It says 17% in the article. This is obviously a massive number, but just wondering where the 28% number is coming from? https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/13/twilio-layoffs-1500-employee...
Regardless, though, it seems to me a bit disingenuous to suggest that an outage now is correlated with a layoff from 5 months ago, let alone causal. Even with the more-recent layoff, Twilio is still well above its 2020 employee count, which should be more than sufficient to keep things running (and then some).
(Disclosure: former long-tenured Twilio employee; resigned a year ago.)
That being said, a 5 month delay is not at all surprising in the time between critical people were laid off and major issues arose.
Most systems are designed to run on their own (developers like to be able to go on holiday). The real problems arise when those systems are changed, and/or upgraded.
Regardless, I'm glad the title has been changed, as it was just unnecessary editorializing.
Any engineer at the company can add a small extra feature here and there to a system where the expert is gone.
But the issue is when that expert was maintaining a vision over their part of the platform, and keeping all of the smaller changes in-line with proper architecture for that system (knowing why we don’t do x, etc). The expert is able to push back against features that may cause problems, or suggest better ways to solve the goal. Laying off that expert will mean the things that they were protecting in the past are no longer protected. So the newbies comes in and add some change that creates an n+1 query, which might not be a big deal. But then they change some other functionality later that makes it n^2+1. And by not understanding the system, their changes compound over time to bring major issues to the system.
But small changes are fine. That’s why it takes so long for quality to suffer when you remove the experts.
And you don’t always know who the experts are either, especially as company leadership. It’s not always the person with a big title. Managers may know better, depending on how technical they are.
(I was thinking the same though.)