10 ms·

I did SRE consulting work for a phase of my career... as the author points out, these systems are scaled out and resilient, but what happens next is entropy. Te

I did SRE consulting work for a phase of my career... as the author points out, these systems are scaled out and resilient, but what happens next is entropy. Team sizes shrink, everything starts to be viewed through a cost cutting / savings lens, overtaxed staff start ignoring problems or the long-term view because they are in firefighting mode, it becomes hard to attract new talent because the perception is "the good times are over." Things start to become brittle and/or not get the attention needed, contractors are brought in because they are cheaper and/or bits get outsourced to the cheapest bidder... the professional care and attention like the author clearly brought just starts to shift over time. Consultants like me are brought in to diagnose what's wrong - the good staff could write our briefs, they know what's going on - and generally we slap a band-aid on the problem because management just wants to squeeze whatever value they can out of the assets rather than actually improve anything.

mirzap 4y ago
- henrikschroder 4y ago
  Your reply is indistinguishable from a religious person exclaiming that "God is omniscient and moves in mysterious ways!" Stop worshipping billionaires.
  - mirekrusin 4y ago
    You could say that if he was new to the party. But he did change the world with his companies already, didn't he?
    - ldng 4y ago
      Really? Has he ?
      - bobsmooth 4y ago
        Before Tesla, EVs were a joke. Before SpaceX, satellite internet was a joke.
        qwytw 4y ago
        And that makes him infallible? If anyone else but Musk bought Twitter and started doing what he did they'd be the laughing stock of the financial world. His reputation is the only thing keeping him afloat (in this specific case, he might still do great with SpaceX and Tesla but so what? People like Jobs, Buffet, Gates etc. also made significant blunders at some points in their career)
        mirekrusin 4y ago
        It makes him more credible than random dudes on internet.
        qwytw 4y ago
        Or you know... you could try looking at facts and data an try to form your own opinion.
        mirekrusin 4y ago
        I think Musk did better homework on it than you.
        qwytw 4y ago
        Or maybe Musk has different goals. Anyway there is no need for you to be (I hope)purposefully obtuse...
    - mcv 4y ago
      Yes, and that's why he's getting worshipped, and that's what's making him go off the rails here.
    - qwytw 4y ago
      Any optimization he might do is unlikely to offset the cost of servicing the debt he offloaded to Twitter's balance sheet after the acquisition. So at 5% interest the yearly cost is 650 million, even at some obscene and unrealistic payroll per employee (including not only developers), like let's say 400k he'd have to fire over 1600 people just to balance this out. There is no way to spin this positively. Also due to no more RSUs cash comp for remaining employee would need to increase. Add to that the the loss in advertisement revenue do to obvious reasons. Taking these facts into account could you please explain how is Musk NOT a liability to Twitter? He basically spent 31 billion (plus 13 billion he offload to Twitter) just to buy the trademark and the user base (and some proportion of advertisers...). From a financial standpoint that's an objectively terrible deal. Musk might have other goals and that's great but in no way this is comparable to Tesla or SpaceX. >But he did change the world with his companies already, didn't he? History is full of examples of extraordinary successful people who get blinded by their own success and start thinking that they are infallible. This ussually results which in pretty unhinged behavior when they get older. Musk does not seem like the most grounded person ever so he's likely at a much higher risk of this than almost every tech billionaire I can think of.
      - mirekrusin 4y ago
        also: History is full of examples of extraordinary successful people [period]. Maybe somebody with Musk track record can be seen as more credible than some random "qwytw" on the internet? I mean incentives are on his side, aren't they? For one his famous. It's his toy, so he won't let it disappear into irrelevance without fighting for it. There are not many people currently alive with comparable track record, being recognized world wide, with deep pockets like him. What if in few years time from now people will be stepping on each other writing posts and books on how they really knew all of that from the beginning, that obviously he was right etc. - doesn't sound unreal or alien to me, quite opposite actually. To be honest, I don't even think anything extraordinary needs to happen for all of it to work out just fine. For all people saying technically it's not just rendering short messages - well it is just that at the end. Look at stackoverflow - most people don't realize it's just single monolith application running on 6 servers - all of it. There are still thousands of people employed there, which feels like too many if anything.
