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You think firing 70% of a company is sane? How about alienating your advertisers? On an advertising funded platform. Railing against work from home and then st

You think firing 70% of a company is sane? How about alienating your advertisers? On an advertising funded platform. Railing against work from home and then stopping paying you office lease? The first eviction was ordered today. How long till the flagship office doors are chained shut? No part of the twitter debacle is sane. Modeling any part of one’s strategy on it would be laughable.

genmud 3y ago
Not OP, but he did caveat it with saying some decisions, which I assume he meant that cutting costs on an overstaffed org is a good idea, but maybe cutting 70% before you have a good idea what they do might have been a bad way to do it. You can make the sane/rational decisions, yet implement those decisions in the most insane way possible.
- __pache__ 3y ago
  Twitter cost cuts seem amazing...?
  - mnky9800n 3y ago
    You didn't see that video of the girl who worked at Twitter but didn't seem to do anything other then drink coffee and go to yoga class? I think if the company is not making a reliable profit then maybe there's some costs that could be cut.
    - martin8412 3y ago
      They were making a profit... It's also not possible to deduce anything from a video of someone supposedly only drinking coffee and doing yoga. She's still be an order of magnitude more productive than the CEO splitting his time between five full time CEO positions.
__pache__ 3y ago
Obviously there was an insane amount of bloat. Many popular apps with similar scale run with 20-100 engineers ....... they had like 4500 or something? Insane waste. Remember that lady going on about "how dare you critique infra! we use graphql!" Nonsense, they were obviously not that valuable: twitter is running great with them all gone..
- nocoiner 3y ago
  I just posted a comment elsewhere to this effect, but as a extremely light Twitter user (have an account, don’t post, click on a handful of links to Twitter posts a week), really basic functionality has become mostly unusable for me since the buyout. Like, a good portion of the time, the site doesn’t even load for me. Video rarely works. The one time since then I tried to log into my account, it took probably 20 minutes between demented captchas and getting kicked back to the start of the process. And I’m not even talking about any higher level functionality or whatever the subjective experience as a poster is like, just simple passive viewing. Obviously a lot of people were unduly pessimistic about Twitter’s technical resilience, but from what I can see, it does not seem to be a well oiled machine.
  - mypornaccount 3y ago
    I have had the exact opposite experience. Do you remember how used to take a second for replies to load under a tweet? Now it’s instantaneous. My suggested feed is a lot better too.
    - idiftl 3y ago
      To add another data point from someone who used to use the site regularly but still occasionally checks in once and a while, I have noticed a significant degradation in quality for the main feed and random outages/errors seem to crop up a lot more frequently. But aside from our respective pieces of anecdotal evidence, we’ve seen how pathetically they’ve been recently handling scaling and technical issues with high traffic events like the Desantis campaign announcement.

genmud 3y ago

Not OP, but he did caveat it with saying some decisions, which I assume he meant that cutting costs on an overstaffed org is a good idea, but maybe cutting 70% before you have a good idea what they do might have been a bad way to do it. You can make the sane/rational decisions, yet implement those decisions in the most insane way possible.

__pache__ 3y ago
Twitter cost cuts seem amazing...?
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  You didn't see that video of the girl who worked at Twitter but didn't seem to do anything other then drink coffee and go to yoga class? I think if the company is not making a reliable profit then maybe there's some costs that could be cut.
  - martin8412 3y ago
    They were making a profit... It's also not possible to deduce anything from a video of someone supposedly only drinking coffee and doing yoga. She's still be an order of magnitude more productive than the CEO splitting his time between five full time CEO positions.

__pache__ 3y ago

Obviously there was an insane amount of bloat. Many popular apps with similar scale run with 20-100 engineers ....... they had like 4500 or something? Insane waste. Remember that lady going on about "how dare you critique infra! we use graphql!" Nonsense, they were obviously not that valuable: twitter is running great with them all gone..

nocoiner 3y ago
I just posted a comment elsewhere to this effect, but as a extremely light Twitter user (have an account, don’t post, click on a handful of links to Twitter posts a week), really basic functionality has become mostly unusable for me since the buyout. Like, a good portion of the time, the site doesn’t even load for me. Video rarely works. The one time since then I tried to log into my account, it took probably 20 minutes between demented captchas and getting kicked back to the start of the process. And I’m not even talking about any higher level functionality or whatever the subjective experience as a poster is like, just simple passive viewing. Obviously a lot of people were unduly pessimistic about Twitter’s technical resilience, but from what I can see, it does not seem to be a well oiled machine.
- mypornaccount 3y ago
  I have had the exact opposite experience. Do you remember how used to take a second for replies to load under a tweet? Now it’s instantaneous. My suggested feed is a lot better too.
  - idiftl 3y ago
    To add another data point from someone who used to use the site regularly but still occasionally checks in once and a while, I have noticed a significant degradation in quality for the main feed and random outages/errors seem to crop up a lot more frequently. But aside from our respective pieces of anecdotal evidence, we’ve seen how pathetically they’ve been recently handling scaling and technical issues with high traffic events like the Desantis campaign announcement.