Twitter Musk and the hilarious meltdown

[Xtrema]

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I believe you today and I knew I'd get called on it - but I'm confident it wasn't always like that. I took a couple Org Analysis (which we obviously called OrgGay) courses and they used MS in Gates's time as an example of a company where the culture was an extremely high work ethic. I recall the book quoting a manager saying "oh, you're going home early?" to an employee who had worked 12hr that day.
Again, a very different time but the theme still stands when employees are dying to get into this prestigious company, once they are in, they will do whatever.

I bet whoever worked on the out of band Kerberos patch last week probably worked a 80hr week after Nov patches broke tons of domain controllers.

[g-m]

What the hell do those words mean

[zechs]

I'm still trying to figure out how a developed piece of software somehow crashes and burns because there are less employees (the answer is it doesn't, Twitter is working fine and it will continue to do so).

It's like both the ex-employees of Twitter and MSM either literally do not understand how their company works/software works, or are purposefully trying to mislead the dumb masses into thinking something is happening that isn't.

Elon may be many things, maybe even stupid, but the only thing of value I can see being lost in these mass firings is knowledge.
There is probably so much legacy garbage code clogging things up that without some of the old developers it may be hard to understand.

Does that matter? No. Twitter isn't complicated. It's probably the least complex of any social media platform.

If it kept the ad revenue it was previously receiving, laid off 75% of its workforce, and focused on growing its userbase, it would be immediately profitable and a growing company.

[ExtraSlow]

I don't know a lot about software, but I always assumed it took fewer people to maintain than to create from scratch.

[LilDrunkenSmurf]

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I believe that Twitter jobs were seen as prestigious and gravy, so there was high demand for them.
Now Musk is putting an end to the gravy. And temporarily out permanently damaging the prestige

Not as prestigious as FAANG. And really, anyone with twitter on their resume will have an easy time finding work elsewhere.

[kertejud2]

Now that Musk is finally fulfilling his goal of bringing everyone's favorite Christian satire sire, the Babylon Bee, back to twitter after their founder had a breakdown, let's remind ourselves of how The Onion started the chain of events that led to Musk wasting $44B.


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[suntan]

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Not as prestigious as FAANG. And really, anyone with twitter on their resume will have an easy time finding work elsewhere.

Well except for the dude that made that scrolly message.

[killramos]

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Well except for the dude that made that scrolly message.

Yea I wouldn’t fuck with Elon, the term vindictive bastard doesn’t do it Justice.

[Yolobimmer]

Fresh off the Twitter press rumour mill!!

Elon locked himself in the bathroom, and employees hear him sobbing!

[rage2]

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I'm still trying to figure out how a developed piece of software somehow crashes and burns because there are less employees (the answer is it doesn't, Twitter is working fine and it will continue to do so).

Realistically, if everything is status quo, it should continue operating. It's the unexpected use cases that causes problems, and requires the people that know those specific subsuystems to diagnose and resolve issues. Let's say some big news item happens on the weekend, usage goes up during scheduled cleanup/backup operations. That would require the right people to back out of said operations cleanly, roll back, etc. It's not just the dev ops crew that's needed. Dev ops might know the right processes for fixing a problem, but they still rely on talking to the right engineers to actually understand the problem in more complicated cases. With twitter feeding their data to so many internal systems, something breaking there might not be noticeable to the end user, except maybe outdated timelines. But they have SLAs with customers for their data, and that could cost them revenue in penalties if things aren't met.

This is assuming he's not rolling out any changes at all, but he's trying to accelerate changes. It's basically a recipe for disaster with minimal understanding and insufficient testing.

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Elon may be many things, maybe even stupid, but the only thing of value I can see being lost in these mass firings is knowledge.
There is probably so much legacy garbage code clogging things up that without some of the old developers it may be hard to understand.

Does that matter? No. Twitter isn't complicated. It's probably the least complex of any social media platform.

If it kept the ad revenue it was previously receiving, laid off 75% of its workforce, and focused on growing its userbase, it would be immediately profitable and a growing company.

I think you're underestimating the complexity of a massive data setup like twitter. From a user's perspective, it's not complicated, but the distributed setup to handle the volume of transactions it goes through daily is nothing easy. There's hints of problems already this week, when Elon pushed the teams to kill off unnecessary micro services which lead to 2FA failing and breaking anyone logging in that needed 2FA. That knowledge lost is a direct cause of issues like that. I doubt there's one single engineer that understands the entire ins and outs of the system at twitter. Knowledge like this is typically distributed within different teams. So yea, the brain drain is a massive problem.

