[schmuckonwheels]

Is there a substantive connection?

Like all the doom and gloom after the Twitter layoffs predicting the site would implode and go permanently offline "within a month" which...never happened.

It's also ironic in the sense it implies the indignant people were so bad at their jobs they designed and built a system so fragile it would collapse without constant intervention from thousands of individuals.

You do realize it's possible for an organization to be overstaffed?

[happytoexplain]

This is unrealistic and seems to be biased by some kind of broad un-focused hostility. Yes, maybe they were overstaffed. But it's reasonable to suspect that leadership overcut, given the current climate and the number being 15,000. Your characterization of Twitter predictions relies on cherry-picking and ignores the actual impacts, and there's no evidence that the system goes down without "constant" intervention from "thousands". Your tone also implies that large, complex systems, even if designed well, don't normally require a lot of maintenance from many people.

[schmuckonwheels]

>Your tone also implies that large, complex systems, even if designed well, don't normally require a lot of maintenance from many people.

That's correct.

In the case of Twitter, it was disclosed that many of their systems were running out of date EOL software, to the point of being a security liability, which raises the question: if the systems weren't being maintained, wtf were all those people doing? Taste-testing the free food and cappuccinos?

[montjoy]

> many of their systems were running out of date EOL software, to the point of being a security liability

This is more likely a management problem rather than a staffing problem. Lower level management knows about these kind of things but often they are not incentivized to make them a priority due to a culture focused on growth and “winning”.

[SSLy]

I work in the field. All of the software that's not sold by Huawei is steaming pile of excrements that only has accidental design.

You do need too many people to work with that. Cutting them is asking for pain.

[SoftTalker]

Verizon is a traditional for-profit telco. Not some VC funded startup trying to hit a burn rate. Very unlikely they were overstaffed by 15k, sounds more like overzealous cost-cutting to hit a quarterly target.

[weinberg]

Gotta get those bonuses in the upper levels.

[Lord_Zero]

There were issues and outages for weeks after the layoffs though. Many people also believe its overrun with far more bots than when it had more robust content moderation tools and teams.

Also things break. Vulnerabilities come along that need to be carefully patched and deployed. Tools and packages get depreciated. Updates can be done to save compute, and money. Things don't just hum along with zero intervention by no one for years and years.

[NBJack]

Real-time multi-directional communications over massive geographic areas with tens of thousands of physical cell sites connected to ~140M devices vs... public text messages with media.

I realize your point, but its fair to say maintaining a nationwide physical wireless infrastructure may not be the same as hosting tweets, particularly when outages strike.

[kshacker]

Slight sarcasm ahead—fair warning.

When Twitter did, its CEO may have slept at the office for weeks to make sure problems were resolved.

On the other hand, the Verizon CEO may be shopping for a new boat

[mmooss]

> the doom and gloom after the Twitter layoffs predicting the site would implode and go permanently offline "within a month" which...never happened.

Many think Twitter has imploded, though it's online.

> You do realize it's possible for an organization to be overstaffed?

It's possible to be understaffed or appropriately staffed. Anything is possible!