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There are people at Twitter now that think the entire thing can be built and operated by just "20 amazing engineers" [1] . That is so beyond stupid that if Elon

There are people at Twitter now that think the entire thing can be built and operated by just "20 amazing engineers" [1] . That is so beyond stupid that if Elon thinks the same way the company is absolutely doomed. This isn't some WordPress blog. [1] https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/1595320501156487168?t=0Z3e2biJVfMO_sRrtp6tqw&s=19 https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159532050115648716...

zimpenfish 4y ago
> There are people at Twitter now that think the entire thing can be built and operated by just "20 amazing engineers" Thing is - you can absolutely build and operate a site that allows people to post things and have other people follow them with just "20 amazing engineers". What you can't do with just "20 amazing engineers" is operate a safe, harassment-limiting, CSAM-free, ad-friendly, legality-following, privacy-preserving, FTC consent decree'd site.
- ncr100 4y ago
  Don't forget, publicly traded company... Requires statistical/ redundant trust.
- jazzyjackson 4y ago
  Twitter is rife with porn and links to onlyfans and famous for its mob justice and crypto-scamming. I think you're overselling what engineers can accomplish.
- random314 4y ago
  And have actual revenues exceeding 1B$. Which would be the interest payments Musk needs to make. Fat chance of that happening with 20 engineers.
- GauntletWizard 4y ago
  I was part of a team that built Houseparty, a video chat application that had millions of concurrent users, and it had, at peak, about 30 great devs. Twitter can survive Musk's cuts. It might not be pretty, and I think he's an ass in many ways (and I've interviewed with him!) But he's not wrong that it was bloated.
  - hatenberg 4y ago
    This is a local utility company operating water towers to supply their town opiniating about operating the Hoover dam
    - GauntletWizard 4y ago
      Yeah, no. I also worked at Google and also understand what real traffic is. Houseparty had millions of users, Google had millions of QPS. Twitter probably has millions of QPS, but our backend dev lead was from twitter, and Houseparty had more real load.
  - genmud 4y ago
    I won’t disagree that Twitter was massively bloated, but part of that is because they had so many different business areas of focus. People like to oversimplify what it does, if it was only sharing tweets and images, sure you could get by with 20 or 30 engineers. But they are a self service ad network, a video upload site, a live streaming service, an analytics service and I’m sure I’m missing others. Now, if you figure 20 engineers per service, plus moderation staff, sales, g&a, etc… you can easily hit hundreds (if not thousands) of people necessary to just keep things going.
welshwelsh 4y ago
Sounds about right to me. PlentyOfFish was run by one person for years. Moot ran 4chan with the help of 1 part time engineer. Whatsapp has 55 employees and over 2 billion monthly active users. I get that Twitter has some unique challenges like handling tweets from celebrities with millions of followers, but there's no reason it needs thousands of employees.
- genmud 4y ago
  PoF was orders of magnitude less complicated than twitter is in 2022. It’s also much more complicated than whatsapp was prior to acquisition by FB too. Off the top of my head, twitter has multiple media types like video, live streaming, an ad exchange, data analytics tracker and embeds in websites.

zimpenfish 4y ago

> There are people at Twitter now that think the entire thing can be built and operated by just "20 amazing engineers" Thing is - you can absolutely build and operate a site that allows people to post things and have other people follow them with just "20 amazing engineers". What you can't do with just "20 amazing engineers" is operate a safe, harassment-limiting, CSAM-free, ad-friendly, legality-following, privacy-preserving, FTC consent decree'd site.

ncr100 4y ago
Don't forget, publicly traded company... Requires statistical/ redundant trust.
jazzyjackson 4y ago
Twitter is rife with porn and links to onlyfans and famous for its mob justice and crypto-scamming. I think you're overselling what engineers can accomplish.
random314 4y ago
And have actual revenues exceeding 1B$. Which would be the interest payments Musk needs to make. Fat chance of that happening with 20 engineers.
GauntletWizard 4y ago
I was part of a team that built Houseparty, a video chat application that had millions of concurrent users, and it had, at peak, about 30 great devs. Twitter can survive Musk's cuts. It might not be pretty, and I think he's an ass in many ways (and I've interviewed with him!) But he's not wrong that it was bloated.
- hatenberg 4y ago
  This is a local utility company operating water towers to supply their town opiniating about operating the Hoover dam
  - GauntletWizard 4y ago
    Yeah, no. I also worked at Google and also understand what real traffic is. Houseparty had millions of users, Google had millions of QPS. Twitter probably has millions of QPS, but our backend dev lead was from twitter, and Houseparty had more real load.
- genmud 4y ago
  I won’t disagree that Twitter was massively bloated, but part of that is because they had so many different business areas of focus. People like to oversimplify what it does, if it was only sharing tweets and images, sure you could get by with 20 or 30 engineers. But they are a self service ad network, a video upload site, a live streaming service, an analytics service and I’m sure I’m missing others. Now, if you figure 20 engineers per service, plus moderation staff, sales, g&a, etc… you can easily hit hundreds (if not thousands) of people necessary to just keep things going.

welshwelsh 4y ago

Sounds about right to me. PlentyOfFish was run by one person for years. Moot ran 4chan with the help of 1 part time engineer. Whatsapp has 55 employees and over 2 billion monthly active users. I get that Twitter has some unique challenges like handling tweets from celebrities with millions of followers, but there's no reason it needs thousands of employees.

genmud 4y ago
PoF was orders of magnitude less complicated than twitter is in 2022. It’s also much more complicated than whatsapp was prior to acquisition by FB too. Off the top of my head, twitter has multiple media types like video, live streaming, an ad exchange, data analytics tracker and embeds in websites.