When will Twitter collapse? (Elon Musk firings)
When you ask on HN whether software companies hire too many engineers most answers are negative. Twitter has lost 50% of its workers and Elon Musk just recently tweeted: "Significant backend server architecture changes rolled out. Twitter should feel faster.", and they've also released new features. HN commenters said that due to the firings, Twitter wouldn't be able to change things without breaking everything in the way anymore. When "Twitter will collapse"?
Relevant post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984823
19 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 55.2 ms ] threadPerhaps it is time for the doomsters to admit that they purposefully were spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt and complete nonsense to predict an imminent collapse that didn't happen after the firings.
Twitter is still running just fine with less than 1,000 engineers and no total 'collapse' happened in weeks since those news reports.
[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...
We used to see the twitter whale a lot in the past but not lately. That hints to the idea that they have harden the infrastructure to tolerate common problems. Given the past problems with these social media companies that were related to a one point of failure that brought down the whole network. I suspect that it takes a lot to bring down the whole system at once.
There won't be any collapse. The remaining engineers are leveling up and understanding what they need to know. My experience has been that if I don't know a system, I can get familiar enough with it within weeks. If for some reason I can't figure out a part then I treat it as a black box and work towards replacing it. If the remaining engineers can't do the same then it's time to get a leader that can help them thru the situation. All these tech companies have spent top dollar to hire the best so they can get thru the knowledge loss relatively soon. There's plenty of brain power left at twitter to get them through the current problems.
The website/service is running but the company appears to have issues with rent payments[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34206993
Also, the number of articles about Elon's activity at Twitter will cause Tesla to collapse. I'm sure Elon has many teams of capable people at each company that does not require constant input from Elon. It's a bit unnerving to see the degree that media has taken this.
Without more details, I'm going to hypothesize that these are just the sort of routine improvements and performance wins that such teams deploy on a semi-regular basis. Anything can be called a "significant architecture change" if you want it to be.
If it is in fact a very major change, though, it was probably in the pipeline long before Elon arrived, given the time it takes to develop and fully test such things. It's quite possible that the past couple months were spent entirely on testing and refining a large-scale change that had already been mostly complete pre-acquisition.
What evidence do we have for this?
He's pushed aggressively for a few specific features, but we don't know how much of the work was done before the layoffs, whether that pace of development is sustainable, and whether it extends beyond his pet projects.
If you use the site you can literally see new changes daily, not all of them are great but at least it's not a stagnated mess like before.
BTW what exactly is better?
I hardly use Twitter but the few times I did, I didn't recognize any change.
I'm starting to see some degradation already -- for example, a bunch of researchers I follow fled to Mastodon, so Twitter is less useful to me than before. I think this is a second-order effect of Musk's cruel/trollish behavior and of the content moderation, sales, legal, and policy teams being gutted, functions which someone who views Twitter as a "software and services company" (his phrasing) probably see as less important.