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Comment by ClassyJacket | Hacker News Reader

This is a great way to drive away your best talent and ensure those who stay are more tired, frustrated, and stressed.

Twitter doesn't need "best people" - it's not innovating and hasn't been for a very long time.

Have you any idea what it takes simply to maintain a machine such as twitter, let alone make even minor alterations? There was a recent telling interview by someone who used to work there who thought it wouldn't be long until the whole thing collapses on its own because there were huge teams dedicated to simply keeping the thing running.

Back of the envelope calculation:

A billion users, each tweeting once an hour with 140 characters. That's 38.147 Megabytes/s. My laptop could handle that raw volume. Increase it by an order of magnitude for all the network nonsense and it can still run on my 4 year old desktop.

Twitter is not some hypertech company, it shouldn't need more than a hundred engineers to run. I imagine that's the bet Musk is making too.

What a terribly dishonest and overly-simplistic way of modeling of a distributed system much less a simple web service. found the engineer who, in their own words, “couldn’t code their way out of paper bag.”

If you're serving 40mb a second you don't _need_ a distributed system.

Twitter isn't Netflix.

It’s pretty laughable you believe your own “math.” I guess even serving an actual front end doesn’t factor into your calculations. Hey go build something and you might find out what it actually takes to build/maintain a system of any real consequence instead of doing leet code exercises and smelling your own brain farts.

I guess you're right, you need 10,000 JS engineers to change a light bulb.

In the same vein, look at how Plenty of Fish has a huge customer base, and runs on very skimpy hardware. Back in 2006 it had 45M visitors a month, served up over 1B page views a month, all running off three database servers and two load balanced webservers. Guess how many employees? One, Markus Frind[1].

1. http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture

Of course things have changed, money will do that.

Twitter has about 10x that monthly visitor number just in mDAU. And pof has scaled 100x! (To 100 employees — that seems pretty insane relative the traffic they have going by this weird metric of “amount of data served should roughly equal the number of employees by some ratio”). Comparison also seems a bit lacking given the difference in magnitude also the engineering problems involved (e.g. moderation, botting etc.) Guessing also that creating a dating site is not an exercise in needing a lot of skilled engineering work given it’s been a solved set of problems since the late 90s. Hey Verizon has 132,000 employees — I guess they should only need a fraction of that right since consumer cellular has 2,400?

"Innovating" is not the only nor primary thing that requires "best people".

innovating is a meaningless term in ad tech companies. optimizing I think is a better word.

I agree, just keeping things running at that scale requiere people with some impressive skills

We'll see, my bet is that nothing catastrophic will happen as a result of layoffs and hiring freeze at Twitter.

Revenue-wise I think a fake checkmarked Nintendo being up with a photo of mario doing the middle finger for hours does a lot, and spells not great stuff. My understanding is that advertisers aren't even locking in contracts for next year or similar.

I bet advertisers LOVE this situation. They probably weren't excited about how centralized systems are, which robs them of some of their say and power in the ecosystem. This is an opportunity for them to show what control and influence they have and basically a warning to others not to toy with their demands.

Twitter has already been having reliability issues for weeks or more, that's not going to get better if you lay off a bunch of your ops and sweng personnel

Yeah but if they want to do anything more than struggle to fight fires 24/7 they need at least average people, and management that trusts them, and buy in for the work needed to make a robust system.

Well it's currently operating at a loss, so if they don't innovate somehow the company is doomed.

It's amazing how many techies seem to be unable to understand this as if there was still infinite VC money and cash raising via stock sale for every company that can't figure out how to make money.

If we get a general tech correction as part of this downturn things are going to be very different for companies that have been burning money for years.

It also leads to more mistakes and cutting corners (usually hidden), so in the long term as they accumulate this will bite him in the ass when a particularly bad one gets out in the wild unnoticed. And I thought this guy had a high IQ, clearly he's not that bright after all.

Having a high IQ doesn't make you immune from cockups.

These are not complicated decisions to navigate.

