4 ms·

I dislike Elon Musk, but apart from a few stability glitches the product seems fine and product delivery seems to be moving faster than it has in years. I know

I dislike Elon Musk, but apart from a few stability glitches the product seems fine and product delivery seems to be moving faster than it has in years. I know everyone is waiting for it to crash, and you may be right, but so far, stripping (hundreds of?) millions of cost out of the business seems to be have been a good strategy from a technical perspective at least.

random314 4y ago
Only need about 20% of the engineers are dedicated to keeping services running in any tech company. The other 80% are focused on new product features, growing revenue, growing engagement, growing new user signups, l blocking bad actors and legal compliance.
- csande17 4y ago
  Having worked in a "growing engagement" role at a big company, I'd say it's more accurate to describe it as "running no-op experiments over and over until the A/B testing tool tells you one had a 'statistically significant' result". It seemed to me like the exact kind of make-work Musk fans criticize. Axing all of those roles could make it easier to ship valuable user-visible features, since the remaining engineers wouldn't have to work around feature flags for fifty ongoing experiments.
  - random314 4y ago
    Let's not project your role at Company X onto Twitter. Especially, given that neither of us have worked at Twitter X.0
- zpeti 4y ago
  Definitely doesn’t seem like that other 80% did a lot of that at Twitter.
  - random314 4y ago
    Definitely doesn't seem like you have any data points at all to make a judgement, apart from the revenue collapse of 40%.
bawolff 4y ago
Honest question, as a non twitter user, what does "product delivery seems to be moving faster than it has in years." mean? Has there been new features?
riffraff 4y ago
> product delivery seems to be moving faster than it has in years. They launched Twitter Blue which was a disaster, then redid the timeline, which at best is a mild improvement, and they rushed out things that were already in development. I'm not in the Twitter Death Cult camp, but I don't think we can judge new development based on the last four months.
iFred 4y ago
Twitter services that are publicly exposed have seen a global latency average has racked on 150ms with regular spikes of several seconds or more. [1] Core services for Twitter have been throwing 500s a dozen times every few hours. [2] Twitter performance for users in Australia has fallen apart twice due to what was found out to be someone losing access to a root certificate and mitigation delayed because the team that could fix it is no longer employed. [3] This is far more than a few stability glitches. [1] https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/hI9vrUO4k/home?orgId=4&refresh=5m&viewPanel=23&from=now-90d&to=now https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/hI9vrUO4k/home?orgId=4&refr... [2] https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/hI9vrUO4k/home?orgId=4&refresh=5m&viewPanel=19&from=now-7d&to=now https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/hI9vrUO4k/home?orgId=4&refr... [3] https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/hI9vrUO4k/home?orgId=4&refresh=5m&viewPanel=17 https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/hI9vrUO4k/home?orgId=4&refr...

random314 4y ago

Only need about 20% of the engineers are dedicated to keeping services running in any tech company. The other 80% are focused on new product features, growing revenue, growing engagement, growing new user signups, l blocking bad actors and legal compliance.

csande17 4y ago
Having worked in a "growing engagement" role at a big company, I'd say it's more accurate to describe it as "running no-op experiments over and over until the A/B testing tool tells you one had a 'statistically significant' result". It seemed to me like the exact kind of make-work Musk fans criticize. Axing all of those roles could make it easier to ship valuable user-visible features, since the remaining engineers wouldn't have to work around feature flags for fifty ongoing experiments.
- random314 4y ago
  Let's not project your role at Company X onto Twitter. Especially, given that neither of us have worked at Twitter X.0
zpeti 4y ago
Definitely doesn’t seem like that other 80% did a lot of that at Twitter.
- random314 4y ago
  Definitely doesn't seem like you have any data points at all to make a judgement, apart from the revenue collapse of 40%.

bawolff 4y ago

Honest question, as a non twitter user, what does "product delivery seems to be moving faster than it has in years." mean? Has there been new features?

riffraff 4y ago

> product delivery seems to be moving faster than it has in years. They launched Twitter Blue which was a disaster, then redid the timeline, which at best is a mild improvement, and they rushed out things that were already in development. I'm not in the Twitter Death Cult camp, but I don't think we can judge new development based on the last four months.

iFred 4y ago

Twitter services that are publicly exposed have seen a global latency average has racked on 150ms with regular spikes of several seconds or more. [1] Core services for Twitter have been throwing 500s a dozen times every few hours. [2] Twitter performance for users in Australia has fallen apart twice due to what was found out to be someone losing access to a root certificate and mitigation delayed because the team that could fix it is no longer employed. [3] This is far more than a few stability glitches. [1] https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/hI9vrUO4k/home?orgId=4&refresh=5m&viewPanel=23&from=now-90d&to=now https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/hI9vrUO4k/home?orgId=4&refr... [2] https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/hI9vrUO4k/home?orgId=4&refresh=5m&viewPanel=19&from=now-7d&to=now https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/hI9vrUO4k/home?orgId=4&refr... [3] https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/hI9vrUO4k/home?orgId=4&refresh=5m&viewPanel=17 https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/hI9vrUO4k/home?orgId=4&refr...