4 ms·

I'm a software engineer and I still suspect Twitter will be on average no worse (could be better even) with 1/3rd or less of its current engineer count.

by Tenoke 4y ago

Macha 4y ago
It's current engineer count as of today, or it's current engineer count as of 2 weeks ago? By all accounts after the layoffs, voluntary resignations in response to layoffs, and people who refused the ultimatum and so probably consider themselves laid off, it's not clear Twitter even has a skeleton crew
disintegore 4y ago
I'm personally surprised that with so much of the workforce gone, and internal operations being total bedlam, the only thing that went down were 2FA emails. Someone at Twitter knew what they were doing. Let's hope they didn't get swept up.
- vasco 4y ago
  If they stopped builds, should be stable. All the infrastructure I've ever worked with has been the most stable when developers aren't pushing to production. 95% or more of incidents are caused by deployments. If you send everyone home, and things autoscale, it can stay up for a good while without SRE or similar functions having to do something.
dagmx 4y ago
I’m a software engineer too and I think software engineers are some of the worst at understanding the extents of a business outside their own niches.
butterlesstoast 4y ago
Very insightful. It is definitely a balance. They could get away with less devs. I guess I am curious what the specific breaking point will be. Sr Devs will only put up with so much (Even when making an incredible salary). Side note: do we know how much Twitter Sr. Devs make for sure? I know the term "400k for 5hrs a week" keeps getting thrown around. However, that doesn't seem incredibly well researched and has some triggers baked in
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
flowerbreeze 4y ago
Maybe true, but it could also be true that the ones who are smart enough to maintain it will leave and the ones who aren't will stay.
techdragon 4y ago
1/3 … sure. But the current reports are in the vicinity of 60% to 90% of the companies employees. Obviously it’s extremely hard to get accurate numbers because one minute it’s reply yes to this or your gone, the next it’s report to this room, then batches are getting rehired because they are essential to operations and it’s jumping around like the staff head count graph has arrhythmia.
turdprincess 4y ago
It really depends on who stays and who goes. Big organizations are collections of individual teams. Each key part of the site has a team behind it with 5 - 10 engineers. If the departures are such that for each team, 1 competent senior engineer remains who can keep that domain running, then Twitter could be unaffected with 1/5 of its workforce. They might not be building new features, but the current site could function, which is reasonable since the current site is arguably feature complete. But in reality it won't be as clean as that. If the whole localization team quits, suddenly the site won't be translated to other languages. If the whole mobile release team quits, suddenly the Twitter app might disappear from the app store. Or the security team is gutted and suddenly everyone's passwords are leaked.

I'm a software engineer and I still suspect Twitter will be on average no worse (could be better even) with 1/3rd or less of its current engineer count.

by Tenoke 4y ago

I'm a software engineer and I still suspect Twitter will be on average no worse (could be better even) with 1/3rd or less of its current engineer count.

Macha 4y ago

It's current engineer count as of today, or it's current engineer count as of 2 weeks ago? By all accounts after the layoffs, voluntary resignations in response to layoffs, and people who refused the ultimatum and so probably consider themselves laid off, it's not clear Twitter even has a skeleton crew

disintegore 4y ago

I'm personally surprised that with so much of the workforce gone, and internal operations being total bedlam, the only thing that went down were 2FA emails. Someone at Twitter knew what they were doing. Let's hope they didn't get swept up.

vasco 4y ago
If they stopped builds, should be stable. All the infrastructure I've ever worked with has been the most stable when developers aren't pushing to production. 95% or more of incidents are caused by deployments. If you send everyone home, and things autoscale, it can stay up for a good while without SRE or similar functions having to do something.

dagmx 4y ago

I’m a software engineer too and I think software engineers are some of the worst at understanding the extents of a business outside their own niches.

butterlesstoast 4y ago

Very insightful. It is definitely a balance. They could get away with less devs. I guess I am curious what the specific breaking point will be. Sr Devs will only put up with so much (Even when making an incredible salary). Side note: do we know how much Twitter Sr. Devs make for sure? I know the term "400k for 5hrs a week" keeps getting thrown around. However, that doesn't seem incredibly well researched and has some triggers baked in

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

flowerbreeze 4y ago

Maybe true, but it could also be true that the ones who are smart enough to maintain it will leave and the ones who aren't will stay.

techdragon 4y ago

1/3 … sure. But the current reports are in the vicinity of 60% to 90% of the companies employees. Obviously it’s extremely hard to get accurate numbers because one minute it’s reply yes to this or your gone, the next it’s report to this room, then batches are getting rehired because they are essential to operations and it’s jumping around like the staff head count graph has arrhythmia.

turdprincess 4y ago

It really depends on who stays and who goes. Big organizations are collections of individual teams. Each key part of the site has a team behind it with 5 - 10 engineers. If the departures are such that for each team, 1 competent senior engineer remains who can keep that domain running, then Twitter could be unaffected with 1/5 of its workforce. They might not be building new features, but the current site could function, which is reasonable since the current site is arguably feature complete. But in reality it won't be as clean as that. If the whole localization team quits, suddenly the site won't be translated to other languages. If the whole mobile release team quits, suddenly the Twitter app might disappear from the app store. Or the security team is gutted and suddenly everyone's passwords are leaked.