No I guess not. His rants on social media have cost him in the past. I believe he may have psychopathic tendencies because he appears to be attempting to project his own work ethic (long hours etc) onto staff but cannot emphasize with them, or understand they aren't him/have his circumstances/have his ability. His goals are great and have certainly pushed our tech boundaries into near science fiction, but he really doesn't have the social and people skills, which is ironic given he's bought Twitter. If there was one thing I could tell him, it's that he should engage his brain before his mouth, a little (benevolent) social manipulation to get what he wants will be more successful before he barks orders for long hours or sacks people at short notice. Carrot before the stick.

I generally agree with what you are saying. But:

> certainly pushed our tech boundaries into near science fiction

That bit seems a bit of an exaggeration to me.

The reasoning:

- Boeing laughed at SpaceX and their proposed rocket re-use and cheap(er) space flight. Now Boeing is the no.3 supplier to NASA, SpaceX at 2 and playing catch up.

- Self driving cars were not an industry until Tesla pushed it, it is still the pioneer in this respect as no other car make has the same level of self driving features. How cool is a car that drives to you on button click? :)

- No other US company has announced humanoid robots aside from Boston Dynamics, which are not for the general public.

- Tesla has pushed for secondary industries such battery invovation and solar roof tiles (not regular panels on roofs). This in itself is not new but is a future green environment goal.

- The Boring company goals may be a pipe dream (har har) but the intent is there to provide hyper transportation, akin to 50s trashy comic ideals.

- How many non governmental industries can offer Ukraine help with something like Starlink? Can't be many... (honestly don't know but initially seems altruistic).

I'm afraid you have drunk the kool aid. Self-driving cars are an idea as old as the car itself, and many companies are much further along than Tesla who are stuck on their "no LIDAR" stance when LIDAR is rapidly becoming cheaper and more available. Almost ironic from the company that bet on lithium batteries for cars. The robots are a demo gag (much like the smart summon, or the cybertruck, or the semi, or ..). The "solar tiles" are a fire hazard and the Tesla solar business a total shambles, which makes sense since it was just a nepotistic bailout of Solarcity. Hyperloop is dead and so is the Boring company.

SpaceX alone succeeding is a once in a century event. Tesla kicking off EV for the world as well.

> - Self driving cars were not an industry until Tesla pushed it, it is still the pioneer in this respect as no other car make has the same level of self driving features. How cool is a car that drives to you on button click? :)

Tesla was founded in 2003, and self driving wasn't a thing to think about back then.

DARPA had been working on getting the research for it underway - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2004) -- and that was announced in 2002.

I'd suggest a read of https://www.wired.com/story/darpa-grand-urban-challenge-self... to get a bit of perspective on it. Also look at the number of teams that were trying to do it back then and presumably had thought about it and done some preliminary work on it even before ( https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/11/08/107226/in-the-19... ).

This isn't "before Tesla, no one was doing it" it is much more a "until recently, the necessary processing power was impractical to have in a car."

> - The Boring company goals may be a pipe dream (har har) but the intent is there to provide hyper transportation, akin to 50s trashy comic ideals.

It's worth noting that what they're pushing is not tunneling technology but a particular mass transit system that is essentially a repackaging of personal rapid transit (PRT). Although, unlike the PRT system constructed 50 years ago and every other PRT system built since, Musk's version requires human drivers (as it relies on unmodified Tesla vehicles which are not self-driving).

Sometimes it makes you less self aware that you might be wrong.

It's fun to read about this stuff in the news and comment on it here and on Twitter but the reality couldn't be more different. If you're qualified enough to be in the running to work at Twitter, you likely have many options available to you (employment wise). None of those people are trying to go work at Twitter because there's just too much BS flying around over there.

If this keeps up the only way Twitter is going to be able to attract talent IMO is by offering massive comp packages, because that's the only way you're going to get people that aren't die hard Twitter/Elon Musk fans to want to come there.

All tech companies have been hiring bottom of the barrel engineers who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. This is just a realignment where where knowing how to put the lego pieces together isn't enough any more.

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