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Re: "Everyone acts as if Twitter pre-Musk was a well oiled machine that shit the bed overnight after he took over" I'm one of those "everyones" and I and every

by Zigurd 3y ago

Re: "Everyone acts as if Twitter pre-Musk was a well oiled machine that shit the bed overnight after he took over" I'm one of those "everyones" and I and everyone else I've read on the topic have been pointing out that hardly any web scale platform would fail suddenly. It's been only 6 months. Without the repeated flailing at Musk's insistence, Twitter's remaining engineers probably would not have broken anything important for another 6 months. Blaming the "cruft" is silly after you fire almost all the people who understood the "cruft."

housemusicfan 3y ago
> Blaming the "cruft" is silly after you fire almost all the people who understood the "cruft." Funny because the Venn diagram of people who say this and those that have been boasting that Threads was built by 10 engineers because "that's all you need" is roughly a circle. Twitter's code was a precarious mess that required an army of people to keep it stable (while making no changes). It had to go.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  Let's see, one way to interpret this is to detect contradiction and mock people for contradicting themselves. But another, wiser approach is to realize maybe the contradiction happens in your mind as you're ignoring important variables. Namely, Threads is a brand new app, built from the group up itself, but also relying on Meta's massive Instagram & Facebook infrastructure, manned by tens of thousands of engineers. So it's to be expected the app and backend themselves will require a small team to build a new effort on top of this existing infrastructure. While Twitter is a legacy app, and their infrastructure was entirely in-house. And most of those people are gone now. Do you think it's a contradiction that a legacy app and a new app require a different management strategy and it gets effort, knowledge and time to trim down a company? Or do you think you come in with the hatcher and just fire 80% of them like Elon did, and then expect everything just works? Meta has 90,000 employees by the way. That's the support this team of ten people get, when they need something.
  - Zigurd 3y ago
    Twitter also hasn't got a code base, a performance tweaked runtime, a test engineering group, or an operations group like Instagram has to borrow from. Even with all that, Threads was launched conservatively. Not in Europe at all. Threads got 10 times the expected sign-ups. It scaled up faster than anything ever has. That's pretty remarkable.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Twitter also hasn't got a code base, a performance tweaked runtime, a test engineering group, or an operations group like Instagram has to borrow from. Unless you count Tesla and SpaceX, which Musk apparently did, as places to borrow from, despite the rather different application domains.
      - infamouscow 3y ago
        Do you have hard evidence Musk was instructing Tesla and SpaceX employees to work on Twitter? I recall several poorly written reports on this subject. It turned out the Tesla and SpaceX employees were consulting on the side, which is not the same as commanding an entire department by fiat to drop everything at Tesla or SpaceX and work on Twitter. Zuckerberg has that option, Musk does not. The fact this has to be clarified in a HN thread is an astonishing indictment of the state of the education system and the public's reading comprehension.
        dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Do you have hard evidence If I had hard evidence, I wouldn’t say “apparently”.
        infamouscow 3y ago
        If a fallacious rumor spreads, hiding behind "apparently" doesn't absolve one from being rightfully called out for promulgating bullshit.

by Zigurd 3y ago

housemusicfan 3y ago

> Blaming the "cruft" is silly after you fire almost all the people who understood the "cruft." Funny because the Venn diagram of people who say this and those that have been boasting that Threads was built by 10 engineers because "that's all you need" is roughly a circle. Twitter's code was a precarious mess that required an army of people to keep it stable (while making no changes). It had to go.

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
Let's see, one way to interpret this is to detect contradiction and mock people for contradicting themselves. But another, wiser approach is to realize maybe the contradiction happens in your mind as you're ignoring important variables. Namely, Threads is a brand new app, built from the group up itself, but also relying on Meta's massive Instagram & Facebook infrastructure, manned by tens of thousands of engineers. So it's to be expected the app and backend themselves will require a small team to build a new effort on top of this existing infrastructure. While Twitter is a legacy app, and their infrastructure was entirely in-house. And most of those people are gone now. Do you think it's a contradiction that a legacy app and a new app require a different management strategy and it gets effort, knowledge and time to trim down a company? Or do you think you come in with the hatcher and just fire 80% of them like Elon did, and then expect everything just works? Meta has 90,000 employees by the way. That's the support this team of ten people get, when they need something.
- Zigurd 3y ago
  Twitter also hasn't got a code base, a performance tweaked runtime, a test engineering group, or an operations group like Instagram has to borrow from. Even with all that, Threads was launched conservatively. Not in Europe at all. Threads got 10 times the expected sign-ups. It scaled up faster than anything ever has. That's pretty remarkable.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Twitter also hasn't got a code base, a performance tweaked runtime, a test engineering group, or an operations group like Instagram has to borrow from. Unless you count Tesla and SpaceX, which Musk apparently did, as places to borrow from, despite the rather different application domains.
    - infamouscow 3y ago
      Do you have hard evidence Musk was instructing Tesla and SpaceX employees to work on Twitter? I recall several poorly written reports on this subject. It turned out the Tesla and SpaceX employees were consulting on the side, which is not the same as commanding an entire department by fiat to drop everything at Tesla or SpaceX and work on Twitter. Zuckerberg has that option, Musk does not. The fact this has to be clarified in a HN thread is an astonishing indictment of the state of the education system and the public's reading comprehension.
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Do you have hard evidence If I had hard evidence, I wouldn’t say “apparently”.
        infamouscow 3y ago
        If a fallacious rumor spreads, hiding behind "apparently" doesn't absolve one from being rightfully called out for promulgating bullshit.