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I don’t think so. I think although Elon is poorly managing Twitter. What we are seeing is how poorly managed Twitter was behind closed doors. Years of technical

I don’t think so. I think although Elon is poorly managing Twitter. What we are seeing is how poorly managed Twitter was behind closed doors. Years of technical debt and no movement or improvements. Sounds like people were just getting over paid and producing very little. Atleast that’s what it seems like from all the ex employees ranting on Twitter about being fired.

gonzo41 4y ago
Maybe... But not all tech debt is bad. As long as it's not holding you back and you are making deliberate choices. Twitter may have been badly managed, but it was consistent in experience. And in a large way that is a valuable product/feature itself. Elon will change things enough that it won't be like what it was, a giant distributed broadcast platform. I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself. He seems to be very badly advised at the moment. It's going to lead to a elon against the world situation where he wrecks something everyone likes and he's tarnished forever. He should have paid the 1Bn exit fee and just keep shitposting from the sidelines.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > He should have paid the 1Bn exit fee and just keep shitposting from the sidelines. He didn't have that option. That was the fee if the deal fell through for other reasons outside Musk's control. Musk didn't have any out in the contract. When that became clear in Delaware, he gave in.
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    Oh damn, I didn't click on that point. What a footgun.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  > But not all tech debt is bad. Of course not, if a company is profitable, its technical debt that made the company money and paid the bills. But if technical debt means running 40 servers instead of 10, then it should be something that is addressed, not ignored for 10+ years. > but it was consistent in experience. Consistent experience of being spammed by bot accounts. Looking at anyone popular and 95% of the replies are bots, or tweeting the wrong word and being spammed by bots. Is a terrible experience which has never been addressed. > I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself. I agree. I think over the years popularity has gone to his head, stroked his ego, and he isn't the same person he was 10 years ago. He may not be the greatest example of a 'good' person but wqhat hes done with Tesla, SpaceX, etc, getting the right people in place and such to build these companies up, hes done well, but in the last 4-5 years hes sorta gone off the rails.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    > But if technical debt means running 40 servers instead of 10, then it should be something that is addressed, not ignored for 10+ years. Technical debt is rarely that simple. Usually it is a pile of Chesterton's Fences that only the people who built it really understand why its all there, but if you start just ripping it all down then you wind up breaking something important (think "service which scours databases to ensure that they're compliant with GDPR regulations and avoids a billion dollar fine from the EU" or something of that nature). The code may have grown organically and arguably need to be tossed and rewritten, but most of the time the code in its current state is also the requirements doc for the rewrite (and either the rewrite will take 10 times as long as anyone thinks or else the new system will throw away 90% of the old system without understanding it and now you have to deal with pissed off EU regulators and there goes everything you would have saved). I'm usually on the side where I think its time to take the hard decisions and spend the effort either cleaning up the existing codebase or rewriting it, but that's rarely the way the business sees things, and they'd prefer to just bolt on some more crap yet again to keep it going for another year because they're trying to boost their metrics, not solve long term problems.
    - philliphaydon 4y ago
