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> at the same time if Twitter as a company isn't really doing much, why do they have thousands of developers on staff? ...to keep the app running? New devices,

> at the same time if Twitter as a company isn't really doing much, why do they have thousands of developers on staff? ...to keep the app running? New devices, new standards, a lot of things change that you need devs to keep up with. Also, what's up with people saying twitter is stagnant? They've added Spaces, Twitter Blue and Crypto Profile Pictures - all 3 massive features added to their product. They're all trash, but that's besides the point.

ceeplusplus 5y ago
Those things you mention hardly justify thousands of expensive developers to maintain and create. I bet a team of 10 top notch engineers could create Spaces+Blue+Crypto pfp's in a couple months and run it at Twitter scale. Don't forget Instagram was acquired when it had 13 employees serving tens of millions of users. Speaking out of experience, most engineers in big tech are bike shedding on internal tools that don't do anything useful. A small minority deliver the majority of the impact. On top of that at companies like Twitter and Google some of those useless employees spend their time complaining about social justice initiatives rather than doing work.
- throwanem 5y ago
  Speaking out of what experience? You've just appealed to your own authority; it seems not out of line to ask whence that comes.
  - ceeplusplus 5y ago
    Working at several big tech companies in industry. I can't say my experience is fully representative but I do start to see a pattern when my experiences line up with that of all my friends. There are a _lot_ of internal tools and anecdotally many of them seem like they're designed to abstract away things which wouldn't need abstracting for a company that exclusively hired high performing engineers.
    - WesternWind 5y ago
      Plenty of things are abstracted not because they need to be, but because they can be, and doing so increases efficiency, security, the ability to scale, and the ability of engineers to reason about the development.
      - djbusby 5y ago
        And do the task consistently and correctly.
- dkislyuk 5y ago
  I think this is a pretty naive take. Developing anything at Twitter-scale will run into security considerations, infrastructure development or optimization, constructing data workflows, multiple design iterations, UX design (how do people find and use this feature?), i18n, accessibility, product marketing, user testing, copy testing, and other functions and that’s not even considering the actual product development, which is of course across multiple platforms. See also: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
  - mccorrinall 5y ago
    Instagram scaled to a 1bn usd valuation with 13 employees. Then they got acquired by facebook. Instagram is still pretty lean from what I’ve heard.
    - phillipcarter 5y ago
      I don't think Instagram had to seriously tackle the kinds of problems you're replying to prior to that acquisition. But when you're a big time tech company, the minimum bar is simply higher. That means more humans.
    - TuringNYC 5y ago
      Build the product, sure. Build the product to scale across the world?...I strongly disagree. Pre-revenue that is possible. Post revenue, you'd need at least lawyers and accountants in each country you operate in. Then you need systems to respond to subpeonas and legal requests, that is a hundred people right there. IG was 13 employees when you had a fraction of the images and they didnt have to be profitable, rather just grow by burning $. Now consider scale and profitability and you need even more people to grow tech cost consciously.
      - cudgy 5y ago
        > Now consider scale and profitability and you need even more people to grow tech cost consciously. This seems intuitively false. Adding more people to tech domains can actually decrease effectiveness with more expense, resulting in lower profits. Obviously, there is a sweet spot, but Twitter is a basic product regardless of how many countries it operates within.
- WatchDog 5y ago
  Even highly effective engineers will have trouble delivering features, in a large company, when they could easily deliver the same features in a smaller company. Process and politics is part of it, but the one of the problems with having so many developers, is that these developers end up writing code, all of that code ends up making things more complicated than they need to be, which makes introducing new features more complicated, due to all the systems you need to integrate with.
- majormajor 5y ago
  There is a huge difference between building a clone today on top of today's tools and commodity cloud platforms versus building it originally on what was around in 2006 and then having to constantly add features, change things, and then maintain 15 years worth of accumulated special edge cases forever without downtime. Comparing to Instagram seems pretty unfair too as it's newer, it was even-more-featured-limited for a long time, is now part of a much larger behemoth and had much lower scale than today's twitter when it was acquired, and my guess would be that it's an easier scaling problem too (lower on post frequency, more read-heavy workload).
kerkeslager 5y ago
> They're all trash, but that's besides the point. No, that's exactly the point. Just because you make something doesn't mean it was progress.
- cyberlurker 5y ago
  R&D is not useless.
