8 ms·

I really don't get it. Twitter has five thousand full-time employees. I have to assume at least 20% of them are in product development in some capacity. What ex

I really don't get it. Twitter has five thousand full-time employees. I have to assume at least 20% of them are in product development in some capacity. What exactly are these people doing all day? I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years. And they continue to ignore the drumbeat of user asking for an edit button, and are completely unable to come up with any kind of reasonable solution to the abuse or bot problems. I don't know Kayvon personally, but what exactly is wrong with Twitter that it's so bad and slow at product development? This should be #5000 on their list of things to do.

ilamont 7y ago
They've done quite a bit on the product front, although it's fair to question the utility to average users: - Increased tweet length to 280 chars - Tweet threads - GIF integration - Multiple UI revisions of desktop and mobile apps There's also been a fair amount of work on ads and security, although these changes will be less apparent to most users.
- throwaway724 7y ago
  None of those things strike as 1) important or 2) indicative of a high-performing product development team given their size. But we can agree to disagree!
  - baddox 7y ago
    Ads and security are both extremely important to Twitter. It's hard to imagine any product concern being more important than those two, other than perhaps uptime.
- danShumway 7y ago
  But is any of this really stuff that should take 1000 engineers to build? Tweet length? GIFs? I don't question that those engineers are working hard. I'm sure they're not sitting around twiddling their thumbs. And I don't question that there aren't some genuinely hard, complicated problems to solve at Twitter, particularly around scaling and security. But from a structural perspective, I do still kind of wonder if companies the size of Twitter and Facebook aren't just an extended, very public example of Brooks's Law. Anecdotally, I've been in large teams and small teams and I work equally hard in both environments. But even with the same amount of work, somehow, more stuff gets done and more products get shipped from the smaller teams.
  - KarlKemp 7y ago
    Having made the same observation as you, I always preferred the formulation in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringelmann_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringelmann_effect. Although the Wikipedia article lists "loss of motivation" as a cause, it originally focussed more on coordination problems growing with group size–sort of a reverse Metcalf'. In that sense it avoids the lazy cynicism of writing off whole groups of people as stupid or unmotivated (i. e. all of Dilbert). Instead, it's a starting point to consider how much we can still improve what's arguably humanity's claim to fame, the ability to cooperate.
  - mypalmike 7y ago
    There's a ton of infrastructure to build and maintain at Twitter. Yesterday's solutions don't scale and need replacing. Yesterday's "just get it done, we'll worry about cost (or quality, or operational burden) later" have happened and it's time to fix. Lather, rinse, repeat. This post should give you an idea of scale at Twitter. When I worked there, I spent about 2 months focused just on creating software to help automate the Clos migration mentioned. And there are just tons of things like this that are constantly being worked on. https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2017/the-infrastructure-behind-twitter-scale.html https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
ceejayoz 7y ago
I don't understand why anyone wants an edit button. Delete the tweet if you made a typo. I'd really prefer I not retweet a funny joke and an hour later discover it's been edited into a neo-Nazi recruitment link or something.
- slouch 7y ago
  It would be a valuable experience for you and the health of Twitter, though.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    Could you elaborate?
    - slouch 7y ago
      Your retweet behavior would change, Twitter would move past "no edit button" and iterate using the new data points
- strictnein 7y ago
  An edit button should only be allowed if it removed all Likes/Retweets/Comments a tweet had. And at that point, what's the point
  - sli 7y ago
    I wouldn't mind if editing was only available for maybe 5 minutes or something. I pretty much only delete/rewrite to fix typos.
    - stevewodil 7y ago
      Jack has discussed this. It won't happen. Even in 5 minutes a tweet can reach MANY people, and then it would be able to be changed entirely? Twitter won't get an edit feature, it just doesn't work for the platform. The only way I see it happening is as an 'undo' send feature like Gmail has. You can see the tweet for 15 seconds before it actually goes out. This has also been discussed as an issue since Twitter is supposed to be real-time, but maybe certain people wouldn't care and enable the feature
TLLtchvL8KZ 7y ago
I think all 5000 of them are busy "moderating" complaints. My account was suspended for 7 days for telling a youtuber (one I'd spoken with back and forth many times) that she had some clothes fluff in her armpit on pic she posted. Apparently that falls under harassment of a sexual nature and my appeal was denied within 15 minutes.
- vcoelho 7y ago
  Without the context, I can see that remark being made by a creep
kaffeemitsahne 7y ago
Advertising
advaita 7y ago
Could it be that they're just bogged down in fire fighting and paying off the tech debt accumulated over years? (Genuine question, as someone who has never worked in >50 eng company, I always wonder how those companies tackle stuff like this.)
mumblemumble 7y ago
> What exactly are these people doing all day? Maintaining the infrastructure needed to deliver ads that are targeted based on real-time event streams collected from users' interaction with the website and app. Stuff like that. That's my guess, anyway. It's the kind of thing that can keep a lot of developers very busy, but not something they'll be talking about much in public.
chadlavi 7y ago
They're making tons of innovative new features for their customers, who are advertisers. People who write and read tweets aren't the customer, they're the product.
anticensor 7y ago
Editing tweets is against the core concept of Twitter.
- celeritascelery 7y ago
  I would consider “stories” against the core concept of twitter as well.
- chanmad29 7y ago
  why not have a edit history but still show the most recent tweet at the time?
  - dddbbb 7y ago
    It doesn't mesh well with the retweet functionality if a user can retroactively change the content.
    - taneq 7y ago
      Then have the retweet keep the "version" of the tweet that they retweeted, maybe with a flag to say "this tweet has since been changed"?
    - nradov 7y ago
      That doesn't seem to be a problem on Facebook. Shared posts can still be edited later.
reaperducer 7y ago
What exactly are these people doing all day? I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years. Maybe Twitter is less caught up on the SV "gotta change/break something user-facing today to justify my job" treadmill than other tech companies. Or maybe the changes they make are on the back end. It's been a long time since I've seen a fail whale. Considering the global societal impact that Twitter has, I'm surprised it has only 5,000 employees.
- nradov 7y ago
  If it's not broken it doesn't have enough features yet.
bchillman 7y ago
A lot of features never make it past experimentation and never see the light of day. The lifecycle of these experiments can last months and multiple code paths on mobile clients have to be carefully maintained. Failure to catch regressions on experiments cause unclean data and prevent experiments from re-starting until the new client reaches app stores.
Reedx 7y ago
Hanging out on the roof or in meetings, waiting for the day to end.
vikasg 7y ago
The only comment on HN more tiresome than "lol I can build twitter over a weekend" is a comment by a throwaway implicitly claiming that fixing the twitter product problems is easy.

