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This is a very stupid thing to do. First, code is not the issue. Code can be rewritten in not a lot of time, when you have clear what to write. Twitter is not s

This is a very stupid thing to do. First, code is not the issue. Code can be rewritten in not a lot of time, when you have clear what to write. Twitter is not something so complex, in principle, thus it shouldn't be that difficult (a team of 10 good programmers in a month can probably rewrite everything). The thing where is 99% of the complexity and you can't redesign in a month is the infrastructure, how data is stored, how the various components communicate together, how everything scales globally, and all the related components. Things like Twitter are not complex for the application (that is trivial to implement) but for what it takes to run that trivial applications with that kind of numbers. Looking only at the code is stupid, since code is fairly trivial to rewrite, while doing infrastructure changes is something difficult, costly and in some cases even impossible.

aroman 4y ago
> a team of 10 good programmers in a month can probably rewrite everything unless you scope-down "everything" to the point of triviality, that is ludicrously underestimating the intrinsic complexity of twitter's product surface, and all the plumbing and necessary tools that lie beneath
- uptownfunk 4y ago
  Probably not as hard as it seems, Amazon does this regularly with the concept of 2 pizza team. The real challenge is figuring out what is the 20% of Twitter that drives 80% of revenue. Probably basic Twitter posting and ads, and whatever fraud/bot prevention is needed to keep running smoothly.
  - bagacrap 4y ago
    why would you throw away 20% of your revenue? Obviously a lot of functionality is there to chase marginal percentages of revenue, but it's still worthwhile at Twitter scale.
    - propogandist 4y ago
      Because twitter is a money losing business. The cost of that 20% revenue is too high and hurts the profit margin.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Amazon has more than 50 employees.
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  given how many people twitter employs and how many features actually get shipped at twitter, I'd say scope-down isn't that terrible of an idea
trident5000 4y ago
Its not stupid because he knows and trusts his engineers at Tesla. He knows nobody at Twitter. Hes probably trying to get an understanding of whats going on without relying on a bunch of employees who might not like him. It takes a while to build an employee base you trust, certainly in his situation.
- code_runner 4y ago
  I believe you’re missing the point. Random code reviews performed by people in a whole different sector aren’t the best way to find out “what’s going on”.
  - VirusNewbie 4y ago
    It may not be the best way, but I could certainly see it having some value. Twitter has a ton of home grown tooling that a company it size wouldn't have if it was started today. Is the team of people maintaining their custom stream processing engine really going to say "You could probably just replace this whole team by using Flink"? Repeat for their custom NoSql DB, their batch processing engine, their RPC framework etc.
  - trident5000 4y ago
    I never said it was the best way, but it may be the most viable option. And you dont have Tesla engineers personally go through the code, you have them sit down with twitter engineers and have them walk through how it works. Its probably a general understanding exercise.
  - robryan 4y ago
    They don't really need to find out anything meaningful. They are basically just putting Twitter employees on notice that they may be going deep into the details when assessing where the company is at and what changes they might want to make.
  - joezydeco 4y ago
    Those who think this is a code review for the sake of looking for bugs or architecture issues are missing the point. It's an intimidation factor on Musk's part. Are you willing to play along and show your work? Or are you going to huff and puff and complain about it? Maybe you're hiding something, or maybe you're not going to be a cooperative resource going forward. Now you're on the cut list. Maybe the code will get glanced at for a moment. Most of us can tell well written code from spaghetti without running it through a compiler. But still, that's not the prime objective here.
jwilber 4y ago
Here’s just what Twitter has open-sourced: https://github.com/orgs/twitter/repositories https://github.com/orgs/twitter/repositories Laughable that you think 10 people can rewrite all of this in a month. It would take longer to scope out the design docs alone.
sedatk 4y ago
Just the iOS app is 2.5 million lines[1]. Good luck writing tenth of that from scratch in a month. [1] https://twitter.com/bhcarpenter/status/1585834343766773761 https://twitter.com/bhcarpenter/status/1585834343766773761
turmeric_root 4y ago
I agree, I made my own google docs implementation using a `<textarea>` and it was super easy.
1270018080 4y ago
> (a team of 10 good programmers in a month can probably rewrite everything). Is this satire?

aroman 4y ago

> a team of 10 good programmers in a month can probably rewrite everything unless you scope-down "everything" to the point of triviality, that is ludicrously underestimating the intrinsic complexity of twitter's product surface, and all the plumbing and necessary tools that lie beneath

uptownfunk 4y ago
Probably not as hard as it seems, Amazon does this regularly with the concept of 2 pizza team. The real challenge is figuring out what is the 20% of Twitter that drives 80% of revenue. Probably basic Twitter posting and ads, and whatever fraud/bot prevention is needed to keep running smoothly.
- bagacrap 4y ago
  why would you throw away 20% of your revenue? Obviously a lot of functionality is there to chase marginal percentages of revenue, but it's still worthwhile at Twitter scale.
  - propogandist 4y ago
    Because twitter is a money losing business. The cost of that 20% revenue is too high and hurts the profit margin.
- lupire 4y ago
  Amazon has more than 50 employees.
rjzzleep 4y ago
given how many people twitter employs and how many features actually get shipped at twitter, I'd say scope-down isn't that terrible of an idea

trident5000 4y ago

Its not stupid because he knows and trusts his engineers at Tesla. He knows nobody at Twitter. Hes probably trying to get an understanding of whats going on without relying on a bunch of employees who might not like him. It takes a while to build an employee base you trust, certainly in his situation.

code_runner 4y ago
I believe you’re missing the point. Random code reviews performed by people in a whole different sector aren’t the best way to find out “what’s going on”.
- VirusNewbie 4y ago
  It may not be the best way, but I could certainly see it having some value. Twitter has a ton of home grown tooling that a company it size wouldn't have if it was started today. Is the team of people maintaining their custom stream processing engine really going to say "You could probably just replace this whole team by using Flink"? Repeat for their custom NoSql DB, their batch processing engine, their RPC framework etc.
- trident5000 4y ago
  I never said it was the best way, but it may be the most viable option. And you dont have Tesla engineers personally go through the code, you have them sit down with twitter engineers and have them walk through how it works. Its probably a general understanding exercise.
- robryan 4y ago
  They don't really need to find out anything meaningful. They are basically just putting Twitter employees on notice that they may be going deep into the details when assessing where the company is at and what changes they might want to make.
- joezydeco 4y ago
  Those who think this is a code review for the sake of looking for bugs or architecture issues are missing the point. It's an intimidation factor on Musk's part. Are you willing to play along and show your work? Or are you going to huff and puff and complain about it? Maybe you're hiding something, or maybe you're not going to be a cooperative resource going forward. Now you're on the cut list. Maybe the code will get glanced at for a moment. Most of us can tell well written code from spaghetti without running it through a compiler. But still, that's not the prime objective here.

jwilber 4y ago

Here’s just what Twitter has open-sourced: https://github.com/orgs/twitter/repositories https://github.com/orgs/twitter/repositories Laughable that you think 10 people can rewrite all of this in a month. It would take longer to scope out the design docs alone.

sedatk 4y ago

Just the iOS app is 2.5 million lines[1]. Good luck writing tenth of that from scratch in a month. [1] https://twitter.com/bhcarpenter/status/1585834343766773761 https://twitter.com/bhcarpenter/status/1585834343766773761

turmeric_root 4y ago

I agree, I made my own google docs implementation using a `<textarea>` and it was super easy.

1270018080 4y ago

> (a team of 10 good programmers in a month can probably rewrite everything). Is this satire?