  - kerkeslager 5y ago
    Agreed. However, releasing every half-baked misfeature that comes out of R&D is useless.
  - spurgu 5y ago
    Law of diminishing returns. We're talking about a simple platform of people relaying updates of 140 characters with a comment section and a feed algorithm to aggregate the content to everyone with a focus on prolonging everyone's engagement time while also following guidelines on what's "politically correct". There's only so much you can do, unless you venture out into manipulating public discourse, or striving to become a nation-state (or at least its propaganda machinery) or taking over the world (with all the imaginable internet services provided by you - email, storage, encyclopedias, news etc). At some point you should stop and think about your core business. And at some point you should realize that the law of diminishing returns applies. And at some point you should realize that it's fine to provide a stable service to a stable amount of users with a stable amount of features. Not that much R&D required. Or, rather, this is how our society would have to work in order to stay healthy. Living on a planet with finite resources while using them up like they're not is a sure-fire way to doom. We already know enough about farming for example to make it sustainable. We just don't know how to do it in a way where we don't cut down production considerably and starving a lot of people in the process. Not a nice topic to bring up i your election speech. But it's nice to ride the train since things seemingly move forward thanks to rising inflation (which is due to the problem in the first place) and the price of your product can go up. Oh, I might've misunderstood you as well. /remindme 20 years
honkdaddy 5y ago
FWIW, I have a close friend who worked on Twitter's "Health" team whose job at one point was building mini games for the support/moderation staff to play during company mandated breaks in between looking at racist tweets and CP. He coasted for a while then moved onto a job with more work. This is entirely anecdotal, but from the little I know from his couple months there, Twitter has no idea what to do with the huge amount of engineers they employ. This is by no means an endorsement of Musk, but the company could use some new direction I think.
- http-teapot 5y ago
  I am an ex-Twitter engineer with long tenure. You are sharing hearsay. It's not worth very much.
  - InCityDreams 5y ago
    So....tell us the truth.
    - http-teapot 5y ago
      At the scale of a company like Twitter, my point of view ain’t worth much either and pretending to hold the truth would be pretentious.
      - jchw 5y ago
        While I understand what you’re getting at, this is basically pointless, because nobody is going to accept hand wavey “you can never know, so don’t even try!”-type answers. Even if that is the best way to go.
        wussboy 5y ago
        I’m not accusing GP of this necessarily, but quite often the view “since we can’t know everything, we can’t know anything” is considered wisdom. To the GP: we all understand that your experience isn’t the same experience of everyone, but it is AN experience, and would be useful to us who don’t have any experience.
xiphias2 5y ago
Spaces is amazing. It was great listening Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador talk while they were making history by voting Bitcoin to be adopted as legal tender in the country. He was just looking at his Twitter feed at that time, and was interested in what people are talking about the bill in spaces. I know he's controversial, but I wish more politicians would make themselves more accessible through Twitter (and I'm not a Trump fan, I just think he used it more effectively than other politicians).
- epolanski 5y ago
  Yeah, they give lunatics like Nayib a voice, by the way good luck going to el salvador and hope to use bitcoin. But so does Instagram and Facebook and other socials. Politicians doing live QAs on facebook was happening a decade ago already, since live streams were a thing.
  - spurgu 5y ago
    Giving people a voice sure seems like a clear downside of this whole internet thing. Or does it simply mean that humanity is fucking destructive (while individual humans generally are beautiful)?
    - epolanski 5y ago
      It's not a downside. The downside is that we don't teach critical thinking to children in school. So you end up with adults that believe whatever tv tells them or will buy any compelling argument without trying to debunk it first.
      - cudgy 5y ago
        And with more opinions available to people, there is less likelihood of a large mass galvanized around one crazy theory (the one that the overlords deem not crazy).
        5y ago
ehnto 5y ago
> ...to keep the app running? New devices, new standards, a lot of things change that you need devs to keep up with. I guess, and I imagine at their size they probably run pretty inefficiently. It just seems like a surprisingly big team. From all fronts really, not just development but design too, does it really take that much effort to keep Twitter "twittery"? > Crypto Profile Pictures Straight out of a satire piece, I had not heard about that.
nl 5y ago
> They've added Spaces, Twitter Blue and Crypto Profile Pictures - all 3 massive features added to their product. I think your definition of "massive" is different to mine. Spaces is at least a new medium. The other two are incremental features that a small (<10 person) team would ship in a few months at another FANG company.

