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Comment by throwaway5959 | Hacker News Reader

Might as well have just fired them. There’s no way a feature like that can get released in most companies on that timeline, even without the scale issues.

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I mean... something can always get released. I would imagine few people who don't get fired on Nov 7th are going to be around in another two months anyway though, who wants to work under such treatment in a job market like this? (Unless you're hoping for some kind of vesting of something I guess?)

People who have drunk the musk Kool aid, so to speak.

It’s a dick move by it is also an excellent way to filter out employees who have any semblance of work life balance or don’t think that Musk shits diamonds.

Not emeralds?

What? Even in a bloated, red-tape bureaucratic hellhole, that's maybe a few engineer-weeks at absolute most. Wire up a payment processor, plug into whatever api sets the blue checkmark, have some expiration logic, done.

There's doing the work, and then it's a new build to test and twitter has multiple targets (app and website), there'll be at least one round of testing involved, which isn't quick, and if a defect is found it'll very quickly blow out in time.

Not even that. They already have Twitter Blue, a premium service that's 3 bucks a month. So they already have payments, they already have subscriptions and membership periods. They literally just need another plan tier added.

Not even that, the article says that the plan is to just repurpose Twitter Blue, not add another tier.

>The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users, according to people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence seen by The Verge.

That sounds more difficult to me. You need to create a pipeline to migrate all existing users to your new pricing model, and you need to create all the messaging around that in all different languages. Seems it would be easier if it was just a new feature with a clean slate.

This is spoken by someone that's never had to work in a global environment.

Like payment stuff and subscriptions is a nightmare when you have to deal with legal issues across the world. This is without going into needing to actually scope out the work, figure out how to integrate the changes safely, test them, roll them out and more. Plus it's disruptive to whatever work engineers were already doing to suddenly tell them 'do this thing NOW or you're fired'.

I really start to wonder how many people have actually worked as professional engineers.

I thought the same thing, it was a naive comment indeed.

> engineer-weeks

The executive sponsor and their focus groups, product managers and their review committees, finance and their budgetary approvals, HR and their headcount approvals, the project managers and their technical working groups and sizing estimates, dev, UX, legal, test, deployment, DEI, customer advocacy, competitive analysis, etc all have to have representatives to develop a plan and sign off on it, meetings have to be scheduled, documents have to be created, approvals have to be stamped.

If you've ever worked in a true bureaucratic hellhole, you can understand how a few engineer-weeks turns into a 3 year 20 million dollar that can't be killed because too many "important" people would get egg on their face so it eventually gets rolled out, promotions and handshakes all around, and then it gets scrapped 2 weeks later because it is so terrible and nobody speaks of it again.

It seems to me the faces wont be there to carry the egg.

It seems like this sort of overhead is exactly what Musk is planning to jettison.

When there's top executive will to drive things ahead and to cut short bureaucracy, all those that you listed - though common - become moot. Especially when someone as driven as Elon is leading the fray. It's not like the changes will be as slow as with Tesla, where you have serious safety and regulatory issues to deal with.

Who’s going to do the verification work on IDs, etc people will need to send in?

How complicated are you imagining this to be? I’ve worked in similar spaces and this seems very doable

When the mandate comes from the CEO backed by a very near term termination threat, they may be able to get their way much more easily than usual.

I would argue it’s very doable.

Are you missing the point of either it works or they get fired?

It's not about doable or not, it's about employee leadership.

I doubt that threats like these lead to high quality code.

I can probably get one or two other HN'ers and ship this out in a few hours.

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