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What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

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Re: What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

#11

Post by tzs »

ck2 wrote: post #4

How can over 100 people be needed for basically a scaled blog system that consists only of 140 character titles (not even any article content) and RSS feeds? It doesn't even have a search feature (past the previous week) or html, or tags, etc. Doesn't WordPress.com do it with like a dozen people and their system is way, way, way more complex? update: no, wait, in December 2010 they announced it's over 350 people now…

Handling on average something like 76000 status updates per second (much higher when something interesting happens in the world), each of which must quickly become available to anywhere from 1 to a million clients.

Wordpress.com is trivial compared to Twitter.

Re: What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

#12

Post by ck2 »

tzs wrote: post #11
ck2 wrote: post #4

How can over 100 people be needed for basically a scaled blog system that consists only of 140 character titles (not even any article content) and RSS feeds? It doesn't even have a search feature (past the previous week) or html, or tags, etc. Doesn't WordPress.com do it with like a dozen people and their system is way, way, way more complex? update: no, wait, in December 2010 they announced it's over 350 people now…

Handling on average something like 76000 status updates per second (much higher when something interesting happens in the world), each of which must quickly become available to anywhere from 1 to a million clients. Wordpress.com is trivial compared to Twitter.

Yes but that's handled by hardware, not by people, and I am sure only a few critical coders handle the software performace.

WordPress.com is not as trivial as you might think http://en.wordpress.com/stats/

Certainly it's just a matter of scaling once you hit a certain level of volume, you just have to be able to bring more servers online into the grid.

Scaling from 10,000 users to 1 million is probably very hard.

Scaling from 1 million to 100 million, well you better have a pattern down that works with easy hardware replication (like google does).

Re: What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

#13

Post by BenSchaechter »

scarmig wrote: post #10
ck2 wrote: post #4

How can over 100 people be needed for basically a scaled blog system that consists only of 140 character titles (not even any article content) and RSS feeds? It doesn't even have a search feature (past the previous week) or html, or tags, etc. Doesn't WordPress.com do it with like a dozen people and their system is way, way, way more complex? update: no, wait, in December 2010 they announced it's over 350 people now…

Quora to the rescue: http://www.quora.com/Twitter-Inc-company/Why-does-Twitter-ne...

Huzzah, I asked this question!

Re: What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

#14

Post by phaedrus »

My "new hire" treatment as government contractor was so bad I almost quit. Even though it's a huge organization there's no process at all in place; you're just thrown to the wolves. Basic things like where and how to get my security badge and car tags were not covered. I was not given any input about what was expected of me, but I found out about things I was supposed to do only when I was getting yelled at for not having them done. Everyone I work with are of the baby boomer generation, while I am a millennial, and instead of mentoring me they excluded me. Often I would get in trouble for missing meetings because the location of the meeting was spread by word of mouth but no one would come by and tell me. My first project was to port some code written by a much older engineer, but this engineer believed that he had job security if he were the only one who knew the system. Our boss told him "You WILL let him shadow you and read your code," and he shot back, "He will NOT shadow me and he will not see my code!" For the first few weeks, the only copy I had of the code I was supposed to port, I got from snooping in his trash when he threw away a CD (old hacker trick :) ).

Things got better eventually but it was definitely the worst way to treat a new hire.

Re: What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

#15

Post by ganjianwei »

ck2 wrote: post #9
shaunxcode wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I initially upvoted you because I agree - it is mind boggling but really I think the reality is that scaling at levels like that is a much bigger job/problem than you/I can imagine. Also I doubt all of the people are technical?

I just have to start wondering when it's over 100 though and now they are at 350. They don't have an ad sales force right? They don't have a billing department right? Maybe they have housekeeping and food prep people included in that 350? I honestly don't know and my instinct could be very wrong, but 350 seems crazy high.

They do have an ad sales force. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/new-hires-at-twitte...

Re: What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

#17

Post by ck2 »

scarmig wrote: post #10
ck2 wrote: post #4

How can over 100 people be needed for basically a scaled blog system that consists only of 140 character titles (not even any article content) and RSS feeds? It doesn't even have a search feature (past the previous week) or html, or tags, etc. Doesn't WordPress.com do it with like a dozen people and their system is way, way, way more complex? update: no, wait, in December 2010 they announced it's over 350 people now…

Quora to the rescue: http://www.quora.com/Twitter-Inc-company/Why-does-Twitter-ne...

Wow, very nice find. I took a stab at the question via Google but gave up.

I also discovered they have their own (but singular) datacenter:

http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/07/room-to-grow-twitter-...

But they are planning on adding more, which leads me to believe maybe that's what some of the new hires are for.

Re: What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

#18

Post by benologist »

tzs wrote: post #11
ck2 wrote: post #4

How can over 100 people be needed for basically a scaled blog system that consists only of 140 character titles (not even any article content) and RSS feeds? It doesn't even have a search feature (past the previous week) or html, or tags, etc. Doesn't WordPress.com do it with like a dozen people and their system is way, way, way more complex? update: no, wait, in December 2010 they announced it's over 350 people now…

Handling on average something like 76000 status updates per second (much higher when something interesting happens in the world), each of which must quickly become available to anywhere from 1 to a million clients. Wordpress.com is trivial compared to Twitter.

You're an order of magnitude past their peak load - New Years Eve they set a new record of almost 7000/second.

http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/01/06/new-years-eve-set-a...

I don't believe Twitter is trivial, but I think they're perceived as more complex than they are - WordPress + Reddit + Heroku only have like 10% that number combined. Apples to oranges, but those 3 companies would be doing more everythings per second than Twitter when you combine them.

Re: What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

#19

Post by [deleted] »

ck2 wrote: post #4

How can over 100 people be needed for basically a scaled blog system that consists only of 140 character titles (not even any article content) and RSS feeds? It doesn't even have a search feature (past the previous week) or html, or tags, etc. Doesn't WordPress.com do it with like a dozen people and their system is way, way, way more complex? update: no, wait, in December 2010 they announced it's over 350 people now…

[deleted]

Re: What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

#20

Post by benologist »

noahlt wrote: post #6
ck2 wrote: post #4

How can over 100 people be needed for basically a scaled blog system that consists only of 140 character titles (not even any article content) and RSS feeds? It doesn't even have a search feature (past the previous week) or html, or tags, etc. Doesn't WordPress.com do it with like a dozen people and their system is way, way, way more complex? update: no, wait, in December 2010 they announced it's over 350 people now…

iPhone, Android, and Mac clients. Maintaining as well as improving the web interface and the API. Lots more scaling - people check Twitter way more than they do Wordpress-hosted blogs. I'm sure there's more, this is just what came off the top of my head.

Wasn't their iPhone stuff a single guy who had a nice/leading client they bought last year?
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