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the other 7000 employees didnt take their code with them when they left, twitter kept that

jrockway 4y ago
Yeah, 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 ago
  the "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 ago
550 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 ago
  Ok 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 ago
    Absolutely, 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.

Yeah, 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 ago
the "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 ago

550 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 ago
Ok 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 ago
  Absolutely, 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.