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I think this idea hurts the industry. Don't get me wrong. I think it is important to hire the right people, but if you don't hire enough people this 3 man job i

I think this idea hurts the industry. Don't get me wrong. I think it is important to hire the right people, but if you don't hire enough people this 3 man job is 80-100 hours a week per for months to years. Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. Then when you design more features, security and other various systems to serve the customers it will creep in complexity. You can not escape that no matter what you do.

frenchman99 3y ago
I have noticed absolutely no difference with Twitter/X. I am a casual user, sure, but for me it seems to work well.
- andrewinardeer 3y ago
  There was a bit of downtime and some bugs did make it into their prod env after the restructure. These bugs were rectified fairly quickly too. I generally agree with you on your comment. I am a casual user of X these days and the site seems to be humming along without any user facing engineering issues. With his products such as Tesla, X and Starlink touching millions of people daily Elon is an easy to reach punching bag. Even if he is somehow instrumental in solving the massive feat of putting humans safely on Mars there will always be people on the side lines having shots at him.
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  Anecdata for sure, but I use Twitter every day and features such as video upload just stopped working for me (failing silently), not to mention the site crashing or becoming completely unresponsive every week or so.
  - Marazan 3y ago
    The entire multi-media infrastructure at Twitter is visibly creaking.
- majani 3y ago
  Funny enough, where I've noticed the most bugs is in the ad buying process. They want an active account (which many corporate accounts wouldn't qualify as), then they want you to be a Twitter Blue member(which requires a verified phone number), then my company's phone number wasn't accepted. I gave up after that
- iLoveOncall 3y ago
  I'm not even a casual user, I just go there when a friend sends me a funny tweet or an article point to one, and even I have noticed major bugs like comments not loading or other functionalities not working.
  - NavinF 3y ago
    That's not a bug. If you're not logged in or your account looks like a bot, you can't see comments
    - anonzzzies 3y ago
      > your account looks like a bot That's not a bot if you are not a bot? I know it's 'normal', but I still it as a bug. AI classifying me as something I not is a bug.
      - NavinF 3y ago
        Depends on the account. Eg if you look at unfiltered YouTube comments on youtube studio, you'll find many humans that behave like bots and post link to their videos in unrelated discussions
      - egman_ekki 3y ago
        That’s exactly what a bot would say.
        anonzzzies 3y ago
        Doesn’t make blocking innocent accounts automatically less of a bug.
- Marazan 3y ago
  Media loading is dog slow these days. 10+ second waits for images in tweets to load. That's the most directly obvious thing that has happened post takeover.
- renegade-otter 3y ago
  We don't know how that relates to the traffic. If the load caved, you need less capacity to handle it. The DeSantis launch campaign was a complete disaster, and only recovered mid-stream when 2/3 of the users left. There is a case to be made that Twitter would have been profitable if it didn't torch money on unnecessary complexity, but the crashing ad revenue suggests Musk is not the business genius that you might expect.
weird-eye-issue 3y ago
> Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. what happened?
- Sparkyte 3y ago
  Back when he acquired twitter he fire 2/3rds the company.
  - falcor84 3y ago
    I think the interesting "what happened" is about the consequences - has there been some objective drop in uptime/performance/errors or some other technical metric?
    - Sparkyte 3y ago
      Yes actually. And one massive security breach.
      - leereeves 3y ago
        Could you be more specific?
      - andrewinardeer 3y ago
        Even before he acquired the company they had security issues. Someone even managed to tweet from his account with a BTC scam.
  - drno123 3y ago
    No, what is the consequence, how has quality of Twitter diminished? As a “normal” user I can not observe any degradation of Twitter service.
    - Sparkyte 3y ago
      Sure, but I feel like this was because of feature creep more than anything else. Most common thing people use it for is posting and reading. If you fake feeds as if they are real-time then the viewer will never know there was a system outage. I am almost positive there was a massive security breach too.
thilog 3y ago
Twitter most likely hasn't been able to retain the "right" people.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  Only people that don't want to get deported during a tech hiring slowdown
- Sparkyte 3y ago
  This is true.
Aeolun 3y ago
Having only 3 people forces you to be very judicious about what you do. For most companies that’s a good thing.
EspressoGPT 3y ago
> Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. He had a point there though: He said that there seem to be "3 managers 'managing' one engineer", and I believe this is a common problem in the industry. VC-funded startups are terribly overstaffed and over-inflated.
- rhuru 3y ago
  Musk's actions have certainly damaged Twitter and its engineering. When you set the house on fire of course some termites will get killed but then you might also kill some babies and the family dog. A lot of tech companies have bloat in the form of AI ethics people, DEI people and so on. They need to go. But Musk probably hurt twitter a lot in short term by firing a lot of engineers and making it a place that made people unhappy.
  - csomar 3y ago
    > AI ethics people These do actually have a proper job. They do ethics laundering for the tech companies and are very valuable.
    - duckhelmet 3y ago
      [dead]
  - mk89 3y ago
    He is squeezing everything as much as he can. Introduced failing ideas that made him ridiculous world wide, ... to finally hire a CEO. And now he is using the platform to influence elections and events - free for all. Sure.
  - dingdong33 3y ago
    Our company has a position like a DEI director, and honestly, it baffles me. All they seem to do is push what some might call 'leftist woke propaganda' in their never-ending meetings, and I question whether our company's resources should be invested in that.
gumballindie 3y ago
> 3 man job is 80-100 hours a week per for months to years. Is it though? Small, lean, teams have fewer processes, less distractions, better communication, and more flexibility in what they can do. I've been in such teams and built such scalable systems and there was nothing 80-100 hours about it. It turned worse once the company was acquired and management and "specilised" workers were brought in.
pcchristie 3y ago
> Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. Has it? I've had the exact same experience.
coldtea 3y ago
>Look how X has diminished in quality Ideologically or from a service perspective? I don't see any noticable drop in the latter. Some disruption is expected as huge parts of the team is fired/leaves, but I see it going on in business as usual otherwise.
kristopolous 3y ago
> You can not escape that no matter what you do. The point is you can. Choosing not to do is probably more important than being able to do. Organizations are reflected in the products they create. We shape our teams and thereafter they shape us. This doesn't mean brain teasers or other arbitrary metrics with standard bell curve distribution so you can pick the statistical outliers and claim you've done this. That's totally wrong because that's not what you're fitting. Those are filters that produce stochastic results with merely the statistical properties of these rules of thumb. If you're looking for a programmer, here's a better test: think if some famous programmer walked in and sat down to do your process. Could they pass? If the answer is "dice roll", meaning you'd say, turn down Rob Pike or Larry Wall, then you're doing it wrong. As far as X, Musk is insane and drunk with power, that is not this.
ben_w 3y ago
> Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. True but different: even ignoring how many of them were customer support and moderation, once the tech stack gets complex, you can't just snap your fingers and act like it's a simpler stack. Even if a fresh 3-good-graduates team can reach feature parity with your now-1000-person team, when they've had 6 months from `git init` and you've been at it since the new team were in Kindergarten, the only way for the big corp to do the same is to buy out the new team and then leave them alone.
teakie 3y ago
this is what work is. efficiency shrinks by more team also you get other people. if you are working on something you stay alive until it's done. ≠ a job
Mizoguchi 3y ago
Considering the hostile takeover of Twitter, the layoffs, lack of leadership and Elon pulling cables out of servers, the platform has been working exceptionally well, at least in my experience. Either it was built like a tank or some of the people working there are extremely competent. To be fair is not like Twitter has never been prone to issues. I'm an old enough user to remember the fail whale and many of the great outages of Twitter's first decade. It didn't became stable until maybe 5 years ago and even recently just prior to Elon coming in they had another hours-long downtime.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

