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Brandon Adams's avatar

I was a production engineer at Facebook for seven years. It's SRE with slight philosophical differences on how to interact with software engineers.

People that make these headcount estimates of Twitter could keep running with low hundreds of employees are way off base. That might kind of make sense if they didn't own their own infra, and you just had people maintaining front-end bits and business logic running on something like AWS.

But they do own their own infra. As far as I can tell, they have at least three datacenters, and hundreds of thousands of servers. Problems become very different when you run at a massive scale like Twitter. You discover you need whole teams to take care of problems that didn't even exist when the product had half as much traffic.

Also, I'm kind of disappointed in the recycled anti-Musk takes I was hearing on the podcast. There are interesting angles to take that aren't favorable to Musk, but Katie and Jessie seemed to be taking the liberal consensus of "Musk is a crazy person or Nazi" at face value.

For example, the way the deal was structured requires massive restructuring of the company. They were already losing money, and Musk's purchase added a billion dollars in debt service per year. Maybe he's a crazy person for structuring the deal this way, or in how he's handling the cuts, or maybe he's intentionally trying to scare away all but the True Believers. He was able to attract geohot to come work on Twitter things, and that guy is a genius.

While I said that those low hundred headcount estimates were far too low, there likely is a ton of bloat at Twitter. If they're anything like Facebook they've accumulated lots of career-minded folks that don't really care about what they work on. High salaries attract top talent, but they also attract people that want to do as little work as possible to draw a high salary. They grind leetcode, ace the interview, and then figure out how little they can do to keep their jobs and still get promoted. If you're lucky you won't find yourself depending on the output of such a person, because they'll slow you down. However, that's hard to avoid. When I started at Facebook I never encountered such people, but when I finished I'd say it was most of the people we were hiring.

Also, agreed that it's awful how Musk spreads memes without attribution. Why doesn't he just retweet the originals?

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Chumb's avatar

Thank you for the valuable perspective. I get torn a lot, I do generally feel bad for folks losing jobs, but I also feel like successful companies attract a lot of freeloaders. Eventually that has to end

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Never wrong... Ok, sometimes's avatar

Always good to have an informed tech opinion, total breath of fresh air!

Should note that the "only a few hundred employees" line that people are pushing is hyperbole. There are still thousands and thousands of employees left at Twitter.

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Ian [redacted]'s avatar

Thanks for that. I kind of have that estimate of low hundreds in my mind because I didn't know how much of their own infrastructure they own. I imagine transitioning to AWS (as suggested by his buddies on the All In Podcast a while ago) would save a ton more on employees, though that transition would likely require a lot of smart people to make themselves irrelevant.

Like you said, it's super disappointing to hear Off The Shelf opinions on this pod. I was really looking forward to an episode where K&J discuss the Twitter thing because they're amazing an unwinding ridiculous drama, and this Twitter thing looks super dramatic to me.

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Brandon Adams's avatar

For that kind of a lift you'd not only need to spend a boatload on the engineering effort to migrate, you'd also need to coordinate with AWS to ensure that they'll have the capacity to accommodate you, and then somehow flip your datacenter assets so it's not a complete loss. The big players probably aren't interested in buying because the headache of having special formerly-Twitter datacenters that deviate from the standard Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Facebook/etc way of doing things probably isn't worth the additional compute/storage they can provide.

You'd also be paying a premium to AWS from then on, and have to coordinate with them on any new rollout that changes your hardware footprint, because you're too big to just expect your capacity requests to be fulfilled.

Big players continue to build and operate their own datacenters because it's worth it.

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Ian [redacted]'s avatar

At the scale of Twitter it must be worth it. But I think, in spirit, some of the idea about getting rid of a lot of the staff makes sense if they can focus on providing value and offloading functionality on to external systems. Maybe they offload on to the credit network for verifying that someone is at least real enough to own a credit card, reducing pile-ons by reducing anonymity, making money via subscriptions instead of ads. Shrug. I've never really used Twitter so I kind of don't care :)

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Never wrong... Ok, sometimes's avatar

"Maybe they offload on to the credit network for verifying that someone is at least real enough to own a credit card"

This is exactly what Twitter Blue is intended to do

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Electroverted's avatar

I think Elon is starting to retweet more. Prior to this, he would save the image, sometimes crop out sources, and tweet.

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