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> I think it remains to be seen how long a bloatless twitter can last. I'm not convinced Twitter had a ton of bloat. (Most of the teams actually involved don't

> I think it remains to be seen how long a bloatless twitter can last. I'm not convinced Twitter had a ton of bloat. (Most of the teams actually involved don't seem to think so). Just because Elon can't understand something, doesn't make that thing "bloat". Twitter definitely had a few weird features that could be cut (the audio podcasting thing, for example). But calling most of Twitter microservices "bloat" is about as dumb as calling a cars Seatbelt and Airbag and Crumple Zones and that spare tire in the trunk "bloat" -- it's only "bloat" if you assume all people will always be perfect and no one will ever make a mistake anywhere, and nothing bad will ever happen.

keneda7 4y ago
I have several college friends (developers) that ended up at twitter. Some of them loved it, some of them hated it, one universal thing I pretty much heard from all of them is that they typically did actual work 15-20 hours week. Now overall I wouldn't say this is unusual in tech. I know plenty of people at other major tech companies, including other FAANGs, that say the exact same thing. But just because its appears to be a industry wide issue does not make it okay. It seems to me like that this would signify bloat. You only have enough work for your developers to be working half time. We aren't even getting into the whole rest and vest. That has been discussed here many times: https://www.google.com/search?q=rest+and+vesters+paid+for+nothing+site:https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://www.google.com/search?q=rest+and+vesters+paid+for+no...
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  I guess my question is - what are they doing for the rest of the week? Are they straight up just not doing anything, or just not writing code? I honestly don't think I could be writing code 40 hours a week, but I think that the code I do write when I'm writing it is the better for my taking the rest or zone out time. I also don't know if my work would be of a decent quality if I was suddenly asked to be typing all 40 hours a week.
  - keneda7 4y ago
    Cannot speak to all of them but I know a couple work on sides personal projects the rest of their time. Doesn't matter if they are in the office or at home. No one is asking them to write code 40 hours a week. That is not realistic in coding. Most developers' jobs include a lot more than coding. They are saying they spend 15-20 hour a week on all job related work. Whether that is coding, code review, engineering, testing, research, documentation, meetings ect.
- bratwurst3000 4y ago
  Whats the problem with working only half of the time? Work is also a social enviroment and the «not working » part of work a realy important part. If the staff would work 100% of the worktime they would be fucked. Most people I know prefere a good working condition than working ultra hard for some sadistic asholes.
  - keneda7 4y ago
    I don't even know where to begin with this comment? So you have no problem being paid for only half the time right? Or are you saying you deserve to steal from the company you work for?
    - riizade 4y ago
      There are a lot of assumptions baked into your position. 1. The employer pays for your time, not your expertise or output. It'd only be stealing from the company if the company cares about hours worked over output. If we explore this concept in a theoretical sense it's clear that it doesn't hold up. You have two candidates One candidate has 20+ years of experience doing the exact thing you want them doing. This candidate says they'll work for you for $100k/yr, and they'll work 10 hours a week, complete all the relevant tasks, and very very rarely cause catastrophic errors or user-impacting bugs. The other candidate is fresh out of school and says they'll work 50 hours a week. They'll complete the same amount of work as the first candidate, but they'll write more bugs, there will be more planning mistakes causing feature delays, and there's a reasonable chance of catastrophic failure due to debugging-in-prod shenanigans. They are also asking for $100k/yr. Which candidate is better? Under the assumption that employers pay for _time_, the second candidate is better, but I'd argue most companies should prefer the first candidate. 2. More hours worked produces more or higher quality output. There's a reasonable amount of research and practical anecdotes that disputes this recently (see companies that have gone to 32-hour 4-day workweeks with no reduction in productivity). Enough that at least, this point is seriously in doubt. 