Cruel Changes at Twitter

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

32 points·ThatGeoGuy··4 comments

> Talking with long-time Twitter engineers, they told me the site has a complex architecture for a very good reason. It was built to allow for safe and fast tweaking of any part of Twitter, making it easy for developers to iterate.

Well Twitter did anything but rapidly tweak stuff. Let's be honest out of the major tech companies they seemed the most clueless and slow.

The only major update was a messy UI redesign which made everything much worse.

I think the reason a bunch of them got fired because they had created this complex mess without proper reasons.

> I think the reason a bunch of them got fired because they had created this complex mess without proper reasons.

They got fired because costs needed to decrease immediately. It’s hard to attribute these firings to poor performance when the company is in a giant financial hole of Musk’s own creation.

Yeah it’s a bit of an odd claim, how does more complex architecture allow for easier iteration?

All common sense would suggest that the average developer, who doesn’t quite get how everything works, will become more afraid of iterating quickly.

It seems like if we balance the net loss and profit of Twitter over the last 10 years it's about one billion in losses. That's just about what has been added in interest for each year now post acquisition. So it seems like Twitter could have operated more or less indefinitely with just the interest of about 3 or 4 years?

From an economic point of view everyone is worse off now: The employees who presumably have to commute, all those who lost their jobs and those who lost the business of those employees and finally the users.

How is this good in any way?

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