Comment by nextlevelwizard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nextlevelwizard | Hacker News Reader

nextlevelwizard

People were appalled by the Twitter firings, but seriously, how many people does it take to run old, established, (micro)blogging platform?

I don't know the number, but the number before the firings was too high. From what I've gathered by watching from the sidelines they are probably now gone too far south from the correct number.

However the lesson to learn is not to not fire people. Yes. Of course it sucks when you lose your job, especially if it was for no fault of your own - just because some middle manager jack-off got too budget one year and decided to hire everyone with body temperature above room temperature. But we need to start culling the herd.

We have too many noobs who are just wreaking havoc across our code bases, making products and user experience worse. Hardware gets faster and faster every single year, but end users don't see any benefits. We see some benefit since we are on the top of the food chain enjoying our $5K max specced Macs, but even then we should see much faster and way more reliable software than we see today. It is so fucking sad when I try to load a website and it takes 30-60 seconds for all the javascript bloat just to get to me and I'm even running all kind of blockers so I won't be getting nearly as much bloat as a normal end user.

Tech used to be cool. Now it is just money all the way down. Just think how fucking cool the current AI wave would be without all the neutering that is going on since none of the big companies dare to take a risk and actually let people have even a bit of fun.

Are you seriously trying to put the blame for software bloat and bad UX on "noobs" implementing things poorly?

Popular web pages being choked with ads and modal banners is the result of business decisions to put those there. Jira being notoriously laggy and confusing is the result of prioritizing feature breadth over UX. Apps being built in heavy frameworks is the result of founders and CTOs deciding that they can ship faster and be more likely to make it to the next funding round if they color within the lines than if they focus on speed. Major company products often being poorly designed is the result of organizational fragmentation and lack of a global perspective.

Does everybody always do the best job they could within the constraints they have? Obviously not. Are the problems with technology in general primarily the result of _bad engineers making implementation mistakes_? Absolutely not!

It seems like you're making a point of outrage of something that's evident. If you hire way more than the market was used to, you'll hire less qualified people, and unless tooling is better to replace the reduced skills and experience, lower quality software will be produced. I agree OP was doing a lot of drama about "noobs ruining everything" which is also a stretch, but this negative effect should be self evident.

It's not actually self-evident: even if you take for granted that less-qualified people get hired, that could mean that companies invest more in training, or that the marginal bit of software is equally good but slower to produce than if more-qualified engineers had written it (because it took more code reviews and produced more technical debt along the way), etc.

Besides, that's barely pertinent to my point, which is that if you see bugs, you can probably blame them on engineers, but if you see design and product choices you don't like, attributing it to "noob" programming is bizarre.

Exactly.

In the last 20 years, if there is one thing that really changed in this profession was the amount of leeway developers have to criticize product and UX decisions. We're approaching "none".

The amount of political capital you have to spend just to avoid bloat is not available to most senior developers, let alone to "noobs".

>Are you seriously trying to put the blame for software bloat and bad UX on "noobs" implementing things poorly?

>Popular web pages being choked with ads and modal banners is the result of business decisions to put those there

Who do you think has implemented all that shitty ad and banner code? It for sure wasn't a professional. If ads had initially been implemented by competent programmers they wouldn't have contained nearly as many avenues for abuse and actual malware spreading mechanisms.

More so professional programmers can pick their work. Noobs have to settle for writing shitty ad code.

>bad engineers making implementation mistakes

Most of these noobs aren't even "engineers" they are bunch of near tech illiterate "normies" who have just graduated from two week code camp. These are the people who unironically say "my job is just copy-pasting from StackOverflow". I am sorry to say this, but you (whoever is reading this and hard disagreeing) might be the problem.

> but seriously, how many people does it take to run old, established, (micro)blogging platform?

How many people does it take to run an international advertisement platform with a microblogging service?

I mean it is all a matter of framing here. I hardly believe most of twitter staff has been developers and systems people, but many people who talk with potential customers, deal with specific problems that arise from being present in 200+ countries etc. If you're doing that seriously that takes a certain amount of people.

Also: of course a company can downsize. But it matters how it is done. Defending the disregard for the human lives the way this was done had wins you nothing except the chance to be affected by similar methods yourself in the future.

That aside: Tech used to be cool in a time where tech people didn't have to care for all of that. When it was just us building our lego towers. But now lego towers run the world and building them the same with disregard for the outside world would be truly deranged.

If your business requires thousands of people to still not make profit maybe - just maybe - your business sucks and you shouldn't be in it?

Sure. But that is a different question.

I'd argue what twitter is doing shouldn't even be a business in the first place, but something a public institution of some sorts runs.

>People were appalled by the Twitter firings

Mostly due to the manner in which it was done, not so much the necessity or lack thereof (depending on your viewpoint).

There's classy ways to do layoffs, and then there's whatever the hell that was.

Tbf nothing about twitter was or is classy. The org was a dumpster fire before and it’s still a dumpster fire just a different one.

Okay, but it was still no way to treat people.

How is it different/worse than what Facebook just did?

https://www.theverge.com/23551060/elon-musk-twitter-takeover...

Panic to literally print code along with other arbitrary hoops that sometimes materialize, encouraging employees to sleep at the office; a general climate of fear. The list goes on.

If people had to work whole day and sleep in office after firings of their colleagues, I would not call it sensible in any way.

If you just want to argue against your imagination I suggest notepad.

Engineers were hired for growth. Just maintaining a platform will result in the slow decline you are seeing at IBM. You need a culture of innovation to tap into new opportunities and for that you need to have engineers that are not working on just maintaining the core platforms.

I agree that the balance is tech hires was skewed in recent years. That was mostly because tech companies naively assumed the COVID hyper growth was sustainable.

> how many people does it take to run old, established, (micro)blogging platform

Not everything scales. Compliance doesn’t, for example. You need people to handle compliance across regions. That means lawyers, product managers, and ultimately engineers.

>>> People were appalled by the Twitter firings, but seriously, how many people does it take to run old, established, (micro)blogging platform?

You underestimate the amount of people it takes. There are so many things to do, dev, SRE, ops, support etc.

> how many people does it take to run old, established, (micro)blogging platform?

It depends; do you plan to add new features, keep servers running, offer high level of security and a nice community while operating on a large scale?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com