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Twitter has fewer than 550 full time engineers
- chayesfss 4y agoAnddd, the app is still up, crazy right… like why is this news¿
- blitzar 4y agothe other 7000 employees didnt take their code with them when they left, twitter kept that
- jrockway 4y agoYeah, thinking about this as an extended vacation seems right to me. Things don't usually go down over the weekend or winter break. That doesn't mean "hey that means we only need 0 employees". Certainly you can make a microblog service with less than 500 engineers, but there is a lot of work invested in their datacenters (from physically managing the machines to their network / orchestration control plane). That can even be outsourced as many companies do, but it ain't free.
- blitzar 4y agothe "story" that the employees were all terrible and the code a disaster would have been proven if the site crashed day 1 I am actually a fan of cycles where "no new features" is a priority, making systems less fragile and tollerate the weekend / holiday helps you sleep at night, and sleeping at night is nice.
- mytailorisrich 4y ago550 engineers to maintain and develop the code base is still a rather large number. Is it too few? I don't know. There is little doubt that Twitter was bloated, the question is by how much.
- andrewstuart 4y agoOk I want you to write a system that can write hundreds of thousands of messages per second, and read millions of messages per second, globally and with low latency, with every message being permanently stored and available for query. Till need you design and implement redundancy and fault tolerance. You’ll need a strategy for backing up everything. You’ll need to be able to deploy code updates to your global infrastructure which is self managed because running this in a cloud would be ridiculously expensive. You’ll need video ingestion systems, monitoring and alerting. You’ll need advertising systems, billing systems, content moderation systems, anti spam and anti bot systems. You’ll need to implement an API for developers. You’ll need applications for mobile and web. You’ll need developers to do this, testers to test it, people to organize all this stuff.
- mytailorisrich 4y agoAbsolutely, you'll need developers and testers. To think you necessarily need thousands of them, though, is a stretch. I think people have drunk the kool aid over the past decade of 'growth-driven' startup where the game was to hire as many engineers as possible as fast as possible. This is what is partially fueling the current job reduction cycle in the industry. There are simply more engineers on the payroll than needed to deliver a profitable product.
- evgen 4y agoThis is news because later this year they are probably going to have problems. You have obviously never worked at a large internet service, but when you spend some time backstage at such a venture you learn that there is a great deal of inertia within various projects and pieces of infrastructure. If 80-90% of the team for component X departs the system is unlikely to fail quickly (a frequently repeated mistaken belief when Twitter was shedding engineers so fast) but it is going to start having problems that will not be visible to the outside world. This is not a problem for a while because the former employees who built and maintained the system were fairly smart people and built something that was relatively reliable; they wanted to be able to sleep through the night without a page or go on vacation too. Bugs exposed by other teams using that component will go unfixed and will need to be patched around by the caller. New features that might have used component X will be sidelined because no one wants to put more load on it or risk their feature on a component that people have started whispering about in the corridors. What is worse is that the people frantically spending their days patching and repairing this Titanic below decks do not see the iceberg and do not have enough manpower to turn the ship even if they did, the people who could help give warning or helped prevent the problem left a while ago. Eventually this component is going to get stressed, some lingering bug will get triggered, or some other system elsewhere in the architecture diagram will fail and shed load to our component X that is barely keeping up and it too will fail. The danger for Twitter is that the failure could cascade through multiple poorly-maintained systems and lead to a much bigger problem.
- gsatic 4y agoYou should visit big telcos. Things chug along not because there is a great competent army fixing anything. Institutional knowledge is regularly lost thanks to changes in tech, ever changing fortunes of the biz, divisions getting sold off etc etc. They chug along because people make do with what ever works. It sort of like your OS crashing. You keep backups, reload, reboot. You dont debug and fix. The older systems get that's pretty much the norm.
- onion2k 4y agoThe app staying up is a testament to the robust engineering that the team did in previous years. If it'd fallen over immediately that would be a sign that the engineers did a bad job. The fact Twitter hasn't died shows that Elon fired a good engineering team.
