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Comment by fshr | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to hear your thoughts on what kinds of unique institutional knowledge you think they've built up and what sets the Twitter employees apart from their peers at other companies. My main guess would be scaling caches and services, but even that isn't a super rare these days compared to say 2006. I'm not sure what about Twitter specifically, the app and its functions, is that complex to pass on. Coming into codebases that large is very challenging, but it's doable. Isn't the current calculus ~ lowering headcount to stay solvent vs. the risk of more lost knowledge and the other 50% of the company losing their jobs?

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Well, for one, Twitter is under a 20 year consent decree with the FTC and all of the relevant leaders in charge of this resigned this week and individual twitter engineers now need to "self certify" that they're complying with the decree.

People who have intimate experience with just exactly the degree of latitude the FTC will allow for twitter and have a personal relationship that allows them to negotiate with the FTC isn't exactly a skill you can just find on the street.

For details, there are at least 2 issues with the FTC.

in 2011 there was a settlement about Failure to Safeguard Personal Information [1].

"Under the terms of the settlement, Twitter will be barred for 20 years from misleading consumers about the extent to which it protects the security, privacy, and confidentiality of nonpublic consumer information, including the measures it takes to prevent unauthorized access to nonpublic information and honor the privacy choices made by consumers.

Then in 2022 FTC charged Twitter for using account security data for targeted advertising. They have a $150M fine and some other conditions [2].

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2011/03/...

[2] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/05/...

> what kinds of unique institutional knowledge you think they've built up and what sets the Twitter employees apart from their peers at other companies

Literally knowing how twitter codebase works. Knowing about existing issues and workarounds for them. You wont find this knowledge in other companies.

> Coming into codebases that large is very challenging, but it's doable.

Sure, but it takes awful lot of time if there is no one around to explain you stuff. By awful time, I mean really a lot of additional time.

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