831–840 of 1001 posts
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> removing engineers won't instantly crash the product. It'll happen slowly It's amazing to me how many people following the Twitter saga, some familiar with or actually working in technology, thought that Twitter would crash within days of the engineers being fired. And because it didn't, the job cuts are justified.
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I don't think it will fail on a technical level. As this article says lots of engineering has gone in to make the thing pretty resilient. I would also say that there are still enough engineers who work there who can figure out what's gone wrong and "turn it on and off again" or w/e makes it splutter back to life. In terms of changes to the Platform ditto. It's not difficult to make these changes that a team of 100's…
From this operations engineer's perspective, there are only 3 main things that bring a site down: new code, disk space, and 'outages'. If you don't push new code, your apps will be pretty stable. If you don't run out of disk space, your apps will keep running. And if your network/power/etc doesn't mysteriously disappear, your apps will keep running. And running, and running, and running. The biggest thing that brings…
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Yep, agree. Twitter's revenue was primarily from ads, and now I'd bet their ads revenue has dropped a huge amount. Given how Musk is behaving now (reinstating Trump etc.), and losing many pivotal sales people, and the firing of a ton of people in charge of dealing with hate speech and such, it seems unlikely advertisers will return now.
advertisers wont care in a couple months. the situation has lots of public attention now, which is what the advertisers are actually afraid of. They don't want their brand associated with the craziness. They don't actually care one way or the other about any choice musk makes. They're not going to just walk away from a 300+ million person audience permanently just due to principles
Right now the trend is advertisers getting more spooked because of unpredictability and Musk being unable to reassure them in calls he has been reported to have been on. I expect this trend to continue
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I agree those were odd takes. I've likened firing most of the engineers to taking your hands off the wheel in the car. It won't crash immediately, but it doesn't mean the car can go driverless. With that said, there are differences between internal systems and something like Twitter on the public internet. I assume that Twitter is a system under constant attack. What happens when the next log4shell level vulnerabilit…
> It won't crash immediately, but it doesn't mean the car can go driverless. Unless the company that creates it is owned by Elon ;)
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Yeah, network scaling bugs are the most fun. The one I liked the most was when after expanding a pool of servers, they started to lose connectivity for a few minutes and then come back a minute or so later as if nothing happened. Turns out we accidentally stretched one server VLAN too wide, to roughly 600 devices within one VLAN within one switch. The servers had more-or-less all-to-all traffic, and that was enough t…
vlans are convenience that is the enemy of performance and undertandability.
I imagine the site will mostly continue to more-or-less work, despite all the layoffs. They still have thousands of staff. The network effect of Twitter is so big that people will continue to use it even if fail whales become more common. Others suggest that it will soon crash and burn, or that Musk will get bored and sell it for a few billion. Or that Musk is a genius who will make some sort of amazing Twitter 2.0 that does for social media what Tesla did for electric cars. But without any appealing long term vision, and with an owner who bought it to satisfy their ego rather than with any real plan, the reality may be more boring. I imagine it will just languish for many years, with occasional manufactured drama, and occasional downtime, but no real innovation. Maybe to be eventually supplanted by something else in 10 years or so.
> This left a lot wondering what exactly was going on with all those engineers and made it seem like it was all just bloat. I was partly expecting the rest of the article to explain to me why exactly it wasn't just bloat. But it goes on talking about this 1~3-person cache SRE team that built solid infra automation that's really resilient to both hardware and software failures. If anything, the article might actually…
No matter if it was or not and for better or worse: If Twitter survives this without any major harm it will have profound consequences for the whole software industry.
"Major harm," to me, would be either bankruptcy or a competitor overtaking significant chunks of Twitter's users. Even if Elon literally has to re-hire half the roles he fired for, or Twitter is down for a few days or a week, or they struggle to get advertisers for a little while, that's nothing for the long-term. In six months, the chances that it'll look like these firings were a bad idea are minimal.
And likewise with the "the only realistic way to moderate an online platform is the way Twitter was doing it" narrative. In six months, all it takes is the ship to still be floating without the old moderation to prove it out, and that's by far the most likely outcome.
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I agree those were odd takes. I've likened firing most of the engineers to taking your hands off the wheel in the car. It won't crash immediately, but it doesn't mean the car can go driverless. With that said, there are differences between internal systems and something like Twitter on the public internet. I assume that Twitter is a system under constant attack. What happens when the next log4shell level vulnerabilit…
If Twitter went another month without an outage, how would you adjust your opinion? How about a year? The car analogy is amusing, but how much does it really hold up? Have we ever seen another major social media company drop this much of its staff in one go? I certainly can’t think of an example. I think we’re in somewhat uncharted waters here. A driverless car won’t last long, we know that for a fact. I think it rem…
It's also really hard to define 'last' though. Does 'last' mean just for up-time? Does it mean up-time without a major security incident while maintaining the same DAU? Does it mean business as usual on all fronts except number of employees? We know that Twitter already had some security issues with their God Mode admin panel.
I really wonder, for example, whether no angry ex-employees still have access to critical systems or data. This is usually pretty well regulated in large organizations like twitter, but since they've lost the majority of their staff, who knows when the people looking after that left?
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The reality is most huge companies are majority bloat. The hiring numbers are also in part crap that goes into Series X Raise pitch decks. Oftentimes a lot of the new bloat pisses off competent people, because their work doesn't actually get less, it becomes more. Not only do they have to now nanny people that are often not actually competent in their job, they just happened to go through the coding interview with wh…
Except in these firing sprees it's not competent employees that remain - those people are usually the first to jump ship because they have options and see where it's headed. It's not like they get raises for staying to get a part of the savings from the cuts - usually they get pay freezes. Restructuring is done on whatever idea the new owner(s) have in plan - which could be equally disconnected from "real product". I…