ceeplusplus 5y ago

Those things you mention hardly justify thousands of expensive developers to maintain and create. I bet a team of 10 top notch engineers could create Spaces+Blue+Crypto pfp's in a couple months and run it at Twitter scale. Don't forget Instagram was acquired when it had 13 employees serving tens of millions of users. Speaking out of experience, most engineers in big tech are bike shedding on internal tools that don't do anything useful. A small minority deliver the majority of the impact. On top of that at companies like Twitter and Google some of those useless employees spend their time complaining about social justice initiatives rather than doing work.

throwanem 5y ago
Speaking out of what experience? You've just appealed to your own authority; it seems not out of line to ask whence that comes.
- ceeplusplus 5y ago
  Working at several big tech companies in industry. I can't say my experience is fully representative but I do start to see a pattern when my experiences line up with that of all my friends. There are a _lot_ of internal tools and anecdotally many of them seem like they're designed to abstract away things which wouldn't need abstracting for a company that exclusively hired high performing engineers.
  - WesternWind 5y ago
    Plenty of things are abstracted not because they need to be, but because they can be, and doing so increases efficiency, security, the ability to scale, and the ability of engineers to reason about the development.
    - djbusby 5y ago
      And do the task consistently and correctly.
dkislyuk 5y ago
I think this is a pretty naive take. Developing anything at Twitter-scale will run into security considerations, infrastructure development or optimization, constructing data workflows, multiple design iterations, UX design (how do people find and use this feature?), i18n, accessibility, product marketing, user testing, copy testing, and other functions and that’s not even considering the actual product development, which is of course across multiple platforms. See also: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
- mccorrinall 5y ago
  Instagram scaled to a 1bn usd valuation with 13 employees. Then they got acquired by facebook. Instagram is still pretty lean from what I’ve heard.
  - phillipcarter 5y ago
    I don't think Instagram had to seriously tackle the kinds of problems you're replying to prior to that acquisition. But when you're a big time tech company, the minimum bar is simply higher. That means more humans.
  - TuringNYC 5y ago
    Build the product, sure. Build the product to scale across the world?...I strongly disagree. Pre-revenue that is possible. Post revenue, you'd need at least lawyers and accountants in each country you operate in. Then you need systems to respond to subpeonas and legal requests, that is a hundred people right there. IG was 13 employees when you had a fraction of the images and they didnt have to be profitable, rather just grow by burning $. Now consider scale and profitability and you need even more people to grow tech cost consciously.
    - cudgy 5y ago
      > Now consider scale and profitability and you need even more people to grow tech cost consciously. This seems intuitively false. Adding more people to tech domains can actually decrease effectiveness with more expense, resulting in lower profits. Obviously, there is a sweet spot, but Twitter is a basic product regardless of how many countries it operates within.
WatchDog 5y ago
Even highly effective engineers will have trouble delivering features, in a large company, when they could easily deliver the same features in a smaller company. Process and politics is part of it, but the one of the problems with having so many developers, is that these developers end up writing code, all of that code ends up making things more complicated than they need to be, which makes introducing new features more complicated, due to all the systems you need to integrate with.
majormajor 5y ago
There is a huge difference between building a clone today on top of today's tools and commodity cloud platforms versus building it originally on what was around in 2006 and then having to constantly add features, change things, and then maintain 15 years worth of accumulated special edge cases forever without downtime. Comparing to Instagram seems pretty unfair too as it's newer, it was even-more-featured-limited for a long time, is now part of a much larger behemoth and had much lower scale than today's twitter when it was acquired, and my guess would be that it's an easier scaling problem too (lower on post frequency, more read-heavy workload).

kerkeslager 5y ago

> They're all trash, but that's besides the point. No, that's exactly the point. Just because you make something doesn't mean it was progress.

