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> When people ask questions like "Why does it take X engineers to run twitter?", well that is the reason. What drives (drove) most of it is that as a product m
by dehrmann 3y ago
> When people ask questions like "Why does it take X engineers to run twitter?", well that is the reason.
What drives (drove) most of it is that as a product matures and the user base grows, polishing smaller features and chasing 0.1% wins can meaningfully drive metrics to a point that having a team focus just on a single user flow is a net positive. Enabling this often means a more modular codebase and system architecture so people aren't stepping on each other's toes. There are also exploratory features that are unlikely to pan out, but at the scale of 500M users, if they do, it's huge. A lot of this work might be wrong, but some of it isn't, and you won't know what's what until you try.
At 500M users, you also need more spam detection, account protection, content moderation, etc.
You can run status quo Twitter with fewer engineers, but don't expect incremental growth, and expect more issues like the recent SEC mishap.
- nradov 3y agoAnd yet X has launched major new features even after eliminating the majority of engineers. So, at least in that one case it's pretty clear that most employees were just goofing around (regardless of work location).
- paulryanrogers 3y agoHow have those new features faired? From what I've heard UX and reliability has degraded. Moderation is non-existent and harassment is increasing. They can't even live stream Elon's own guests to a few million people.
- lightbritefight 3y agoExactly. Launching is easy. Launching something stable and making incremental improvements is hard. Twitter doesnt seem to be doing the latter.
- nradov 3y agoThe Community Notes feature is working great. It's better than the moderation on any other social networks that I use.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoYou then look at something like Spotify who, from the outside, has too much staff, so the platform gets reworked regularly.