  - octodog 4y ago
    This is a ridiculous take and you are not really adding anything to the discussion. Musk has successfully run companies in the past and is running two extremely successful companies right now.
    - Hnrobert42 4y ago
      I disagree. GP was pointing out that GGP was deifying Musk in sort of a cult of personality. I didn’t notice that until GP’s post.
    - hcazz 4y ago
      To play devil's advocate for a bit, are you certain he's solely responsible for the successes of SpaceX/Tesla, or that those companies succeeded in spite of his leadership? In case it isn't clear, I agree with the parent comment. In the same tone as the comment above the parent, you could also write "Thing is - Elon Musk knows a thing or two about sexual harassment lawsuits. It's inevitable that he will have another at Twitter." Stop idolizing billionaires. >Musk has successfully run companies in the past and is running two extremely successful companies right now. Is he actually running those companies, or is he posting selfies of whiteboards at 1:30am showing architecture diagrams of Twitter? In these markets, after he was nearly forced by courts into completing a purchase deal for Twitter after making an overpriced offer, I'm genuinely curious to see how he pays the ~$1b in interest per year on the debt to purchase Twitter.
      - GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
        He can just sell more tesla stock, its a fake financial problem he’s being loud about
      - kortilla 4y ago
        > Stop idolizing billionaires. Stop saying this in discussions about one particular person. It’s as useful as saying “stop idolizing millionaires” when someone says they like Hillary Clinton as a Presidential Candidate.
        4y ago
  - kortilla 4y ago
    > Stop worshipping billionaires. This is a vapid over-generalization designed to dismiss any statements by attaching them to the wealth, not the person. Don’t do this. Nobody is talking about the Waltons, Buffet, Larry Ellison, etc. This is a discussion about Musk specifically and his history of operating companies.
    - henrikschroder 4y ago
      The US has been formed religiously by various congregations that descend from Calvinism, which teaches that hard work earns you the grace of God. In modern times, this has morphed into Prosperity Gospel which teaches that if you are loved by God, you will become materially successful, as well as the flipside; if you are materially successful, you must therefore be loved by God. The billionaire worship is simply the secular version of this faith. X made billions of dollars by owning a business that does Y, therefore X must be an expert on Y, and businesses in general, and is a genius, and is a morally superior person. Otherwise X wouldn't be a billionaire, because - horror of all horrors - the world is just, isn't it? It couldn't be the case that X just got lucky, can it? Surely, X has earned their billions, right?
      - kortilla 4y ago
        You’re still fixating on the wealth part, which people on this site (at least the arguments I see upvoted) do not. People are “worshipping” Musk because of his repeated success in making successful large innovative businesses. The wealth he has is a product of that, but the deference is to the success of the companies.
- zichy 4y ago
  > He proved over and over again. [Narrator voice] He did not.
  - mirekrusin 4y ago
    Did SpaceX failed for bankruptcy or something? Did Tesla not change the whole industry?
    - theclansman 4y ago
      Funny enough it would be hard to find anyone with more CEO experience than Musk. This doesn't mean he does all the management, often the work of these guys is to find the right people to do the management for them.
    - ldng 4y ago
      SpaceX is subsidised (and so is Tesla) and automotive industry was already in the process of electrifying. Tesla just put pressure to speed it up. Haven't checked but it would not surprises me if Formula E predated Tesla.
