4 ms·

A couple weeks ago 50% were laid off and nothing happened. Now I read on Twitter that Twitter died and it's at a record high DAU. Make it make sense! It may be

by memish 4y ago

A couple weeks ago 50% were laid off and nothing happened. Now I read on Twitter that Twitter died and it's at a record high DAU. Make it make sense! It may be bumpy in the short term, but then all of the supremely confident naysayers are going to look ridiculous and spiteful if it turns out that Twitter can operate with 80-90% fewer employees.

nso95 4y ago
Ok but what if they can't
- convery 4y ago
  Then the company can hire more engineers? Even if devs in SF virtue-signal on Twitter about how they'd never work under Musk, a competitive paycheck attracts outsiders.
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    I wonder how high the paycheck will have to be and how much more expensive this strategy will be than just slowly firing people.
  - piva00 4y ago
    Who is gonna onboard those new engineers? I subscribe to Peter Naur's view of programming as theory building, the knowledge of what these applications running inside Twitter do is being lost on a fast pace, the code itself doesn't tell the whole theory behind the code. Institutional knowledge is necessary to sufficiently onboard any new hire, without that you have headless chickens running around trying to figure out what exactly are they working with. How do you solve Chesterton's Fence when there's no one around to tell you why the Fence is there?
  - DoughnutHole 4y ago
    Except Musk's companies are already known for underpaying, and the Twitter is stuck servicing a colossal debt from the purchase. Any engineers capable enough to rescue this trainwreck will likely be able to secure better compensation elsewhere without having to endure Musk's new indefinite "hardcore" death march. Twitter is going to operate on a skeleton staff of H1B's dependent on their employment for their visas (who are probably already floating their resumes) and whatever underqualified graduates they can hire.
guax 4y ago
I can pretty easily keep a mysql instance running. I cannot easily do that while adding features to it. Scale that up a lot and you can see how Twitter can keep running with much less people while not delivering anything. The fact that a site that big hasn't broken yet shows how good they actually were and in the end he did fire good engineers while not even tackling Twitter main problems which none were technical. Bots are still rampant, moderation is gone, monetization is non existant and advertisers were scared away. Unless things change what you're seeing is not a success, it's a zombie.
- gscott 4y ago
  At scale things break in weird and unexpected ways.
lm28469 4y ago
If my SRE quit everything would be fine for weeks/months and then nobody would know what to do when shit start to die

by memish 4y ago

nso95 4y ago

Ok but what if they can't

convery 4y ago
Then the company can hire more engineers? Even if devs in SF virtue-signal on Twitter about how they'd never work under Musk, a competitive paycheck attracts outsiders.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  I wonder how high the paycheck will have to be and how much more expensive this strategy will be than just slowly firing people.
- piva00 4y ago
  Who is gonna onboard those new engineers? I subscribe to Peter Naur's view of programming as theory building, the knowledge of what these applications running inside Twitter do is being lost on a fast pace, the code itself doesn't tell the whole theory behind the code. Institutional knowledge is necessary to sufficiently onboard any new hire, without that you have headless chickens running around trying to figure out what exactly are they working with. How do you solve Chesterton's Fence when there's no one around to tell you why the Fence is there?
- DoughnutHole 4y ago
  Except Musk's companies are already known for underpaying, and the Twitter is stuck servicing a colossal debt from the purchase. Any engineers capable enough to rescue this trainwreck will likely be able to secure better compensation elsewhere without having to endure Musk's new indefinite "hardcore" death march. Twitter is going to operate on a skeleton staff of H1B's dependent on their employment for their visas (who are probably already floating their resumes) and whatever underqualified graduates they can hire.

guax 4y ago

I can pretty easily keep a mysql instance running. I cannot easily do that while adding features to it. Scale that up a lot and you can see how Twitter can keep running with much less people while not delivering anything. The fact that a site that big hasn't broken yet shows how good they actually were and in the end he did fire good engineers while not even tackling Twitter main problems which none were technical. Bots are still rampant, moderation is gone, monetization is non existant and advertisers were scared away. Unless things change what you're seeing is not a success, it's a zombie.

gscott 4y ago
At scale things break in weird and unexpected ways.

lm28469 4y ago

If my SRE quit everything would be fine for weeks/months and then nobody would know what to do when shit start to die