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Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

nytimes.com

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Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#51

Post by SapphireSun »

TheOneTrueKyle wrote: post #6
chollida1 wrote: post #3

I think its valid to ask if Jack Dorsey is the next executive to leave. The moment Anthony Noto went to Twitter, all wall street could talk about was that he was brought in to sell the company. Who ever the next CTO is, they're going to have some tough decisions to make. Twitter already has to pay out an extreme amount of compensation in stock options just to get and retain talent. I don't want this to seem inflammat…

The moment Dick left was when I felt a disturbance in the twitterverse (but I also have a disdain for Dorsey). It kind of felt weird to me that Twitter went from this platform of literally starting revolutions to managing expectations of its users in the name "fighting harassment". I now use it simply to tweet out my latest recipes...

Since the US election, Twitter has been headline newsworthy nearly every day. Whether you think that's a bad thing or not, it's still a potent force in the world, surprisingly to me.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#52

Post by usaphp »

While it's a topic about twitter I'd like to ask a question that always puzzles me. Twitter has 3900+ employees and good portion of those are developers, I just don't understand how can such a basic product that almost never pushes any updates or radical changes/improvements require so many employees. What the hell are they doing except for burning investors cash? Just curious...

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#53

Post by djfm »

I have mixed feelings about twitter. On the one hand I see it as a nice way to make interesting conversations surface and reach a wide audience. On the other hand I see it as a constant stream of ads. I don't know if I'd be happy if it all goes down, or if something better comes along. Which problem is twitter actually trying to solve?

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#54

Post by wgyn »

blackaspen wrote: post #24
slg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Twitter ever really about tech excellence? My perspective as an outsider who doesn't live or work in Silicon Valley, it always seemed more of a communications and media company founded on a tech backbone. Beyond their early scaling problems, which they spent a long, long time fighting, what really exciting tech has emerged from Twitter? Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook all have much more impressive technology…

Twitter's Github: https://github.com/twitter Apache Aurora, Bootstrap, Storm, Heron, Pants, ThriftMux, DistributedLog, Apache Cotton, Iago, just to name a few.

Don't forget finagle and scalding.

At the company I work at, various of the above projects are integral to one system or another (though to be fair, there are quite a number of ex-Twitter folks floating around). I'm not a Scala expert, but as far as I can tell Twitter also has a large footprint in that community.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#55

Post by dmix »

rahrahrah wrote: post #45
chillydawg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not a social network? It's an advertising brokerage.

Yeah? And Facebook isn't a social network either, it's an advertising brokerage? And Google isn't a search engine, it's an advertising brokerage? The Financial Times isn't a newspaper, it's an advertising brokerage? Spotify isn't music streaming, it's an advertising brokerage?

And users aren't important, just their eye balls.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#56

Post by streblo »

x0x0 wrote: post #17
aresant wrote: post #7

Bigger to me is the VP of Product - Josh McFarland - just bailed out 30 minutes ago too: https://twitter.com/crazyfoo/status/811331557608652800 AKA outside of Dorsey, who is a split / shared CEO, who is in charge of Twitter?

Josh came in from the TellApart acquisition, an adtech/retargeting/data company, where he was ceo. I can't understand how he was vp product on a social network.

He was not the VP of product, he was a VP of product, specifically VP of product for Twitter's advertising arm.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#57

Post by gdulli »

johns wrote: post #13
aresant wrote: post #7

Bigger to me is the VP of Product - Josh McFarland - just bailed out 30 minutes ago too: https://twitter.com/crazyfoo/status/811331557608652800 AKA outside of Dorsey, who is a split / shared CEO, who is in charge of Twitter?

I hope using a tweetstorm to announce his departure was a subtle shot at the company's inability to ship a product the way people want to use it.

This is the company that leaked they were doing an algorithmic timeline, it was really unpopular and they said they weren't doing it, then it turned out to be a lie when they started rolling it out 2-3 weeks later.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#58

Post by [deleted] »

usaphp wrote: post #52

While it's a topic about twitter I'd like to ask a question that always puzzles me. Twitter has 3900+ employees and good portion of those are developers, I just don't understand how can such a basic product that almost never pushes any updates or radical changes/improvements require so many employees. What the hell are they doing except for burning investors cash? Just curious...

[deleted]

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#59

Post by slg »

minimaxir wrote: post #44
slg wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't most of those projects be boiled down to dealing with scaling? Twitter has seemed to have been mostly focused inwards, trying to get themselves more efficient at being Twitter. The other companies I mentioned seem more ambitious in expanding their tech outwards.

That's a No True Scotsman perspective. Scaling isn't easy.

I'm not saying it is easy or disparaging the work of the engineers there. I am saying it seems like they have a different approach to how tech fits in with the goals of the company. To oversimplify, Twitter is focused on efficiency while others are focused on growth. Maybe the actual goals are different, but that is the impression I get looking at their output.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#60

Post by [deleted] »

djfm wrote: post #53

I have mixed feelings about twitter. On the one hand I see it as a nice way to make interesting conversations surface and reach a wide audience. On the other hand I see it as a constant stream of ads. I don't know if I'd be happy if it all goes down, or if something better comes along. Which problem is twitter actually trying to solve?

[deleted]
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