      - kortilla 4y ago
        > SpaceX is subsidised Winning government contracts over other competitors is not the same thing as “subsidized”. Otherwise Hilton is subsidized because government employees stay there sometimes.
        rpeden 4y ago
        I get the impression that some government contracts are used as stealth subsidies. And SpaceX, Tesla, and Starlink have benefited from plenty of actual subsidies, too. To be clear, I'm not implying that's a bad thing. These companies seem like an example of subsidies working as intended, i.e. driving innovation.
        kortilla 4y ago
- mirekrusin 4y ago
  He also doesn't make decisions like this from monologues in his head - he surrounds himself with people having deep expertise and makes bold decisions based on feedback; if something doesn't make sense, they'll stop doing it the next morning. In "normal" corp not only it'll be there 3 years from now, it'll also grow fat around it and spawn other idiotic initiatives with little to no (negative?) value.
- gitgud 4y ago
  - fastball 4y ago
    Literally his first two companies, Zip2 (CTO) and x.com (CEO), were pure software companies? Another company he founded, SpaceX, is the first space launch provider to ever achieve propulsive landing and re-use of an orbital-class rocket, a feat which includes some of the hardest software engineering you can do. Another company he runs, Tesla, is famous for being one of the few car companies that makes software for their cars that people actually want to use. If a citation is needed, it is a citation to explain how anyone could possibly believe with that track record that Elon Musk doesn't know how software is built.
    - __bjoernd 4y ago
      Knowing how to run a software company and knowing how to build software are two things. The first thing usually implies hiring the right people for the second thing. I’m sure Musk knows at least a bit of that, but everything we see with Twitter is that he’s axing those people at a rate that you can’t keep up hiring at. So there is some obvious disconnect here and I don’t think “Ah, he knows what he is doing “ is a sufficient explanation.
      - fastball 4y ago
        He was the CTO of Zip2, a software company. He knows how software is built. Sure he might not be a whiz with React like me or the OC, but... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ With regard to him firing too many people, see my thoughts about what his mindset might be here[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33703280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33703280
        nebula8804 4y ago
        The Zip2 application ran on a single PC. Technology has changed a lot from the early Java days(I think what Zip2 was written in). Perhaps this helps explain some of his public mistakes in understanding the codebase of Twitter.
- underwater 4y ago
  Look at his claim that Twitter is slow in India because of poorly batched backend calls [1]. He's simply regurgitating what he thinks he heard from others without really understanding how anything works. He knows less about software architecture than an intern picked at random. 1. https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592176202873085952 https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/15921762028730859...
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    Stop repeating this, because Elon had the gist of it correct, if not the specifics. a) Twitter is atrociously slow for something that displays a mere kilobyte of text at a time. b) Much of that is because of hundreds of client-server JavaScript requests on first load. Not technically RPCs, but just as slow and looking nearly identical on the network. c) Most of the rest is because of a thousand microservices chatting away at each other. Not technically client-to-server, but still taking significant time. Elon accidentally conflated the network path of (b) with the performance issues caused by (c). They're both bad! They both need fixing! The fact that Musk mixed up doesn't matter.
    - DSMan195276 4y ago
      > Much of that is because of hundreds of client-server JavaScript requests on first load. Isn't this not true though? Based on the responses to his Tweet only one GraphQL request is made which batches the whole thing. > Most of the rest is because of a thousand microservices chatting away at each other. Not technically client-to-server, but still taking significant time. But what does this have to do with India? If the slowness is due to calls between microservices hosted on (from my understanding) their own hardware, why would it matter if the initial GraphQL request comes in from India, since all the rest of the backend requests would be the same?
