolling. Those are the hard parts.

"Just" delivering and storing tweets is easy. If you ignore the nasty business of the moderation. And most people have never even visited analytics.twitter.com and seen how much data is available to them about their own tweets, much less looked at ads.twitter.com and seen how precisely they can be targeted, and the precision Twitter offers in what kind of things you can pay for (engagement, follows, media views, clicks). And they've certainly not tried running ad campaigns in those categories, and seen how good Twitter are at showing your ads mostly to people doing what you're paying for.

Musk's actions makes me wonder how well he understood the complexity of Twitter too. Surely he must have looked at those other aspects of Twitter before he made his bid.

If you buy the narrative that 80% of employees were bloat and you can cut them without impacting top line, then it will work. If you think he's gutted essentially activities that will sink the ship, then it won't

It's also really hard to define 'last' though. Does 'last' mean just for up-time? Does it mean up-time without a major security incident while maintaining the same DAU? Does it mean business as usual on all fronts except number of employees? We know that Twitter already had some security issues with their God Mode admin panel.

I really wonder, for example, whether no angry ex-employees still have access to critical systems or data. This is usually pretty well regulated in large organizations like twitter, but since they've lost the majority of their staff, who knows when the people looking after that left?

I'm not convinced Twitter had a ton of bloat. (Most of the teams actually involved don't seem to think so). Just because Elon can't understand something, doesn't make that thing "bloat".

Twitter definitely had a few weird features that could be cut (the audio podcasting thing, for example). But calling most of Twitter microservices "bloat" is about as dumb as calling a cars Seatbelt and Airbag and Crumple Zones and that spare tire in the trunk "bloat" -- it's only "bloat" if you assume all people will always be perfect and no one will ever make a mistake anywhere, and nothing bad will ever happen.

Now overall I wouldn't say this is unusual in tech. I know plenty of people at other major tech companies, including other FAANGs, that say the exact same thing. But just because its appears to be a industry wide issue does not make it okay. It seems to me like that this would signify bloat. You only have enough work for your developers to be working half time.

We aren't even getting into the whole rest and vest. That has been discussed here many times: https://www.google.com/search?q=rest+and+vesters+paid+for+no...

No one is asking them to write code 40 hours a week. That is not realistic in coding. Most developers' jobs include a lot more than coding. They are saying they spend 15-20 hour a week on all job related work. Whether that is coding, code review, engineering, testing, research, documentation, meetings ect.

1. The employer pays for your time, not your expertise or output.

It'd only be stealing from the company if the company cares about hours worked over output. If we explore this concept in a theoretical sense it's clear that it doesn't hold up.

You have two candidates One candidate has 20+ years of experience doing the exact thing you want them doing. This candidate says they'll work for you for $100k/yr, and they'll work 10 hours a week, complete all the relevant tasks, and very very rarely cause catastrophic errors or user-impacting bugs.

The other candidate is fresh out of school and says they'll work 50 hours a week. They'll complete the same amount of work as the first candidate, but they'll write more bugs, there will be more planning mistakes causing feature delays, and there's a reasonable chance of catastrophic failure due to debugging-in-prod shenanigans. They are also asking for $100k/yr.

Which candidate is better? Under the assumption that employers pay for _time_, the second candidate is better, but I'd argue most companies should prefer the first candidate.

2. More hours worked produces more or higher quality output.

There's a reasonable amount of research and practical anecdotes that disputes this recently (see companies that have gone to 32-hour 4-day workweeks with no reduction in productivity). Enough that at least, this point is seriously in doubt.

3. Twitter maybe pays a senior engineer $400k/yr under the expectation of their output for 40 hours, and if they get less it wasn't a fair deal.

This is a reasonable take, but Twitter (like most for-profit companies) theoretically has a performance evaluation system, managers, deadlines, etc. They're paying an engineer some amount of money for some amount of output. If that engineer produces that amount of output, Twitter is happy, the engineer is happy, there's no issue. If the engineer working 20 hours or less per week caused them to not meet their goals, then Twitter has the right to fire that employee. They don't, so that implies that they're happy with the arrangement.

4. The employee's salary is equal to their expected output/profit

If the Labor Theory of Value is correct, then companies derive their profits almost exclusively from the labor of their employees.

In order for an employee to "steal" from a company by under-producing work, they would have to earn more in salary + benefits than they earn the company from their work.

This is necessarily not the case (on average) in a for-profit company, because if the company makes a profit and uses those profits to grow or to issue dividends to shareholders, they have earned "_surplus value_" from the employees' labor (on average).