3. Twitter maybe pays a senior engineer $400k/yr under the expectation of their output for 40 hours, and if they get less it wasn't a fair deal. This is a reasonable take, but Twitter (like most for-profit companies) theoretically has a performance evaluation system, managers, deadlines, etc. They're paying an engineer some amount of money for some amount of output. If that engineer produces that amount of output, Twitter is happy, the engineer is happy, there's no issue. If the engineer working 20 hours or less per week caused them to not meet their goals, then Twitter has the right to fire that employee. They don't, so that implies that they're happy with the arrangement. 4. The employee's salary is equal to their expected output/profit If the Labor Theory of Value is correct, then companies derive their profits almost exclusively from the labor of their employees. In order for an employee to "steal" from a company by under-producing work, they would have to earn more in salary + benefits than they earn the company from their work. This is necessarily not the case (on average) in a for-profit company, because if the company makes a profit and uses those profits to grow or to issue dividends to shareholders, they have earned "_surplus value_" from the employees' labor (on average). --- In any case, it's not necessarily true that you're wrong, but your comment was fairly dismissive and confrontational. There are a _lot_ of cultural and individual assumptions baked into how we exchange salary/wages for labor, and it's worth examining those before firing off moral judgments at one another for not working hard enough or working too much or whatever.
joenot443 4y ago
I think it's well understood that when people refer to Twitter's "bloat" they're talking about its bloat of extra employees, not its extra microservices. I've told this example before, but my close friend and roommate did a year at Twitter in 2019. He was tasked with implementing versions of simple, relaxing JS games like Tetris which would be used by Twitter's moderation staff when they felt they had accumulated too much stress and needed a break. He was making $300k USD to copy an open-source version of Tetris to be played by paid staff! This was actually one of his more engaging projects, most days he said that he wrote 0 code at all. He got great reviews and was being encouraged by his manager to pursue the senior track; from what I could observe from the outside, there was a complete misalignment of goals at pretty much all levels. Perhaps we disagree which is totally fine, but I think this type of allocation of eng resources absolutely counts as "bloat". You may see that work as comparable to a seatbelt or crumple zone, but I personally see it as more comparable to all the other expensive, useless nonsense which plagues modern cars.
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  Those views aren't incompatible: 1) Twitter could easily live without 10-30% staff and there was some bloat, positions to be cut 2) Believing that 90% of organization does nothing useful is insane.
  - joenot443 4y ago
    Agreed.
- zestyping 4y ago
  > He was tasked with implementing versions of simple, relaxing JS games like Tetris which would be used by Twitter's moderation staff when they felt they had accumulated too much stress and needed a break. Oh my god, this is incredible. Thank you for this story.
- JackFaker 4y ago
  This is an interesting example but I have to wonder if it may inadvertently highlight a disconnect between the parties involved. I'm no expert in this area but many stories have surfaced over the years regarding high levels of stress and (in extreme cases) meaningful declines in the mental health of social media content moderators. I recently encountered a twitter thread from an early LiveJournal employee (1) @rahaeli "about Trust & Safety work, the toll it takes on you, the things you see, and the human misery, suffering, and death that happens when you fuck it up, including murder and child sex abuse." and I am inclined to believe that, while relatively simple and un-engaging, managers and end-users likely would have found it important. (1) = https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1594724749954863105?s=20&t=AdSVrkpjfphYCzZdPIxg-A https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1594724749954863105?s=20&...
chasd00 4y ago
maybe the thinking is tear it down to just bare bones and life support and then rebuild? Although, and I say this as a semi-fan, it's really exhausting trying to understand Musk heh.
- matwood 4y ago
  The problem with the rebuild speculation is the company is now saddled with so much debt, they have no money to hire.

