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Comment by chasd00 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe Musk was right about the bloat

It is fascinating that half (or more?) of Twitter's workforce can be released and there's no discernible degradation of the service. I wonder how many other tech CEO are looking at their organizations and wondering if they could slash similarly without losing platform performance.

> there's no discernible degradation of the service

Twitter advertisers would beg to differ.

The service has degraded for advertisers?

In terms of brand safety it has. But we haven’t seen the same backlash as when FB or YT had brand safety issues a few years ago. My guess is because the Elon stories are chumming the water for Twitter stories. Curious if it ever shakes out

We aren’t talking about brand safety, just whether the site is working as expected after firing all the engineers.

Yes. I've heard directly of the chaos. If I hadn't heard directly I wouldn't have commented but sadly have, from multiple people.

I'm interested to know more about what's failing.

The Latest Tweets feed on the Android app was completely broken for about a week for me and several other people.

Seems short-sighted. That Twitter hasn’t fallen over appears more like a credit to the SRE work that went into getting everything running on, effectively, autopilot. Today’s Twitter infra is clearly a far cry from the stuff a decade ago.

Yes. It just shows that it doesn't take 7,000+ employees to run the blue bird site.

Only around 500 to 1000 despite all the emotional reactions, outrage, FUD and unfounded apocalyptic prophesies made by the media and the doomsters predicting the imminent collapse of Twitter.

The twitter app itself could probably run fine with much less than that, I've seen skeleton engineering crews support hundreds of millions of MAUs pushing terabytes of data. What musk has sacrificed is everything besides the twitter app, which is probably not enough to maintain twitter the corporation in the long term.

> everything besides the twitter app

Like what? What has twitter acheived beside twitter app with more employees for a decade?

Having used twitter, I don't know what I don't know, but it's hard to imagine how the company could possibly have 7K employees. Maybe 500 to 1K seems more reasonable given what's there.

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