4 ms·

> Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet. …except you know the entire company? The one tha

• smoldesu 4y ago
  And yet the website is still here. If you want to critique the new leadership, than do it by all means. The actual employees seem to be doing a fine job at reduced-capacity though, and they've even managed to make a few changes I like. The point still stands - Twitter was operating way above it's means. If it actually requires 7500 engineers to keep running, then Twitter doesn't stand a chance anyways. Something tells me that's not the case, though...
  • TomSwirly 4y ago
    "I sold all my fire extinguishers, got rid of all my insurance, and got rid of the locks on my doors yesterday, and nothing has happened! This proves no one needs any of these things."
  • dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Twitter was operating way above it’s means. But for a one-time charge for a lawsuit settlement, it was profitable just before Musk took over, it was not operating above its means (it almost certainly is now, despite the cuts, because of the loss of advertising revenue on top of the enormous debt service costs Musk loaded it up with to finance the acquisition.) > The actual employees seem to be doing a fine job at reduced-capacity though Keeping the lights on in the core app? Maybe (subjectively, I’m seeing more problems with app behavior, and seeing more reports of them, but that could, at least in part, be more attention being on it.) With the kind of safety that is of concern to moderators, no, despite Musk’s claims of reduced hate speech and other objectionable content by Twitter’s count, outside analysis has that skyrocketing. Basic business functions? Well, missing payroll in a couple of EU jurisdictions is kind of a big deal. So, no, I would say the existing crew isn’t doing a great job of keeping Twitter running, though the most clear problems aren’t in app function, but other business-critical functions. But, it wasn’t just engineers that were cut, and keeping the lights on, without innovation, is probably the easiest function to maintain with deep cuts, since software doesn’t actually rot.
  • mhoad 4y ago
    Individually these are fatal mistakes. Collectively it’s clear… It’s over for Twitter under Musk. They might be able to sell it to someone for a fraction of the price they have paid for it but every day that he stays in charge the less they will be able to sell it for.
    • v0idzer0 4y ago
      You’re just fantasizing. Twitter is fine. Thriving really.
      • TomSwirly 4y ago
        How can you call a company that lives off ads and just lost its top ten advertisers "thriving"?
    • smoldesu 4y ago
      Unfortunately there is not anyone dumber than Musk to whom he might sell the platform. That being said, even Musk isn't capable of destroying Twitter (at least yet). The site is still here, and all the profiles with their 280-character messages still load. Trust me, I want Twitter to suffer the worst death of all. It's just not likely that Elon Musk will be the reason why the site falls, at least not from a technical standpoint.
      • mhoad 4y ago
        You also seem to have a very narrow definition of what failure looks like as defined by HTTP status codes. It’s already over… I don’t know how long the death rattle is going to last but it’s past the point of no return in any meaningful sense.
        • CountSessine 4y ago
          What metric would you use? Daily impressions? Those seem to be up. Posts? Also up. Impressions, posts, and status codes are the measure of success (status codes of course being a proxy for earnings as well as operations given that if they go out of business they won't be returning status codes at all).
  • sangnoir 4y ago
    It's not hard to maintain a frozen codebase with a skeleton crew. This is practiced routinely at many organizations during end-of-year holidays when many people take PTO. However, not many companies can survive with a permanent code-freeze, which is why companies don't just fire the "excess" folk who take PTO between December 25 and January 1, even though "things were fine" in that timeframe
    • ilyt 4y ago
      Well muski boy probably fired many people that will be expensive to replace I heavily doubt most of developers in twitter work on its core functionality. Many of them probably could be fired without much repercussions on company, the problem really is that there is no way in hell to judge that quickly and immediately start firing.
      • ben_w 4y ago
        The core functionality can be replaced by a single, albeit particularly skilled, final year university student project. It's the load balancing, the advertising, the billing system, the >200 legal jurisdiction's worth of regulation [0], lobbying both for and against various regulations, auditing everything for legal disputes, the dynamic battle with scammers and spammers who want to figure out and get around the spam filters, and the security updates (some of which they need to write themselves and not just install on all their machines). Probably some other stuff as well, but this is already like a Monty Python sketch. [0] not just each nation, but e.g. all the different US states