There was that Project Veritas expose that revealed a Senior Engineer at Twitter did 4 hours of work per week and he said everyone else did the same thing.

It makes perfect sense because when Jack was part time CEO of Twitter he was known to spend less than a full work day at the company per week. Productivity tends to trickle down, it's contagious.

Much like a super high performer on a team tends to lift 1x engineers on the team to 1.5x - 2x engineers, I've observed.

Parag Agrawal as a CTO shipped essentially zero features. In fact, Twitter got noticeably worse over the years. Periscope and Vine were genuine innovations, both cast to the side.

You could get to the truth by reading between the lines in the whistleblower report after they fired Mudge, whom Jack brought in as an infosec consultant. I'd suggest reading it, it's quite an eye opener to pre-Musk Twitter. Notably their security culture was described as being 10 years behind industry standards, over half of their nearly 500,000 servers were running unpatched OSes that were EOL and no longer receiving updates, over 25% of employee computers had security updates disabled, etc. Over half their employees had access to prod. It reads like the dumpster fire you would expect from a year 1 startup yet their literal army of essential, irreplaceable, webshit cybergeniuses allowed all this to happen under their watch. Any rational person would read this and conclude, "What were these people doing all day?"

Why do new features need to be added? Like one of the worst obsessions a developer or team can have is to add new features for the sake of it, breaking things that people took for granted or torpedoing other efforts.

A lot of Twitters headcount was specifically devoted to serving certain regions. For example, Twitter had integration with multiple different game services and specific regional functionality. They had a large API that they had to maintain, update and respond to dev requests.

A lot of what happens isn't visible.