ilamont 7y ago

They've done quite a bit on the product front, although it's fair to question the utility to average users: - Increased tweet length to 280 chars - Tweet threads - GIF integration - Multiple UI revisions of desktop and mobile apps There's also been a fair amount of work on ads and security, although these changes will be less apparent to most users.

throwaway724 7y ago
None of those things strike as 1) important or 2) indicative of a high-performing product development team given their size. But we can agree to disagree!
- baddox 7y ago
  Ads and security are both extremely important to Twitter. It's hard to imagine any product concern being more important than those two, other than perhaps uptime.
danShumway 7y ago
But is any of this really stuff that should take 1000 engineers to build? Tweet length? GIFs? I don't question that those engineers are working hard. I'm sure they're not sitting around twiddling their thumbs. And I don't question that there aren't some genuinely hard, complicated problems to solve at Twitter, particularly around scaling and security. But from a structural perspective, I do still kind of wonder if companies the size of Twitter and Facebook aren't just an extended, very public example of Brooks's Law. Anecdotally, I've been in large teams and small teams and I work equally hard in both environments. But even with the same amount of work, somehow, more stuff gets done and more products get shipped from the smaller teams.
- KarlKemp 7y ago
  Having made the same observation as you, I always preferred the formulation in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringelmann_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringelmann_effect. Although the Wikipedia article lists "loss of motivation" as a cause, it originally focussed more on coordination problems growing with group size–sort of a reverse Metcalf'. In that sense it avoids the lazy cynicism of writing off whole groups of people as stupid or unmotivated (i. e. all of Dilbert). Instead, it's a starting point to consider how much we can still improve what's arguably humanity's claim to fame, the ability to cooperate.
- mypalmike 7y ago
  There's a ton of infrastructure to build and maintain at Twitter. Yesterday's solutions don't scale and need replacing. Yesterday's "just get it done, we'll worry about cost (or quality, or operational burden) later" have happened and it's time to fix. Lather, rinse, repeat. This post should give you an idea of scale at Twitter. When I worked there, I spent about 2 months focused just on creating software to help automate the Clos migration mentioned. And there are just tons of things like this that are constantly being worked on. https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2017/the-infrastructure-behind-twitter-scale.html https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...

