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

matthewtejo.substack.com

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

#31

Post by yieldcrv »

acdha wrote: post #16
yieldcrv wrote: post #6

I don't think it's that crazy. Private Equity and Wall Street doesn't have pressure for resilience, it has pressure for churn. As long as revenue and spending... exists... things are fine. Ideally they are numbers that grow. This doesn't lend itself to clearing out a development backlog, or engineers doing the most important things, it lends itself to rapid iteration and justifications for the iterations. So now that…

The problem is that it’s run by someone who overpaid badly and needs to come up with significantly more money to pay for the debt he saddled the company with, and then his actions seriously disrupted ad revenue. That puts him more in the PE playbook of cutting costs as deeply as possible even at the extent of long-term growth. Unlike his other companies there isn’t strong government support to drive business for Twit…

He's going to sell Tesla shares to pay off his debts, he's knocked off $4 billion already, he'll be able to keep doing that, make offers to buyout stakes of Twitter from people that really don't want to be involved in this shit show. Twitter will operate at lower costs, and also not be profitable for him given current information. That's financially fine.

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

#32

Post by kfrzcode »

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…

[flagged]

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

#33

Post by philistine »

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…

And Twitter's problem are nowhere near technological. The site needed to make more money, not reengineer the whole thing while advertisers are fleeing because Trump is back on on a whim!

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

#34

Post by swellguy »

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.

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

#35

Post by smegsicle »

irrational wrote: post #12

Very interesting article. But the constant misuse of “to” for “too” kept throwing me out of reading mode. I wonder why my brain does that instead of reading past it since I know what is actually meant.

> "to many" - 5 matches

he did get it right one time though

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

#37

Post by mtejo »

cloudking wrote: post #4
mtejo wrote: post #2

Hey, sorry for the new account, i just like to try my best to keep my online identity separate. this for better or for worse has my real name on it. Hope this is interesting!

Nice work! Does Twitter runs their own DCs or hosted somewhere else?

Thanks! Yeah the other guy is right

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

#38

Post by Robotbeat »

colesantiago wrote: post #15
danielodievich wrote: post #3

Excellent article. However!, software, like everything, is subject to laws of physics. Entropy always wins in the end. No matter how good the original engineering and planning, without maintenance it will all fall apart soon enough.

> Entropy always wins in the end. No matter how good the original engineering and planning, without maintenance it will all fall apart soon enough. This seems to be more true of Mastodon than Twitter. I can't imagine any self hosted Mastodon instance staying up longer than twitter.

I found it really interesting that one of the main Iceland instances is being run on a Raspberry Pi out of some student's living room in Sweden. Over 500 users at the moment. https://types.pl/@tritlo/109383888427885539

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

#40

Post by mtejo »

smegsicle wrote: post #35
irrational wrote: post #12

Very interesting article. But the constant misuse of “to” for “too” kept throwing me out of reading mode. I wonder why my brain does that instead of reading past it since I know what is actually meant.

> "to many" - 5 matches he did get it right one time though

haha I'll go fix that. sorry :(
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