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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   38837 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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While I don't share the general admiration for Elon Musk, I have to admit, I think this is funny.

I don't know if Americans/non-British English speakers will quite get the joke about "Chief Twit" and it certainly seems a lot more self-aware than Musk has previously shown himself to be.

But I do find myself in need of The Idiot's Guide To What Is Going On Here. First, Musk said he would buy Twitter, and that was so terrible it had to be fought at all costs. Then he backed out, or tried to, and that was also so terrible that he needed to be forced to go through with it. Now it looks like the deal is back on, and this is now terrible again (possibly because he said he'd sack 75% of the workforce, which I don't believe is serious but has a lot of knickers in a twist).

So - good, bad, terrible, meh that he is (seemingly) going to buy Twitter?

I expect him to fire close to 75%. He couldn’t get the funding he needed. Running twitter lean will be essential to paying off acquisition debt. And a lot of people think these tech shops are bloated.

The really hard part is figuring out which 75% to fire. Twitter can certainly be run very lean if you clear all the deadwood and you keep everyone who actually has the implicit knowledge required to run the whole thing, but all the employees are trying to convince you that they're the ones who are very important, we'll have to see if Musk manages to correctly pick the people to keep. It doesn't help that social media companies are especially vulnerable to downtime. If your fishing company gets a 2-month period of downtime while they figure out how to slim down, no problem, you just lose 2 month's revenue, the fish will still be there waiting, but twitter's users will move on to other things after any sort of prolonged downtime.

there is absolutely no way twitter would have downtime. I am sure a transition plan is already in place and there is enough redundancy that the site will still be up even if important people quit. The last people to be fired would be those whose job it is to keep the site up.

Two months won't happen. But there's probably zero people at Twitter that know the entire stack, and probably about 1-2 people per team that know their team's domain well enough to quickly diagnose and recover from outages.

Some of those teams manage things that the entire rest of the site depends on to stay up. What may have been a 10 minute outage with the right people available to fix the issue could become an hours long outage as people with less skill and experience struggle to even root cause the problem.

It's weird to remember the before time when Twitter was still on Rails and hours long outages would happen every couple of months or so.

I don't have insider knowledge on Twitter, but I do know that Facebook spends a bonkers amount of money on what it calls Site Integrity. Thousands of engineers work on it, hundreds or perhaps thousands of people are involved in creating policy, and many thousands of people are employed to enforce policy with manual reviews of potentially violating content.

If you scaled back Twitter Trust and Safety to only act on Tweets that violate the law, you'd wind up with a whole lot of jobs that have little or no work to do.

He could be planning on culling the twitter workforce then hiring on more compliant devs to replace them.

IMO FTX has shown that a cast of thousands is not necessary for big and fast product development. A small crew, properly motivated, is much more effective. I think the Silicon Valley approach of hiring engineers by the thousand has not borne fruit. Coordination is hard, so five hard working engineers are probably more productive than 20 engineers who are spending an hour per day at the company massage room, yoga classes and so on.

Yes I agree below turnarounds need to force optimize/efficiency and then new initiatives. Especially since twitter doesn’t have the cash and balance sheet of fb which can just spend silly.

Twitter now has a lot of debt and high cash flow to interest costs. They need to rationalize there before growth.

Honestly sometimes needing to be rational is better or you end up like fb spending money everywhere with no direction, twitters lack of financial power means whatever they do will be focused and critical to the company.

Gotta clear out the deadwood first.

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