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Here's what CEOs are going to think: If Twitter stays operational with a skeleton crew: it's confirmation to them that engineering is overstaffed and Twitter w

Here's what CEOs are going to think: If Twitter stays operational with a skeleton crew: it's confirmation to them that engineering is overstaffed and Twitter was bloated. If Twitter starts breaking down: it's confirmation that Twitter was so overstaffed it became too bloated to produce reliable, resilient software and instead relied on its outsized headcount to keep things running rather than doing things "properly"

blitzar 4y ago
If Twitter stays operational with a zero crew - the crew they had, that built it were f'ing geniuses, artists even.
- ctrbg 4y ago
  This! If a system has minimal operational burden, that means it was designed by people who cared deeply about it and worked diligently building it. Those characteristics are rare commodity these days!
dboreham 4y ago
The bloat is deliberate. It comes from investors asking what you as a company manager are doing to put their money to work. One of the things you can do is hire more people, ostensibly to create more stuff to create more income. This lasts until the investors tell you you're being wasteful with their money by employing so many people. This is all that happened in the past couple of months.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I mean you're not wrong; a lot of tech companies have money to burn and nowhere to put it other than hiring more people and doing more engineering work and bets that may or may not end up anywhere. The meme goes that most are in optimizing advertisements and gathering / collating data, anyway. So while I don't disagree with Twitter downsizing - as the other tech companies have been doing recently - I don't think it was wise to go at it so aggressively, having the effect that there's now a walkout of staff that Twitter absolutely needs to run.
jeffbee 4y ago
Twitter is going to enter a period of unprecedented reliability, at least for several weeks, maybe through the end of the year. Any idiot can run a rapidly shrinking service with users and advertisers both running for the exits, and no engineers on staff to push new changes.

blitzar 4y ago

If Twitter stays operational with a zero crew - the crew they had, that built it were f'ing geniuses, artists even.

ctrbg 4y ago
This! If a system has minimal operational burden, that means it was designed by people who cared deeply about it and worked diligently building it. Those characteristics are rare commodity these days!

dboreham 4y ago

The bloat is deliberate. It comes from investors asking what you as a company manager are doing to put their money to work. One of the things you can do is hire more people, ostensibly to create more stuff to create more income. This lasts until the investors tell you you're being wasteful with their money by employing so many people. This is all that happened in the past couple of months.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I mean you're not wrong; a lot of tech companies have money to burn and nowhere to put it other than hiring more people and doing more engineering work and bets that may or may not end up anywhere. The meme goes that most are in optimizing advertisements and gathering / collating data, anyway. So while I don't disagree with Twitter downsizing - as the other tech companies have been doing recently - I don't think it was wise to go at it so aggressively, having the effect that there's now a walkout of staff that Twitter absolutely needs to run.

jeffbee 4y ago

Twitter is going to enter a period of unprecedented reliability, at least for several weeks, maybe through the end of the year. Any idiot can run a rapidly shrinking service with users and advertisers both running for the exits, and no engineers on staff to push new changes.