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.
> 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.
When you own a company and fire someone to cut costs nobody is gonna say anything, of course. It's the sad reality.
When you cut the company to 1/3 and keep foreigners because of their visa status, nobody is gonna say anything of course, but that says a lot about you!
I do not believe that half the company was just "overstaff". I have been in situations where 1 manager had 1 reporter/reported, but they were single cases - it can't be spread to the entire company and nobody does anything.
> When you cut the company to 1/3 and keep foreigners because of their visa status, ... that says a lot about you!
That... you care about people regardless if they are foreigners and that you try to help those that would have the most problems if they were let go, especially as these problems are a consequence of your hiring of them?
I'm not familiar with the story, but from the way you presented it it sounds like a proper thing to do.
EDIT: not taking Musk's side, just pointing out the issue with the parent's argument.
Or… heart me out, maybe it’s because Elon knows they have the most to loose and are thus more likely to do whatever he wants to not get kicked out of the country.
Elon made some statements that made his disdain for the “laptop class” quite clear. He is no saint, or genius. He’s mostly just an extremely ruthless smart man.
Sure, that is also a possible (even likely) explanation. As I said, I don't defend Musk - my opinion of him is quite low and is getting lower and lower. Just wanted to point out the trouble with the argument. Anyway.
He has finally showed the world his true self. I am happy about that - I don't want another capitalist sanctified for being a genius, which he is not. The more this becomes clearer the better for everyone.
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.
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.
I am not OP but one of the things I have seen these people do is to insist on removing words like "nitty gritty" from our developer documentation by calling it racist.
"I won't give names but trust me", VC funded tech companies with 3-10 bros 'who have or not a vague technical background but more see themselves as high level thinkers' between founders and their first hires for 'key strategic roles' followed by an engineer and one to three interns to fill production role are a common reality, at least on startup scenes I attended. In the startup process 'marketing' is also glorified (not that i disagree it's importance) so once you have one or two guy who can make demos, hiring marketing people is often the next priority.
I have seen situations where there are 10% engineers to 50% "assorted management" in tech companies. (the remaining 40% being a mix of sales and support staff such as office management).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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?
Which security breach are you referring to? I'm not aware of any major ones that have happened since the acquisition, but this one seems to be the one people point to even though it happened prior.
https://privacy.twitter.com/en/blog/2023/update-about-an-all...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.