8 ms·

>removing engineers won't instantly crash the product. It'll happen slowly It's amazing to me how many people following the Twitter saga, some familiar with or

>removing engineers won't instantly crash the product. It'll happen slowly It's amazing to me how many people following the Twitter saga, some familiar with or actually working in technology, thought that Twitter would crash within days of the engineers being fired. And because it didn't, the job cuts are justified.

Aeolun 4y ago
> thought that Twitter would crash within days of the engineers being fired Because they work for companies where the product would fail within days of them being fired themselves.
- hef19898 4y ago
  That's what people keep telling themselves. Truth is, everybody is replaceable. And usually, loss of institutional knowledge takes a while to show real effects.
  - anon400232 4y ago
    Saying everyone is replaceable is a first-degree approximation. The next level of detail would talk about, at least: (a) how much knowledge gets lost; (b) how many person hours -and- "wall clock time" it takes to rebuild that knowledge; (c) the amortized cost (or benefit) of losing that person
  - forgetfulness 4y ago
    It depends on how well or poorly run the business is. I worked at a company where everything hinged solely on one guy working from another country. When he left, loss of institutional knowledge took about three days to show real effects as things also came down crashing. I worked hard to make _myself_ replaceable for when I left, it was a pretty good exercise, but me having that degree of freedom was symptomatic of the problems of the company.
  - blueprint 4y ago
    how can you possibly say everyone is replaceable while next giving an example of a case where it's not only not true but potentially so invisible in its consequences as to make it hard or impossible to satisfactorily replace someone? a "person" can be rebuilt but not replaced. companies and societies aren't actually bose-einstein condensates. everyone is replaceable is just what different types of people say as a coping mechanism. it's a disgusting thing to promulgate too. maybe if someone is equivalent to a cog they can be replaced but humans are not exactly standardized cogs. what you mean to say, and may get in the habit of repeating instead, is that we don't necessarily need a specific person even though we are accustomed to them. it still might take you 10 years to find someone who does 80% of the same things as the other person while the missing 20% is what made that person such a unique hire in the first place. i find it a disgusting phrase that is so typical of the view of a society like ours today that is losing view of the value of life.
  - lightbendover 4y ago
    Having been on the side of thinking I was absolutely irreplaceable on a team, I was more or less proven right when I left and the team failed to deliver anything at all for about 10 months, even having to shut down existing products, and is now limping along. The truth in retrospect is that it was my fault (and my upper leadership's) that I wasn't replaceable. I created a knowledge silo around myself since I wanted to move fast and figured I could prevent the team from being bogged down in complexity if I just handled it myself and while that worked in regards to delivering out-sized results for the available bandwidth, it also was a risk that materialized as described above. So while I do believe that everyone should be replaceable and it's their responsibility to be, it's not always the case and products can live and die by it.
  - boringg 4y ago
    The dangerous piece of this is executives who don't have a solid grasp of how things are operating can assume that a product still running after the departures is still successful. Validates their decision making even as things deteriorate in the background. That said you can replace people and build back that institutional knowledge -- both loss and gain take significant amount of time.
- dopidopHN 4y ago
  I’ve been in a lot of sinking ship. For the type of jobs at hand here, One of the things I learned is that nobody is essential. Even that person you think is essential.
CPLX 4y ago
There are fairly widespread reports of technical issues. I’ve seen a few about 2FA failing, strange undefined behavior in the ad serving platform, and others. Of course it could go either way but the jury is currently out. It’s entirely possible that severe company-impairing technical breakdowns are already in progress and unrecoverable. Or maybe not.
matwood 4y ago
I agree those were odd takes. I've likened firing most of the engineers to taking your hands off the wheel in the car. It won't crash immediately, but it doesn't mean the car can go driverless. With that said, there are differences between internal systems and something like Twitter on the public internet. I assume that Twitter is a system under constant attack. What happens when the next log4shell level vulnerability comes out?
- trashtester 4y ago
  > It won't crash immediately, but it doesn't mean the car can go driverless. Unless the company that creates it is owned by Elon ;)
  - Finnucane 4y ago
    Which is why we're expecting it to suddenly go up in flames, rather than just swerve off into a ditch.
    - raspberry1337 4y ago
      Who's we? I'm laughing at HN know-it-alls predict the imminent collapse of twitter
