Twitter's high ROI engineering work | Hacker News Reader

Twitter's high ROI engineering work

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27 pointssteviesands12 comments

He really had no idea what he was buying, didn't he?

funny how the argument that Elon knows nothing by bringing up RPCs is backed by (in part) a trace diagram showing RPC's all over the place.

slow clap

These people are really good at “dunking on you” on Twitter

Upon closer inspection, they’re full of s*t

> Elon knows nothing by bringing up RPCs

As best I understand the Twitter spat, he was claiming the client was making 1000 RPCs to generate the home timeline - hence it being slower in India where mobile internet is slower. Except the Android dev pointed out it was actually only 6 (IIRC) calls from the client and slowness had nothing to do with that.

Didn't Elon clarify that he's referring to the RPCs between services in the BE?

So there is a specific BE only for a region that is slow but another that is not?

Possible he did, I suppose, but I never saw it in any of the recaps / threads. But also wouldn't make a lick of sense talking about India vs US for speed...

The Twitter product has not meaningfully changed or evolved in 10 years.

Revenue and user growth and product stagnated. So who cares about optimizing a further 100ms improvement or what OSS they maintained?

The “interesting stuff” you see in this post is what many engineers love to do. Make work for the sake of work. It doesn’t always translate into growth.

> The Twitter product has not meaningfully changed or evolved in 10 years.

In the last few years alone they made huge changes like Blue, reader mode, ad-free articles, super follows, birdwatch, spaces/ticketed spaces, the list goes on.

All under an FTC consent degree which required "that Twitter produce written privacy assessments of any new “product, service or practice” — or when Twitter updates those things — that could affect user data or put it at risk."[1] - not an environment where you can "move fast and break things"!

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/11/tech/musk-twitter-ftc/ind...

> The Reddit product has not meaningfully changed or evolved in 10 years

> The Apple product has not meaningfully changed or evolved in 10 years

> The WhatsApp product has not meaningfully changed or evolved in 10 years

How are these good examples? Those product’s revenue streams and user bases have grown tremendously.

Twitter’s workforce bloat has outpaced both its users, revenue, and its share price.

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