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I'm not sure many people who actually worked on reliability expected imminent implosion. It's more like thinking the seed of eventual destruction was probably

I'm not sure many people who actually worked on reliability expected imminent implosion. It's more like thinking the seed of eventual destruction was probably planted. From a reliability perspective, there's probably two interesting forms of failure here. One is latent, like shutting off backups. Like yeah, you can shut them off and nothing bad will happen imminently, but eventually something bad will happen, and that will be a very bad day. Firing an entire team of experts in a system is kinda like getting rid of backups or probably closer to making backups but not testing them. If you don't test your backups, maybe you will be fine, or maybe you won't. The other is corrosive. Imagine upsetting a companies most impactful devs while simultaneously shrinking growth prospects. How are you going to hire amazing devs when the devs you have left are kinda mediocre or working due to coercion (h1b) rather than more positive reasons? What do you think Twitters sales pitch is to potential new hires? Reliability/security/etc are all types of maintenance where most of the time you don't have a problem, but sometimes the little hook on your power line fails, resulting in the live cable hitting trees that weren't trimmed, on a forest rife with fuel that results in billions of dollars of damage. The lower the investment, the higher the chance of failure, every individual failure has the chance to compound with other failures into catastrophic failure.

bcrl 4y ago
Or if your local power company is Hydro One that has known Suspect Insulators on the transmission lines strung above the distribution lines, you'll end up having 44kV pumped into lines that normally carry 7.2kV with the end result that appliances expecting 120VAC at the wall will get a whopping 733V surge, frying a whole bunch of electronics and nearly starting a few house fires. That could never happen, right? Ooops, it happened here last year.
bsder 4y ago
Lots of people at Twitter want to keep their cushy jobs. Musk or no, there are a bunch of people at Twitter that want to keep their jobs and realize that the best way to do that is to keep Twitter running. They will do their best to put chewing gum on things to keep it together. As you point out, things don't die all at once ... until they do. It will be interesting to see if there are outages during the Super Bowl.
FrontierPsych 4y ago
>How are you going to hire amazing devs when the devs you have left are kinda mediocre or working due to coercion (h1b) rather than more positive reasons? There's a lot of companies shedding tech talent right now. Those people are looking for jobs. The tech industry has always been cyclical. It's just been on an up for a long time, so people who have recently started have never been through a downturn and have an inflated sense of themselves and their worth. During the dot-com bubble in 1999-ish, ask how valuable tech workers were. I'm not saying tech isn't valuable, but I think tech workers overvalue themselves and it is most likely time for a market correction. Elon Musk has always been known as a hard-driving manager. He does squeeze every last drop of productivity out of people. I've read all kinds of articles on this and SpaceX and his other ventures. The fact of the matter is that, believe it or not, some people thrive on this high-pressure cooker environment, and not the ping-pong playing, foosball playing, getting massages every day environment. Hard for coddled techs to understand, I know, I know. But he has kept a LOT of techs for SpaceX, which fuck....talk about tech and the ability to land the rocket and get rockets to the ISS, fuuuuck. So he knows a thing or two about it, unlike us armchair quarterbacks. >What do you think Twitters sales pitch is to potential new hires? "Be part of a team that can re-build this great company from the ground up. Be part of something great. You will work hard and I will have exceptionally great expectations of you, but consider what Musk has accomplished - Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla, etc,etc. Do you want to be with a wishy-washy company that coddles you or be with a someone who transforms society. Yes, we got rid of a lot of people, we had to in order to pare down everything so there was not a lot of bloat. That is what Musk has always done and he is successful so he will be successful here." Again, maybe YOU wouldn't like that sales pitch, but there will be a lot of techs out there that will. That's all that matters. Everything else is just blah, blah, blah. >Reliability/security/etc are all types of maintenance where most of the time you don't have a problem,.... Musk runs SpaceX, Tesla, solar companies, etc. He knows a thing or two about it.

bcrl 4y ago

Or if your local power company is Hydro One that has known Suspect Insulators on the transmission lines strung above the distribution lines, you'll end up having 44kV pumped into lines that normally carry 7.2kV with the end result that appliances expecting 120VAC at the wall will get a whopping 733V surge, frying a whole bunch of electronics and nearly starting a few house fires. That could never happen, right? Ooops, it happened here last year.

bsder 4y ago

Lots of people at Twitter want to keep their cushy jobs. Musk or no, there are a bunch of people at Twitter that want to keep their jobs and realize that the best way to do that is to keep Twitter running. They will do their best to put chewing gum on things to keep it together. As you point out, things don't die all at once ... until they do. It will be interesting to see if there are outages during the Super Bowl.

FrontierPsych 4y ago

>How are you going to hire amazing devs when the devs you have left are kinda mediocre or working due to coercion (h1b) rather than more positive reasons? There's a lot of companies shedding tech talent right now. Those people are looking for jobs. The tech industry has always been cyclical. It's just been on an up for a long time, so people who have recently started have never been through a downturn and have an inflated sense of themselves and their worth. During the dot-com bubble in 1999-ish, ask how valuable tech workers were. I'm not saying tech isn't valuable, but I think tech workers overvalue themselves and it is most likely time for a market correction. Elon Musk has always been known as a hard-driving manager. He does squeeze every last drop of productivity out of people. I've read all kinds of articles on this and SpaceX and his other ventures. The fact of the matter is that, believe it or not, some people thrive on this high-pressure cooker environment, and not the ping-pong playing, foosball playing, getting massages every day environment. Hard for coddled techs to understand, I know, I know. But he has kept a LOT of techs for SpaceX, which fuck....talk about tech and the ability to land the rocket and get rockets to the ISS, fuuuuck. So he knows a thing or two about it, unlike us armchair quarterbacks. >What do you think Twitters sales pitch is to potential new hires? "Be part of a team that can re-build this great company from the ground up. Be part of something great. You will work hard and I will have exceptionally great expectations of you, but consider what Musk has accomplished - Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla, etc,etc. Do you want to be with a wishy-washy company that coddles you or be with a someone who transforms society. Yes, we got rid of a lot of people, we had to in order to pare down everything so there was not a lot of bloat. That is what Musk has always done and he is successful so he will be successful here." Again, maybe YOU wouldn't like that sales pitch, but there will be a lot of techs out there that will. That's all that matters. Everything else is just blah, blah, blah. >Reliability/security/etc are all types of maintenance where most of the time you don't have a problem,.... Musk runs SpaceX, Tesla, solar companies, etc. He knows a thing or two about it.