      - jiggawatts 4y ago
        > his Tweet only one GraphQL request is made which batches the whole thing. Literally bang in the middle of an F12 network trace showing dozens of requests, mostly JavaScript. Not JSON RPC, per se, but still an overhead taking up seconds, especially on low-end Android devices. > But what does this have to do with India? Everything. Nitter uses 40KB of code & data to display the same content that takes Twitter megabytes. People in subsequent threads have pointed to the gigabytes of "data" usage by the Twitter Android app, which is just absurd for an app that displays primarily text. It's a bloated pig of an app that performs poorly on 5G networks in the United States, and hence terribly on slow and overloaded networks separated from Twitter's data centres by an ocean. "It works fine for me" says the engineer connected to the WiFi in Twitter HQ.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  Yeah he is so smart, he locked himself out in firing spree during some manic phase and then had to beg people he just fired to let him in. If anything, this twitter saga showed serious cracks (that were there before if you looked closely) in his persona. Vengeful, petty childish behavior was there before (ie Musk accusing main Thai cave rescuer for being a pedophile, because he refused his submarine concept? Plenty of similar stories) Its a matter of approach - if you focus on all his success, you can continue worshiping him as some capitalist messiah. If you focus on bad stuff, he is a fucked up mess to be polite, a bad parent and husband, an even worse human being in general, utterly horrible boss, person with deep mental issues that aren't clearly tackled in appropriate ways. The truth, somewhere in the middle of those 2 extremes, still ain't that nice IMHO. He burned basically all good PR capital be built over the years, basically nobody sees him now as good person, just another ultra rich a-hole like Bezos that needs to be kept in check. As he will find in following years, people's opinions trickle down to cash flow. If I would be buying an electric car right now (which doesn't make much sense for another decade to me), Tesla would be off the table for example.
- logistark 4y ago
  Actually there are some claims in recent code reviews at Twitter that he even doesn't know how to use a for loop. https://twitter.com/JadeMasterMath/status/1592803431651368960?s=20&t=ZlAOdMWres3JDBeShigUsg https://twitter.com/JadeMasterMath/status/159280343165136896...
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    This sounds like satire.
- nebula8804 4y ago
  I don't know man. His last pure software company was PayPal and they fired his ass from the CEO role and put in a competent CEO (Peter Theil) to right the ship and sell it off before the 01 crash. Tesla and SpaceX have been wildly successful and he will forever recieve some well deserved credit for their successes but at the same time I think its pretty bad that Tesla (and SpaceX) have had multiple near death experiences and some them could have been avoided if it weren't for incompetence. I followed the Model 3 production religiously and the amount of dumb mistakes they made even after other industry experts were yelling at them about imminent iceberg collision is just unbelievable. In fact the Model 3 production, with its horribly designed body that he wasn't keeping on top of and Musk's stupid attempts to automate all of assembly should be entirely attributed to him. It was so bad it was worse than even the shortseller's worst predictions. I guess you can give him a pass for near bankruptcy #1(Roadster roll out) and #4(COVID lockdowns). Not sure about #2(Model S early sales woes and potential acquisition by Google) All I am saying is that he fucks up A LOT and has thus far managed to stave off the consequences of his decisions but many occurrences have been down to luck and luck is something you should never bet on.
bigiain 4y ago
New owner: "Nothing ever goes wrong with the cache! It just works, look at the status logs. Why are we even paying those guys to look after it!" Also new owner: "What even is Mesos? Why are we running something called Aurora? Obviously pure bloat. Fire the lot of them."
radu_floricica 4y ago
Yeah, but that's not what's happening here, is it? Musk is pretty obviously looking for a corporate culture shift, not turning the company into a cash cow - and for this to work, entropy needs only to work slower than half a year. Which this article argues pretty convincingly is going to happen.
rjzzleep 4y ago
The reality is most huge companies are majority bloat. The hiring numbers are also in part crap that goes into Series X Raise pitch decks. Oftentimes a lot of the new bloat pisses off competent people, because their work doesn't actually get less, it becomes more. Not only do they have to now nanny people that are often not actually competent in their job, they just happened to go through the coding interview with wholly unqualified interviewers, but they now also have to handle nightmare features that were built by people completely disconnected from the other side. I'm not a friend of Elon's, but outside of the flashiness of the whole thing, I don't think his firing spree was wholly unwarranted. The other day I saw a video of a bunch of people at twitter leaving that have been there for a decade or so. I mean wholly crap, this reminds me of old German industry where people retire in the place they started.
- yunohn 4y ago
  > I mean wholly crap, this reminds me of old German industry where people retire in the place they started. This is honestly uncalled for. Job hopping every 2-3yrs should not be an expected task.
  - 867-5309 4y ago
    is that down to the employer or employee?