      We could write a book on the different types of technical debt, obviously dumbing it down to 40 vs 10 servers is a massively over simplification on my part. My point is when you're in a small company, even dollar counts, if infrastructure isn't trying to optimize hardware utialization then you end up throwing hardware at the problems. If engineering isn't trying to optimize codebases then you're throwing more resources at the problem (people, hardware, time, more services, monitoring, and safe guards). Then there's issues with marketing, sales, management, etc. The other day we had that tweet from elon 'apologising' for android being slow and the '1000 requests' which was disputed by one of the engineers and he got himself fired. But what he said is they have 10+ years of technical debt hindering performance. Large companies like twitter suffer from the idea they are 'too big to fail'. They have 1000s of engineers and I question, what are they doing, you obviously have enough money and resources, but at the same time why are a portion of those people not sitting there optimizing what exists. We don't see any resolution to bots, we don't see new useful features, we don't see any attempt to address issues people have been complaining about for 10 years. etc. So we have 1000s of engineers doing what exactly? There's some incredibly smart people working or worked at twitter, but their talents were wasted on effectively maintaining a sinking ship by trying to make it sink slower instead of trying to patch the holes and keep it afloat.
- PonySoldier 4y ago
  > something everyone likes There's a decent chunk of the population that would be ecstatic if Twitter went away and they never had to hear about it again, so he'd probably gain some fans there.
CloudRecondite 4y ago
When Twitter fails there will be no one to blame but Elon. Even so he will still have people like you defending him.
- ilyt 4y ago
  How saying "he's poorly managing it" defending that clown ? "elon badly managing it" and "twitter being a shitshow before he took over" do not collide with eachother either
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  I'm not quite sure how I'm defending him. I don't really like him, especially after he voiced his opinions on Ukraine and Taiwan, I hope he loses all his money. And I'll never touch a Tesla. All Elon has done by buying Twitter is reveal how much of a trash company it was internally. From management/board perspective, clearly they was never listening to the engineers and just doing the bare minimum to get inflated salaries and bonuses.
  - echelon 4y ago
    I was a fan for all that Musk did with SpaceX. Single-handedly dropping costs to LEO and creating a civilian / commercial space industry -- mind blowingly impressive, and willed into existence by one man. When he spoke against Taiwanese and Ukrainian sovereignty, he looked an awful lot like he was being controlled or having his arm twisted by foreign powers. These were hugely inflammatory remarks made back to back during a time of heightened geopolitical tensions. I have to wonder if those high up in the ranks at the DoD are looking at ways to minimize Elon's risk or influence. Especially given the fact that he now launches classified payloads. Elon has enormous vested financial interests near or within two adversarial countries.
    - cokeandpepsi 4y ago
      The issue here is that he has idiots whispering in his ear this time, the majority of his other ventures he was partnered with decent people it's pretty obvious there's a load of sv vultures egging him on hard to imagine a worse direction for this to go
synu 4y ago
Even if that’s true (I just don’t know) the cost alone of servicing the company debt is now greater than the cost of paying all those people to sit around and do nothing, and anyway the problems with Twitter aren’t ones that are fixed by engineering.
lazide 4y ago
If you’ve got a giant house of cards you bought for $44 bln, I’m not sure the right approach is to start lobbing grenades immediately.
- ilyt 4y ago
  The house just standing costs him money tho
  - lazide 4y ago
    Less money however, at least in the short term. It had a lot more revenue!
bydlocoder 4y ago
Do you have any insights on a technical debt thing? From the outside their engineering looks top-notch.

