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A top reply [0] that Elon replied to: > Elon, there's a bunch of us in SV who will come up tonight to help on the infra side to keep the site up. > If you nee

A top reply [0] that Elon replied to: > Elon, there's a bunch of us in SV who will come up tonight to help on the infra side to keep the site up. > If you need help just ask. As if you could just drive over to the Twitter HQ, grok how all the infrastructure works, and make/provide meaningful contributions/tweaks/upkeep.... tonight That's either a level of delusion that I can't imagine and/or someone who has no idea what they are talking about. I also can't imagine carrying water for or "simp-ing" for a billionaire, especially one who treats people so terribly (this "work yourself to the bone or resign" ultimatum was one of the more disgusting things I've seen in tech, I'm appalled at the people defending it as some genius move). Really I feel bad for the people who have no choice but to stay at Twitter, the H-1B's and the like. The brain drain is going to be (/already has been) massive and all that will be left are the people who have no choice, can't find a better/different job, or are true sycophants. None of that makes for a healthy work environment and isn't conducive to making good products. [0] https://twitter.com/MichaelGuimarin/status/1593415642111045633 https://twitter.com/MichaelGuimarin/status/15934156421110456...

neuracnu 4y ago
To be honest, this sounds like bloody red meat to any black or grey hats out there interested in having some infiltration fun. Why not show up at Twitter’s hq with a mouth full of smart sounding engineering babble and a backpack full of spycraft toys?
- kibwen 4y ago
  Yep, Elon's paranoid about his current employees sabotaging him, but he should be just as paranoid about new job applicants looking to gain access and capitalize on the internal chaos.
  - nikau 4y ago
    Not gonna lie, if my current contract was ending id take a stint at twitter for a while just to be a fly on the wall for the insanity even knowing id get the arse at any time.
    - johannes1234321 4y ago
      I'm somewhat surprised that nobody bypassed the internal systems to tweet stuff using Musk's account. (Or maybe somebody has and we just can't distinguish?)
recuter 4y ago
> As if you could just drive over to the Twitter HQ, grok how all the infrastructure works, and make/provide meaningful contributions/tweaks/upkeep.... tonight The infra is just too clever for anybody to grok in a million years. These clowns probably don't even have fedoras, no way they'll ever figure it out.
- lovecg 4y ago
  Ever been on a team where a key person responsible for a piece of infra leaves suddenly, and next incident takes hours to resolve instead of minutes as everyone is running around trying to understand what the code is doing? It will be like that but way worse.
  - recuter 4y ago
    Yes, I have actually. Let it take hours to resolve, what of it? Way better than keeping a person around who hoards institutional knowledge and admin access for job security. In fact that would be the first person I'd zero in on and get rid of, and have in the past. Not only are people like that not indispensable, they should never have been hired, anywhere. A well engineered twitter has everything necessary to run it in properly documented internal wikis and can be handed off to a small new group of competent ops people at the drop of a hat. Ideally new hires should be able to fix and change things within a day of starting their jobs with little to no hand holding. I'm sure it is very far from that at the moment due to the unprofessionalism of everybody involved, but this is actually the best and fastest way to get it there purely from an ops perspective - usually takes years to convince management to yank off the bandaid because everybody is too scared to take responsibility. Twitter used to have fail whales all the goddamn time, sky doesn't fall, it isn't amazon they aren't losing money every second it is down. Whoever stayed on will be able to figure out eventually which things to restart in what order so long as they aren't locked out of the servers. Unless Twitter is still using Zookeeper. :P In the process of figuring it out they'll be putting in-writing what should have been documented all along and getting a feel for the brittle bits. Long term twitter is better off. Good riddance to bad rubbish. I'm sure the databases have recent known good backups at worst you'll get a bunch out of prolonged outages and some dataloss - since we are talking about tweets, nothing of value was lost.
ALittleLight 4y ago
I think Twitter is becoming a place for high risk reward employment. Maybe it crashes and burns, maybe you quickly ascend the ranks in the turmoil and reach a point in your career that would have taken substantially longer in a more traditional route. If Twitter does something like what Tesla did, you might even get filthy rich. Or, hey, maybe it doesn't work out and you get nothing but an interesting story, Twitter collapses or Elon fires you or whatever. Many companies say that they are like a startup, but I can see Twitter going back to that style. Far fewer people, far faster shipping, less thinking things through, etc. The bluechecks for anyone in a week and undoing it seems very startup like to me. Is that good? Probably not - but it is interesting, and, like I said, high risk high reward.
- tstrimple 4y ago
  > high risk reward employment. I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. Has there been literally *any* indication that this "hardcore" attitude will result in more reward?
  - ALittleLight 4y ago
    You don't think you would have an opportunity to achieve a higher position at Twitter (and more money either there or by switching into an adjacent company) faster than at a FAANG? And the other indication you have, apart from common sense, is Tesla. If you had got and held on to a lot of Tesla stock you would have been rewarded. No guarantees obviously, but if Twitter could be as successful - same thing could happen there. It's a possibility.
    - astrange 4y ago
      Wouldn't it be more profitable to just make Twitter over again at a new company?
      - ALittleLight 4y ago
        Yes, but more risk. In five to ten years I think there is more of a chance for Twitter to be worth 500 billion dollars than a random startup trying to recreate Twitter.
enumjorge 4y ago
Later in that thread he says he's currently in sales, but used to be a "self-taught infrastructure engineer". If you look at the site that he links from his Twitter profile you'll see a half-finished site made with a site-generator. Just the type of talent you want running the infra for the company you just paid $44B for.
- chrisbolt 4y ago
  What kind of frontend skills are you expecting from an infrastructure engineer, self-taught or not?
  - enumjorge 4y ago
    It's about the optics of some rando, with a half broken site that he's sharing publicly, claiming he'll "come up tonight" to help run one of the biggest sites on the web. Using a landing page creator like ConvertKit shouldn't require any frontend skills.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    ...Ability to change title of the page from "Home - made with softr.io" to his name ? Guy can't even use website generator
AYBABTME 4y ago
At the end of the day, most software eats the same stuff and the levers are often rudimentary and grokable, especially if you focus on a specific area. I don't think someone could meaningfully implement a new feature in a night, but could they tackle a problem in a given service and identity a rough remediation to save the next 72h? Yes, this stuff happens all the time. I've jumped on outages like this and figured it out as I went. You're not going to build a new feature but it's probably possible to get oriented enough to avoid catastrophy. People want it all to fail out of spite, and attempt to bring their dreams to life by merely doomsdaying repeatedly and with fervor. We had 4y of Trump and no amount of wishful doomsdaying actually changed anything. The media was full of drama and we told ourselves stories of incredible disfunctions, but at the end of the day the government kept on doing its thing, the country mostly didn't change too much on the fundamentals. Reality is most often more boring than that (save FTX-like events).
- gjulianm 4y ago
  That’s very naive. We’re talking about a distributed system with thousands of servers, with code from people who might not even work there anymore. Yeah, maybe if a server gets a high disk usage alert because of runaway logs you might fix it… but maybe that fix causes another problem, or maybe the alert is in a system that you don’t even know its purpose. Maybe 72h is just what it takes to you understand the internal tooling and how to do any action there.
  - LambdaComplex 4y ago
    > code from people who might not even work there anymore I think that's most of the code, at this point
  - AYBABTME 4y ago
    Basic firefighting often revolves around the same set of problems. It's not that naive. Tell me I'm wrong? I work with systems like this. Realistically most problems that show up by themselves (ie not caused by bad code) often have very common mitigations/remedies. There's surely some super complex interaction going on but bugs showing up of this complex nature are usually due to code changes, or scaling events that reach a tipping point. Odds are those aren't the bread and butter of problems faced by Twitter _right now_.
gerbler 4y ago
Hahaha. Even better, the twitterer specializes in digital detoxes (a worthy cause, but counter to Twitter's goals). Maybe his secret plan is to turn down services in a volunteer capacity
raspberry1337 4y ago
I'm appaled at how ignorant you are