- joenot443 4y ago
  If Twitter went another month without an outage, how would you adjust your opinion? How about a year? The car analogy is amusing, but how much does it really hold up? Have we ever seen another major social media company drop this much of its staff in one go? I certainly can’t think of an example. I think we’re in somewhat uncharted waters here. A driverless car won’t last long, we know that for a fact. I think it remains to be seen how long a bloatless twitter can last. I’m personally optimistic.
  - jokethrowaway 4y ago
    I've seen that happens on a smaller scale. Company soft killed the product, everybody left, they didn't hire anyone to replace. We went from 20 engs to 3. Worst codebase ever made by ex FANGs hotshots who thought they understood something about system architecture. Very "clever" and complicated. Data consistency issues happening everyday, likely due to misuse of messagging queues. Chargebacks being ignored and mailed in physical letters every month. A couple of millions going through the platform every year. My task was to run a team of mostly juniors maintaining and adding features to that mess. I had no clue what that codebase was doing. We just left things as they were, fixing fires as they came. Nothing too bad happened. Slowly built a leaner replacement for some components. We simplified things over time and we even rebuilt some of the knowledge of the old platform, which helped with the daily outages. The issues started happening not as often. Eventually. I moved on from that company, removing again a big chunk of knowledge. Over time I've heard tales of other people coming in and rebuilding that knowledge, over and over. The platform is still standing.
recuter 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- donkeyd 4y ago
  > The job cuts are clearly justified because of the extremely toxic "work culture" I'm very curious in what way the stuff Elon is doing is not creating toxic work culture? >Minimum< 40 hour work week. 100% office work. Working into the night. Being fired for pushing back. I'm not denying there may have been toxic work culture before, but I don't see how replacing it with another form of toxic work culture is to be celebrated. Also, writing this: > There is no active independent thought around this subject to be found. Only vitriol and bile. And then spewing a bunch of vitriol and bile really distracts from any point you were trying to make: > akin to witnessing a fat child throwing an epic tantrum laying flat on a mall floor > Straight up Cartmenesque. > clearly justified because of the extremely toxic "work culture" / cult > because mommy didn't buy them an xbox
  - recuter 4y ago
    Up until recently 100% office work was the norm. It still is for most people. Many employers are quite adamant about it, not just Elon. 40 hours per week is also known as the standard work week. A bog standard j-o-b. Those are not reasonable examples of any sort of toxicity. If these painfully regular employment terms are not competitive with other offers nobody is forced to pick twitter as their employer. > but I don't see how replacing it with another form of toxic work culture is to be celebrated. Walk on by. Find a company more suited to your temperament that will give you the pay and perks you think you deserve. > And then spewing a bunch of vitriol and bile really distracts from any point you were trying to make > because mommy didn't buy them an xbox I assure you the child was quite literally stating xbox as the reason for his tantrum. Loudly. Whilst withering on the floor. I'm simply giving an eye witness account.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nobleach 4y ago
I'm still on the fence. As an engineering manager, I tend to attach faces to those "jobs". So seeing cuts, I imagine a ton of people that had to go home and tell their friends/family/etc that they no longer had a job. On the other hand. As an engineer, we tend to attach way too much self importance to our roles. Like if we're not there entering the "numbers" 4 6 15 16 24 32 every 108 minutes, the entire business is going to crumble. So... this is one I'm going to watch with a keen eye.
- mobiledev2014 4y ago
  You got the numbers wrong and Elon fired the person who knows them...
  - nobleach 4y ago
    typing on my phone.... perhaps if I had an Apple ][+
- polynomial 4y ago
  It's great to hear your concern with the actual people. That tends to get lost for some reason. And I agree we tend to attach too much importance to our roles, but the flip side bears a certain amount of truth, though on a timeline more like 108 days than 108 minutes.
  - nobleach 4y ago
    I definitely walk a fine line of wanting people to know how much I value them and how valuable they are to the business as a whole. But, the harsh truth is, every single one of us is replaceable. I've just seen that play out too many times in my career. People with all kinds of domain tribal knowledge walk out the door. Everyone holds their breath as if it'll be the end. And a month or so later, we're still afloat. (I still hate to see good people leave)
- adalacelove 4y ago
  > Like if we're not there entering the "numbers" 4 6 15 16 24 32 every 108 minutes, the entire business is going to crumbl Never I have encountered an engineer that thought that.