gonzo41 4y ago

Maybe... But not all tech debt is bad. As long as it's not holding you back and you are making deliberate choices. Twitter may have been badly managed, but it was consistent in experience. And in a large way that is a valuable product/feature itself. Elon will change things enough that it won't be like what it was, a giant distributed broadcast platform. I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself. He seems to be very badly advised at the moment. It's going to lead to a elon against the world situation where he wrecks something everyone likes and he's tarnished forever. He should have paid the 1Bn exit fee and just keep shitposting from the sidelines.

ceejayoz 4y ago
> He should have paid the 1Bn exit fee and just keep shitposting from the sidelines. He didn't have that option. That was the fee if the deal fell through for other reasons outside Musk's control. Musk didn't have any out in the contract. When that became clear in Delaware, he gave in.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  Oh damn, I didn't click on that point. What a footgun.
philliphaydon 4y ago
> But not all tech debt is bad. Of course not, if a company is profitable, its technical debt that made the company money and paid the bills. But if technical debt means running 40 servers instead of 10, then it should be something that is addressed, not ignored for 10+ years. > but it was consistent in experience. Consistent experience of being spammed by bot accounts. Looking at anyone popular and 95% of the replies are bots, or tweeting the wrong word and being spammed by bots. Is a terrible experience which has never been addressed. > I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself. I agree. I think over the years popularity has gone to his head, stroked his ego, and he isn't the same person he was 10 years ago. He may not be the greatest example of a 'good' person but wqhat hes done with Tesla, SpaceX, etc, getting the right people in place and such to build these companies up, hes done well, but in the last 4-5 years hes sorta gone off the rails.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  > But if technical debt means running 40 servers instead of 10, then it should be something that is addressed, not ignored for 10+ years. Technical debt is rarely that simple. Usually it is a pile of Chesterton's Fences that only the people who built it really understand why its all there, but if you start just ripping it all down then you wind up breaking something important (think "service which scours databases to ensure that they're compliant with GDPR regulations and avoids a billion dollar fine from the EU" or something of that nature). The code may have grown organically and arguably need to be tossed and rewritten, but most of the time the code in its current state is also the requirements doc for the rewrite (and either the rewrite will take 10 times as long as anyone thinks or else the new system will throw away 90% of the old system without understanding it and now you have to deal with pissed off EU regulators and there goes everything you would have saved). I'm usually on the side where I think its time to take the hard decisions and spend the effort either cleaning up the existing codebase or rewriting it, but that's rarely the way the business sees things, and they'd prefer to just bolt on some more crap yet again to keep it going for another year because they're trying to boost their metrics, not solve long term problems.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    We could write a book on the different types of technical debt, obviously dumbing it down to 40 vs 10 servers is a massively over simplification on my part. My point is when you're in a small company, even dollar counts, if infrastructure isn't trying to optimize hardware utialization then you end up throwing hardware at the problems. If engineering isn't trying to optimize codebases then you're throwing more resources at the problem (people, hardware, time, more services, monitoring, and safe guards). Then there's issues with marketing, sales, management, etc. The other day we had that tweet from elon 'apologising' for android being slow and the '1000 requests' which was disputed by one of the engineers and he got himself fired. But what he said is they have 10+ years of technical debt hindering performance. Large companies like twitter suffer from the idea they are 'too big to fail'. They have 1000s of engineers and I question, what are they doing, you obviously have enough money and resources, but at the same time why are a portion of those people not sitting there optimizing what exists. We don't see any resolution to bots, we don't see new useful features, we don't see any attempt to address issues people have been complaining about for 10 years. etc. So we have 1000s of engineers doing what exactly? There's some incredibly smart people working or worked at twitter, but their talents were wasted on effectively maintaining a sinking ship by trying to make it sink slower instead of trying to patch the holes and keep it afloat.
PonySoldier 4y ago
> something everyone likes There's a decent chunk of the population that would be ecstatic if Twitter went away and they never had to hear about it again, so he'd probably gain some fans there.

CloudRecondite 4y ago

When Twitter fails there will be no one to blame but Elon. Even so he will still have people like you defending him.

ilyt 4y ago
How saying "he's poorly managing it" defending that clown ? "elon badly managing it" and "twitter being a shitshow before he took over" do not collide with eachother either
philliphaydon 4y ago
I'm not quite sure how I'm defending him. I don't really like him, especially after he voiced his opinions on Ukraine and Taiwan, I hope he loses all his money. And I'll never touch a Tesla. All Elon has done by buying Twitter is reveal how much of a trash company it was internally. From management/board perspective, clearly they was never listening to the engineers and just doing the bare minimum to get inflated salaries and bonuses.
- echelon 4y ago
  I was a fan for all that Musk did with SpaceX. Single-handedly dropping costs to LEO and creating a civilian / commercial space industry -- mind blowingly impressive, and willed into existence by one man. When he spoke against Taiwanese and Ukrainian sovereignty, he looked an awful lot like he was being controlled or having his arm twisted by foreign powers. These were hugely inflammatory remarks made back to back during a time of heightened geopolitical tensions. I have to wonder if those high up in the ranks at the DoD are looking at ways to minimize Elon's risk or influence. Especially given the fact that he now launches classified payloads. Elon has enormous vested financial interests near or within two adversarial countries.
  - cokeandpepsi 4y ago
    The issue here is that he has idiots whispering in his ear this time, the majority of his other ventures he was partnered with decent people it's pretty obvious there's a load of sv vultures egging him on hard to imagine a worse direction for this to go

synu 4y ago

Even if that’s true (I just don’t know) the cost alone of servicing the company debt is now greater than the cost of paying all those people to sit around and do nothing, and anyway the problems with Twitter aren’t ones that are fixed by engineering.

lazide 4y ago

If you’ve got a giant house of cards you bought for $44 bln, I’m not sure the right approach is to start lobbing grenades immediately.

ilyt 4y ago
The house just standing costs him money tho
- lazide 4y ago
  Less money however, at least in the short term. It had a lot more revenue!

bydlocoder 4y ago

Do you have any insights on a technical debt thing? From the outside their engineering looks top-notch.