16 ms·

The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. My guess is Elon said "the site's too slow!" Engine

The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. My guess is Elon said "the site's too slow!" Engineers noticed that the home feed request was slow. They didn't understand how it worked, had no tools to profile it, and were given an unrealistic deadline to fix it. So about the only thing they could do was issue multiple, parallel requests and hope that at least one of them was fast. I worked in the games industry for a while, and came to understand how they could spend so much money and so much time, and yet release a game where even basic functionality was broken. It's exactly this sort of extreme schedule pressure that, ironically, makes a huge morass where changing one thing breaks 10 other things, so progress grinds to a halt.

trevioustrouble 3y ago
[flagged]
- anonymousab 3y ago
  > and needs to be rate-limited for unregistered users It seemingly needs to be rate-limited for not just registered users, but registered paying premium users as well. And the rate limits for them are enough to be passed in less than an hour of average idle use! > if you think you’d do a better job than Elon with Twitter, you wouldnt. Doing nothing and not saddling twitter with unnecessary extra debt would have already been doing better than Elon.
- bbreier 3y ago
  I have no experience managing a company at that scale so I won't challenge the assertion that Elon is doing a better job than I would but... the feed has not been rate limited for unregistered users for the history of the site as far as I know, and its been pretty damn stable and snappy!
- pkulak 3y ago
  I can see your perspective, up to the last bit. Elon is objectively incompetent.
- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  I didn't see them mention a degree in philosophy at all. > The people that were fired from Twitter were fired for good reason Ooh, you're talk like you're privy to inside information. I hope you brought enough for the rest of the class. > if you think you’d do a better job than Elon with Twitter, you wouldnt. You'd have to try rather hard to do worse.
unconed 3y ago
Except, progress grinding to a halt pretty much described Twitter before Elon Musk too. The story that anyone who knew anything was let go is just that, a story, as the number of employees by year shows Twitter, and other tech companies in the same period, overhired and then went back to pre-2020 levels. The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everything Twitter does, especially if things go wrong, whereas before it was mainly just a faceless bureaucracy whose Trust and Safety lead at times had more visibility than the CEO. The subtext is that Twitter changing hands also involved trimming a lot of the dead weight, particularly hitting the softer managerial/diversity/HR side. Now a lot of people are rooting for the site to fail because it has gotten too "bro-ey", as the era of trust-and-safety and $15k backchannel bluecheck deals has made way for free-speech and monthly subscriptions.
- beaned 3y ago
  There's definitely a strong element of people here rooting for Twitter to fail because they dislike Elon's politics.
  - inpdx 3y ago
    As a software developer, I hate the way he treats his employees. Politics are secondary.
    - beaned 3y ago
      Do the people who actually work for his companies generally feel the same way?
  - epistasis 3y ago
    I hate Elon's politics but want Twitter succeed. And if he didn't make his politics part of how he runs stuff, I probably wouldn't even care about his politics. But you know how celebrities get crap for inserting politics into things, when they know very little about that topic? Elon is going to get the same.
walrus01 3y ago
> The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. This is like a case study in what happens when you fire everyone except the sycophants and yes-men. I only feel sorry for remaining non-yes-men twitter employees who might still be there because for whatever personal reasons they're in a precarious economic situation where they can't quit (H1B?) or are tied to the company for healthcare coverage (Thanks, America, for being the greatest country in the world) because they can't afford any other health insurance option.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- julesqs 3y ago
  to be fair i would guess that a lot of the engineers there are also stuck because of visa issues. plenty of sychophants too i’m sure.
  - alsetmusic 3y ago
    That’s what they meant about H1B. https://www.google.com/search?q=h1b+visa https://www.google.com/search?q=h1b+visa
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  Yeah I wish Obama care had simply been: 'employer provided healthcare is illegal in 2024'
  - Travis_Pastrami 3y ago
    I don't see how that would be any better than what we have now. If employer provided healthcare was removed, that would leave us with a bunch of private healthcare companies. These private companies would drive up the cost even more. If an affordable or free healthcare option was offered on top of making employer provided healthcare illegal, then I completely am behind your idea.
andsoitis 3y ago
> The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. Are you saying the engineers who are now at Twitter don’t have the right skills?
- tadfisher 3y ago
  That's a non-sequitir. You can be at the top of your field and not completely understand a complex system. Also, the right people may not have even been involved in the implementation of this "feature".
