Can someone please tell me why the press hate Twitter so much?! It seems that every Twitter story these days is spun so negatively...
Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
201–210 of 347 posts
Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not going to argue with you. 4000 employees is going to lead to a lot of inertia when doing development (even if only 10% of them were devs). However, the culture and process changes you need to institute in order to make such a change work is not trivial. Probably necessary for the future growth of the company, but could quite easily end up killing it in the process.
Not asking you to argue with me. I'd just be interested to see some substantiation for the claim that Twitter is overstaffed. It seems like that claim turns up a lot, and I'm sort of surprised that no one seems to have taken the time to explain why he thinks so.
In my case, it's merely a matter of having worked in large organisations before. The communication overhead is too large. If you have 400 programmers, that's at least 40 teams. If they are all working on the same product, then you have a significant problem with communication.
I once worked on a product with 5000 programmers. Average production was 1 line of code per day per programmer. While LOC may be a poor measure of productivity, at the 250 lines per year level, you've got a serious problem no matter how you look at it.
With those numbers, we were churning 1.25 million lines of code a year, which obviously could not be done without a very large team. But the cost is crippling. Not only that, but there is just no way in hell you are going to hire 5000 good programmers. Deadwood is going to be a massive problem.
What's the solution? Simplification, prioritisation and diversification. If you have to churn a million lines of code a year to say competitive, then it may be too late. Before it gets to that point you need to simplify your code base and throw away the things you don't need. You need to think very clearly about what makes money and what doesn't and you need to have clear priorities for how to downsize your engineering work to a point where the costs don't eat the profit. Finally, once you've got a handle on that, you can build your business by diversifying into separate business areas -- there is no problem churning a million lines of code if it is not all in one product. 10 products, churning 100K LOC each will be much more manageable. But probably you will be much more profitable than that if you manage 10 products each churning 20K LOC per year (on the assumption that a simpler product will be easier to monetise).
Again, LOC is not a reasonable metric, I'm only using it to indicate approximate scope in terms that most programmers can understand.
I don't know how many programmers Twitter has. Like I said, even if it is only 10% and the rest are ops, sales, etc I think they have got problems. TBH, I have trouble imagining Twitter utilising 3000+ sales people effectively as well, but that's not my area of expertise so I will keep my mouth shut.
Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right that it's already usable, but it could be even better. For example: 1) Making it easier to compose Tweetstorms (third-party services like WriteRack exist, but it would be nice to have official support). 2) Enhancing the display of Tweetstorms to make them easier to follow. Right now, the UI for viewing Tweet replies is the same regardless of who's replying to who. Twitter could make it so that a person's…
What makes tweetstorms better than just letting people write long tweets? Tweetstorms infuriate me because they totally dominate my feed and ensure that the same tweet keeps being shoved back to the top of the timeline. Much better to let people write long tweets and just hide the part >140 characters behind an expand button. So I can safely ignore the whole thing.
The pacing of tweetstorms is what makes them unique. It's something fairly unique - if I wanted "longer tweets" I would go to Medium.
The timeline thing is a real(ish) problem that can be solved with UI, in a similar way how they show conversations inline (automatically collapse them)
Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know I might sound like a vim user, but tweetstorms are honestly one of my favourite parts of twitter. Maybe there could be a better UI for authoring and displaying them, but there's something I really enjoy about reading a story 140 characters at a time.
Same. My thought for this, and I wanted to build a media industry specific alternative to Twitter using it, was to allow a tweet/story to have depth/paging. So, imagine your timeline is a regular, vertical stream. But any tweet could have paging on the horizontal axis, and you'd hit next or swipe to continue reading. Anyone browsing could read the opening tweet and ignore the rest if they wanted. Subsequent tweets wi…
> I wanted to build a media industry specific alternative to Twitter using it
Considering really the only people on Twitter is just Media people...
Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, they have one product but multiple VPs of product? Sounds like some trimming was in order.
It's just a title, and titles are free. If you want to see a lot of VPs, go visit your friendly neighborhood bank. :-)
Titles are not free. Titles convey job responsibilities and authority.
Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's just bizarre is that they were seriously considering censoring Donald Trump's account at one point and even announced it. From a purely business standpoint, that was a dumb idea even to propose. It makes you wonder about the rationality of management and if they view the company as some sort of hipster San Francisco hobby paid for by VCs and not as a profit making enterprise.
It's amazing from a business perspective, but at a certain point ethical questions arise. Should Twitter give a world shakingly powerful lier an unfiltered platform to the public? If he had to go through the press, everything he said would be filtered by editors and fact checkers. Incredible business opportunity, but frankly, the fate of the world is in part being determined by Twitter's granting him a platform. I ca…
> Should Twitter give a world shakingly powerful lier an unfiltered platform to the public?
All Politicians lie. Twitter is not in the business of being a fact checker.
Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before someone comments noting that the 1st amendment only restricts government and is not binding on twitter: please note that free speech is a valuable community principle for the same reasons it is a valuable legal principle. The "marketplace of ideas" is very real and very valuable and ought not be censored. Moreover, it is very hard to consider social networks in this day and age to be acting as anything other t…
On the other hand, it's perfectly reasonable to remove some disruptive individual from a lecture (think someone repeatedly shouting the name of a soda in order to disrupt the lecture, not an invited speaker). This is the same sort of removal of ideas from the marketplace that you are talking about, it's just probably not one you want to use as a test for what you have articulated.
There is a clear difference in these two examples. Trump tweeting does directly interfere with other Twitter users use of the platform while someone yelling at a lecture does.
Twitter's attempts to "police" its users has been both a failure and damaged the reputation of the platform.
Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just a title, and titles are free. If you want to see a lot of VPs, go visit your friendly neighborhood bank. :-)
Titles are not free. Titles convey job responsibilities and authority.
Honarary academic checking in - everything about my title is free.
Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
#209Twitter can make money, all it has to do is reduce its operational costs first. Then launch new products to grow. Twitter isn't going to become the new ad-sense or Facebook if it isn't a platform at first place. And you don't become a platform if your product isn't relevant to a lot of people. People use Google for search. People use Facebook to connect with friends and family. Who needs a Twitter account aside from…
What twitter SHOULD have done, and should probably re-consider, is leave the API open , but charge a fee to utilize it at scale. Let startups come up with creative new uses for your platform, and if they get traction - acquire them. You print money and find an easy target for growth. Twitter's problem is their continued refusal to recognize themselves as a platform. It's probably too late at this point, but I don't t…
Similar to aws? micro-pricing, or some free level? paying, say, 1c per 100 tweets for my app(s) would probably be doable. Or perhaps giving more metrics for paid accounts, or prioritized delivery?
Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with SapphireSun but Twitter isn't the gov't. https://xkcd.com/1357/
To be honest, I'm not sure where I stand on this issue, but it does seem like real damage might be done. I'm frankly worried about him starting a nuclear war. Most of our principles presuppose that the world won't end if we do something stupid. I'm not sure that assumption is valid in this case. EDIT: In nearly every other case, I am very pro-free speech. It 's an indicator of how shocking this is that I'm rethinking…
So you thing censorship is the answer to your irrational fears?
Thank god we don't live in the 17th century or you would be burning people at the stake for the same reasons.