Twitter engineer explains how it will break in the coming weeks | Hacker News Reader

Twitter engineer explains how it will break in the coming weeks

technologyreview.com

30 pointssprague24 comments

I was on the "Twitter will could be dead by the end of the weekend" train in the beginning, mostly because the popular narrative was that Twitter was poorly built, which is why they had 7000 developers. I've come around for a couple of reasons: Those devs seem to have overengineered a lot of stuff, and made it pretty robust, and elon still has at least 1000 people who either believe in his hype or couldn't leave because of their visa. That's plenty to keep some form of website with the twitter logo running at all times. 100 people is enough to keep some semblance of "a" twitter running, but more than several hundred means that twitter will have a web presence as long as elon is willing to burn cash, or forever if he finds some profitability.

I have several years experience now being the sole person on a mission critical portion of an international company that was still abandoned/ignored/whatever by management. All but 5% of the people I worked with have left, and there are entire portions of the code base that nobody left has ever touched or been involved with.

What happens is erosion. A manager will ask "Why is <thing> running poorly, or doing the wrong action" and you will only be able to say "I don't know". You then have to spend an hour tracking down the relevant code and teach yourself something that used to be the remit of a team of twelve and they could have answered/fixed this question in a minute. Now every ticket has to include a section about the required software archeology.

Things will keep running, but you can't really build on the previous code very well, because you have no clue how it was built or the sharp edges it works around. Even minor updates to the system means an entire sprint worth of research and a half solution that is less robust. Bugs on the tracker will never be looked at, and the backlog explodes with tickets that won't be touched before the heat death of the universe. It destroys morale, makes onboarding new devs difficult, kills any advantage a previously smart architecture brought you, makes you a pariah in the local employment environment, and reduces even your most senior devs to the output of a brand new junior dev. Your everyday task is "can I put out more fires than will start today".

This is all very much correct, especially about highly competent devs being turned into researchers that require learning the code base archeology for weeks before every sprint before even the slightest ode can be touched. But this isn’t limited to Twitter. This is like half of all the code based I’ve ever worked with

I hope for the good of humanity that a difference here is that Twitter has some utility, whereas the comparable code bases at large tech firms are mostly useless features/products (i.e. bullshit work).

While they've had some operational difficulties (like locked themselves out of some servers, or stopped services and then couldn't reboot them), just staying up is not that much of a problem.

The problem is making changes. The know-how on the system is 90% gone. So anything you touch risks falling down like a house of cards now.

And without drastic changes, Twitter can't be monetized. So things are pretty bad.

Two weeks since this piece was posted. I wonder if the anonymous engineer quoted is still at the company.

While they certainly have a lot more staff than feared (2700 when they said that 90% left) and I think they can probably keep it up mostly ok (there are already bugs) I'm curious where that leaves feature delivery. We've already had blue checks pushed back to November 29th, and now it's pushed back indefinitely. Encrypted DM's may be easier, but I wonder if there are spam/harassment and all sorts of other unknown implications.

In case you are concerned about twitter stability: I'm making tool to backup your likes/bookmarks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33722663

As someone who is not on Twitter, can you tell me why one would want to backup their Likes?

I use likes as bookmarks ("likes" used to call "favorites"). There are people who make things, research, stat/vis and tweet about it.

If every time someone made a loosy forecast that someone had to put a hundred bucks into a 3rd party escrow until the forecast comes true or false, the "news" agencies would run out of rumors to discuss.

It is almost as though many folks want Twitter to fail, instead of having a better social media to compete with Meta/TikTok. People forget that Elon was one of the original dot com millionaires with his success in PayPal. Back then they said that he can't land/reuse rockets or make electric cars.

> People forget that Elon was one of the original dot com millionaires with his success in PayPal.

Who are these people you speak of. On here? Did you do a poll or how did you figure this out. I thought this was common knowledge.

I want them all to fail.

I'll drink to that!

> It is almost as though many folks want Twitter to fail

I don't want Twitter to fail. But if Twitter failing delivers a death blow to the "rich==smart", "leveraged buyouts are good", "billionaires create jobs", etc. beliefs that people have, well, let it fail hard because the world will be better for it.

Have you actually looked at potential statistical correlations between richness and smartness?

> It is almost as though many folks want Twitter to fail

I mean, I do want it to fail. It's an awful thing. Maybe it is better than Meta/TikTok (I disagree, I hate them all, but I especially despise twitter), but I still would want it dead. I want them all dead

It's been interesting looking at the subreddit for twitter, there seems to be more and more issues popping up in the last few days. https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/new/

https://archive.ph/U3qBm

This is the same as the people on 4chan waiting for the mass vaccine die-off, with the chant ‘2 more weeks’.

It would be the same if those people on 4chan were actually on the team that designed the vaccine. Unless you’re disputing that the person being quoted is/was actually a Twitter engineer.

It's funny how often idiots claim something will happening in the future, despite insurmountable evidence of the counterfactual.

The closest thing I can relate to that, is the Google engineer that claimed the AI was sentient. Everything for he clicks and likes. Long live the content gods.

If someone deserves to be called an “idiot” in regards to this story, it’s the headline writer. The article quoted extensively from an anonymous Twitter engineer, and there was nothing from this person making predictions about the “coming weeks”.

I guess the person does think it’s inevitable for the service to continuously degrade over time, and any time in the future is technically included in the “coming weeks”. So, well done headline writer, grab those clicks.

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