I think gutting 80% of your workforce and showing that Twitter will continue running as a site is a pretty incredible POC. I don't know if you can separate the chaos based on erratic decision making and Musk personality. But I imagine some tech execs running successful simple products with huge eng head count behind it looks at this and thinks that an engineering product doesn't necessarily need thousands of engineers. I think the next few years you'll see a huge reduction in head count across the board. And on top of that, the amount of change and experimentation (some or most of it bad) can continue with a much lower headcount.
> We all are seeing this unfold and these posts are shorthand ways of calling this out
HN isn't a place to vote your sentiment like a popularity contest. It's a place for discussion. So if you post the equivalent of "space man bad", and someone does believe, yes, space man is bad, he shouldn't necessarily upvote it. It's just low quality low information post
Twitter may have had some bloat, but it also had excellent SREs and solid reliability engineering. Nobody who knew about that expected it to collapse overnight.
But serious failures will happen, as the graceful degradation turns into not-so-graceful outages, new features break things in unexpected ways, and the remaining infra staff burn out. It’s just a matter of time.
I'm reminded of corporate raider Carl Ichan firing 12 floors at of people after spending some time and not being able to figure out what they do. The company was ACM (manufacturing railcars), about 30 years ago. Turns out those 12 floors of people were actually costing jobs in other place just to support them. Well he fired all 12 floors and nothing changed.
And yet its on the path to bankruptcy because of years of poor management and failure to capitalize on its value to those brands.