ceejayoz 7y ago

I don't understand why anyone wants an edit button. Delete the tweet if you made a typo. I'd really prefer I not retweet a funny joke and an hour later discover it's been edited into a neo-Nazi recruitment link or something.

slouch 7y ago
It would be a valuable experience for you and the health of Twitter, though.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Could you elaborate?
  - slouch 7y ago
    Your retweet behavior would change, Twitter would move past "no edit button" and iterate using the new data points
strictnein 7y ago
An edit button should only be allowed if it removed all Likes/Retweets/Comments a tweet had. And at that point, what's the point
- sli 7y ago
  I wouldn't mind if editing was only available for maybe 5 minutes or something. I pretty much only delete/rewrite to fix typos.
  - stevewodil 7y ago
    Jack has discussed this. It won't happen. Even in 5 minutes a tweet can reach MANY people, and then it would be able to be changed entirely? Twitter won't get an edit feature, it just doesn't work for the platform. The only way I see it happening is as an 'undo' send feature like Gmail has. You can see the tweet for 15 seconds before it actually goes out. This has also been discussed as an issue since Twitter is supposed to be real-time, but maybe certain people wouldn't care and enable the feature

TLLtchvL8KZ 7y ago

I think all 5000 of them are busy "moderating" complaints. My account was suspended for 7 days for telling a youtuber (one I'd spoken with back and forth many times) that she had some clothes fluff in her armpit on pic she posted. Apparently that falls under harassment of a sexual nature and my appeal was denied within 15 minutes.

vcoelho 7y ago
Without the context, I can see that remark being made by a creep

kaffeemitsahne 7y ago

Advertising

advaita 7y ago

Could it be that they're just bogged down in fire fighting and paying off the tech debt accumulated over years? (Genuine question, as someone who has never worked in >50 eng company, I always wonder how those companies tackle stuff like this.)

mumblemumble 7y ago

> What exactly are these people doing all day? Maintaining the infrastructure needed to deliver ads that are targeted based on real-time event streams collected from users' interaction with the website and app. Stuff like that. That's my guess, anyway. It's the kind of thing that can keep a lot of developers very busy, but not something they'll be talking about much in public.

chadlavi 7y ago

They're making tons of innovative new features for their customers, who are advertisers. People who write and read tweets aren't the customer, they're the product.

anticensor 7y ago

Editing tweets is against the core concept of Twitter.

celeritascelery 7y ago
I would consider “stories” against the core concept of twitter as well.
chanmad29 7y ago
why not have a edit history but still show the most recent tweet at the time?
- dddbbb 7y ago
  It doesn't mesh well with the retweet functionality if a user can retroactively change the content.
  - taneq 7y ago
    Then have the retweet keep the "version" of the tweet that they retweeted, maybe with a flag to say "this tweet has since been changed"?
  - nradov 7y ago
    That doesn't seem to be a problem on Facebook. Shared posts can still be edited later.

reaperducer 7y ago

What exactly are these people doing all day? I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years. Maybe Twitter is less caught up on the SV "gotta change/break something user-facing today to justify my job" treadmill than other tech companies. Or maybe the changes they make are on the back end. It's been a long time since I've seen a fail whale. Considering the global societal impact that Twitter has, I'm surprised it has only 5,000 employees.

nradov 7y ago
If it's not broken it doesn't have enough features yet.

bchillman 7y ago

A lot of features never make it past experimentation and never see the light of day. The lifecycle of these experiments can last months and multiple code paths on mobile clients have to be carefully maintained. Failure to catch regressions on experiments cause unclean data and prevent experiments from re-starting until the new client reaches app stores.

Reedx 7y ago

Hanging out on the roof or in meetings, waiting for the day to end.

vikasg 7y ago

The only comment on HN more tiresome than "lol I can build twitter over a weekend" is a comment by a throwaway implicitly claiming that fixing the twitter product problems is easy.