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> 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.
by 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 agoAbout 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 agoNo 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 agoI 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 agoI was a reactor operator. I can't do it now. It takes continuous use to maintain knowledge and skills that narrow.
- lifeisstillgood 3y agoSeriously ? How did you end up in that line of work? HN has a tendancy to find something like "nominative determinism" - "comment determinism" where a comment about a job produces a (contradictory) reply from someone doing that job.
- Eisenstein 3y agoThe person I know who is a reactor operator was really good at math, joined the Navy and got trained to operate a nuclear sub. Then in the private sector I am sure that skillset is somewhat rare, so it was easy to get a job there.
- CobaltFire 3y agoCan’t speak for them, but being poor, intelligent, and in need of steady income when you graduate High School is a very good way to end up in the Navy’s nuclear program. Source: Was kicked out, poor, and intelligent. Ended up a submarine reactor operator.
- 2muchcoffeeman 3y agoAKA domain knowledge
- _the_inflator 3y agoOf course. The machines get it. And do exactly as commanded. ;)
- jjgreen 3y agoThey used to, now they mutter amongst themselves, casting occasional contemptuous glances at you and me.
- ithkuil 3y agoIndeed, if a dumb computer can understand the code and execute it flawlessly then so can you! /s
- poisonarena 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- glenngillen 3y agoThis is such a disingenuous take. Twitter isn’t just a web page that displays the last thing saved to a database. It curates a different version of that for the millions of users reading it. That’s before you think about Spaces, the whole advertising platform that supports it, the abuse systems, and the infrastructure required to do all of that at a scale far beyond some bootcamp clone. HN discourse should be above this.
- TillE 3y agoJust to give one example, I (and many others) have tens of thousands of blocked accounts. How do you implement that efficiently, at scale? Are you gonna do an extra database check for every single tweet that comes my way? Hopefully not. And if you think about how Twitter works for five seconds, just consider everything that has to happen when an account with 100M followers posts a tweet. It's an absolute nightmare.
- chirau 3y agoOut of curiosity, what do you mean by tens of thousands of blocked accounts? Are those your bot accounts that get blocked or it is you blocking people from your feed?
- hapidjus 3y agoI think they’re referring to accounts that they blocked, so that content from those accounts wont show up in the feed.
- sprite 3y agoA bit off topic, but any book/article recommendations for building things at Twitter/IG scale? I know for example IG switched to a "fan-out" approach early on to handle accounts with a lot of users. Would love to learn more about this.
- maxlin 3y agoThis rhetoric is well past its peak. When the firings happened, people said twitter would crash in a week. It's been a long time since then, and twitter, for my very generic uses and purposes, has just gotten better. Demonizing past hard decisions at every unrelated point of difficulty has to be the worst kind of toxicity there is.
- seanhunter 3y ago> Demonizing past hard decisions at every unrelated point of difficulty has to be the worst kind of toxicity there is. It's not great, but that's really a bizarre thing to say. There are many many things far more toxic than that.
- maxlin 3y agoIt really depends I suppose. If you consider the accused to to be in an unearned place of power, it might feel like an acceptable thing to do (albeit still quite icky and pedesterian). But if the situation is very different and/or you are not sure if your PoV is fully justified, this can absolutely be the most toxic low-effort thing one can do when thrown at someone who's already fighting an uphill battle. Without going to specifics this is something I've experienced myself, and have also seen happen close to me in a very toxic calculated way. So these kinds of comments are IMHO overally very unconstructive.
- ziftface 3y agoCan you explain how the Twitter experience has gotten better for you?
- maxlin 3y agoOn the community side, it now better reflects its mission as the public market square, where before it was so unbalanced to the left (also making what was to the right way more polarized) that it just wasn't very much fun or developing to stay on for long. Before I was only a lurker but now I sometimes chime in to tech threads without fearing someone will try to cancel me over a way I name a fruit or something. On the tech side, it has retained everything that made it good (didn't implode!), and the tweet length / "show more" logic fits my style of writing perfectly. Spaces are also a kind of thing that I didn't use before but became immediately accessible as it was added right to twitter itself (and things like the 24h wagner coup space with 6M visitors isn't something I have seen in the past). And other simple things, like long videos sometimes fit a need, even while most of the time a youtube link also works. Some things like crypto spam also seem to be in a bit better state, though can't obviously ever be completely removed
- spamizbad 3y agoIf it's not true that's actually more damning: The "experts" seem to frequently break it.
- anonymoushn 3y agoWe can just read posts by former twitter staff engineers who say the same thing.
- chris_wot 3y agoIt’s likely. The number of people predicting degradation were wrong only on the length of time it took for the degradation to start occurring.
- lanstin 3y agoI think most experts were fascinated by the whole experiment as it is essentially gathering data on a subject we had theories on but no experiments. I used to work at a company where both the main data center and the main dev office were in the flight path of a major airport. We joked that if the data center had a plane hit it we’d go down quickly but recover but if the office building got hit we be fine for a while but long term in trouble.
- Rimbo 3y agoYou might be right; the person you're replying to might have zero idea. Now me... I know someone personally who was a senior exec for Twitter's software team, who left after Elon's purge. He left because all the people who understood the system and could predict the side effects were fired or left. He'd been with companies going through death spirals before, and had no interest in being involved with another one. So, while the person you're replying to might not know, my friend DOES know.
- poisonarena 3y ago[flagged]
- larvaetron 3y ago"Something went wrong. Try reloading."
- mochaki 3y ago[dead]
- djbusby 3y agoThis is still hearsay. However, even with my limited experience in similar scenarios on smaller scale - it still feels accurate.
- PointyFluff 3y ago[dead]
- j16sdiz 3y agoI don't know you or your friend, but thinking how dreadful some hiring process can be, I would defer changing my job as much as possible..
- d3ckard 3y agoHiring processes are a cakewalk compared to company in death spiral. Damn, even compared to a company with a bad period of high pressure. It’s a mistake to stay.
- jrm4 3y agoZero idea is a bit much. Seems like an entirely reasonable assumption.
- onion2k 3y agoThe current state of Twitter seems to indicate there's a significant problem with the code, which implies the people who would have either spotted that before it was deployed or fixed it quickly afterwards, are unable to do so. Given the number of layoffs and resignations Occam's Razor would suggest the reason is because those people aren't available to do that work. We don't kmow it's true but it is a likely explanation.
- tomatocracy 3y agoBut these are "significant problems with the code" which evidently can't be fixed by simply reverting relevant changes. In that case, it seems more likely to me that these are due to long-standing issues which would have caught up to the company sooner or later.
- onion2k 3y agowhich evidently can't be fixed by simply reverting relevant changes Rumors suggest that part of the change is moving from GCP to something else. Something like can't be reverted without signing a new contract with Google (and paying the bill..).
- tomatocracy 3y agoAh - I hadn't heard that and it does make some sense. But I'm not sure that the alternative version of events (where the engineers who were fired or left were still around) would look much better in that case - perhaps delay/better planning might have helped (though of course we don't know how much planning was done) but it's also entirely credible that this was essentially inevitable with such a move.
- rlt 3y agoWhy should such things matter if it fits his narrative?