    - yunohn 4y ago
      All companies I’ve worked at, startup to FAANG, have tried their best to reduce attrition and retain employees by providing growth opportunities. Changing jobs is a skill/knowledge net-negative for the employer, and can be negative (outside of salary) for the employee as they have to relearn everything (relationships, tech debt, processes) etc.
      - saagarjha 4y ago
        I have yet to see an employer match the market rate for talent.

mirzap 4y ago

henrikschroder 4y ago
Your reply is indistinguishable from a religious person exclaiming that "God is omniscient and moves in mysterious ways!" Stop worshipping billionaires.
- mirekrusin 4y ago
  You could say that if he was new to the party. But he did change the world with his companies already, didn't he?
  - ldng 4y ago
    Really? Has he ?
    - bobsmooth 4y ago
      Before Tesla, EVs were a joke. Before SpaceX, satellite internet was a joke.
      - qwytw 4y ago
        And that makes him infallible? If anyone else but Musk bought Twitter and started doing what he did they'd be the laughing stock of the financial world. His reputation is the only thing keeping him afloat (in this specific case, he might still do great with SpaceX and Tesla but so what? People like Jobs, Buffet, Gates etc. also made significant blunders at some points in their career)
        mirekrusin 4y ago
        It makes him more credible than random dudes on internet.
        qwytw 4y ago
        Or you know... you could try looking at facts and data an try to form your own opinion.
        mirekrusin 4y ago
        I think Musk did better homework on it than you.
        qwytw 4y ago
        Or maybe Musk has different goals. Anyway there is no need for you to be (I hope)purposefully obtuse...
  - mcv 4y ago
    Yes, and that's why he's getting worshipped, and that's what's making him go off the rails here.
  - qwytw 4y ago
    Any optimization he might do is unlikely to offset the cost of servicing the debt he offloaded to Twitter's balance sheet after the acquisition. So at 5% interest the yearly cost is 650 million, even at some obscene and unrealistic payroll per employee (including not only developers), like let's say 400k he'd have to fire over 1600 people just to balance this out. There is no way to spin this positively. Also due to no more RSUs cash comp for remaining employee would need to increase. Add to that the the loss in advertisement revenue do to obvious reasons. Taking these facts into account could you please explain how is Musk NOT a liability to Twitter? He basically spent 31 billion (plus 13 billion he offload to Twitter) just to buy the trademark and the user base (and some proportion of advertisers...). From a financial standpoint that's an objectively terrible deal. Musk might have other goals and that's great but in no way this is comparable to Tesla or SpaceX. >But he did change the world with his companies already, didn't he? History is full of examples of extraordinary successful people who get blinded by their own success and start thinking that they are infallible. This ussually results which in pretty unhinged behavior when they get older. Musk does not seem like the most grounded person ever so he's likely at a much higher risk of this than almost every tech billionaire I can think of.
    - mirekrusin 4y ago
      also: History is full of examples of extraordinary successful people [period]. Maybe somebody with Musk track record can be seen as more credible than some random "qwytw" on the internet? I mean incentives are on his side, aren't they? For one his famous. It's his toy, so he won't let it disappear into irrelevance without fighting for it. There are not many people currently alive with comparable track record, being recognized world wide, with deep pockets like him. What if in few years time from now people will be stepping on each other writing posts and books on how they really knew all of that from the beginning, that obviously he was right etc. - doesn't sound unreal or alien to me, quite opposite actually. To be honest, I don't even think anything extraordinary needs to happen for all of it to work out just fine. For all people saying technically it's not just rendering short messages - well it is just that at the end. Look at stackoverflow - most people don't realize it's just single monolith application running on 6 servers - all of it. There are still thousands of people employed there, which feels like too many if anything.
- octodog 4y ago
  This is a ridiculous take and you are not really adding anything to the discussion. Musk has successfully run companies in the past and is running two extremely successful companies right now.