frenchman99 3y ago

I have noticed absolutely no difference with Twitter/X. I am a casual user, sure, but for me it seems to work well.

andrewinardeer 3y ago
There was a bit of downtime and some bugs did make it into their prod env after the restructure. These bugs were rectified fairly quickly too. I generally agree with you on your comment. I am a casual user of X these days and the site seems to be humming along without any user facing engineering issues. With his products such as Tesla, X and Starlink touching millions of people daily Elon is an easy to reach punching bag. Even if he is somehow instrumental in solving the massive feat of putting humans safely on Mars there will always be people on the side lines having shots at him.
rpastuszak 3y ago
Anecdata for sure, but I use Twitter every day and features such as video upload just stopped working for me (failing silently), not to mention the site crashing or becoming completely unresponsive every week or so.
- Marazan 3y ago
  The entire multi-media infrastructure at Twitter is visibly creaking.
majani 3y ago
Funny enough, where I've noticed the most bugs is in the ad buying process. They want an active account (which many corporate accounts wouldn't qualify as), then they want you to be a Twitter Blue member(which requires a verified phone number), then my company's phone number wasn't accepted. I gave up after that
iLoveOncall 3y ago
I'm not even a casual user, I just go there when a friend sends me a funny tweet or an article point to one, and even I have noticed major bugs like comments not loading or other functionalities not working.
- NavinF 3y ago
  That's not a bug. If you're not logged in or your account looks like a bot, you can't see comments
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    > your account looks like a bot That's not a bot if you are not a bot? I know it's 'normal', but I still it as a bug. AI classifying me as something I not is a bug.
    - NavinF 3y ago
      Depends on the account. Eg if you look at unfiltered YouTube comments on youtube studio, you'll find many humans that behave like bots and post link to their videos in unrelated discussions
    - egman_ekki 3y ago
      That’s exactly what a bot would say.
      - anonzzzies 3y ago
        Doesn’t make blocking innocent accounts automatically less of a bug.
Marazan 3y ago
Media loading is dog slow these days. 10+ second waits for images in tweets to load. That's the most directly obvious thing that has happened post takeover.
renegade-otter 3y ago
We don't know how that relates to the traffic. If the load caved, you need less capacity to handle it. The DeSantis launch campaign was a complete disaster, and only recovered mid-stream when 2/3 of the users left. There is a case to be made that Twitter would have been profitable if it didn't torch money on unnecessary complexity, but the crashing ad revenue suggests Musk is not the business genius that you might expect.

weird-eye-issue 3y ago

> Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. what happened?

