[tomkin]

I think you're making a few assertions that would be more honestly served if you conceded as assumptions.

Twitter validated it's own employee count with an absurd overhead.

It has concerns of scale, performance and user experience. So does GitHub, Shopify, Pandora, Spotify, Snapchat, LinkedIn, MailChimp, WordPress.com, etc, and yet, manage will much less resources and overhead. Oh yea, and fucking Netflix - which - as far as I can tell - has much more and difficult problems to solve at a much faster pace. They employ 4,700.

As of this comment, Twitter employs 3,583 people.

What they needed to do was hire 100 talented people, allow third-party clients, try and occasionally acknowledge the developers who implement their platform, and stopped with the asinine "we're trying so hard guys" blog posts. We get it. You're having a hard time and you want everyone off of your grass. That's fine, but don't come asking for sugar at my house 'cause you ain't Beyonce.

[rtpg]

Netflix has less "hard problems" in terms of operations than Twitter.

With Twitter everyone's data is interconnected. With Netflix, you could theoretically have each server just be completed isolated from each other (modulo account management).

Netflix has operational problems to solve in terms of bandwidth, though. There's definitely major difficulties there, but they're of a different variety to the high coupling Twitter deals with

[tomkin]

I'll say what I've said in another thread on this matter, which is, no one outside of this bubble buys this shit. There are global supply-chain networks that move millions of products, and they don't employ as much as a micro-blogging platform. It's hubris to think we're so special.

[williamscales]

I absolutely agree with you. Modern software "engineering" is much closer to craftsmanship than true engineering practice.