- viraptor 4y agoIt's not going to disappear overnight, but you can see the cracks. The 2fa went down in multiple countries for hours, Oz and NZ lost access for almost a day, people reported "looping" timelines of the same 7 tweets, notification issues, and some other things I already forgot. Sure, they're up, but things are not 100% ok. The number of broken things is not even close to what we've experienced in the last few years - this was an extremely reliable service before.
- sebzim4500 4y agoStill sounds like quite a lot to maintain a project with the complexity of twitter.
- moonchrome 4y agoIf they only intend to maintain it's basically dead - where is the turnaround going to come from ?
- petodo 4y agoYup, seems like they could scratch zero from that number for such simple product, even the apps can be just wrappers for website.
- clnq 4y agoWe don’t know the code complexity.
- spoils19 4y agoI think Elon should invest in some internal tooling that Twitter can take advantage of, such as infrastructure management or ad dashboards.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- danjac 4y agoIt's a tip of the iceberg. The part you see - the UI - is a small part, the complexity is in the backend (advertising/marketing tools, content moderation, metrics, devops etc). Musk being the archetypal Mr First Principles Guy, he probably thought just the same: "it's a simple webapp, how hard can it be?"
- andrewstuart 4y agoDoesn’t sound like a $44 billion company. For some reason headcount seems to matter in valuation. Ironically as Musk cut the headcount he probably cut the valuation. The purchase of Twitter may go down as one if the biggest value destruction events in history.
- fredgrott 4y agoThat was already known by the way the money came in to support Elon's bid. As really at that point Twitter was only worth $1billion not $44 billion.
- Hamuko 4y agoIt didn't sound like a $44 billion company when Elon made the offer.
- hef19898 4y agoWell, and it wasn't. Which even Elon realized soon enough after believing it long enough to sign a binding acquisition agreement.
- baby-yoda 4y agoWhatsApp had 55 employees and was acquired for $22 billion (IIRC). Seems like 550 engineers could be plenty productive if in the right scenario (emphasis on if).
- vkou 4y agoIt was acquired by Facebook, for whom they were an existential threat.
- weitzj 4y agoI think I read some where that this was quite cheap. Just approx $8 to get a social profile of a user on your platform
- acdha 4y agoWhatsApp is a very different product: it’s built around one to one communication so you don’t get all of the fan out problems of having to distribute messages everyone’s followers, or the search / advertising / timeline filtering. Consider that there are single people who can post something which will be watched within seconds by millions of people, except those who have blocked that person or filtered that topic and ask how hard that looks behind the scenes.
- pictur 4y agoit's pretty funny how stupid rich people like elon musk try to convince the poor that "we can do more with less engineers". "hey slave, you have to do more work so we don't have thousands of employees. i don't want to pay thousands of employees, you understand slave?"
- convery 4y agoFYI, Elon Tweeted[0] a response to the article saying they have about double the headcount reported by CNBC. So take it with a grain of salt. [0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1616706530841333761?s=20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1616706530841333761?s=20
- arlcode 4y agoI'll continue to take whatever Musk says with a grain of sand. Thank you. For real though: He has proven time again that he lies on trivial matters. Regrettably my trust in him telling the truth is at rock bottom now. It used to be at the same level as other marketing departments/generic politicians but dropped over time.
- ben_w 4y ago"Lies" implies deliberate rather than in error. This is much harder to demonstrate even when it is correct. In either case, still a good reason to take with a grain of salt, though one should do that for everyone anyway unless they're talking about their specialist subject.
