It is insane that this would get past QA or any sort of testing.
Something new on twitter breaks every week. It's wild.
There used to be a bug that wreaked havoc for a short time where you could force anybody to follow you. At the time I don't recall people blaming Twitter's leadership or culture--it was just a bug because software sometimes has bugs.
Yeah, I have. On multiple occasions before Musk took over, Twitter also had bugs.
Even if you think firing like 6/7th of Twitter's staff (or whatever) was a mistake, there's really no arguing that they're making more visible product changes than they have in years. That means that bugs happen. And frankly...proving that a tech company doesn't need that level of bloat is a valuable lesson for the entire software industry. If they overshot and have X% more bugs for now, that's fine. They'll still be dramatically leaner than before.
With this line of thinking, I could say climate change isn't happening because of the temperature outside my house.
I don't care at all, and am just reacting to the phenomenon of folks going "it's definitely worse now, and I know, because I used the product before". OK, great...I used the product before too, and don't perceive that to be true.
Making visible product changes is the easiest thing to do in software.
Yeah, this wasn't a simple staff reduction. Twitter fired something like 80% (?) of their employees. By conventional wisdom, they should have gone down hard and never recovered. There are lots of people in this comment thread who are (dubiously) trying to make the case that they did.
The Twitter example, for better or worse, revealed that tech companies are not just a little bit redundantly staffed...they're employing tons of people who effecitvely just make work for each other.
I've been arguing since the purge that Twitter was in the "Wile E Coyote ran off the cliff and is still treading air" phase, but that argument is getting harder and harder to justify as Twitter somehow stays alive. How could firing all those people really do nothing to the operational success of the company? What were they all doing? Companies don't hire people where they have nothing for them to do. I look at my (BigTech) company and everyone is running around like crazy with 3-5X more tasks in their backlog than they can possibly do. We always need more people. How do you get rid of 80% and just carry on??? Are they all just writing TPS reports for each other to read?
* project is done to 85% effectiveness by <= 1 FTE
* company is flush with cash, and can hire someone to backfill that last 15%
* new person is not fully occupied backfilling that 15%, and therefore *finds new things to do*...which creates more projects that are done to 85% effectiveness
* goto step 1
Anyway, shovel enough money into the boiler during the "hypergrowth" phase, and you can easily end up with lots of people who are all very busy, but just not productive.
I think it's still an open question whether the business is damaged irrecoverably. I guess now they don't have the same reporting requirements, as a private company, but everything I've read suggests they're losing as much money as ever.
Although... you can certainly imagine a world where they both avoided infrastructure-death and managed to sustain the business (not pissing off advertisers, not pissing off power users, no pointless rebrands, etc).
This bug has been happening since the beginning of time. I saw that constantly pre-musk
Today the bugs are back. Things are constantly a problem. This isn't a "well all software has bugs" -- yeah true, but somehow for 7 years twitter was bug-free. Or rather the bugs were quickly caught and fixed. And now... nothing.
Musk got rid of all guardrails, and now we face the consequences.
- Twitter staff were needed - Twitter will fail if the firings continued - He just fired all these useful people
But at the end of the day, Twitter/X is still the same exact thing and runs exactly the same way. It does prove that firing all the slack can change very little but it's a good narrative to cry about Elon Musk and his "sinking soonTM ship".
I find it quite bizarre how some people still try to push some narrative about the site being broken. It's not more broken it was before the takeover outside the odd Spaces dropout (which is a new feature so doesn't really count), but is now better serving its actual mission as an actually unbiased speech platform, radical as that is in the current day. Now X just needs to stay unchanged for ten years to overcome any competition.
And now I click Install in the App Store and "something goes wrong". Simply can’t install it.
There must be UIKit people remaining at X, after all they’re updating the iOS app which must share the same code as the Mac app. But for some reason they don’t update, but leave a broken, uninstallable app on the App Store.