  - Hnrobert42 4y ago
    I disagree. GP was pointing out that GGP was deifying Musk in sort of a cult of personality. I didn’t notice that until GP’s post.
  - hcazz 4y ago
    To play devil's advocate for a bit, are you certain he's solely responsible for the successes of SpaceX/Tesla, or that those companies succeeded in spite of his leadership? In case it isn't clear, I agree with the parent comment. In the same tone as the comment above the parent, you could also write "Thing is - Elon Musk knows a thing or two about sexual harassment lawsuits. It's inevitable that he will have another at Twitter." Stop idolizing billionaires. >Musk has successfully run companies in the past and is running two extremely successful companies right now. Is he actually running those companies, or is he posting selfies of whiteboards at 1:30am showing architecture diagrams of Twitter? In these markets, after he was nearly forced by courts into completing a purchase deal for Twitter after making an overpriced offer, I'm genuinely curious to see how he pays the ~$1b in interest per year on the debt to purchase Twitter.
    - GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
      He can just sell more tesla stock, its a fake financial problem he’s being loud about
    - kortilla 4y ago
      > Stop idolizing billionaires. Stop saying this in discussions about one particular person. It’s as useful as saying “stop idolizing millionaires” when someone says they like Hillary Clinton as a Presidential Candidate.
      - 4y ago
- kortilla 4y ago
  > Stop worshipping billionaires. This is a vapid over-generalization designed to dismiss any statements by attaching them to the wealth, not the person. Don’t do this. Nobody is talking about the Waltons, Buffet, Larry Ellison, etc. This is a discussion about Musk specifically and his history of operating companies.
  - henrikschroder 4y ago
    The US has been formed religiously by various congregations that descend from Calvinism, which teaches that hard work earns you the grace of God. In modern times, this has morphed into Prosperity Gospel which teaches that if you are loved by God, you will become materially successful, as well as the flipside; if you are materially successful, you must therefore be loved by God. The billionaire worship is simply the secular version of this faith. X made billions of dollars by owning a business that does Y, therefore X must be an expert on Y, and businesses in general, and is a genius, and is a morally superior person. Otherwise X wouldn't be a billionaire, because - horror of all horrors - the world is just, isn't it? It couldn't be the case that X just got lucky, can it? Surely, X has earned their billions, right?
    - kortilla 4y ago
      You’re still fixating on the wealth part, which people on this site (at least the arguments I see upvoted) do not. People are “worshipping” Musk because of his repeated success in making successful large innovative businesses. The wealth he has is a product of that, but the deference is to the success of the companies.
zichy 4y ago
> He proved over and over again. [Narrator voice] He did not.
- mirekrusin 4y ago
  Did SpaceX failed for bankruptcy or something? Did Tesla not change the whole industry?
  - theclansman 4y ago
    Funny enough it would be hard to find anyone with more CEO experience than Musk. This doesn't mean he does all the management, often the work of these guys is to find the right people to do the management for them.
  - ldng 4y ago
    SpaceX is subsidised (and so is Tesla) and automotive industry was already in the process of electrifying. Tesla just put pressure to speed it up. Haven't checked but it would not surprises me if Formula E predated Tesla.
    - kortilla 4y ago
      > SpaceX is subsidised Winning government contracts over other competitors is not the same thing as “subsidized”. Otherwise Hilton is subsidized because government employees stay there sometimes.
      - rpeden 4y ago
        I get the impression that some government contracts are used as stealth subsidies. And SpaceX, Tesla, and Starlink have benefited from plenty of actual subsidies, too. To be clear, I'm not implying that's a bad thing. These companies seem like an example of subsidies working as intended, i.e. driving innovation.
        kortilla 4y ago
mirekrusin 4y ago
He also doesn't make decisions like this from monologues in his head - he surrounds himself with people having deep expertise and makes bold decisions based on feedback; if something doesn't make sense, they'll stop doing it the next morning. In "normal" corp not only it'll be there 3 years from now, it'll also grow fat around it and spawn other idiotic initiatives with little to no (negative?) value.
gitgud 4y ago
- fastball 4y ago
  Literally his first two companies, Zip2 (CTO) and x.com (CEO), were pure software companies? Another company he founded, SpaceX, is the first space launch provider to ever achieve propulsive landing and re-use of an orbital-class rocket, a feat which includes some of the hardest software engineering you can do. Another company he runs, Tesla, is famous for being one of the few car companies that makes software for their cars that people actually want to use. If a citation is needed, it is a citation to explain how anyone could possibly believe with that track record that Elon Musk doesn't know how software is built.