- threatofrain 4y agoElon didn't have a verbal oopsies when he said that an emergency worker was a pedophile during a deadly rescue event. He didn't have an accident when he doubled and then tripled-down on the claim, by further clarifying that that by pedo he meant sex with young Thai boys. Elon didn't accidentally hire an investigator to dig up dirt on the rescue worker. When Elon very recently reassured stockholders that he wouldn't sell, he didn't have an accident when he had two selloff events worth billions. It's no surprise that someone would lie for billions, but Elon will risk his reputation by lying just to destroy a rescue worker for offending him over social media. Lying is not merely some accidental or defensive maneuver that Elon employs when his back is against the wall; dishonesty is very much part of his tactical repertoire for public speech.
- 4y ago
- AraceliHarker 4y agoWhy don't they fire those in charge of selecting 'What's happening' and those who recently implemented 'For You'? Both are unwanted features.
- 6nf 4y ago'For you' is not a new feature, it's just the 'show latest' button in a new location.
- calderknight 4y agoThe 'For You' tab gives you what was the default feed. This is the feed that includes Tweets from accounts which you do not follow, etc. It's the 'Following' tab that gives you the old 'latest Tweets first' feed.
- 6nf 4y agoYea it used to be a toggle and now it's two tabs.
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoWhy would you fire the people who implemented the unwanted features as opposed to the those who required the unwanted features?
- sundaeofshock 4y agoBecause the person who required those features happens to be the owner of the company, and that person never takes the blame for anything.
- petodo 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34465542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34465542
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lnsru 4y agoSo there were that many guys with visa and/or mortgage issues and we’re not able to leave on time and must sleep now in the office.
- rvz 4y agoYet months later, Twitter is still running despite deranged predictions [0] of its immediate collapse and clearly the other 7,000 employees were just not needed. Again, the media really knew how to fool and create pure hysteria and manipulation to get almost everyone believing everything they write. [0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-how-a-twitter-engineer-says-it-will-break-in-the-coming-weeks/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...
- blitzar 4y ago"Twitter’s collapse into an unusable wreck is some time off, the engineer says" Your own citation even fails to agree with you deranged premise.
- machina_ex_deus 4y agoThe media definitely knew they are exaggerating nonsense, but they wanted to convince people and advertisers to leave Twitter, and all this scaremongering helped.
- readonthegoapp 4y agoso you're saying Twitter was incredibly well-engineered?
- michpoch 4y agoI'd really like to see someone smart trying to estimate what 550 engineers are working at Twitter on. It still seems like plenty.
- ramraj07 4y agoThis trite argument made some sense when there were 8000 engineers, but when the 4th most popular social media platform has only 550 engineers working on it, you don’t need to dig deep to figure out how so many engineers are needed. Even the famously nimble WhatsApp which has fewer features and complexity needs this order of magnitude engineers so why would you expect Twitter to be leaner?
- marcos100 4y agoDidn't WhatsApp had like 50 employees in total when they were sold to Facebook?
- zoover2020 4y agoWhatsApp having less complexity? Care to elaborate on that? I'm aware they scaled to 1B+ users with ~100 engineers but I'm failing to see why they'd be working on less complex problems.
- Glaurung 4y agoTwitter has a direct messaging feature. It also has many, many other features. Whatsapp is direct messaging, full stop. The two are not at all comparable.
- no_way 4y agoWhatsApp always comes up in comparison to Twitter, but they are fundamentally different. WhatsApp is mostly one on one interaction, while Twitter potentially allows every user to interact with every other user, it's unbelievably more complex to do that at scale compared to WhatsApp, not even talking about all the extra features Twitter has. Search probably being best example of complexity differences.
- andrewstuart 4y agoAll the people in this thread saying how few engineers are needed to run Twitter and how it seems more than enough…… Ha ha…. I bet you’re thinking it’d be better rewritten in Ruby on Rails!
- fredoliveira 4y ago> I bet you’re thinking it’d be better rewritten in Ruby on Rails! I'm not sure if this is a joke, an old Twttr reference, or just ignorance. But early Twitter was Ruby on Rails.
- fredgrott 4y agoand the CTO was fired for keeping it in RoR.
- xrayarx 4y agoThis is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34460797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34460797
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]