keneda7 4y ago

I have several college friends (developers) that ended up at twitter. Some of them loved it, some of them hated it, one universal thing I pretty much heard from all of them is that they typically did actual work 15-20 hours week. Now overall I wouldn't say this is unusual in tech. I know plenty of people at other major tech companies, including other FAANGs, that say the exact same thing. But just because its appears to be a industry wide issue does not make it okay. It seems to me like that this would signify bloat. You only have enough work for your developers to be working half time. We aren't even getting into the whole rest and vest. That has been discussed here many times: https://www.google.com/search?q=rest+and+vesters+paid+for+nothing+site:https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://www.google.com/search?q=rest+and+vesters+paid+for+no...

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
I guess my question is - what are they doing for the rest of the week? Are they straight up just not doing anything, or just not writing code? I honestly don't think I could be writing code 40 hours a week, but I think that the code I do write when I'm writing it is the better for my taking the rest or zone out time. I also don't know if my work would be of a decent quality if I was suddenly asked to be typing all 40 hours a week.
- keneda7 4y ago
  Cannot speak to all of them but I know a couple work on sides personal projects the rest of their time. Doesn't matter if they are in the office or at home. No one is asking them to write code 40 hours a week. That is not realistic in coding. Most developers' jobs include a lot more than coding. They are saying they spend 15-20 hour a week on all job related work. Whether that is coding, code review, engineering, testing, research, documentation, meetings ect.
bratwurst3000 4y ago
Whats the problem with working only half of the time? Work is also a social enviroment and the «not working » part of work a realy important part. If the staff would work 100% of the worktime they would be fucked. Most people I know prefere a good working condition than working ultra hard for some sadistic asholes.
- keneda7 4y ago
  I don't even know where to begin with this comment? So you have no problem being paid for only half the time right? Or are you saying you deserve to steal from the company you work for?
  - riizade 4y ago
    There are a lot of assumptions baked into your position. 1. The employer pays for your time, not your expertise or output. It'd only be stealing from the company if the company cares about hours worked over output. If we explore this concept in a theoretical sense it's clear that it doesn't hold up. You have two candidates One candidate has 20+ years of experience doing the exact thing you want them doing. This candidate says they'll work for you for $100k/yr, and they'll work 10 hours a week, complete all the relevant tasks, and very very rarely cause catastrophic errors or user-impacting bugs. The other candidate is fresh out of school and says they'll work 50 hours a week. They'll complete the same amount of work as the first candidate, but they'll write more bugs, there will be more planning mistakes causing feature delays, and there's a reasonable chance of catastrophic failure due to debugging-in-prod shenanigans. They are also asking for $100k/yr. Which candidate is better? Under the assumption that employers pay for _time_, the second candidate is better, but I'd argue most companies should prefer the first candidate. 2. More hours worked produces more or higher quality output. There's a reasonable amount of research and practical anecdotes that disputes this recently (see companies that have gone to 32-hour 4-day workweeks with no reduction in productivity). Enough that at least, this point is seriously in doubt. 3. Twitter maybe pays a senior engineer $400k/yr under the expectation of their output for 40 hours, and if they get less it wasn't a fair deal. This is a reasonable take, but Twitter (like most for-profit companies) theoretically has a performance evaluation system, managers, deadlines, etc. They're paying an engineer some amount of money for some amount of output. If that engineer produces that amount of output, Twitter is happy, the engineer is happy, there's no issue. If the engineer working 20 hours or less per week caused them to not meet their goals, then Twitter has the right to fire that employee. They don't, so that implies that they're happy with the arrangement. 4. The employee's salary is equal to their expected output/profit If the Labor Theory of Value is correct, then companies derive their profits almost exclusively from the labor of their employees. In order for an employee to "steal" from a company by under-producing work, they would have to earn more in salary + benefits than they earn the company from their work. This is necessarily not the case (on average) in a for-profit company, because if the company makes a profit and uses those profits to grow or to issue dividends to shareholders, they have earned "_surplus value_" from the employees' labor (on average). --- In any case, it's not necessarily true that you're wrong, but your comment was fairly dismissive and confrontational. There are a _lot_ of cultural and individual assumptions baked into how we exchange salary/wages for labor, and it's worth examining those before firing off moral judgments at one another for not working hard enough or working too much or whatever.

joenot443 4y ago

I think it's well understood that when people refer to Twitter's "bloat" they're talking about its bloat of extra employees, not its extra microservices. I've told this example before, but my close friend and roommate did a year at Twitter in 2019. He was tasked with implementing versions of simple, relaxing JS games like Tetris which would be used by Twitter's moderation staff when they felt they had accumulated too much stress and needed a break. He was making $300k USD to copy an open-source version of Tetris to be played by paid staff! This was actually one of his more engaging projects, most days he said that he wrote 0 code at all. He got great reviews and was being encouraged by his manager to pursue the senior track; from what I could observe from the outside, there was a complete misalignment of goals at pretty much all levels. Perhaps we disagree which is totally fine, but I think this type of allocation of eng resources absolutely counts as "bloat". You may see that work as comparable to a seatbelt or crumple zone, but I personally see it as more comparable to all the other expensive, useless nonsense which plagues modern cars.

KptMarchewa 4y ago
Those views aren't incompatible: 1) Twitter could easily live without 10-30% staff and there was some bloat, positions to be cut 2) Believing that 90% of organization does nothing useful is insane.
- joenot443 4y ago
  Agreed.
zestyping 4y ago
> He was tasked with implementing versions of simple, relaxing JS games like Tetris which would be used by Twitter's moderation staff when they felt they had accumulated too much stress and needed a break. Oh my god, this is incredible. Thank you for this story.
JackFaker 4y ago
This is an interesting example but I have to wonder if it may inadvertently highlight a disconnect between the parties involved. I'm no expert in this area but many stories have surfaced over the years regarding high levels of stress and (in extreme cases) meaningful declines in the mental health of social media content moderators. I recently encountered a twitter thread from an early LiveJournal employee (1) @rahaeli "about Trust & Safety work, the toll it takes on you, the things you see, and the human misery, suffering, and death that happens when you fuck it up, including murder and child sex abuse." and I am inclined to believe that, while relatively simple and un-engaging, managers and end-users likely would have found it important. (1) = https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1594724749954863105?s=20&t=AdSVrkpjfphYCzZdPIxg-A https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1594724749954863105?s=20&...

chasd00 4y ago

maybe the thinking is tear it down to just bare bones and life support and then rebuild? Although, and I say this as a semi-fan, it's really exhausting trying to understand Musk heh.

matwood 4y ago
The problem with the rebuild speculation is the company is now saddled with so much debt, they have no money to hire.