  - __bjoernd 4y ago
    Knowing how to run a software company and knowing how to build software are two things. The first thing usually implies hiring the right people for the second thing. I’m sure Musk knows at least a bit of that, but everything we see with Twitter is that he’s axing those people at a rate that you can’t keep up hiring at. So there is some obvious disconnect here and I don’t think “Ah, he knows what he is doing “ is a sufficient explanation.
    - fastball 4y ago
      He was the CTO of Zip2, a software company. He knows how software is built. Sure he might not be a whiz with React like me or the OC, but... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ With regard to him firing too many people, see my thoughts about what his mindset might be here[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33703280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33703280
      - nebula8804 4y ago
        The Zip2 application ran on a single PC. Technology has changed a lot from the early Java days(I think what Zip2 was written in). Perhaps this helps explain some of his public mistakes in understanding the codebase of Twitter.
underwater 4y ago
Look at his claim that Twitter is slow in India because of poorly batched backend calls [1]. He's simply regurgitating what he thinks he heard from others without really understanding how anything works. He knows less about software architecture than an intern picked at random. 1. https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592176202873085952 https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/15921762028730859...
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  Stop repeating this, because Elon had the gist of it correct, if not the specifics. a) Twitter is atrociously slow for something that displays a mere kilobyte of text at a time. b) Much of that is because of hundreds of client-server JavaScript requests on first load. Not technically RPCs, but just as slow and looking nearly identical on the network. c) Most of the rest is because of a thousand microservices chatting away at each other. Not technically client-to-server, but still taking significant time. Elon accidentally conflated the network path of (b) with the performance issues caused by (c). They're both bad! They both need fixing! The fact that Musk mixed up doesn't matter.
  - DSMan195276 4y ago
    > Much of that is because of hundreds of client-server JavaScript requests on first load. Isn't this not true though? Based on the responses to his Tweet only one GraphQL request is made which batches the whole thing. > Most of the rest is because of a thousand microservices chatting away at each other. Not technically client-to-server, but still taking significant time. But what does this have to do with India? If the slowness is due to calls between microservices hosted on (from my understanding) their own hardware, why would it matter if the initial GraphQL request comes in from India, since all the rest of the backend requests would be the same?
    - jiggawatts 4y ago
      > his Tweet only one GraphQL request is made which batches the whole thing. Literally bang in the middle of an F12 network trace showing dozens of requests, mostly JavaScript. Not JSON RPC, per se, but still an overhead taking up seconds, especially on low-end Android devices. > But what does this have to do with India? Everything. Nitter uses 40KB of code & data to display the same content that takes Twitter megabytes. People in subsequent threads have pointed to the gigabytes of "data" usage by the Twitter Android app, which is just absurd for an app that displays primarily text. It's a bloated pig of an app that performs poorly on 5G networks in the United States, and hence terribly on slow and overloaded networks separated from Twitter's data centres by an ocean. "It works fine for me" says the engineer connected to the WiFi in Twitter HQ.