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    > You can be at the top of your field and not completely understand a complex system. The tweet reads: "Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in." Does that strike you as complex? I mean, surely they had the context (need to log in) because it was all over the news
    - fesoliveira 3y ago
      I don't know what kind of systems you worked on in your career, but even simpler systems with smaller userbases than twitter are quite complex if you are new to it. Twitter serves their service to the entire world, with multiple layers of systems working in conjunction in order to make things work smoothly. A new engineer that has not been working on it for no more than a couple months would likely be unaware of how the different systems communicate and interact. A change like this will have have a lot of unintended consequences, and not having a senior engineer with lots of context leading the change will undoubtedly cause these kinds of issues.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - 3y ago
humean1 3y ago
> The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left And never created sufficient testing.
- bandyaboot 3y ago
  Yes, because Elon Musk would never scrap existing pre-release testing procedures.
- whatever1 3y ago
  There is never sufficient testing. If there is, then you have a formal proof for your algorithm.
  - kybernetikos 3y ago
    Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. – Donald Knuth It's not just hypothetical either. There was a bug in a sorting algorithm a few years back that had been 'proved' correct. I think it was to do with numbers wrapping, and that hadn't been considered in the mathematical proof.
    - Regic 3y ago
      WPA2 also had an exploit (KRACK) while the handshake algorithm itself was "proven to be secure". Formal verification is a powerful tool but it does not guarantee bug-free code: it merely guarantees that the particular bugs you checked for are not possible.
- greenthrow 3y ago
  You can't write tests for the changes someone might make in the future.
  - onion2k 3y ago
    That's exactly why you write tests. You want to be sure future changes don't break present functionality, especially if the future changes are being done by someone who doesn't understand your part of the system.
sigzero 3y ago
> The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. You have zero idea if that is true or not.
- lolinder 3y ago
  About 80% of Twitter was laid off or quit. I think it's a reasonable supposition that a good number of those were critical personnel who felt they could get a better deal somewhere else.
  - FranksTV 3y ago
    "But the code is self-documenting!"
    - IntelMiner 3y ago
      No matter how good your documentation or comments are, that doesn't mean whoever is left holding the bag will understand it. Or at least not in the amount of time it would take to keep it from exploding I understand the abstracted theory of how a nuclear power plant works (uranium heats water -> makes steam -> drives turbines etc) but if you sat me down at the control console and asked me to restart a reactor? Yeah I'd have no idea where to even begin. Even if I had a manual as thick as a fridge to (slowly) flick through
      - mastazi 3y ago
        I have the impression that the comment you are replying to was sarcastic. Of course you're right that experience can't be replaced with documentation. The role of documentation IMHO is making it easier for people to gain experience by smoothing out the process -> it aids the process of gaining experience, does not replace it
      - fires10 3y ago
        I was a reactor operator. I can't do it now. It takes continuous use to maintain knowledge and skills that narrow.
jayd16 3y ago
> The people at Twitter who understood the system But this is Scaling-101 stuff. It's not some super complex or unique system going wrong. At least according to the article, it's a classic case of bad retry logic leading to a death spiral. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundering_herd_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundering_herd_problem
- cto_of_antifa 3y ago
  [dead]
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  This has absolutely nothing to do with the thundering herd problem.
  - m00x 3y ago
    +1. Ironic that someone saying it's scaling 101 follows up the comment with a completely wrong explanation.
  - jayd16 3y ago
    Explain why not, if you please. If unresponsiveness causes increased traffic, which causes further unresponsiveness, is that not referred to as a thundering herd problem? Is the stated mitigation of a backoff not fully relevant here?
    - ineptech 3y ago
      It's the difference between one customer asking a hundred cooks for a waffle and a hundred customers asking one cook for a waffle. The former is the thundering herd (a bunch of processes trying to do something that only needs to be done once, causing resource contention) and this is akin to the latter (with the "customers" being parallel requests from the frontend).
      - jayd16 3y ago
cameronfraser 3y ago
> So about the only thing they could do was issue multiple, parallel requests and hope that at least one of them was fast. lol nobody would do this to solve this problem because it doesn't even remotely solve it or give the appearance of solving it, if anything it's guaranteed to make things go slower
- kortilla 3y ago
