HN: Tech companies should take more time to work through the psychological and social impacts of their tech decisions.

Also HN: Why does it take them so long to implement this, it's just a simple technical decision?

(this is a guess, I don't work at twitter)

December: VP approves initiative

January: PM assigned for initial research, weekly iterations on a product spec defining what considerations need to be accounted for

February: Engineering lead assigned and starts to scope out technical implications on various datastores, weekly meeting with teams affected to see what's possible/what implications will be

March: Engineering team established/actual work starts

April: Proof of concept ready, comms start

I don't think it's about the edit button itself, literally.

The fact that a tweet is immutable is likely an assumption running deep inside twitter's system. For a large enough system, I could totally see implementing something like this taking months, just from the cross-team overhead or schema migrations

Umm, if everything was built around the idea that tweets were immutable, yeah I could imagine it's quite a bit of work to change things. Immutable and mutable data can be treated _very_ differently in systems bigger than the little toys you make for fun.

At Twitter's scale and having spent many years assuming tweets never change, I'd be surprised if it only took 4 months. I'd be surprised if they don't spend the next year finding systems they missed while building the feature.

It's absolutely bizarre to refer to the feature as an "edit button", which totally glosses over all the architectural and UI changes required.

Yeah it's really easy to make a button that you can click. Oh you wanted it to do something?