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I get paid to jump into completely new (though mostly old) code bases that have problems. But those are mobile apps implemented on a tech stack I'm familiar wit

by Zigurd 4y ago

I get paid to jump into completely new (though mostly old) code bases that have problems. But those are mobile apps implemented on a tech stack I'm familiar with. Twitter-scale is totally different. I have a family member who works at keeping major parts of a major platform running. At that scale you make your own tools. Nobody outside the company is ready to use those tools without training.

everforward 4y ago
This. If there's no one left to pass on the tribal knowledge, the contractors have to reverse engineer how that stuff works. It'll take months to rebuild that tribal knowledge. The underlying tech is probably standard (e.g. they probably haven't invented their own routing protocol), but the control plane is likely custom. The impact of making manual changes or changing the control plane is probably unknown, ranging from being fine to borking the system in some way that even reverting the changes won't fix. The best option would be to try to rehire the former employees, probably at dramatically increased pay. I don't even know if that would work, though. Bridges have been burned.