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I agree, when I was working with small companies this kind of thinking was all too common: Can we make a Twitter clone in a week? “Yes it’s just a backend and a

I agree, when I was working with small companies this kind of thinking was all too common: Can we make a Twitter clone in a week? “Yes it’s just a backend and a frontend.” Vs “with support for 187 million active users? Which level of accessibility? Will we have a cloud provider? Media upload support? Redundancy? What kind of login functionality? Do we have support if they loose their email account? Why are you looking at me like that? You know what: no we can’t do it. No I don’t care that your grandson thought anyone can do it”.

Guest42 6y ago
And the common question..."How quickly can you do it if I add 10 people....ok 11, but no more, because we have to be mindful of cost"
- ljw1001 6y ago
  This question depends more on the manager’s motives than on their knowledge.
chasd00 6y ago
heh in the consulting world it's pretty common to be in a situation of "i signed a contract to deliver a twitter clone in a week, here's the kickoff date. get started."
908B64B197 6y ago
> Can we make a Twitter clone in a week? Yes. The v1 isn't the hard part of building a competitor to Twitter. The hard part is scaling the user base, getting funding to keep the site running and being able to grow it.
- danielscrubs 6y ago
  V1 is a hard part, what you are talking about is the insanely hard part. ;)
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    I meant, cloning all of Twitter today is useless because you won't ever need the infrastructure to handle 100M+ users. But a basic microblogging platform? It's not impossible to do in a week.
    - danielscrubs 6y ago
      I believe you can do it in whatever time you want. You are the one setting the definition of done after all, not the manager.
zabzonk 6y ago
> Can we make a Twitter clone in a week? Why would you want to make one at all?
- danielscrubs 6y ago
  You can replace it with an in-house customer chat, if you feel the example is contrived. But my point is, everything looks easy if you look at it shallowly, managers without professional programming experience will look at the problem from that angle. The best will be able to help, the worst will have this shallow look and expect the moon by morning.

Guest42 6y ago

And the common question..."How quickly can you do it if I add 10 people....ok 11, but no more, because we have to be mindful of cost"

ljw1001 6y ago
This question depends more on the manager’s motives than on their knowledge.

chasd00 6y ago

heh in the consulting world it's pretty common to be in a situation of "i signed a contract to deliver a twitter clone in a week, here's the kickoff date. get started."

908B64B197 6y ago

> Can we make a Twitter clone in a week? Yes. The v1 isn't the hard part of building a competitor to Twitter. The hard part is scaling the user base, getting funding to keep the site running and being able to grow it.

danielscrubs 6y ago
V1 is a hard part, what you are talking about is the insanely hard part. ;)
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  I meant, cloning all of Twitter today is useless because you won't ever need the infrastructure to handle 100M+ users. But a basic microblogging platform? It's not impossible to do in a week.
  - danielscrubs 6y ago
    I believe you can do it in whatever time you want. You are the one setting the definition of done after all, not the manager.

zabzonk 6y ago

> Can we make a Twitter clone in a week? Why would you want to make one at all?

danielscrubs 6y ago
You can replace it with an in-house customer chat, if you feel the example is contrived. But my point is, everything looks easy if you look at it shallowly, managers without professional programming experience will look at the problem from that angle. The best will be able to help, the worst will have this shallow look and expect the moon by morning.