Anyways, I don't work at twitter, I don't know anyone that works at twitter, but this is typically how things are setup at other saas companies.

[ThePenIsMightier]

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Realistically, if everything is status quo, it should continue operating. It's the unexpected use cases that causes problems, and requires the people that know those specific subsuystems to diagnose and resolve issues. Let's say some big news item happens on the weekend, usage goes up during scheduled cleanup/backup operations. That would require the right people to back out of said operations cleanly, roll back, etc. It's not just the dev ops crew that's needed. Dev ops might know the right processes for fixing a problem, but they still rely on talking to the right engineers to actually understand the problem in more complicated cases. With twitter feeding their data to so many internal systems, something breaking there might not be noticeable to the end user, except maybe outdated timelines. But they have SLAs with customers for their data, and that could cost them revenue in penalties if things aren't met.

This is assuming he's not rolling out any changes at all, but he's trying to accelerate changes. It's basically a recipe for disaster with minimal understanding and insufficient testing.



I think you're underestimating the complexity of a massive data setup like twitter. From a user's perspective, it's not complicated, but the distributed setup to handle the volume of transactions it goes through daily is nothing easy. There's hints of problems already this week, when Elon pushed the teams to kill off unnecessary micro services which lead to 2FA failing and breaking anyone logging in that needed 2FA. That kowledge lost is a direct cause of issues like that. I doubt there's one single engineer that understands the entire ins and outs of the system at twitter. Knowledge like this is typically distributed within different teams. So yea, the brain drain is a massive problem.

Anyways, I don't work at twitter, I don't know anyone that works at twitter, but this is typically how things are setup at other saas companies.

I thoroughly agree with you.
But I question how much of a disaster his rapid changes might be based on his experience pushing extreme high-tech personnel to do ludicrous things in silly timelines at both Tesla and Space-X. (And I suppose PayPal?).
He's really good (generally) at getting results from that.

[JRSC00LUDE]

I have to agree with rage because I don't understand anything he's saying.

I think that's also how you end up voting liberal.

[Yolobimmer]

Hey, question. Is it Musks debt that is the cause of his panic and added Twitter losses?

https://www.reuters.com/markets/euro...es-2022-10-05/

[LilDrunkenSmurf]

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I thoroughly agree with you.
But I question how much of a disaster his rapid changes might be based on his experience pushing extreme high-tech personnel to do ludicrous things in silly timelines at both Tesla and Space-X. (And I suppose PayPal?).
He's really good (generally) at getting results from that.

But he's pushing the people who built those systems. Something as large and diverse as twitter has a lot of legacy code and tech debt, I can only assume. I work at a much smaller SaaS company, and there's still lots of "we'll clean that up when we get to it, but it's not a priority right now". It's been like that at basically every SaaS company I've worked at.

[suntan]

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It's been like that at basically every company that writes any sort of software even if it's a fucking bash script I've worked at.

ftfy

[zechs]

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I think you're underestimating the complexity of a massive data setup like twitter. .

Maybe. I am under the impression that Musk hasn't literally fired everyone of value, but I suppose that could be the case and he has severely damaged the backend workings of Twitter.

But besides your 2FA issue (which I haven't seen mention of, interesting to hear), so far Twitter is working as per usual for it's users. So if Twitter works as is usual for us, the end user, has not crashed/become unavailable at records useage levels, all with 75% less staff... Dunno what to tell you. I'm still leaning towards him making the right call.

[LilDrunkenSmurf]

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Maybe. I am under the impression that Musk hasn't literally fired everyone of value, but I suppose that could be the case and he has severely damaged the backend workings of Twitter.

But besides your 2FA issue (which I haven't seen mention of, interesting to hear), so far Twitter is working as per usual for it's users. So if Twitter works as is usual for us, the end user, has not crashed/become unavailable at records useage levels, all with 75% less staff... Dunno what to tell you. I'm still leaning towards him making the right call.

https://www.androidauthority.com/twi...s-2fa-3234698/

[The_Penguin]

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I bet whoever worked on the out of band Kerberos patch last week probably worked a 80hr week after Nov patches broke tons of domain controllers.

We wish. Anyone who approves and applies MS patches less than 3 weeks from release deserves what they get.

[The_Penguin]

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Realistically, if everything is status quo, it should continue operating.

Assuming nobody who saw the writing on the wall regarding their employment, or who generally disliked Elon, etc. didn't plant malicious code.

[ExtraSlow]

Are Coders considered Fiduciaries?