Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#51

Post by koyanisqatsi » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 3:42 AM UTC

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #47

koyanisqatsi wrote: post #13

Elon used to be a software engineer so it's kinda weird how he thinks a legacy codebase like Twitter can be fixed up to use $1B less every year. Twitter is limited mainly by storage, their compute costs are negligible in comparison. So unless there is so much bloat in their hardware procurement process that they're over-provisioning storage by more than $1B a year there is no way to reduce costs. The hardware costs w…

I struggle to find one correct remark in your comment. This take clearly suggests you have never worked on any similar infrastructure / distributed systems before at scale. So you're telling me there's no backend or compute workers? And you're telling me that there are no opportunities for performance optimization? That they are already 100% native C++ services at full parallel utilization? That they've already tuned…

You should sit down and perform the storage calculation instead of struggling to find something correct in what I said because that will be a better use of your limited time.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#52

Post by GoOnThenDoTell » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 3:42 AM UTC

bagels wrote: post #37

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can, that's great, if not then they're setting up Twitter for bankruptcy, or asset sales, if they have any. Generally speaking, loading up a company with debt is corrosive to good management. If you have to cover your interest payments each month, and that's hard, it focuses the business on short term survival rather than investing in growth in the longer term.

Definitely, the debt is a burden. I don't see how it's a waste to save money though. Maybe the cuts are so dramatic it damages the business, but reducing wasted money is generally good management.

Cutting costs is good, quickly slashing 50% doesn’t seem carefully considered and may cause actual problems.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#53

Post by partiallypro » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 3:43 AM UTC

bagels wrote: post #34

This is an incredible opportunity for the engineers remain which Musk surely has converted in to saboteurs with his antics. Sabotage disguised as cost savings.

They'd be easily found out by a smart engineer and promptly fired and probably banned by every competitor once word got out.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#54

Post by bagels » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 3:43 AM UTC

bushbaba wrote: post #31

frellus wrote: post #20

To be fair, there are going to be plenty of critical leaks coming out of Twitter with a 50% cutting of staff. That's so many whistleblowers, my backyard is completely leaf free now. Frankly, if Musk cuts $1B from the run rate and there isn't a bad outage, a lot of people will look pretty stupid. To be fair, I don't know if Twitter is overspending on infrastructure, but I would guess there are always places to streaml…

I don’t think the 1B/year shows issue on cloud pricing. It’s instead bloat of twitter’s setup. That’s way in excess of what should reasonably be spent. I suspect there’s a lot of bad coding practice going on. Of which the bulk is data analytics.

AWS profit margin is something like 35%. I think some of their infra is there, so that might be an upper bound?

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#55

Post by GoOnThenDoTell » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 3:44 AM UTC

nothatscool wrote: post #43

nemothekid wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Buy a company, drastically reduce unnecessary expenses. This famously works out very well for PE firms. It seems very naive to assume Twitter was casually spending 1B/yr in "unnecessary expenses". Maybe the previous CEO/CTO was a baffling moron, but I tend to have more faith in people absent of evidence otherwise. I'm going to be surprised if Twitter is around in year - I'm just they have the capital to keep the li…

Weren’t they spending almost half a billion a year on r&d?

That usually just means regular engineering staff

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#56

Post by afavour » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 3:46 AM UTC

bagels wrote: post #14

afavour wrote: post #4

$1bn, the exact amount of debt interest Twitter now has to pay off after Musk saddled it with so much debt. So much of this feels like such a waste. I don’t have any problem with the idea of someone taking Twitter private in order to fix it. But with this kind of debt financing and with a CEO that doesn’t seem to understand the company (and tried to get out of buying it)…

Ignoring all the other things that are wrong with this whole situation... if they can make it $1B more efficient, how is it a waste even given the loans? Presumably the plan is to get rid of the debt eventually, and then you'll have a much more financially healthy company, assuming it can actually get $1B more efficient.

Seems like a pretty massive “if” there. An extra one billion in efficiency without detriment to the service?

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#57

Post by GoOnThenDoTell » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 3:46 AM UTC

partiallypro wrote: post #53

bagels wrote: post #34

This is an incredible opportunity for the engineers remain which Musk surely has converted in to saboteurs with his antics. Sabotage disguised as cost savings.

They'd be easily found out by a smart engineer and promptly fired and probably banned by every competitor once word got out.

Incompetence and mistakes are usually hard to prove is malice

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#58

Post by fsdjkflsjfsoij » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 3:46 AM UTC

nemo wrote: post #32

fsdjkflsjfsoij wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That most likely won't happen though. In a month most people won't be talking about this and Twitter will be running fine.

This one looks meaningfully different. I won't be logging on in a month since I've already deleted my account (had it since 2010).

> This one looks meaningfully different.

You might be right but plenty of people say this every time some major event at Twitter takes place. The vast majority of people don't care that much about layoffs at Twitter and certainly aren't going to migrate to another service over it.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#59

Post by volume » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 3:47 AM UTC

edge17 wrote: post #25

Why does this article claim to know that Twitter might go down due to cost cutting? Isn't there a possibility that their infrastructure is just hugely wasteful? Having never worked at giant web app company, if it were run efficiently then what should we expect their server and infra costs to be? Surely that is the type of Fermi calculation someone on this site can make.

> Why does this article claim to know that Twitter might go down due to cost cutting? Isn't there a possibility that their infrastructure is just hugely wasteful?

I see the authors (Sheila Dang, Paresh Dave and Katie Paul) quote "sources".

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#60

Post by bagels » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 3:47 AM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #35

frellus wrote: post #20

To be fair, there are going to be plenty of critical leaks coming out of Twitter with a 50% cutting of staff. That's so many whistleblowers, my backyard is completely leaf free now. Frankly, if Musk cuts $1B from the run rate and there isn't a bad outage, a lot of people will look pretty stupid. To be fair, I don't know if Twitter is overspending on infrastructure, but I would guess there are always places to streaml…

Everyone is “overspending” on infrastructure. There is always money to save the question comes down to where you want to expend your engineering effort and what risk levels you want to take. “Make fewer features, focus on spending less” is a valid executive decision, it’s just a matter of priority. Twitter seemingly being feature complete and losing lots of money most years makes doing this now a decent decision. Spe…

I've had the same experience at startups. Usually it's time to make features, but eventually the spend gets high enough to justify spending a couple weeks of engineer time on it to cut out waste. Same thing happened when I worked a large internet company, just on a different scale.