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by gjulianm 1299 days ago
> If anything, he repeatedly succeeded in building world class software and hardware teams for Tesla, SpaceX, and a few other companies

The point is that Twitter doesn't really needed someone to build a world class software and hardware team. The technical challenges in reliability and speed seemed pretty much solved or on track to be solved already. The problem of Twitter was that they never knew how to properly manage the community and make the company profitable.

Twitter doesn't have a tech problem, it has a community problem.
1 comments
jillesvangurp 1299 days ago
Exactly. it had a team problem. I think it's safe to use past tense now because that team is mostly gone now. It still has some team challenges but those he can fix with strategic hires and hard work.

Fixing the community starts with rolling back all the things that clearly did not work. He's using the sledge hammer method there too. So, not very subtle but generally just getting of rid of a lot of failed and failing policy.

The technical challenges in speed and scaling are not challenges at all anymore. Twitter built a lot of stuff in house when you couldn't get that stuff as a commodity. That has changed since then. You need a cache, you can get one from any number of cloud providers or spin up something off the shelf you run yourself. Same with databases, CDNs, large scale object storage, search infrastructure, message brokers, and all the rest. So, yes, there might be a need for changing some of that necessitated by some key people disappearing but it's not a massive technical challenge.

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gjulianm 1299 days ago
> Fixing the community starts with rolling back all the things that clearly did not work.

And which ones are those? Knowing what did and did not work is an actual challenge by itself.

> You need a cache, you can get one from any number of cloud providers or spin up something off the shelf you run yourself. Same with databases, CDNs, large scale object storage, search infrastructure, message brokers, and all the rest. So, yes, there might be a need for changing some of that necessitated by some key people disappearing but it's not a massive technical challenge.

The massive technical challenge is migrating existing infrastructure to something off the shelf, then finding and fixing the new bugs in that existing infrastructure and/or your deployment/configuration. That shouldn't be underestimated.

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jillesvangurp 1298 days ago
> The massive technical challenge is migrating existing infrastructure to something off the shelf

It's short term disruptive and might involve some fail whales. And then it is solved again. Break it, fix it. Like it or not, that seems to be the plan. If you accept things might temporarily break, it's going to be a lot easier to act.

It's a microblog, not star ship. At least from Elon Musk's point of view, there's going to be a difference between those two and the amount of brain cycles he's going to dedicate to things breaking or not. He's not going to be afraid to break the team (check), the platform (still running fine), or the community (in progress, engagement seems up so far).

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