Reddit has a similar number of MAU and 1/10 the number of staff Twitter had. And I don't think their tech stack is all that spectacular, probably worse than Twitter's. Yet, their site runs just fine.
The fact that Twitter just raptured away 50%+ of their workforce and things are still running mostly the way they did before indicates, to me at least, that Twitter must have been one of the better-run engineering orgs on the planet.
I wonder how many redundancies are for technical roles and how many are for non technical roles (the "political/editorial wing" of the company such as the "curation team", the "human rights" team).
I would hope that their production deployments are fairly stable. If the app was crashing and riddled with known bugs at this point they’d be one of the worst run.
I’m betting on the opposite. If it doesn’t completely fail just trying anything is likely an improvement. I’ve never spoken to anyone who liked Twitter. It’s always just a means to an ends
Agreed. He probably didn’t let go many infra people. If some product teams were reduced in size and will become slower at butchering the UI, the user will only benefit.
A couple of former Twitter people I know have made similar comments hearing that plenty of good ops people were cut. That sounds like the usual PE death cycle getting started: they’re not critical to daily operations so things are fine and you can say “look, I’m a smart manager” until something breaks. After a while, customers get tired of declining service and the process accelerates.
I too test the happy path once and assume there's no problems.