While I agree with you, at the same time if Twitter as a company isn't really doing much, why do they have thousands of developers on staff? I don't think there's anything wrong with being a stable, profitable company, but logically it should also come with a whole lot of layoffs.
> at the same time if Twitter as a company isn't really doing much, why do they have thousands of developers on staff?
...to keep the app running? New devices, new standards, a lot of things change that you need devs to keep up with.
Also, what's up with people saying twitter is stagnant? They've added Spaces, Twitter Blue and Crypto Profile Pictures - all 3 massive features added to their product. They're all trash, but that's besides the point.
FWIW, I have a close friend who worked on Twitter's "Health" team whose job at one point was building mini games for the support/moderation staff to play during company mandated breaks in between looking at racist tweets and CP. He coasted for a while then moved onto a job with more work.
This is entirely anecdotal, but from the little I know from his couple months there, Twitter has no idea what to do with the huge amount of engineers they employ. This is by no means an endorsement of Musk, but the company could use some new direction I think.
That seems like an actually valuable, human thing to work on vs the garbage many devs find themselves working on. Mini games can also be super engaging to build and are a showcase for creativity… I’m really not seeing the problem.
They could just give support staff a proper break and let them do whatever they want with that break (including playing the games they want to play if they deem necessary)
There is a difference between the truth and a truth. It wouldn't be pretentious to share something of your story and how you saw it in the larger picture.
That’s fair but disinformation and the lack of actions against it was part of why I left Twitter. As such, I feel strongly about my experience not being interpreted as the truth or that a significant portion of the company shares the same views as I do.
I feel like public discourse has increasingly been more and more polarizing and anecdotes and hearsay are being leveraged to create further divisions.
I can certainly share your concern here, but not sure what can be done about this. Since you probably have done more thinking in this space, what are some things you think are possible?
While I understand what you’re getting at, this is basically pointless, because nobody is going to accept hand wavey “you can never know, so don’t even try!”-type answers. Even if that is the best way to go.
I’m not accusing GP of this necessarily, but quite often the view “since we can’t know everything, we can’t know anything” is considered wisdom.
To the GP: we all understand that your experience isn’t the same experience of everyone, but it is AN experience, and would be useful to us who don’t have any experience.
> This is entirely anecdotal, but from the little I know from his couple months there, Twitter has no idea what to do with the huge amount of engineers they employ.
I wonder why I keep getting LinkedIn and email notifications about engineering jobs at Twitter.
We're talking about a simple platform of people relaying updates of 140 characters with a comment section and a feed algorithm to aggregate the content to everyone with a focus on prolonging everyone's engagement time while also following guidelines on what's "politically correct". There's only so much you can do, unless you venture out into manipulating public discourse, or striving to become a nation-state (or at least its propaganda machinery) or taking over the world (with all the imaginable internet services provided by you - email, storage, encyclopedias, news etc).
At some point you should stop and think about your core business. And at some point you should realize that the law of diminishing returns applies. And at some point you should realize that it's fine to provide a stable service to a stable amount of users with a stable amount of features. Not that much R&D required.
Or, rather, this is how our society would have to work in order to stay healthy. Living on a planet with finite resources while using them up like they're not is a sure-fire way to doom. We already know enough about farming for example to make it sustainable. We just don't know how to do it in a way where we don't cut down production considerably and starving a lot of people in the process. Not a nice topic to bring up i your election speech.
But it's nice to ride the train since things seemingly move forward thanks to rising inflation (which is due to the problem in the first place) and the price of your product can go up.
Regenerative agriculture practices can allow us to make farming sustainable without cutting down production. In fact, we can actually increase production — or at least avoid loss of production due to soil depletion.
Economic growth is not only driven by the use of new resources but by the increasingly efficient use of existing resources. The real problem is stated in Jevon's paradox[1], that demand is increasing faster than supply, regardless of efficiency, which points the the real real problem, which is that the population is increasing too quickly (though it may slow down and become stable).
Provide females around the world access to education, birth control, and opportunity in the job market and this problem will fix itself. To do that, however, would mean allowing the kind of discourse that Twitter is inclined suppress and many of its more vocal users would call "racist" i.e. being able to criticise cultures that don't give females these opportunities.
> I would have called a streaming service for gamers to be watched by adoring fans utter stupidity. Maybe that’s also why I’m not rich.
Is Discord profitable yet? Reported revenue and users is up significantly post-covid, but that does not necessarily mean there are profits. Your instincts may be under-estimated.
> ...to keep the app running? New devices, new standards, a lot of things change that you need devs to keep up with.
I guess, and I imagine at their size they probably run pretty inefficiently. It just seems like a surprisingly big team. From all fronts really, not just development but design too, does it really take that much effort to keep Twitter "twittery"?
> Crypto Profile Pictures
Straight out of a satire piece, I had not heard about that.
> They've added Spaces, Twitter Blue and Crypto Profile Pictures - all 3 massive features added to their product.
I think your definition of "massive" is different to mine.
Spaces is at least a new medium. The other two are incremental features that a small (<10 person) team would ship in a few months at another FANG company.
Spaces is amazing. It was great listening Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador talk while they were making history by voting Bitcoin to be adopted as legal tender in the country. He was just looking at his Twitter feed at that time, and was interested in what people are talking about the bill in spaces.
I know he's controversial, but I wish more politicians would make themselves more accessible through Twitter (and I'm not a Trump fan, I just think he used it more effectively than other politicians).
Yeah, they give lunatics like Nayib a voice, by the way good luck going to el salvador and hope to use bitcoin.
