Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE

Post by midoridensha » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 5:41 AM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #196

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #164

Twitter is a lot of drama, but ultimately this is a common private equity play: 1) take private 2) fire/layoff until things break, patch up / rehire with cheaper labor. Repeat as necessary 3) spit shine/repackage what's left with a theoretically more appealing balance sheet. 4) resell to another sucker...uh, buyer, or take public again. Fundamentally Musk bought 44 billion for 5 billion of annual revenue, and presuma…

There are a few key differences. PE tries not to massively overpay, it'll put more effort into targeted layoffs, and it'll maintain enough of a "business as usual" posture to not scare away advertisers. Edit: they also put in a CEO whose full-time job is being CEO of that company. But yes, this is very bad execution of the PE playbook.

Post by googlryas » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 5:42 AM UTC

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #131

swellguy wrote: post #34

I think the real question is: Twitter grew 3x on the headcount front with a flat stock price over the course of less than 5 years. What exactly where these thousands of employees actually doing and why did the previous CEO think what they were doing was worth hiring them for? That's just basic accountability from a stock holder or employee perspective. That's apparently a ton of money being wasted on nothing at all.

> Twitter grew 3x on the headcount front There were multiple executives making $10m/yr+ There were board members There were shareholders Why did all of them not stop this headcount increase if it's as easily reduced as "too much headcount bad, smaller headcount good"? These are paid professionals who are supposedly wealthy, good at their jobs, smart, informed, etc. How can us commenters on HackerNews sit from our arm…

Post by miked85 » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 5:43 AM UTC

libraryofbabel wrote: post #178

fenomas wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the analogy here is that the new boss rolled in and sold all the fire extinguishers. That by itself doesn't set the building on fire - it doesn't even increase the chances of a fire occurring on any given day. But when one does...

Every SRE knows that the leading cause of outages by far is someone making a change to the system. Twitter isn’t shipping many new features right now or even doing much maintenance. But eventually they will have to. So the analogy becomes, the new boss sold all the fire extinguishers and also placed a short temporary ban on cooking in the building . But eventually people are going to start turning on stoves again… an…

Post by edmundsauto » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 5:44 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #165

ulkesh wrote: post #27

All this does is point out that smart people worked at Twitter who may now no longer work there, whether on their own accord, or due to Elon’s bulldogging tactics. Elon thinks he knows what he’s doing, but what he is going to be left with are people who are willing to work hard by his standards, but not necessarily smart. The simple truth is Elon knows nothing about the actual work involved in tech. He knows words or…

America is such a great country that a random person can just fecklessly blunder into creating a revolutionary electric car company and cluelessly blunder into creating a rocket company that is the envy of the world.

Post by postalrat » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 5:45 AM UTC

hairofadog wrote: post #149

throwawaylinux wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's pretty hilarious. It has caught the ire of a lot of furious unhinged puritans too, which has actually been the funniest thing about it for me.

It doesn’t bother me because it’s lascivious, it bothers me because it’s the comedy equivalent of fart noises. It was one thing when he was just a user of Twitter, but now he’s in charge, and it seems like a tone is being set that’s not really the vibe I’m into. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.