  Google did this a long time ago. It’s more nuanced than you think. Two requests would be issued and the first acknowledged one cause the second to be cancelled. There was a public paper on this from Dean iirc and the method is a decade old.
  - sagarm 3y ago
    The technique is called "request hedging".
  - dmazzoni 3y ago
    I think the fundamental difference is that Google was using request hedging within their own network, sending the same request to two different internal servers in case one was slow, while Twitter appears to be sending the same request to the same server over the public Internet.
  - cameronfraser 3y ago
    This was very illuminating thanks, learned something new
hvis 3y ago
> My guess is Elon said "the site's too slow!" Seems more like a thinly disguised attempt to force people to purchase subscriptions. Blue checkmarks and all.
- photochemsyn 3y ago
  That's the first thing that came to mind. It's a pay-to-play move, which is not at all surprising. People seem to forget that fully-featured social media-centric corporations are run for profit, and if they can't get enough advertising to balance the books, then what's left but subscriptions? Sometimes people buy media corporations because they're interesting in using them to promote their other more lucrative operations (think Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post) so they don't really care about profitability, but I don't think Twitter fits that model, but who knows?
  - sh34r 3y ago
    > then what's left but subscriptions? The WeChat model is the obvious answer to that rhetorical question. Build paid services on top of your hellsite with millions of addicts using it daily. For example, Twitter could have easily been the gateway to OnlyFans, or to Patreon. Apple is another example of this kind of value-added ecosystem that leverages a foothold to sell other crap to people. Or there's the TikTok model: gobble up all the data, sell data to governments, give MBS or Putin admin access to Twitter, build AI on top of the dataset. Even a private equity chop-shop like Bain could do a better job of extracting value from Twitter than this mess. This isn't a profit-seeking venture for Musk. This is about politics, about power, and primarily about revenge. Musk is giving Notch stiff competition for the title of most pathetic billionaire.
    - Qwertious 3y ago
      >This isn't a profit-seeking venture for Musk. This is about politics, about power, and primarily about revenge. I strongly disagree; this is about Musk buying Twitter accidentally, and then running it as best he could without losing face as "real world iron man". He's fucking up left, right and center because he was completely unprepared to actually run it, and suddenly needs $40B to pay off his debtors. It's also about politics, power and revenge, but it's primarily about Musk being a fucking idiot and constantly digging himself deeper.
ineedasername 3y ago
>The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left Not necessarily. I’ve predicted bad outcomes for decisions in a few cases and been ignored but stuck around regardless. Mostly because I like my job and the goals of my organization even if it makes bad decisions. Of course to remain productive and improve my influence in future decision making it is absolutely critical that when predictions come true, I do not go anywhere near an “I told you so mentality.” Instead I do what I can to clean up the mess with a “how can I help?” attitude. And increasingly over time people take my opinions and analysis much much more seriously. I wouldn’t say that’s the path everyone should take, especially because some work environments are just too toxic for any progress at all (I ran away, fast, from two jobs like that). And some people cherish having an entirely new type of challenge every few years instead of shepherding something through longer periods of time. All valid paths.
- lolinder 3y ago
  > Mostly because I like my job and the goals of my organization even if it makes bad decisions. Keep in mind that Musk intentionally turned Twitter completely upside down. Anything that people there liked about it before Musk is likely gone—coworkers, WFH, perks.
- scott_w 3y ago
  People didn’t leave because of the bad decisions. They left because Musk said he wanted “hardcore” people who’d work 80 hour weeks. Turns out masochism isn’t correlated with great engineering.
  - ineedasername 3y ago
    I think there may be a disconnect between what Musk says and the reality on the ground. Enough so that I, given such a situation, would wait around a little bit to see how things played out before jumping ship. But as I said in my original comment, I’ve sprinted away from toxicity before, and will do so again if it becomes obvious.
    - 3y ago
Topfi 3y ago
It is very possible that they did not predict this specific down stream effect, for one of many reasons. I do not want to discount that, though, as I am not at Twitter and am not on a first name basis with anyone there. Maybe there are some who did see this. What I maintain though is that most anyone still working on code at Twitter, regardless of their experience or overview of the code base, would strongly argue for testing and staging, which appear to go against current leadership's mode of operation, likely because of the time pressure you mentioned. Not pushing such changes straight to production is a concept I feel anyone working at Twitter would subscribe to, yet has to painfully go against, lest they be led go.