---

In any case, it's not necessarily true that you're wrong, but your comment was fairly dismissive and confrontational. There are a _lot_ of cultural and individual assumptions baked into how we exchange salary/wages for labor, and it's worth examining those before firing off moral judgments at one another for not working hard enough or working too much or whatever.

1. In the US at least we know a majority of the workers are hourly. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/johncaplan/2021/03/12/americas-...) So I would absolutely argue those people are paid for their time. I understand the scenario you laid out, but in a big corporation I do not think they would look at it like you are. They would simple look at who is costing the most. Both are costing 100k/yr so compare their output. Anytime their are massive layoffs, lots of important people are let go. This is because often times the people doing the firing, do not know the employees. They are simply lines on a spreadsheet to them. So in your situation above after a mass firing often times the candidate fresh out of school will be the one left.

2. I personally completely agree with you here. From my experience there is absolutely a burn out point. However major corporations do not see it this way at all. They absolutely believe throwing hours at problems brings about solutions. It doesn't matter to them if its making existing employees work 4 extra hours a day or hiring a new employee. It matters which is cheaper in the end. If the position is salaried its cheaper to have existing employees work more. Look at what musk is asking at twitter. If it is hourly, often times its easier to part ways with the burned out workers and hiring new ones. Look at amazons turn over rates.

3. I agree that Twitter gets to decide the expected compensation for work. But musk now owns twitter. He gets to decided what twitter does and doesn't expect from its employees. He made it clear he is very unhappy with how the arrangement was, and what he expects in the future.

4. I would disagree with you here. An employee can steal from a company many ways. For example, an employee could steal the source code from some twitter service that is considered a company secret. In this case, Twitter is paying an employee x amount for y work. Musk has decided what y work is. If an employee decides to not fulfill y work, and still take there whole pay, how is that not a form of stealing? If they're hourly employees they call it timesheet fraud. The idea that an employee can only steal if the are paid more than they bring in is pretty interesting but I think we would be hard pressed to find a single major corporation that views it that way. I think close to 100% of them would go after an employee spending 50% of their time working on non work related tasks.

A vast majority of the assumptions are based on them being the norm in corporate America which twitter is apart of.

We're talking about IT employees. Unless someone was a contractor, most IT employees (white collar workers in general) are exempt, and not tracked or paid hourly.

I've told this example before, but my close friend and roommate did a year at Twitter in 2019. He was tasked with implementing versions of simple, relaxing JS games like Tetris which would be used by Twitter's moderation staff when they felt they had accumulated too much stress and needed a break. He was making $300k USD to copy an open-source version of Tetris to be played by paid staff! This was actually one of his more engaging projects, most days he said that he wrote 0 code at all. He got great reviews and was being encouraged by his manager to pursue the senior track; from what I could observe from the outside, there was a complete misalignment of goals at pretty much all levels.

Perhaps we disagree which is totally fine, but I think this type of allocation of eng resources absolutely counts as "bloat". You may see that work as comparable to a seatbelt or crumple zone, but I personally see it as more comparable to all the other expensive, useless nonsense which plagues modern cars.

1) Twitter could easily live without 10-30% staff and there was some bloat, positions to be cut

2) Believing that 90% of organization does nothing useful is insane.

Oh my god, this is incredible. Thank you for this story.

(1) = https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1594724749954863105?s=20&...

I think it's hard to just use time as a measure. If there are no security issues and they add no features, then things should run fine. Which, ironically points to how solid the team was that was fired.

Of course if Twitter not only limps along, but thrives in this new setup then I'll definitely change my opinion. Being in the US, this might end up the case while Twitter for the rest of the world falls apart.

Keep in mind, that I think Twitter was bloated and needed a big shakeup. Randomly dumping people and those who tried to correct me is not the heuristic I would have used.

With that said, Twitter still has 2 huge problems. No vision and saddled with an enormous amount of debt. Right now, Musk is taking the PE approach to cut and milk what's there. The problem is, there isn't much to milk.

Unless the company that creates it is owned by Elon ;)

This is an excellently apt analogy, in light of Twitter's new owner.

There is no active independent thought around this subject to be found. Only vitriol and bile.

It is shocking to see adults behave in this manner. I am not easily flustered but to me it as akin to witnessing a fat child throwing an epic tantrum laying flat on a mall floor - first time I encountered this was in the US, I had to go for a long walk after laughing my ass off, that country is experiencing a very unique cultural moment - because mommy didn't buy them an xbox.

Straight up Cartmenesque.

The job cuts are clearly justified because of the extremely toxic "work culture" / cult. The focus is quite clearly and exclusively on anything except actual technical work.

Nuking it from orbit by eventually replacing every single person who worked there and the entire tech stack is the only way to salvage it. Perhaps the process unfolded way too quickly, who knows, impossible to tell from the outside, but site is still up and working.

