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A comment on Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired. Parent comment

Re:Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned ou... by sangnoir on Friday December 02, 2022 @04:03PM (#33836879)
It's not hard to maintain a frozen codebase with a skeleton crew. This is practiced routinely at many organizations during end-of-year holidays when many people take PTO.

However, not many companies can survive with a permanent code-freeze, which is why companies don't just fire the "excess" folk who took PTO between December 25 and January 1, even though "things were fine" in that timeframe

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Re:Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned ou... by ilyt on Friday December 02, 2022 @04:27PM (#33837158)
Well muski boy probably fired many people that will be expensive to replace I heavily doubt most of developers in twitter work on its core functionality.

Many of them probably could be fired without much repercussions on company, the problem really is that there is no way in hell to judge that quickly and immediately start firing.

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Re:Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned ou... by ben_w on Sunday December 04, 2022 @04:02AM (#33851906)
The core functionality can be replaced by a single, albeit particularly skilled, final year university student project.

It's the load balancing, the advertising, the billing system, the >200 legal jurisdiction's worth of regulation [0], lobbying both for and against various regulations, auditing everything for legal disputes, the dynamic battle with scammers and spammers who want to figure out and get around the spam filters, and the security updates (some of which they need to write themselves and not just install on all their machines).

Probably some other stuff as well, but this is already like a Monty Python sketch.

[0] not just each nation, but e.g. all the different US states

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