Aeolun 4y ago

> thought that Twitter would crash within days of the engineers being fired Because they work for companies where the product would fail within days of them being fired themselves.

hef19898 4y ago
That's what people keep telling themselves. Truth is, everybody is replaceable. And usually, loss of institutional knowledge takes a while to show real effects.
- anon400232 4y ago
  Saying everyone is replaceable is a first-degree approximation. The next level of detail would talk about, at least: (a) how much knowledge gets lost; (b) how many person hours -and- "wall clock time" it takes to rebuild that knowledge; (c) the amortized cost (or benefit) of losing that person
- forgetfulness 4y ago
  It depends on how well or poorly run the business is. I worked at a company where everything hinged solely on one guy working from another country. When he left, loss of institutional knowledge took about three days to show real effects as things also came down crashing. I worked hard to make _myself_ replaceable for when I left, it was a pretty good exercise, but me having that degree of freedom was symptomatic of the problems of the company.
- blueprint 4y ago
  how can you possibly say everyone is replaceable while next giving an example of a case where it's not only not true but potentially so invisible in its consequences as to make it hard or impossible to satisfactorily replace someone? a "person" can be rebuilt but not replaced. companies and societies aren't actually bose-einstein condensates. everyone is replaceable is just what different types of people say as a coping mechanism. it's a disgusting thing to promulgate too. maybe if someone is equivalent to a cog they can be replaced but humans are not exactly standardized cogs. what you mean to say, and may get in the habit of repeating instead, is that we don't necessarily need a specific person even though we are accustomed to them. it still might take you 10 years to find someone who does 80% of the same things as the other person while the missing 20% is what made that person such a unique hire in the first place. i find it a disgusting phrase that is so typical of the view of a society like ours today that is losing view of the value of life.
- lightbendover 4y ago
  Having been on the side of thinking I was absolutely irreplaceable on a team, I was more or less proven right when I left and the team failed to deliver anything at all for about 10 months, even having to shut down existing products, and is now limping along. The truth in retrospect is that it was my fault (and my upper leadership's) that I wasn't replaceable. I created a knowledge silo around myself since I wanted to move fast and figured I could prevent the team from being bogged down in complexity if I just handled it myself and while that worked in regards to delivering out-sized results for the available bandwidth, it also was a risk that materialized as described above. So while I do believe that everyone should be replaceable and it's their responsibility to be, it's not always the case and products can live and die by it.
- boringg 4y ago
  The dangerous piece of this is executives who don't have a solid grasp of how things are operating can assume that a product still running after the departures is still successful. Validates their decision making even as things deteriorate in the background. That said you can replace people and build back that institutional knowledge -- both loss and gain take significant amount of time.
dopidopHN 4y ago
I’ve been in a lot of sinking ship. For the type of jobs at hand here, One of the things I learned is that nobody is essential. Even that person you think is essential.

CPLX 4y ago

There are fairly widespread reports of technical issues. I’ve seen a few about 2FA failing, strange undefined behavior in the ad serving platform, and others. Of course it could go either way but the jury is currently out. It’s entirely possible that severe company-impairing technical breakdowns are already in progress and unrecoverable. Or maybe not.

matwood 4y ago

I agree those were odd takes. I've likened firing most of the engineers to taking your hands off the wheel in the car. It won't crash immediately, but it doesn't mean the car can go driverless. With that said, there are differences between internal systems and something like Twitter on the public internet. I assume that Twitter is a system under constant attack. What happens when the next log4shell level vulnerability comes out?