Are you not victim to this as well? Who is to say commenters or the media are an accurate representation of the majority?

I'm very curious in what way the stuff Elon is doing is not creating toxic work culture? >Minimum< 40 hour work week. 100% office work. Working into the night. Being fired for pushing back.

I'm not denying there may have been toxic work culture before, but I don't see how replacing it with another form of toxic work culture is to be celebrated.

Also, writing this:

> There is no active independent thought around this subject to be found. Only vitriol and bile.

And then spewing a bunch of vitriol and bile really distracts from any point you were trying to make:

> akin to witnessing a fat child throwing an epic tantrum laying flat on a mall floor

> Straight up Cartmenesque.

> clearly justified because of the extremely toxic "work culture" / cult

> because mommy didn't buy them an xbox

40 hours per week is also known as the standard work week. A bog standard j-o-b. Those are not reasonable examples of any sort of toxicity.

If these painfully regular employment terms are not competitive with other offers nobody is forced to pick twitter as their employer.

> but I don't see how replacing it with another form of toxic work culture is to be celebrated.

Walk on by. Find a company more suited to your temperament that will give you the pay and perks you think you deserve.

> And then spewing a bunch of vitriol and bile really distracts from any point you were trying to make

> because mommy didn't buy them an xbox

I assure you the child was quite literally stating xbox as the reason for his tantrum. Loudly. Whilst withering on the floor. I'm simply giving an eye witness account.

>>Minimum< 40 hour work week. 100% office work.

Those are the norm for most fulltime people in most jobs. You know that, right? Right?

To this I say: Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

Call it "toxic" if you wish, I find this whole thing hilarious. Especially this reply.

If as an employee you do not like the shake up, you always have the right to seek work other places. If you are indispensable (lottery/bus test) you may have some negotiating power but most of the time when up against a big corporation you are just SOL.

Now that the fed has been (rightfully)pulling the rug, people shouldn't be surprised if tech work goes back to the 60/70 hour grinds it was infamous for.

Breathtaking niceness going on from lovely stable people:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/meet-the-projectio...

  The projections were the work of Alan Marling, a Bay Area activist who declined to give his age or comment on his profession. He stood nearby — donning a Captain America face mask and a Sunrise Movement beanie — as passersby, many of whom were tech workers getting off work from nearby offices, stopped to take videos and photos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried

Seems to me the worst anyone's accused their corporate culture of is being heavy on pros and light on cons.

On the other hand. As an engineer, we tend to attach way too much self importance to our roles. Like if we're not there entering the "numbers" 4 6 15 16 24 32 every 108 minutes, the entire business is going to crumble. So... this is one I'm going to watch with a keen eye.

Never I have encountered an engineer that thought that.

"rigorous certifications" - just a degree... not so rigorous

> Never I have encountered an engineer that thought that.

there are people all up and down this page saying effectively just that. well i guess i'm assuming most of these people are engineers in the software sense of the word.

2. I should have looked at your comment history before my first response. I really would like to assume good intent. I don't think I'm going to find it.

When a manager comes on here and says "these workers think they're important but they're just shuffling numbers around" that deserves to be called out.

It also (a) increases the bus factor, [1] and (b) allows people to take vacations and time off without having to watch their phones like hawk.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

You'd be surprised, but that's not necessarily the case.

One of my friends was such a person in a shoe making company as a designer. Instead of giving her a raise, they fired her.

Cue them re-hiring her a month or two later after they found out the hard way that the less experience subordinate really couldn't handle the job of the two of them on their own.

It's all fun and lulz until it happens to you.

(I do also like the lottery version and use them basically interchangeably, though the shorthand is always "bus factor" for me)

For them, hearing "bus factor" may make it through the barrier and result in an involuntary creation of imagery in their head of someone getting gruesomely hit by a bus, and then the corresponding emotions they would feel (or simply just the emotions, without the imagery).

It's not about having enough people to do the work even if someone quits, it's about having enough people that know how to do something that we aren't losing chunks of knowledge if someone quits (or dies, or gets fired, or gets sick, or etc).

It doesn't make sense to me to treat people as part of a conduit bus that are interchangeable as long as there are enough people.

You focused mostly on additive bloat, there's also multiplicative bloat in the form of multiple teams focused on building separate versions of the same product to increase likelihood of success and empire building where leaders don't actually have a remit large enough to support the team size they have, but they have woven a narrative that defends the necessity nonetheless. Put everything together and teams are very easily 6x+ larger than they absolutely need to be to get a product into market.

What we are watching is a massive failure event right now and the question really is if there's enough time for twitter management to fill in the gaps before there's an outage.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-praise-of-maintenance/