neuracnu 4y ago

To be honest, this sounds like bloody red meat to any black or grey hats out there interested in having some infiltration fun. Why not show up at Twitter’s hq with a mouth full of smart sounding engineering babble and a backpack full of spycraft toys?

kibwen 4y ago
Yep, Elon's paranoid about his current employees sabotaging him, but he should be just as paranoid about new job applicants looking to gain access and capitalize on the internal chaos.
- nikau 4y ago
  Not gonna lie, if my current contract was ending id take a stint at twitter for a while just to be a fly on the wall for the insanity even knowing id get the arse at any time.
  - johannes1234321 4y ago
    I'm somewhat surprised that nobody bypassed the internal systems to tweet stuff using Musk's account. (Or maybe somebody has and we just can't distinguish?)

recuter 4y ago

> As if you could just drive over to the Twitter HQ, grok how all the infrastructure works, and make/provide meaningful contributions/tweaks/upkeep.... tonight The infra is just too clever for anybody to grok in a million years. These clowns probably don't even have fedoras, no way they'll ever figure it out.

lovecg 4y ago
Ever been on a team where a key person responsible for a piece of infra leaves suddenly, and next incident takes hours to resolve instead of minutes as everyone is running around trying to understand what the code is doing? It will be like that but way worse.
- recuter 4y ago
  Yes, I have actually. Let it take hours to resolve, what of it? Way better than keeping a person around who hoards institutional knowledge and admin access for job security. In fact that would be the first person I'd zero in on and get rid of, and have in the past. Not only are people like that not indispensable, they should never have been hired, anywhere. A well engineered twitter has everything necessary to run it in properly documented internal wikis and can be handed off to a small new group of competent ops people at the drop of a hat. Ideally new hires should be able to fix and change things within a day of starting their jobs with little to no hand holding. I'm sure it is very far from that at the moment due to the unprofessionalism of everybody involved, but this is actually the best and fastest way to get it there purely from an ops perspective - usually takes years to convince management to yank off the bandaid because everybody is too scared to take responsibility. Twitter used to have fail whales all the goddamn time, sky doesn't fall, it isn't amazon they aren't losing money every second it is down. Whoever stayed on will be able to figure out eventually which things to restart in what order so long as they aren't locked out of the servers. Unless Twitter is still using Zookeeper. :P In the process of figuring it out they'll be putting in-writing what should have been documented all along and getting a feel for the brittle bits. Long term twitter is better off. Good riddance to bad rubbish. I'm sure the databases have recent known good backups at worst you'll get a bunch out of prolonged outages and some dataloss - since we are talking about tweets, nothing of value was lost.