trevioustrouble 3y ago

[flagged]

anonymousab 3y ago
> and needs to be rate-limited for unregistered users It seemingly needs to be rate-limited for not just registered users, but registered paying premium users as well. And the rate limits for them are enough to be passed in less than an hour of average idle use! > if you think you’d do a better job than Elon with Twitter, you wouldnt. Doing nothing and not saddling twitter with unnecessary extra debt would have already been doing better than Elon.
bbreier 3y ago
I have no experience managing a company at that scale so I won't challenge the assertion that Elon is doing a better job than I would but... the feed has not been rate limited for unregistered users for the history of the site as far as I know, and its been pretty damn stable and snappy!
pkulak 3y ago
I can see your perspective, up to the last bit. Elon is objectively incompetent.
EdwardDiego 3y ago
I didn't see them mention a degree in philosophy at all. > The people that were fired from Twitter were fired for good reason Ooh, you're talk like you're privy to inside information. I hope you brought enough for the rest of the class. > if you think you’d do a better job than Elon with Twitter, you wouldnt. You'd have to try rather hard to do worse.

unconed 3y ago

Except, progress grinding to a halt pretty much described Twitter before Elon Musk too. The story that anyone who knew anything was let go is just that, a story, as the number of employees by year shows Twitter, and other tech companies in the same period, overhired and then went back to pre-2020 levels. The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everything Twitter does, especially if things go wrong, whereas before it was mainly just a faceless bureaucracy whose Trust and Safety lead at times had more visibility than the CEO. The subtext is that Twitter changing hands also involved trimming a lot of the dead weight, particularly hitting the softer managerial/diversity/HR side. Now a lot of people are rooting for the site to fail because it has gotten too "bro-ey", as the era of trust-and-safety and $15k backchannel bluecheck deals has made way for free-speech and monthly subscriptions.

beaned 3y ago
There's definitely a strong element of people here rooting for Twitter to fail because they dislike Elon's politics.
- inpdx 3y ago
  As a software developer, I hate the way he treats his employees. Politics are secondary.
  - beaned 3y ago
    Do the people who actually work for his companies generally feel the same way?
- epistasis 3y ago
  I hate Elon's politics but want Twitter succeed. And if he didn't make his politics part of how he runs stuff, I probably wouldn't even care about his politics. But you know how celebrities get crap for inserting politics into things, when they know very little about that topic? Elon is going to get the same.

walrus01 3y ago

> The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. This is like a case study in what happens when you fire everyone except the sycophants and yes-men. I only feel sorry for remaining non-yes-men twitter employees who might still be there because for whatever personal reasons they're in a precarious economic situation where they can't quit (H1B?) or are tied to the company for healthcare coverage (Thanks, America, for being the greatest country in the world) because they can't afford any other health insurance option.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
julesqs 3y ago
to be fair i would guess that a lot of the engineers there are also stuck because of visa issues. plenty of sychophants too i’m sure.
- alsetmusic 3y ago
  That’s what they meant about H1B. https://www.google.com/search?q=h1b+visa https://www.google.com/search?q=h1b+visa
mensetmanusman 3y ago
Yeah I wish Obama care had simply been: 'employer provided healthcare is illegal in 2024'
- Travis_Pastrami 3y ago
  I don't see how that would be any better than what we have now. If employer provided healthcare was removed, that would leave us with a bunch of private healthcare companies. These private companies would drive up the cost even more. If an affordable or free healthcare option was offered on top of making employer provided healthcare illegal, then I completely am behind your idea.

andsoitis 3y ago

> The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. Are you saying the engineers who are now at Twitter don’t have the right skills?

