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by rodlette 886 days ago
A fair conclusion.

SREs predicated Twitter would crumble when Twitter's SRE team was laid off. It had some hiccups, but seems stable now.

I suppose the next line of defence is that it takes a while for architecture to crumble.

Time will tell whether that's accurate, or a No True Scotsman.

4 comments

It sounds like the SREs did a good job of making resilient services
Takeaway is building resilient services is bad for job security lol.
Disclaimer: I've worked in SRE.

My position is that early SRE solved the hard parts, before I was involved. Services and platforms became reliable. The field is mature. SREs still point to risks, but execs have called their bluff.

The takeaway is to make sure you are actually creating value. Maybe Twitter's SREs were not actually improving reliability much.

>SREs predicated Twitter would crumble when Twitter's SRE team was laid off. It had some hiccups, but seems stable now.

I think SREs knew better than to claim such. I saw tons of non-SREs claim that Twitter would surely immediately collapse. Then the 2022 FIFA World Cup occurred immediately after the mass layoffs ... and Twitter kept on working.

They also vastly scaled back the number of services operating though. This whole thing of saying its stable with x << 100 % of staff is kind of nonsense when it its users, revenue, and features are also << what it used to be.
I don't use xitter so forgive my ignorance. What services did they scale back?
My anecdotal impression is the pace at rolling out changes and features seems to have also increased.