Sparkyte 3y ago
Back when he acquired twitter he fire 2/3rds the company.
- falcor84 3y ago
  I think the interesting "what happened" is about the consequences - has there been some objective drop in uptime/performance/errors or some other technical metric?
  - Sparkyte 3y ago
    Yes actually. And one massive security breach.
    - leereeves 3y ago
      Could you be more specific?
    - andrewinardeer 3y ago
      Even before he acquired the company they had security issues. Someone even managed to tweet from his account with a BTC scam.
- drno123 3y ago
  No, what is the consequence, how has quality of Twitter diminished? As a “normal” user I can not observe any degradation of Twitter service.
  - Sparkyte 3y ago
    Sure, but I feel like this was because of feature creep more than anything else. Most common thing people use it for is posting and reading. If you fake feeds as if they are real-time then the viewer will never know there was a system outage. I am almost positive there was a massive security breach too.

thilog 3y ago

Twitter most likely hasn't been able to retain the "right" people.

yieldcrv 3y ago
Only people that don't want to get deported during a tech hiring slowdown
Sparkyte 3y ago
This is true.

Aeolun 3y ago

Having only 3 people forces you to be very judicious about what you do. For most companies that’s a good thing.

EspressoGPT 3y ago

> Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. He had a point there though: He said that there seem to be "3 managers 'managing' one engineer", and I believe this is a common problem in the industry. VC-funded startups are terribly overstaffed and over-inflated.

rhuru 3y ago
Musk's actions have certainly damaged Twitter and its engineering. When you set the house on fire of course some termites will get killed but then you might also kill some babies and the family dog. A lot of tech companies have bloat in the form of AI ethics people, DEI people and so on. They need to go. But Musk probably hurt twitter a lot in short term by firing a lot of engineers and making it a place that made people unhappy.
- csomar 3y ago
  > AI ethics people These do actually have a proper job. They do ethics laundering for the tech companies and are very valuable.
  - duckhelmet 3y ago
    [dead]
- mk89 3y ago
  He is squeezing everything as much as he can. Introduced failing ideas that made him ridiculous world wide, ... to finally hire a CEO. And now he is using the platform to influence elections and events - free for all. Sure.
- dingdong33 3y ago
  Our company has a position like a DEI director, and honestly, it baffles me. All they seem to do is push what some might call 'leftist woke propaganda' in their never-ending meetings, and I question whether our company's resources should be invested in that.

gumballindie 3y ago

> 3 man job is 80-100 hours a week per for months to years. Is it though? Small, lean, teams have fewer processes, less distractions, better communication, and more flexibility in what they can do. I've been in such teams and built such scalable systems and there was nothing 80-100 hours about it. It turned worse once the company was acquired and management and "specilised" workers were brought in.

pcchristie 3y ago

> Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. Has it? I've had the exact same experience.

coldtea 3y ago

>Look how X has diminished in quality Ideologically or from a service perspective? I don't see any noticable drop in the latter. Some disruption is expected as huge parts of the team is fired/leaves, but I see it going on in business as usual otherwise.

kristopolous 3y ago

> You can not escape that no matter what you do. The point is you can. Choosing not to do is probably more important than being able to do. Organizations are reflected in the products they create. We shape our teams and thereafter they shape us. This doesn't mean brain teasers or other arbitrary metrics with standard bell curve distribution so you can pick the statistical outliers and claim you've done this. That's totally wrong because that's not what you're fitting. Those are filters that produce stochastic results with merely the statistical properties of these rules of thumb. If you're looking for a programmer, here's a better test: think if some famous programmer walked in and sat down to do your process. Could they pass? If the answer is "dice roll", meaning you'd say, turn down Rob Pike or Larry Wall, then you're doing it wrong. As far as X, Musk is insane and drunk with power, that is not this.

ben_w 3y ago

> Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. True but different: even ignoring how many of them were customer support and moderation, once the tech stack gets complex, you can't just snap your fingers and act like it's a simpler stack. Even if a fresh 3-good-graduates team can reach feature parity with your now-1000-person team, when they've had 6 months from `git init` and you've been at it since the new team were in Kindergarten, the only way for the big corp to do the same is to buy out the new team and then leave them alone.

teakie 3y ago

this is what work is. efficiency shrinks by more team also you get other people. if you are working on something you stay alive until it's done. ≠ a job

Mizoguchi 3y ago

Considering the hostile takeover of Twitter, the layoffs, lack of leadership and Elon pulling cables out of servers, the platform has been working exceptionally well, at least in my experience. Either it was built like a tank or some of the people working there are extremely competent. To be fair is not like Twitter has never been prone to issues. I'm an old enough user to remember the fail whale and many of the great outages of Twitter's first decade. It didn't became stable until maybe 5 years ago and even recently just prior to Elon coming in they had another hours-long downtime.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]