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back when I was doing personal projects or working at small early-stage startups I used to think the same, but then I've worked at later stage scaleups and even

back when I was doing personal projects or working at small early-stage startups I used to think the same, but then I've worked at later stage scaleups and even large publicly traded companies and realised that once a project becomes large enough, that prototyping phase that you just described is like 1% or 2% of the total workload. There is so much more to the SDLC that is not just writing code (some examples: liaising with stakeholders, requirements gathering, clients acceptance testing, QA, integration testing, certifications, regulatory frameworks etc. etc. etc. -> all things that take much of your time and involve nearly 0 lines of code written).

martindbp 3y ago
> liaising with stakeholders, requirements gathering, clients acceptance testing, QA, integration testing, certifications, regulatory frameworks Some of that sounds like bloat to me. The fact that Twitter is still here and building features faster with 20% of the workforce may indicate that a lot of what was thought needed really wasn't. You might point to the current outage or other bugs but you have to ask yourself, how serious is it really and is it worth 400% more employees to mitigate them?
- habinero 3y ago
  None of that is bloat. It's all necessary once you get past the tinkertoy stage. Also, they aren't building features. The only features that rolled out are the ones that were already done. They haven't released anything.
  - martindbp 3y ago
    Long form video, Twitter blue at the very least, which seems like more than Twitter managed to do per year before then with 4x the manpower. Many of those things you listed are what people who have been in the institutionalized employees find important, essentially process for its own sake. Before the layoffs Twitter had about 7500 employees, while SpaceX at 12000 builds frickin' rockets, have rocket launches every week, designing and building the next level launch platform that will revolutionize space travel, all the while revolutionizing satellite internet. Musk knows a thing or two about what smart, focused people are capable of.
    - mastazi 3y ago
      So you're saying that at SpaceX or Tesla people don't work on any of those things (requirements gathering, clients acceptance testing, QA, integration testing, certifications, regulatory frameworks) and they just happily code away? I very much doubt that's the case.

martindbp 3y ago

> liaising with stakeholders, requirements gathering, clients acceptance testing, QA, integration testing, certifications, regulatory frameworks Some of that sounds like bloat to me. The fact that Twitter is still here and building features faster with 20% of the workforce may indicate that a lot of what was thought needed really wasn't. You might point to the current outage or other bugs but you have to ask yourself, how serious is it really and is it worth 400% more employees to mitigate them?

habinero 3y ago
None of that is bloat. It's all necessary once you get past the tinkertoy stage. Also, they aren't building features. The only features that rolled out are the ones that were already done. They haven't released anything.
- martindbp 3y ago
  Long form video, Twitter blue at the very least, which seems like more than Twitter managed to do per year before then with 4x the manpower. Many of those things you listed are what people who have been in the institutionalized employees find important, essentially process for its own sake. Before the layoffs Twitter had about 7500 employees, while SpaceX at 12000 builds frickin' rockets, have rocket launches every week, designing and building the next level launch platform that will revolutionize space travel, all the while revolutionizing satellite internet. Musk knows a thing or two about what smart, focused people are capable of.
  - mastazi 3y ago
    So you're saying that at SpaceX or Tesla people don't work on any of those things (requirements gathering, clients acceptance testing, QA, integration testing, certifications, regulatory frameworks) and they just happily code away? I very much doubt that's the case.