But so does Instagram and Facebook and other socials. Politicians doing live QAs on facebook was happening a decade ago already, since live streams were a thing.
Giving people a voice sure seems like a clear downside of this whole internet thing. Or does it simply mean that humanity is fucking destructive (while individual humans generally are beautiful)?
And with more opinions available to people, there is less likelihood of a large mass galvanized around one crazy theory (the one that the overlords deem not crazy).
I don't think that's necessarily true. Is QAnon not an issue? The church of scientology? There are a lot of large groups of people "galvanized around one crazy theory." But, maybe you're right that if they're exposed to more, non crazy views that they'll be better off and less galvanized. How would we test the hypothesis? I wonder if you took some fox news viewers and showed them CNN for a month or so if that would change their worldview?
So it's amazing at miseducating and misinforming politicians in impoverished countries?
In industrial economies money is credit and countries issue their own money by setting up a banking system to lend it into existence on security of domestic tangible capital to promote wealth formation and create liquidity for domestic employers to make payroll. Since the early 1700s western governments have known how to create stable money from nothing without any gold, private banks, or external investors by lending it into existence through land loan office system.
It looks like El Salvador didn't create its own money before and was just using US Dollars sent back by emigrants though.
Those things you mention hardly justify thousands of expensive developers to maintain and create. I bet a team of 10 top notch engineers could create Spaces+Blue+Crypto pfp's in a couple months and run it at Twitter scale. Don't forget Instagram was acquired when it had 13 employees serving tens of millions of users.
Speaking out of experience, most engineers in big tech are bike shedding on internal tools that don't do anything useful. A small minority deliver the majority of the impact. On top of that at companies like Twitter and Google some of those useless employees spend their time complaining about social justice initiatives rather than doing work.
I think this is a pretty naive take. Developing anything at Twitter-scale will run into security considerations, infrastructure development or optimization, constructing data workflows, multiple design iterations, UX design (how do people find and use this feature?), i18n, accessibility, product marketing, user testing, copy testing, and other functions and that’s not even considering the actual product development, which is of course across multiple platforms. See also: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
Build the product, sure. Build the product to scale across the world?...I strongly disagree.
Pre-revenue that is possible. Post revenue, you'd need at least lawyers and accountants in each country you operate in. Then you need systems to respond to subpeonas and legal requests, that is a hundred people right there.
IG was 13 employees when you had a fraction of the images and they didnt have to be profitable, rather just grow by burning $. Now consider scale and profitability and you need even more people to grow tech cost consciously.
> Now consider scale and profitability and you need even more people to grow tech cost consciously.
This seems intuitively false. Adding more people to tech domains can actually decrease effectiveness with more expense, resulting in lower profits. Obviously, there is a sweet spot, but Twitter is a basic product regardless of how many countries it operates within.
I'm curious about your opinion on this. I may be thinking about this incorrectly.
Suppose you are Twitter and operating in, say, {Ghana, Russia, Korea, Mexico, and Pakistan}. You're served with subpoenas and legal IP requests in each country. If you dont respond in time, your license to operate may be revoked. Each request is in the native language. How do you "scale" this technically? Can one lawyer handle these across the world? How?
First recognize that lawyers are not a technical issue and that mostly they handle independent cases and subpoena requests. Since the work is fairly compartmentalized (unlike software development) throwing more people at the problem has less of a consequence. Hire a law firm in each country to handle your cases; No need to have lawyers all over the world as employees. Have a small team of international lawyers as employees or hire them as contractors to oversee the contracted teams of lawyers around the world and negotiate when needed.
Furthermore, developing tech for managing this is likely to be unnecessary as there are existing software packages already out there. Doing business across the world and handling legal issues is not unique to Twitter.
>> Hire a law firm in each country to handle your cases; No need to have lawyers all over the world as employees. Have a small team of international lawyers as employees or hire them as contractors to oversee the contracted teams of lawyers around the world and negotiate when needed.
I generally agree with your response, but note that you've just converted FTEs to contractors/outsourcers and "reduced" FTEs that way. You'd have to do the same with accountants and many other country-level positions. But w2-->1099 isnt really a "win".
I don't think Instagram had to seriously tackle the kinds of problems you're replying to prior to that acquisition. But when you're a big time tech company, the minimum bar is simply higher. That means more humans.
There is a huge difference between building a clone today on top of today's tools and commodity cloud platforms versus building it originally on what was around in 2006 and then having to constantly add features, change things, and then maintain 15 years worth of accumulated special edge cases forever without downtime.
Comparing to Instagram seems pretty unfair too as it's newer, it was even-more-featured-limited for a long time, is now part of a much larger behemoth and had much lower scale than today's twitter when it was acquired, and my guess would be that it's an easier scaling problem too (lower on post frequency, more read-heavy workload).
Working at several big tech companies in industry. I can't say my experience is fully representative but I do start to see a pattern when my experiences line up with that of all my friends. There are a _lot_ of internal tools and anecdotally many of them seem like they're designed to abstract away things which wouldn't need abstracting for a company that exclusively hired high performing engineers.
Plenty of things are abstracted not because they need to be, but because they can be, and doing so increases efficiency, security, the ability to scale, and the ability of engineers to reason about the development.
Even highly effective engineers will have trouble delivering features, in a large company, when they could easily deliver the same features in a smaller company.
Process and politics is part of it, but the one of the problems with having so many developers, is that these developers end up writing code, all of that code ends up making things more complicated than they need to be, which makes introducing new features more complicated, due to all the systems you need to integrate with.
