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Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

nytimes.com

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Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#341

Post by whywhywhywhy »

blackaspen wrote: post #24
slg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Twitter ever really about tech excellence? My perspective as an outsider who doesn't live or work in Silicon Valley, it always seemed more of a communications and media company founded on a tech backbone. Beyond their early scaling problems, which they spent a long, long time fighting, what really exciting tech has emerged from Twitter? Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook all have much more impressive technology…

Twitter's Github: https://github.com/twitter Apache Aurora, Bootstrap, Storm, Heron, Pants, ThriftMux, DistributedLog, Apache Cotton, Iago, just to name a few.

Tired of hearing devs reel off these projects like they actually matter. None of that is user facing, none of that is worth the thousands of employees.

Stop looking at everything with dev eyes.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#342

Post by whywhywhywhy »

usaphp wrote: post #52

While it's a topic about twitter I'd like to ask a question that always puzzles me. Twitter has 3900+ employees and good portion of those are developers, I just don't understand how can such a basic product that almost never pushes any updates or radical changes/improvements require so many employees. What the hell are they doing except for burning investors cash? Just curious...

Someone will reply to this reeling off things like bootstrap etc as if they actually matter and justify the millions in high expense developers

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#343

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

cderwin wrote: post #236
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should there be an absolute right to speech, however, especially when it can be used to, for example, silence other people? This is something that countries differ on. The US's notion of near-absolute free speech is rather unusual.

First off, it's not practical to ban all speech supporting censorship, because then all speech supporting that specific policy (including your own comment) would also have to be banned. I'm not aware of other countries suppressing speech that is intended to censor others, though I am aware that countries like France criminally censor anti-semitic remarks such as holocaust denial. Is this what you mean? I've never hea…

> Speech also cannot cause direct harm

Can it not? It can be used to humiliate people to the point of suicide. It can be used to target someone for violence. In the case of people with photosensitive epilepsy, particular visuals could kill them.

Even if the harm in some of these is “indirect”, it's not less problematic.

Another issue is the Overton window.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#344

Post by ulfw »

mathattack wrote: post #332
tyingq wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of banks, a VP title usually means "company officer", and usually comes with perks and legal changes that do cost something.

It's very company dependent. 2 data points from other industries, based on LinkedIn: 1) Ogilvy & Mather: 7,289 employees, 188 with Vice President in the title. 2) Johnson & Johnson: 63,072 employees, 1,154 with Vice President in the title. 3) Microsoft: 129,445 employees, 2,514 with Vice President in the title. I think Vice President doesn't mean as much as it used to. :-)

I am not sure what you are trying to say. The ratios seem quite well aligned. 1) One VP for every 39 employees 2) One VP for every 54 employees 3) One VP for every 51 employees

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#345

Post by ulfw »

balls187 wrote: post #327
wattt wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took them 6 weeks to change the star button into a heart, which nobody wanted because we don't "like" all the things we save for later. Twitter has been going in the wrong direction all year.

They changed "moments" to "explore" but thankfully changed it back.

Goes to show that their product leadership has no clue what they are doing

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#346

Post by BinaryIdiot »

metaphorm wrote: post #325
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #34

I'm sure it's simply arm chair quarter backing but I feel like Twitter could be turned around and I think almost anyone could do it as long as they can force them to take action and quickly. Honestly I feel like I shouldn't even post this because it's half on topic and half off topic. But I was thinking about some ideas I think Twitter should do and, well, screw it I'm curious to see what the HN community thinks of a…

better question is whether or not Twitter _should_ be turned around. it seems like at this point it's a second rate advertising platform that encourages abuse and degeneration of public discourse.

I think it should. It's such a useful tool for quick communication of real time events. It's hard to imagine anything replacing it anytime soon and it does have a significant amount of users, even if it isn't growing much if at all.

You have fair points but I think there are redeeming qualities :)

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#347

Post by mathattack »

ulfw wrote: post #344
mathattack wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very company dependent. 2 data points from other industries, based on LinkedIn: 1) Ogilvy & Mather: 7,289 employees, 188 with Vice President in the title. 2) Johnson & Johnson: 63,072 employees, 1,154 with Vice President in the title. 3) Microsoft: 129,445 employees, 2,514 with Vice President in the title. I think Vice President doesn't mean as much as it used to. :-)

I am not sure what you are trying to say. The ratios seem quite well aligned. 1) One VP for every 39 employees 2) One VP for every 54 employees 3) One VP for every 51 employees

Yes - that this isn't an elite group of "Top 10 execs" at a company. That it's reasonable for Twitter to have several VPs of Product.
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