tadfisher 3y ago
That's a non-sequitir. You can be at the top of your field and not completely understand a complex system. Also, the right people may not have even been involved in the implementation of this "feature".
- andsoitis 3y ago
  > You can be at the top of your field and not completely understand a complex system. The tweet reads: "Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in." Does that strike you as complex? I mean, surely they had the context (need to log in) because it was all over the news
  - fesoliveira 3y ago
    I don't know what kind of systems you worked on in your career, but even simpler systems with smaller userbases than twitter are quite complex if you are new to it. Twitter serves their service to the entire world, with multiple layers of systems working in conjunction in order to make things work smoothly. A new engineer that has not been working on it for no more than a couple months would likely be unaware of how the different systems communicate and interact. A change like this will have have a lot of unintended consequences, and not having a senior engineer with lots of context leading the change will undoubtedly cause these kinds of issues.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - 3y ago

humean1 3y ago

> The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left And never created sufficient testing.

bandyaboot 3y ago
Yes, because Elon Musk would never scrap existing pre-release testing procedures.
whatever1 3y ago
There is never sufficient testing. If there is, then you have a formal proof for your algorithm.
- kybernetikos 3y ago
  Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. – Donald Knuth It's not just hypothetical either. There was a bug in a sorting algorithm a few years back that had been 'proved' correct. I think it was to do with numbers wrapping, and that hadn't been considered in the mathematical proof.
  - Regic 3y ago
    WPA2 also had an exploit (KRACK) while the handshake algorithm itself was "proven to be secure". Formal verification is a powerful tool but it does not guarantee bug-free code: it merely guarantees that the particular bugs you checked for are not possible.
greenthrow 3y ago
You can't write tests for the changes someone might make in the future.
- onion2k 3y ago
  That's exactly why you write tests. You want to be sure future changes don't break present functionality, especially if the future changes are being done by someone who doesn't understand your part of the system.

sigzero 3y ago

> The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. You have zero idea if that is true or not.

lolinder 3y ago
About 80% of Twitter was laid off or quit. I think it's a reasonable supposition that a good number of those were critical personnel who felt they could get a better deal somewhere else.
- FranksTV 3y ago
  "But the code is self-documenting!"
  - IntelMiner 3y ago
    No matter how good your documentation or comments are, that doesn't mean whoever is left holding the bag will understand it. Or at least not in the amount of time it would take to keep it from exploding I understand the abstracted theory of how a nuclear power plant works (uranium heats water -> makes steam -> drives turbines etc) but if you sat me down at the control console and asked me to restart a reactor? Yeah I'd have no idea where to even begin. Even if I had a manual as thick as a fridge to (slowly) flick through
    - mastazi 3y ago
      I have the impression that the comment you are replying to was sarcastic. Of course you're right that experience can't be replaced with documentation. The role of documentation IMHO is making it easier for people to gain experience by smoothing out the process -> it aids the process of gaining experience, does not replace it
    - fires10 3y ago
      I was a reactor operator. I can't do it now. It takes continuous use to maintain knowledge and skills that narrow.

jayd16 3y ago

> The people at Twitter who understood the system But this is Scaling-101 stuff. It's not some super complex or unique system going wrong. At least according to the article, it's a classic case of bad retry logic leading to a death spiral. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundering_herd_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundering_herd_problem

cto_of_antifa 3y ago
[dead]
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
This has absolutely nothing to do with the thundering herd problem.
- m00x 3y ago
  +1. Ironic that someone saying it's scaling 101 follows up the comment with a completely wrong explanation.
- jayd16 3y ago
  Explain why not, if you please. If unresponsiveness causes increased traffic, which causes further unresponsiveness, is that not referred to as a thundering herd problem? Is the stated mitigation of a backoff not fully relevant here?
  - ineptech 3y ago
    It's the difference between one customer asking a hundred cooks for a waffle and a hundred customers asking one cook for a waffle. The former is the thundering herd (a bunch of processes trying to do something that only needs to be done once, causing resource contention) and this is akin to the latter (with the "customers" being parallel requests from the frontend).
    - jayd16 3y ago

cameronfraser 3y ago

> So about the only thing they could do was issue multiple, parallel requests and hope that at least one of them was fast. lol nobody would do this to solve this problem because it doesn't even remotely solve it or give the appearance of solving it, if anything it's guaranteed to make things go slower

kortilla 3y ago
Google did this a long time ago. It’s more nuanced than you think. Two requests would be issued and the first acknowledged one cause the second to be cancelled. There was a public paper on this from Dean iirc and the method is a decade old.
- sagarm 3y ago
  The technique is called "request hedging".
- dmazzoni 3y ago
  I think the fundamental difference is that Google was using request hedging within their own network, sending the same request to two different internal servers in case one was slow, while Twitter appears to be sending the same request to the same server over the public Internet.
- cameronfraser 3y ago
  This was very illuminating thanks, learned something new

hvis 3y ago

> My guess is Elon said "the site's too slow!" Seems more like a thinly disguised attempt to force people to purchase subscriptions. Blue checkmarks and all.

