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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

#91

Post by yieldcrv »

acdha wrote: post #75
yieldcrv wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We’ll see - it’s an expensive hobby and the banks he borrowed from are probably not going to have a great sense of humor.

The banks probably took convertible debt at high interest rates, but who cares about high interest rates when it's only been one month. He probably has a clause for accelerated payments, because its debt, not shares yet.

(after a certain amount of time, or upon default, the debt would convert to shares. but it can be much more complicated, and onerous than that too. lending can be fun.)

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

#92

Post by lantry »

typon wrote: post #61
userbinator wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

software, like everything, is subject to laws of physics I disagree; math would be a closer analogy. And indeed, arithmetic still works like it did a millenia ago. Closer to the present, I have binaries from the late 80s that still work today (and I use them semi-regularly.) Indeed, much of the impetus of the software industry seems to be to propagate the illusion that software somehow needs constant "maintenance" an…

Spot on. Absolutely hate this attitude that software sitting there just gathers wear and tear as if it's a mechanical device. Software is written with a particular target platform in mind: x86, ARM, Nvidia GPUs, FPGA soft-processor etc. If the hardware you are running on doesn't change, your software should still function. If the specs of that target platform don't change, your software should still function. If the…

You're forgetting that software on it's own is basically useless. In order for it to provide value, it has to be operated by a physical machine. All running software is physical, with spinning disks and mechanical relays, electrons being pushed back and forth, and photons flying around. Twitter is not a piece of software, it's a complicated physical system. software is an abstraction.

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

#94

Post by datalopers »

user_ wrote: post #79
lolsoftware wrote: post #11

I'm curious how/if the ostensible decline in active users is affecting things, and to what degree.

> Twitter added 1.6M daily active users this past week, another all-time high https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1594865247323660290

Interesting how this summer all we heard from Musk was how Twitter was overflowing with bots and spam, but now that he runs the place he sure spends a lot of time bragging about all-time high "user" counts.

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

#95

Post by acdha »

user_ wrote: post #79
lolsoftware wrote: post #11

I'm curious how/if the ostensible decline in active users is affecting things, and to what degree.

> Twitter added 1.6M daily active users this past week, another all-time high https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1594865247323660290

Want to bet that’s not unconnected to sacking the people who tried to block bots?

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

#96

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#98

Post by xedrac »

swellguy wrote: post #34

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.

I think a likely answer is "moderating". That would explain why Elon was ok letting so many go so quickly.

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

#99

Post by dchia »

Why do people assume that things would break so easily? I'm pretty sure Twitter (ex)team did tons of scalability testing with loads that are 10x or even 100x. Plus random 100x to 1000x spikes to account for breaking news. And all of these are done automatically, constantly, and consistently over the years.

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

#100

Post by whatshisface »

swellguy wrote: post #34

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.

If the 3x headcount increase really did add no value, there are still about 1/3rd profitable employees there now. In fact giant layoffs tend to cut the best people first because they are the ones who feel comfortable walking. The people that are the last to go are the ones who are very entrenched in the organization and who don't estimate their chances outside of it highly, and that's the exact description of who Elon thinks he's laying off.
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