trashtester 4y ago
> It won't crash immediately, but it doesn't mean the car can go driverless. Unless the company that creates it is owned by Elon ;)
- Finnucane 4y ago
  Which is why we're expecting it to suddenly go up in flames, rather than just swerve off into a ditch.
  - raspberry1337 4y ago
    Who's we? I'm laughing at HN know-it-alls predict the imminent collapse of twitter
joenot443 4y ago
If Twitter went another month without an outage, how would you adjust your opinion? How about a year? The car analogy is amusing, but how much does it really hold up? Have we ever seen another major social media company drop this much of its staff in one go? I certainly can’t think of an example. I think we’re in somewhat uncharted waters here. A driverless car won’t last long, we know that for a fact. I think it remains to be seen how long a bloatless twitter can last. I’m personally optimistic.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  I've seen that happens on a smaller scale. Company soft killed the product, everybody left, they didn't hire anyone to replace. We went from 20 engs to 3. Worst codebase ever made by ex FANGs hotshots who thought they understood something about system architecture. Very "clever" and complicated. Data consistency issues happening everyday, likely due to misuse of messagging queues. Chargebacks being ignored and mailed in physical letters every month. A couple of millions going through the platform every year. My task was to run a team of mostly juniors maintaining and adding features to that mess. I had no clue what that codebase was doing. We just left things as they were, fixing fires as they came. Nothing too bad happened. Slowly built a leaner replacement for some components. We simplified things over time and we even rebuilt some of the knowledge of the old platform, which helped with the daily outages. The issues started happening not as often. Eventually. I moved on from that company, removing again a big chunk of knowledge. Over time I've heard tales of other people coming in and rebuilding that knowledge, over and over. The platform is still standing.

recuter 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
donkeyd 4y ago
> The job cuts are clearly justified because of the extremely toxic "work culture" I'm very curious in what way the stuff Elon is doing is not creating toxic work culture? >Minimum< 40 hour work week. 100% office work. Working into the night. Being fired for pushing back. I'm not denying there may have been toxic work culture before, but I don't see how replacing it with another form of toxic work culture is to be celebrated. Also, writing this: > There is no active independent thought around this subject to be found. Only vitriol and bile. And then spewing a bunch of vitriol and bile really distracts from any point you were trying to make: > akin to witnessing a fat child throwing an epic tantrum laying flat on a mall floor > Straight up Cartmenesque. > clearly justified because of the extremely toxic "work culture" / cult > because mommy didn't buy them an xbox
- recuter 4y ago
  Up until recently 100% office work was the norm. It still is for most people. Many employers are quite adamant about it, not just Elon. 40 hours per week is also known as the standard work week. A bog standard j-o-b. Those are not reasonable examples of any sort of toxicity. If these painfully regular employment terms are not competitive with other offers nobody is forced to pick twitter as their employer. > but I don't see how replacing it with another form of toxic work culture is to be celebrated. Walk on by. Find a company more suited to your temperament that will give you the pay and perks you think you deserve. > And then spewing a bunch of vitriol and bile really distracts from any point you were trying to make > because mommy didn't buy them an xbox I assure you the child was quite literally stating xbox as the reason for his tantrum. Loudly. Whilst withering on the floor. I'm simply giving an eye witness account.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nobleach 4y ago

I'm still on the fence. As an engineering manager, I tend to attach faces to those "jobs". So seeing cuts, I imagine a ton of people that had to go home and tell their friends/family/etc that they no longer had a job. On the other hand. As an engineer, we tend to attach way too much self importance to our roles. Like if we're not there entering the "numbers" 4 6 15 16 24 32 every 108 minutes, the entire business is going to crumble. So... this is one I'm going to watch with a keen eye.

mobiledev2014 4y ago
You got the numbers wrong and Elon fired the person who knows them...
- nobleach 4y ago
  typing on my phone.... perhaps if I had an Apple ][+
polynomial 4y ago
It's great to hear your concern with the actual people. That tends to get lost for some reason. And I agree we tend to attach too much importance to our roles, but the flip side bears a certain amount of truth, though on a timeline more like 108 days than 108 minutes.
- nobleach 4y ago
  I definitely walk a fine line of wanting people to know how much I value them and how valuable they are to the business as a whole. But, the harsh truth is, every single one of us is replaceable. I've just seen that play out too many times in my career. People with all kinds of domain tribal knowledge walk out the door. Everyone holds their breath as if it'll be the end. And a month or so later, we're still afloat. (I still hate to see good people leave)
adalacelove 4y ago
> Like if we're not there entering the "numbers" 4 6 15 16 24 32 every 108 minutes, the entire business is going to crumbl Never I have encountered an engineer that thought that.