Twitter has fewer than 550 full time engineers
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Even the famously nimble WhatsApp which has fewer features and complexity needs this order of magnitude engineers so why would you expect Twitter to be leaner?
I'm aware they scaled to 1B+ users with ~100 engineers but I'm failing to see why they'd be working on less complex problems.
Operating on almost all native platforms, at this scale, with those constraints, isn't something i find much easier than building a feed.
On Whatsapp the ordering guarantees are limited to within the thread and server side timestamps are good enough for the most part to enforce it. Whatsapp/messaging is a very horizontally scalable problem. With feed (assuming) you have a fully personal feed the storage alone is a pain to manage and optimize.
Now of course you can reimplement an ordering mechanism on top of an unordered one, with lost messages detection etc on the client side, and let the server be loose.
but that means reimplementing that logic on every client codebase.
Whatsapp had 35 engineers for 450M users at the time of its acquisition by FB (2014). It had 50 engineers for 900M users (2015).
https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...
Just handling the ads, both backend and user interfaces for buyers, would quickly net you several more developers.
It's easy to have only 45 engineers when you constrain the scope of what they have to do very well, but the scope was much, much, much smaller than Twitter's.
In case you haven't noticed, twitter has many, many, many other features beyond direct messaging, each of which requires its own team to maintain, and many of which are far more complex than a messaging client.
I do not think Twitter had ever 8000 engineers - my understanding is that there were that many employees. It's easy to imagine a lot of non-tech roles, b2b sales, management, support etc.
We have evidence that 8,000 was far too many, because they're gone and Twitter is still Twitter.
We have zero evidence that 550 isn't still too many.
Mind you, I already had searches that triggered bugs in mobile app where first search would always fail, but things like significant drop in tweets I see in my feed from people I follow (and no, none of them were bots), random outages like Lists or the whole search feature just failing, pervasive feeling that even searches return maybe 1/10th of what I was getting before...
This is a tirefire.
Unfortunately, there's a lot more than building a messaging app to running Twitter, the business that sells ads next to those messages.
Run the same thing but for number of people larger than a single server can handle: A an engineer or two for bug catching and resource allocations and a few engineers to build it using software tools for caching and load balancing.
The same thing but tens of millions around the globe: A few engineers to run the thing, A few to keep an eye on the network around the globe and access quality, a few to mitigate hostile behaviour. To build the thing you need a few people with knowledge on distributed systems and specialised people on 3rd party products for CDN and its management. Of course you need the people to build the thing and its UI too.
Oh, so you want to make money from it? You need people to build tools which will interface with your thing to deliver things like ads and special functions. Now you need to replicate all of the previous stuff but this time for your money making software.
Europe says data collection should be like X, UK says should be like Y and the USA should be like Z. Now the people who built the thing can't go home and leave it to the maintainers because they need to modify how things work all the time.
Israel wants to know some info about someone, Turkey wants the some specific data collected and some tweets must not be visible in Turkey, Saudis say they don't want some type of tweets to exist etc. Now you need people to build these things when still don't mess up with the EU, UK, USA practices. Once again you replicate a lot of people but with special duties for special requirements.
Oh crap, some pedos are posting very illegal stuff and others are running massive spam or political opinion manufacturing operations and everyone blames you. You need to create tools to interface with your product to tackle these things. Once again a lot of engineers are needed because you don't simply run an SQL query from your local database, so you need people who understand how to make the thing work on your scale.
Something can no longer scale and you need an alternative solution, you build that alternative solution with a team of engineers but the old stuff can't just go away because some other systems depend on it and it will take years to change their thing so maybe you simply keep the old stuff around together with their engineers?
Before you know it, hundreds or even thousands of people are working on it. Elon firing content safety team is probably about untangling the mess and not about love for sexual predators or fascist or something.
I don't know about the reality of Twitter but having seen how sausage is made in some large companies, I will speculate that it's a build up over time as the nature of the business evolved. Knowing how things work today it's probably possible to simplify it with a complete re-write but how many re-writes go well?
[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1616706530841333761?s=20
Thank you.
For real though: He has proven time again that he lies on trivial matters.
Regrettably my trust in him telling the truth is at rock bottom now. It used to be at the same level as other marketing departments/generic politicians but dropped over time.
In either case, still a good reason to take with a grain of salt, though one should do that for everyone anyway unless they're talking about their specialist subject.
When Elon very recently reassured stockholders that he wouldn't sell, he didn't have an accident when he had two selloff events worth billions. It's no surprise that someone would lie for billions, but Elon will risk his reputation by lying just to destroy a rescue worker for offending him over social media. Lying is not merely some accidental or defensive maneuver that Elon employs when his back is against the wall; dishonesty is very much part of his tactical repertoire for public speech.
I still try to cultivate an attitude of looking for the best in people despite this.
However, the point is more: it's still bad even if it's the lesser of the two.
I'm willing to trust him more over time (as I would most other people) but he's got to earn it. E.g. Bill Gates managed to do that to a degree.
Not that the (sometimes) richest person in the world cares, but he has squandered any up front good will in unforced lie after unforced lie over trivial matters. I've come to the conclusion that he's a particular self centered person (including his interest of the day) with a strong tendency toward pettiness and a severe lack of skill to shrug things of.
Since he's still rich and I don't have to deal with him outside the internet we'll both be fine I think.
Funding secured!
For some reason headcount seems to matter in valuation.
Ironically as Musk cut the headcount he probably cut the valuation.
The purchase of Twitter may go down as one if the biggest value destruction events in history.
Seems like 550 engineers could be plenty productive if in the right scenario (emphasis on if).
Musk being the archetypal Mr First Principles Guy, he probably thought just the same: "it's a simple webapp, how hard can it be?"
Both are unwanted features.
It's the 'Following' tab that gives you the old 'latest Tweets first' feed.
Ha ha…. I bet you’re thinking it’d be better rewritten in Ruby on Rails!
I'm not sure if this is a joke, an old Twttr reference, or just ignorance. But early Twitter was Ruby on Rails.
Again, the media really knew how to fool and create pure hysteria and manipulation to get almost everyone believing everything they write.
[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...
Your own citation even fails to agree with you deranged premise.
Certainly you can make a microblog service with less than 500 engineers, but there is a lot of work invested in their datacenters (from physically managing the machines to their network / orchestration control plane). That can even be outsourced as many companies do, but it ain't free.
I am actually a fan of cycles where "no new features" is a priority, making systems less fragile and tollerate the weekend / holiday helps you sleep at night, and sleeping at night is nice.
To think you necessarily need thousands of them, though, is a stretch.
I think people have drunk the kool aid over the past decade of 'growth-driven' startup where the game was to hire as many engineers as possible as fast as possible. This is what is partially fueling the current job reduction cycle in the industry. There are simply more engineers on the payroll than needed to deliver a profitable product.
Bugs exposed by other teams using that component will go unfixed and will need to be patched around by the caller. New features that might have used component X will be sidelined because no one wants to put more load on it or risk their feature on a component that people have started whispering about in the corridors. What is worse is that the people frantically spending their days patching and repairing this Titanic below decks do not see the iceberg and do not have enough manpower to turn the ship even if they did, the people who could help give warning or helped prevent the problem left a while ago. Eventually this component is going to get stressed, some lingering bug will get triggered, or some other system elsewhere in the architecture diagram will fail and shed load to our component X that is barely keeping up and it too will fail. The danger for Twitter is that the failure could cascade through multiple poorly-maintained systems and lead to a much bigger problem.
The fact Twitter hasn't died shows that Elon fired a good engineering team.