ALittleLight 4y ago

I think Twitter is becoming a place for high risk reward employment. Maybe it crashes and burns, maybe you quickly ascend the ranks in the turmoil and reach a point in your career that would have taken substantially longer in a more traditional route. If Twitter does something like what Tesla did, you might even get filthy rich. Or, hey, maybe it doesn't work out and you get nothing but an interesting story, Twitter collapses or Elon fires you or whatever. Many companies say that they are like a startup, but I can see Twitter going back to that style. Far fewer people, far faster shipping, less thinking things through, etc. The bluechecks for anyone in a week and undoing it seems very startup like to me. Is that good? Probably not - but it is interesting, and, like I said, high risk high reward.

tstrimple 4y ago
> high risk reward employment. I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. Has there been literally *any* indication that this "hardcore" attitude will result in more reward?
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  You don't think you would have an opportunity to achieve a higher position at Twitter (and more money either there or by switching into an adjacent company) faster than at a FAANG? And the other indication you have, apart from common sense, is Tesla. If you had got and held on to a lot of Tesla stock you would have been rewarded. No guarantees obviously, but if Twitter could be as successful - same thing could happen there. It's a possibility.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Wouldn't it be more profitable to just make Twitter over again at a new company?
    - ALittleLight 4y ago
      Yes, but more risk. In five to ten years I think there is more of a chance for Twitter to be worth 500 billion dollars than a random startup trying to recreate Twitter.

enumjorge 4y ago

Later in that thread he says he's currently in sales, but used to be a "self-taught infrastructure engineer". If you look at the site that he links from his Twitter profile you'll see a half-finished site made with a site-generator. Just the type of talent you want running the infra for the company you just paid $44B for.

chrisbolt 4y ago
What kind of frontend skills are you expecting from an infrastructure engineer, self-taught or not?
- enumjorge 4y ago
  It's about the optics of some rando, with a half broken site that he's sharing publicly, claiming he'll "come up tonight" to help run one of the biggest sites on the web. Using a landing page creator like ConvertKit shouldn't require any frontend skills.
- ilyt 4y ago
  ...Ability to change title of the page from "Home - made with softr.io" to his name ? Guy can't even use website generator

AYBABTME 4y ago

At the end of the day, most software eats the same stuff and the levers are often rudimentary and grokable, especially if you focus on a specific area. I don't think someone could meaningfully implement a new feature in a night, but could they tackle a problem in a given service and identity a rough remediation to save the next 72h? Yes, this stuff happens all the time. I've jumped on outages like this and figured it out as I went. You're not going to build a new feature but it's probably possible to get oriented enough to avoid catastrophy. People want it all to fail out of spite, and attempt to bring their dreams to life by merely doomsdaying repeatedly and with fervor. We had 4y of Trump and no amount of wishful doomsdaying actually changed anything. The media was full of drama and we told ourselves stories of incredible disfunctions, but at the end of the day the government kept on doing its thing, the country mostly didn't change too much on the fundamentals. Reality is most often more boring than that (save FTX-like events).

gjulianm 4y ago
That’s very naive. We’re talking about a distributed system with thousands of servers, with code from people who might not even work there anymore. Yeah, maybe if a server gets a high disk usage alert because of runaway logs you might fix it… but maybe that fix causes another problem, or maybe the alert is in a system that you don’t even know its purpose. Maybe 72h is just what it takes to you understand the internal tooling and how to do any action there.
- LambdaComplex 4y ago
  > code from people who might not even work there anymore I think that's most of the code, at this point
- AYBABTME 4y ago
  Basic firefighting often revolves around the same set of problems. It's not that naive. Tell me I'm wrong? I work with systems like this. Realistically most problems that show up by themselves (ie not caused by bad code) often have very common mitigations/remedies. There's surely some super complex interaction going on but bugs showing up of this complex nature are usually due to code changes, or scaling events that reach a tipping point. Odds are those aren't the bread and butter of problems faced by Twitter _right now_.

gerbler 4y ago

Hahaha. Even better, the twitterer specializes in digital detoxes (a worthy cause, but counter to Twitter's goals). Maybe his secret plan is to turn down services in a volunteer capacity

raspberry1337 4y ago

I'm appaled at how ignorant you are