photochemsyn 3y ago
That's the first thing that came to mind. It's a pay-to-play move, which is not at all surprising. People seem to forget that fully-featured social media-centric corporations are run for profit, and if they can't get enough advertising to balance the books, then what's left but subscriptions? Sometimes people buy media corporations because they're interesting in using them to promote their other more lucrative operations (think Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post) so they don't really care about profitability, but I don't think Twitter fits that model, but who knows?
- sh34r 3y ago
  > then what's left but subscriptions? The WeChat model is the obvious answer to that rhetorical question. Build paid services on top of your hellsite with millions of addicts using it daily. For example, Twitter could have easily been the gateway to OnlyFans, or to Patreon. Apple is another example of this kind of value-added ecosystem that leverages a foothold to sell other crap to people. Or there's the TikTok model: gobble up all the data, sell data to governments, give MBS or Putin admin access to Twitter, build AI on top of the dataset. Even a private equity chop-shop like Bain could do a better job of extracting value from Twitter than this mess. This isn't a profit-seeking venture for Musk. This is about politics, about power, and primarily about revenge. Musk is giving Notch stiff competition for the title of most pathetic billionaire.
  - Qwertious 3y ago
    >This isn't a profit-seeking venture for Musk. This is about politics, about power, and primarily about revenge. I strongly disagree; this is about Musk buying Twitter accidentally, and then running it as best he could without losing face as "real world iron man". He's fucking up left, right and center because he was completely unprepared to actually run it, and suddenly needs $40B to pay off his debtors. It's also about politics, power and revenge, but it's primarily about Musk being a fucking idiot and constantly digging himself deeper.

ineedasername 3y ago

>The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left Not necessarily. I’ve predicted bad outcomes for decisions in a few cases and been ignored but stuck around regardless. Mostly because I like my job and the goals of my organization even if it makes bad decisions. Of course to remain productive and improve my influence in future decision making it is absolutely critical that when predictions come true, I do not go anywhere near an “I told you so mentality.” Instead I do what I can to clean up the mess with a “how can I help?” attitude. And increasingly over time people take my opinions and analysis much much more seriously. I wouldn’t say that’s the path everyone should take, especially because some work environments are just too toxic for any progress at all (I ran away, fast, from two jobs like that). And some people cherish having an entirely new type of challenge every few years instead of shepherding something through longer periods of time. All valid paths.

lolinder 3y ago
> Mostly because I like my job and the goals of my organization even if it makes bad decisions. Keep in mind that Musk intentionally turned Twitter completely upside down. Anything that people there liked about it before Musk is likely gone—coworkers, WFH, perks.
scott_w 3y ago
People didn’t leave because of the bad decisions. They left because Musk said he wanted “hardcore” people who’d work 80 hour weeks. Turns out masochism isn’t correlated with great engineering.
- ineedasername 3y ago
  I think there may be a disconnect between what Musk says and the reality on the ground. Enough so that I, given such a situation, would wait around a little bit to see how things played out before jumping ship. But as I said in my original comment, I’ve sprinted away from toxicity before, and will do so again if it becomes obvious.
  - 3y ago

Topfi 3y ago

It is very possible that they did not predict this specific down stream effect, for one of many reasons. I do not want to discount that, though, as I am not at Twitter and am not on a first name basis with anyone there. Maybe there are some who did see this. What I maintain though is that most anyone still working on code at Twitter, regardless of their experience or overview of the code base, would strongly argue for testing and staging, which appear to go against current leadership's mode of operation, likely because of the time pressure you mentioned. Not pushing such changes straight to production is a concept I feel anyone working at Twitter would subscribe to, yet has to painfully go against, lest they be led go.