From what I recall from various blog posts by Twitter staff over the years, Twitter is incredibly lean and terse, and does one thing well: micro blogging. It gets into trouble when serving long form video, which Musk is trying to change with 30min / longer videos or otherwise trying to provide rich media at scale, which is a hard problem. They can throw CDNs at the problem, but that gets expensive, fast, not to mention Twitter video content is compressed almost to the point of being unwatchable. And as for increasing the character count: I welcome that, but rich media is the real problem, not longform text.
Why Hasn't Twitter Crashed Yet?
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Re: Why Hasn't Twitter Crashed Yet?
#12Because 80% of the company was cruft. As it is in most large orgs.
The problem is always - which 80% to cut. If Elon has some magic formula to determine that that all other companies missed, he's going to be a trillionaire.
Re: Why Hasn't Twitter Crashed Yet?
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, Pareto distribution.
You've got to be careful what conclusions you draw from that. It's not easy to tell which people are really pulling their weight, particularly when you have people in operations who are doing things that are essential but not flashy and people in development and marketing who are doing things that are flashy but not essential. When there are mass layoffs often the best people jump ship early figuring they'll have an…
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Re: Why Hasn't Twitter Crashed Yet?
#14Same reason there’s a code freeze around Christmas. Fewer changes means fewer chances to mess things up.
If you fire 80% of the operations staff you better fire 80% of the eng staff too.
As changes get made and released I expect to see some more outages.
Also good staff made the plans and laid the groundwork for resiliency. That work continues to provide benefits after they’ve gone.
Re: Why Hasn't Twitter Crashed Yet?
#15Re: Why Hasn't Twitter Crashed Yet?
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, Pareto distribution.
You've got to be careful what conclusions you draw from that. It's not easy to tell which people are really pulling their weight, particularly when you have people in operations who are doing things that are essential but not flashy and people in development and marketing who are doing things that are flashy but not essential. When there are mass layoffs often the best people jump ship early figuring they'll have an…
> When there are mass layoffs often the best people jump ship early figuring they'll have an easy time getting work elsewhere and an even easier time if they are the first to go. Some of the people who stay are the people who don't feel they have a choice.
Indeed, Dead Sea Effect.
Re: Why Hasn't Twitter Crashed Yet?
#17Failure is proportional to change. A growing company is frequently changing. A company that launches new features is changing. A company trying to fix architecture is changing. The large work forces a lot of valley companies have is built around and justified by this growth/change. The change that twitter will likely experience now is machine failure (3/1000 a day probably), hard drive expiration, potentially databas…
The engineers aren't "coerced" by H1B regulation. They took the job and accepted the visa understanding that their ability to work in the US legally was contingent on their providing services to a particular employer. They were free not to enter into the agreement in the first place.
Re: Why Hasn't Twitter Crashed Yet?
#18Failure is proportional to change. A growing company is frequently changing. A company that launches new features is changing. A company trying to fix architecture is changing. The large work forces a lot of valley companies have is built around and justified by this growth/change. The change that twitter will likely experience now is machine failure (3/1000 a day probably), hard drive expiration, potentially databas…
> The difference between a good engineer and a bad engineer is their `complexity to result` ratio. Good engineers can create simple solutions, while bad engineers create complex solutions, even though both might produce the same end result.
No serious engineer likes complexity for the sake of complexity. This may only apply to juniors practicing RDD (Resume-Driven Development).
Although there are times when a simple solution is not obvious even to the seniors, but these are generally very rare cases.