Twitter, Threads, and the misunderstood nature of engineering
Twitter, Threads, and the misunderstood nature of engineering
Complex internet services fail in interesting ways as they grow in size and complexity. Twitter's recent issues show how failures emerge slowly over time as relationships between components degrade. Meta's quick launch of Threads demonstrates how platform investments can compound over time, allowing them to quickly build on existing infrastructure and expertise. While layoffs may be needed, companies must be strategic to maintain what matters most - the ability to navigate complex systems and deliver value. Twitter's inability to ship new features shows they have lost this expertise, while Threads may out-execute them due to Meta's platform advantages. The case of Twitter and Threads provides a lesson for companies on who they want to be during times of optimization.
My favorite phrase in coding is "9 women can't make a baby in a month, but 9 women can make 9 babies in 9 months".
Elon took over and fired so so so many talented engineers saying they were lazy, or incompetant, or whatever excuse he had when he really meant "they cost a lot". Now he's seeing the downside of that.
The phrase means you can't take a project and throw more people at it to make it go faster because there is institutional knowledge that needs to be learned first. You can't take a 9 month long project that 1 person is in the middle of and throw 8 more people at it and demand it gets done in a month, something Elon is really trying to push. Those 8 other people need time to onramp, to learn how the thing is being built, to learn how systems and subsystems all interact. In fact, usually this is a sign of a terrible leader because most of the time projects will slow down while you're trying to onramp all of those other people when at that point it would have just been faster to let the one person finish.
What you can do, as Facebook obviously did, is actually project plan. They said "we need 9 babies, what do you need to get that done?" and they replied "9 people and 9 months". and look how it paid off.
I hope Elon's twitter tanks because of his impulsive short sighted decisions that he thinks are "projects"
@scrubbles My favorite early moment was him firing people based on lines of code written... which of course meant he fired all of his best because the worst programmers write many lines that do less while great programmers write few lines that do more.
Meh, the best programmers are probably somewhere in the middle.
This also depends on what kind of work you're doing.
Writing some frontend with lots of Boilerplate? That's lots of lines.
Writing efficient code that for example runs on embedded systems? That's different. My entire master's thesis code project on an embedded system consisted of around 600 lines of C code, and it did exactly what it should, efficiently.
A better metric to that effect would be the git activity graph. People that do important changes don't commit 20 times a day - they push a commit usually once a day tops to once every 2 weeks
the worst programmers write many lines that do less while great programmers write few lines that do more.
That doesn't sound exactly right. Readability is IMO the most important code quality followed by things like maintainability. Conciseness is a lot further down the list. If I have to use more lines of code or even leave out a little performance optimization for readability, I generally do.
Hubris aside, Elon will tank because, at Twitter, he seems to be devoid of people who will make things work despite of him. Twitter employees must be giving Musk exactly what he orders and he is seeing the impact of that, since Musk must have thought "a web page... How hard can it be to someone who made reusable rockets?"
I love that because it's such a cautionary tale about bad leadership. He was toxic towards Twitter for years then bought them and doubled down on shitting on them and calling them incompetent... Of course they hate his guts and maliciously comply now.
Elon’s antics aside, I hope no-one thinks that the amount of developers that Twitter had was needed or even sustainable.
Did he get rid of too many? Definitely. Did he get rid of the wrong ones? Definitely.
It depends on their aspirations.
Did they have too many engineers if all they wanted to do was keep the lights on for their core business? Yes.
Did they have too many engineers if they wanted to have the capacity to deliver more ambitious products and solutions, such as massively scalable live video streams, or social audio, or something entirely new? Maybe not.
People really treat these platforms like sports teams.
My giant megacorp owned by a billionaire is better than your giant megacorp owned by a billionaire.
“My Xbox/PlayStation is superior to your Xbox/PlayStation.”
My sports team owned by a giant megacorp is better than your sports team owned by Saudi oil billionaires!
I treat them as sports team insofar as I hope that the stadium catches on fire and collapses on both of them in the middle of the match.
Egging them both onto collapse is the only reasonable perspective
True in society at large, but to be fair, I don't think this post is trying to be "Team Threads" as much as it's trying to point out the consequences of the very different decisions they made. And hopefully in the future, some stupid CEO will think twice when trying to implement shit like Elon Musk did.
I don't believe threads was made in 3 months. I also think the scale of Facebook is insane compared to twitter they have a tech empire and can dump 20b into something and shrug it off when it fails. Facebook also still regularly lays off 1000s of staff including engineers.
Twitter is a platform that's never made profit. I don't think Twitter should have fired 90% of engineers but they definitely needed to lay off some percentage.
We are tribal animals and will do this with just about everything. See also: politics, religion, ancestry, food, computer platforms, smartphone platforms, clothing brands, astrological signs, science fiction franchises, choice of pet, which way the toilet paper goes, etc.
We need to redefine our tribes.
This is a shitty take. Twitter ran perfectly fine before Musk took it over.
Turns out if you don't pay your hosting bills, or your office building bills, fire most of your engineers (after annoying them with bullshit) and making rash decisions without consulting people with technical know-how your service goes to shit.
Musk was stupid enough to DDOS his own service because he doesn't understand it. Blocking public access to tweets while having tweets embedded in millions of websites turned out to be a really bad idea. Simply because Twitter engineers always expected Tweets to be publicly available, so they kept retrying to fetch the data. There's probably a hundred+ developers at Twitter who could have told Musk that little tidbit.
This is 100% on the egomaniacal billionaire and has nothing to do with the technology.
Jesus, be more antagonistic. OP puts the blame on Elon too: "while layoffs may be necessary...", "twitter has lost this expertise."
Pretty clueless to start with "this is a shitty take" then proceed to express the same general idea in simpler terms.
It's also a shitty take because it hypes up Meta. Which basically took Instagram (handling billions of users posting text, images and videos) and creating Threads by turning images and video off. It's the same user accounts too.
That's like Google creating YouTweet by taking their YouTube platform and reducing it to video comments only. Then praising them that they managed to launch a text based service in 2023.
Why not actually talk about Mastodon instead?
Twitter was mostly fine before, because it was before Elon added tons of debt to it through buying it. Now they have much more pressure to generate profit just to pay off interest on those loans.
Are we really praising Zuckerberg now? We are all just supposed to forget Cambridge Analytica, Covid denial, pushing right wing narratives ect?
This is clearly a post talking about investing in engineering capabilities and prioritizing the retaining of talent and not a discussion around the ethics of the businesses involved.