5 ms·

Maybe Musk was right about the bloat

mikece 4y ago
It is fascinating that half (or more?) of Twitter's workforce can be released and there's no discernible degradation of the service. I wonder how many other tech CEO are looking at their organizations and wondering if they could slash similarly without losing platform performance.
- josefresco 4y ago
  > there's no discernible degradation of the service Twitter advertisers would beg to differ.
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    The service has degraded for advertisers?
    - vrc 4y ago
      In terms of brand safety it has. But we haven’t seen the same backlash as when FB or YT had brand safety issues a few years ago. My guess is because the Elon stories are chumming the water for Twitter stories. Curious if it ever shakes out
      - YetAnotherNick 4y ago
        We aren’t talking about brand safety, just whether the site is working as expected after firing all the engineers.
    - josefresco 4y ago
      Yes. I've heard directly of the chaos. If I hadn't heard directly I wouldn't have commented but sadly have, from multiple people.
      - phendrenad2 4y ago
        I'm interested to know more about what's failing.
- a_shovel 4y ago
  The Latest Tweets feed on the Android app was completely broken for about a week for me and several other people.
- garren 4y ago
  Seems short-sighted. That Twitter hasn’t fallen over appears more like a credit to the SRE work that went into getting everything running on, effectively, autopilot. Today’s Twitter infra is clearly a far cry from the stuff a decade ago.
rvz 4y ago
Yes. It just shows that it doesn't take 7,000+ employees to run the blue bird site. Only around 500 to 1000 despite all the emotional reactions, outrage, FUD and unfounded apocalyptic prophesies made by the media and the doomsters predicting the imminent collapse of Twitter.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  The twitter app itself could probably run fine with much less than that, I've seen skeleton engineering crews support hundreds of millions of MAUs pushing terabytes of data. What musk has sacrificed is everything besides the twitter app, which is probably not enough to maintain twitter the corporation in the long term.
  - YetAnotherNick 4y ago
    > everything besides the twitter app Like what? What has twitter acheived beside twitter app with more employees for a decade?
TheBigSalad 4y ago
Having used twitter, I don't know what I don't know, but it's hard to imagine how the company could possibly have 7K employees. Maybe 500 to 1K seems more reasonable given what's there.

It is fascinating that half (or more?) of Twitter's workforce can be released and there's no discernible degradation of the service. I wonder how many other tech CEO are looking at their organizations and wondering if they could slash similarly without losing platform performance.

josefresco 4y ago
> there's no discernible degradation of the service Twitter advertisers would beg to differ.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  The service has degraded for advertisers?
  - vrc 4y ago
    In terms of brand safety it has. But we haven’t seen the same backlash as when FB or YT had brand safety issues a few years ago. My guess is because the Elon stories are chumming the water for Twitter stories. Curious if it ever shakes out
    - YetAnotherNick 4y ago
      We aren’t talking about brand safety, just whether the site is working as expected after firing all the engineers.
  - josefresco 4y ago
    Yes. I've heard directly of the chaos. If I hadn't heard directly I wouldn't have commented but sadly have, from multiple people.
    - phendrenad2 4y ago
      I'm interested to know more about what's failing.
a_shovel 4y ago
The Latest Tweets feed on the Android app was completely broken for about a week for me and several other people.
garren 4y ago
Seems short-sighted. That Twitter hasn’t fallen over appears more like a credit to the SRE work that went into getting everything running on, effectively, autopilot. Today’s Twitter infra is clearly a far cry from the stuff a decade ago.

rvz 4y ago

Yes. It just shows that it doesn't take 7,000+ employees to run the blue bird site. Only around 500 to 1000 despite all the emotional reactions, outrage, FUD and unfounded apocalyptic prophesies made by the media and the doomsters predicting the imminent collapse of Twitter.

CuriouslyC 4y ago
The twitter app itself could probably run fine with much less than that, I've seen skeleton engineering crews support hundreds of millions of MAUs pushing terabytes of data. What musk has sacrificed is everything besides the twitter app, which is probably not enough to maintain twitter the corporation in the long term.
- YetAnotherNick 4y ago
  > everything besides the twitter app Like what? What has twitter acheived beside twitter app with more employees for a decade?

TheBigSalad 4y ago

Having used twitter, I don't know what I don't know, but it's hard to imagine how the company could possibly have 7K employees. Maybe 500 to 1K seems more reasonable given what's there.