cyberlurker 5y ago
R&D is not useless.
- kerkeslager 5y ago
  Agreed. However, releasing every half-baked misfeature that comes out of R&D is useless.
- spurgu 5y ago
  Law of diminishing returns. We're talking about a simple platform of people relaying updates of 140 characters with a comment section and a feed algorithm to aggregate the content to everyone with a focus on prolonging everyone's engagement time while also following guidelines on what's "politically correct". There's only so much you can do, unless you venture out into manipulating public discourse, or striving to become a nation-state (or at least its propaganda machinery) or taking over the world (with all the imaginable internet services provided by you - email, storage, encyclopedias, news etc). At some point you should stop and think about your core business. And at some point you should realize that the law of diminishing returns applies. And at some point you should realize that it's fine to provide a stable service to a stable amount of users with a stable amount of features. Not that much R&D required. Or, rather, this is how our society would have to work in order to stay healthy. Living on a planet with finite resources while using them up like they're not is a sure-fire way to doom. We already know enough about farming for example to make it sustainable. We just don't know how to do it in a way where we don't cut down production considerably and starving a lot of people in the process. Not a nice topic to bring up i your election speech. But it's nice to ride the train since things seemingly move forward thanks to rising inflation (which is due to the problem in the first place) and the price of your product can go up. Oh, I might've misunderstood you as well. /remindme 20 years

honkdaddy 5y ago

FWIW, I have a close friend who worked on Twitter's "Health" team whose job at one point was building mini games for the support/moderation staff to play during company mandated breaks in between looking at racist tweets and CP. He coasted for a while then moved onto a job with more work. This is entirely anecdotal, but from the little I know from his couple months there, Twitter has no idea what to do with the huge amount of engineers they employ. This is by no means an endorsement of Musk, but the company could use some new direction I think.

http-teapot 5y ago
I am an ex-Twitter engineer with long tenure. You are sharing hearsay. It's not worth very much.
- InCityDreams 5y ago
  So....tell us the truth.
  - http-teapot 5y ago
    At the scale of a company like Twitter, my point of view ain’t worth much either and pretending to hold the truth would be pretentious.
    - jchw 5y ago
      While I understand what you’re getting at, this is basically pointless, because nobody is going to accept hand wavey “you can never know, so don’t even try!”-type answers. Even if that is the best way to go.
      - wussboy 5y ago
        I’m not accusing GP of this necessarily, but quite often the view “since we can’t know everything, we can’t know anything” is considered wisdom. To the GP: we all understand that your experience isn’t the same experience of everyone, but it is AN experience, and would be useful to us who don’t have any experience.

xiphias2 5y ago

Spaces is amazing. It was great listening Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador talk while they were making history by voting Bitcoin to be adopted as legal tender in the country. He was just looking at his Twitter feed at that time, and was interested in what people are talking about the bill in spaces. I know he's controversial, but I wish more politicians would make themselves more accessible through Twitter (and I'm not a Trump fan, I just think he used it more effectively than other politicians).

epolanski 5y ago
Yeah, they give lunatics like Nayib a voice, by the way good luck going to el salvador and hope to use bitcoin. But so does Instagram and Facebook and other socials. Politicians doing live QAs on facebook was happening a decade ago already, since live streams were a thing.
- spurgu 5y ago
  Giving people a voice sure seems like a clear downside of this whole internet thing. Or does it simply mean that humanity is fucking destructive (while individual humans generally are beautiful)?
  - epolanski 5y ago
    It's not a downside. The downside is that we don't teach critical thinking to children in school. So you end up with adults that believe whatever tv tells them or will buy any compelling argument without trying to debunk it first.
    - cudgy 5y ago
      And with more opinions available to people, there is less likelihood of a large mass galvanized around one crazy theory (the one that the overlords deem not crazy).
      - 5y ago

ehnto 5y ago

> ...to keep the app running? New devices, new standards, a lot of things change that you need devs to keep up with. I guess, and I imagine at their size they probably run pretty inefficiently. It just seems like a surprisingly big team. From all fronts really, not just development but design too, does it really take that much effort to keep Twitter "twittery"? > Crypto Profile Pictures Straight out of a satire piece, I had not heard about that.

nl 5y ago

> They've added Spaces, Twitter Blue and Crypto Profile Pictures - all 3 massive features added to their product. I think your definition of "massive" is different to mine. Spaces is at least a new medium. The other two are incremental features that a small (<10 person) team would ship in a few months at another FANG company.