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Re: Twitter was down

#401

Post by Aperocky »

popularrecluse wrote: post #37

“I would expect to start seeing significant public-facing problems with the technology within six months,” he says. “And I feel like that’s a generous estimate.” https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...

A certain percentage of engineers have to keep the lights on. It's usually around 10%-40%, depending on staffing levels and engineering quality.

But there's one more gotcha, a company can't just keep 10% - 40% and expect the service to still run, because it's rotating and oncalls can always reach out to other people on the team.

Twitter not only fired indiscriminately, with perverse pattern (more capable to find another job leave first), and didn't even keep the minimum to keep the lights on.

From a software engineering perspective, it's doomed to fail, maybe it can retract to a smaller footprint (abandoning features/stacks) and still work, but that would also be pretty hard. That, and I don't think anyone not desperate will apply for a job there in the foreseeable future.

Re: Twitter was down

#402

Post by favorited »

echelon wrote: post #380
rcme wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people are on H1Bs that don't have the luxury of quitting without solid work lined up. It's also not a great time to be looking for a job.

Jack Dorsey ought to raise a round (not that he needs it) and hire the remaining engineers for BlueSky.

The (very) few I know personally aren't particularly interested in working for him again, and feel like he sold them out.

Re: Twitter was down

#404

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

riffraff wrote: post #243
O__________O wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s not pretend like Twitter has never had downtime, they literally popularized the “Fail Whale” meme way before Elon was around: - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-s...

The fail whale was very common during a time of sustained growth when Twitter did not have the infrastructure it has today, but it all but disappeared in recent time. The fact that things start to fail after that infrastructure has been put on place and running find for a while is noteworthy.

The fail whale was also a very specific case - I have no idea what was going on in the backend, but from a user perspective it was all "twitter's not available". Now we have inconsistent behaviour and countless small bugs that detract from the overall experience.

Re: Twitter was down

#405

Post by Marazan »

bonsaibilly wrote: post #305
stronglikedan wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple and short lived glitch does not a #3 make. Twitter is better than ever now. Elon did good.

We're just pretending it doesn't now take the better part of 10 seconds for twitter.com to load now? That response times have gotten perceivably, measurably worse over the last few months? Or that these glitches aren't now a weekly occurrence?

Apparently there is literally a 5 second pause on load in the javascript.

Re: Twitter was down

#406

Post by globalreset »

idlewords wrote: post #124

Twitter went down constantly in its early years and did fine; as long as errors get fixed, I don't see why that dynamic would spell doom for Twitter now. There are a lot of people for whom the idea that Twitter can get along without most of its former headcount is a bitter pill to swallow, but that doesn't make it untrue. One reason the site was stable pre-Musk is that no one made any changes to it. For better or wor…

Yeap. Most people commenting here are just bitter and are looking for any excuse to confirm their biases.

From a business perspective does it matter that Twitter is down for a moment? It's not a plane or medical machine. It's not blocking anyone from doing anything useful. Everyone are just going to check & post when it is up again.

It also doesn't mean that Twitter employees have a bad work experience like most here assume. Maybe they've got a permission to iterate fast, even if it risks bringing things down, and everyone are having a jolly good time, skipping on the boring chores ensuring everything will go smoothly usually takes.

Re: Twitter was down

#407

Post by DrewADesign »

echelon wrote: post #373
shadowgovt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sending best of luck to the engineers. ... mostly around the hope they can jump ship before the Titanic pulls them under.

Why would you stay at Twitter? Even if you believe in the platform and the mission, this has to be one of the most stressful work environments in tech right now. The only cases I can think of for staying: - Unfortunate H-1Bs tied to the job. (We really need to make it easier for these folks to switch jobs and keep their visa!) - A feeling one needs the job and can't easily get work elsewhere. Perhaps living paycheck…

Maybe folks early in their career. It's not like the cachet has totally dissolved because they did employ a lot of top notch people. Also, when they're interviewing for their next job, even if your departure was super contentious, Twitter is a great scapegoat that nobody will question.

"It says here you were terminated for breaking into a vending machine in the lobby and distributing snacks to your colleagues while dressed as Robinhood."

"Yeah it was an act of protest because management threatened to take away our lunch breaks."

"Well... it... sounds plausible I guess."

Re: Twitter was down

#408

Post by koumou92 »

paxys wrote: post #151

There were many different hypotheses on the outcome of Elon firing 80%+ of Twitter employees: 1. The site would crash and burn the next day. 2. Nothing would change. All those engineers were anyways just sitting around. 3. There would be no immediate impact (servers can run by themselves after all), but the site would slowly degrade over time as institutional knowledge around maintenance, upkeep and all the various s…

Also #4 they are shipping features much more than before. Shipping more always will likely lead to more errors happening. IMO it's a combo of #3 and #4

Re: Twitter was down

#409

Post by rvz »

numpad0 wrote: post #186

PSA: Mastodon, Misskey, Nostr, Bluesky exists now. Just top 3 Mastodon instances(mastodon.social, pawoo.net, mstdn.jp) collectively has > 2mil users, same level as Twitter in 2008. Misskey, an ActivityPub/Mastodon compatible server software, now has >10K users. Nostr isn't much, Bluesky is still invite only and had just went past 2k registered, but those are all available options for direct substitutes to Twitter in…

> Just top 3 Mastodon instances(mastodon.social, pawoo.net, mstdn.jp) collectively has > 2mil users, same level as Twitter in 2008.

You really think 'pawoo.net' and 'mstdn.jp' are fabulous advertisements for Mastodon of over 2M users on those instances, unless you think CP and loli culture there is a great thing since it is totally illegal in hundreds of countries?

Secondly, both pawoo.net and mstdn.jp instances are owned by a single company called Mask Network [0], which essentially means it is not community owned and is under central control of a company that can do whatever it pleases, even if the users on the platform dislike it.

Finally you missed out another large Mastodon instance after mastodon.social which is braag.et which promotes CP and illegal content. So it seems that the instances with the larger amount of users also allows CP and illegal garbage on it.

It's quite hilarious to believe that Mastodon with these examples remotely has a chance against Twitter as an alternative.

[0] https://masknetwork.medium.com/mask-network-acquires-pawoo-n...

Re: Twitter was down

#410

Post by coliveira »

d23 wrote: post #226
s1gnp0st wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Where did this meme of them being a cash incinerator come from (other than from Musk, hoping people didn't look into the public statements)? Last time I looked, they had a few profitable quarters on the books. Looking at the last annual statement, I see a 200M loss on 5B revenue, with them sitting on 8B in assets, 2B of which is in cash. That's nothing close to a cash incinerator. As far as I can tell, tightening up…

Everything changed after mister "genius" operated a leveraged buyout of the company, which essentially means that it is now riddled with debt and zero assets that have not been pledged to pay the debt.
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