saiya-jin 4y ago
Yeah he is so smart, he locked himself out in firing spree during some manic phase and then had to beg people he just fired to let him in. If anything, this twitter saga showed serious cracks (that were there before if you looked closely) in his persona. Vengeful, petty childish behavior was there before (ie Musk accusing main Thai cave rescuer for being a pedophile, because he refused his submarine concept? Plenty of similar stories) Its a matter of approach - if you focus on all his success, you can continue worshiping him as some capitalist messiah. If you focus on bad stuff, he is a fucked up mess to be polite, a bad parent and husband, an even worse human being in general, utterly horrible boss, person with deep mental issues that aren't clearly tackled in appropriate ways. The truth, somewhere in the middle of those 2 extremes, still ain't that nice IMHO. He burned basically all good PR capital be built over the years, basically nobody sees him now as good person, just another ultra rich a-hole like Bezos that needs to be kept in check. As he will find in following years, people's opinions trickle down to cash flow. If I would be buying an electric car right now (which doesn't make much sense for another decade to me), Tesla would be off the table for example.
logistark 4y ago
Actually there are some claims in recent code reviews at Twitter that he even doesn't know how to use a for loop. https://twitter.com/JadeMasterMath/status/1592803431651368960?s=20&t=ZlAOdMWres3JDBeShigUsg https://twitter.com/JadeMasterMath/status/159280343165136896...
- saagarjha 4y ago
  This sounds like satire.
nebula8804 4y ago
I don't know man. His last pure software company was PayPal and they fired his ass from the CEO role and put in a competent CEO (Peter Theil) to right the ship and sell it off before the 01 crash. Tesla and SpaceX have been wildly successful and he will forever recieve some well deserved credit for their successes but at the same time I think its pretty bad that Tesla (and SpaceX) have had multiple near death experiences and some them could have been avoided if it weren't for incompetence. I followed the Model 3 production religiously and the amount of dumb mistakes they made even after other industry experts were yelling at them about imminent iceberg collision is just unbelievable. In fact the Model 3 production, with its horribly designed body that he wasn't keeping on top of and Musk's stupid attempts to automate all of assembly should be entirely attributed to him. It was so bad it was worse than even the shortseller's worst predictions. I guess you can give him a pass for near bankruptcy #1(Roadster roll out) and #4(COVID lockdowns). Not sure about #2(Model S early sales woes and potential acquisition by Google) All I am saying is that he fucks up A LOT and has thus far managed to stave off the consequences of his decisions but many occurrences have been down to luck and luck is something you should never bet on.

bigiain 4y ago

New owner: "Nothing ever goes wrong with the cache! It just works, look at the status logs. Why are we even paying those guys to look after it!" Also new owner: "What even is Mesos? Why are we running something called Aurora? Obviously pure bloat. Fire the lot of them."

radu_floricica 4y ago

Yeah, but that's not what's happening here, is it? Musk is pretty obviously looking for a corporate culture shift, not turning the company into a cash cow - and for this to work, entropy needs only to work slower than half a year. Which this article argues pretty convincingly is going to happen.

rjzzleep 4y ago

The reality is most huge companies are majority bloat. The hiring numbers are also in part crap that goes into Series X Raise pitch decks. Oftentimes a lot of the new bloat pisses off competent people, because their work doesn't actually get less, it becomes more. Not only do they have to now nanny people that are often not actually competent in their job, they just happened to go through the coding interview with wholly unqualified interviewers, but they now also have to handle nightmare features that were built by people completely disconnected from the other side. I'm not a friend of Elon's, but outside of the flashiness of the whole thing, I don't think his firing spree was wholly unwarranted. The other day I saw a video of a bunch of people at twitter leaving that have been there for a decade or so. I mean wholly crap, this reminds me of old German industry where people retire in the place they started.

yunohn 4y ago
> I mean wholly crap, this reminds me of old German industry where people retire in the place they started. This is honestly uncalled for. Job hopping every 2-3yrs should not be an expected task.
- 867-5309 4y ago
  is that down to the employer or employee?
  - yunohn 4y ago
    All companies I’ve worked at, startup to FAANG, have tried their best to reduce attrition and retain employees by providing growth opportunities. Changing jobs is a skill/knowledge net-negative for the employer, and can be negative (outside of salary) for the employee as they have to relearn everything (relationships, tech debt, processes) etc.
    - saagarjha 4y ago
      I have yet to see an employer match the market rate for talent.