> how does it persuade you of that?

By flowing from many people think it's bloat - I'll tell you what's really going on to tiny team of 1~3 built whole infra for critical component.

I'm not really trying to make commentary on whether or not Twitter engineering was bloat, or whether or not I think it'll hit problems in the future. Just commenting on the fact that the article broke my expectations a little bit as a reader.

> In a start-up many of these roles can be ignored, becaus growth > stability. In a large organization, part of the bloat helps insure a certain amount of stability that's necessary to keep an organization alive.

It also (a) increases the bus factor, [1] and (b) allows people to take vacations and time off without having to watch their phones like hawk.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

>removing engineers won't instantly crash the product. It'll happen slowly

It's amazing to me how many people following the Twitter saga, some familiar with or actually working in technology, thought that Twitter would crash within days of the engineers being fired. And because it didn't, the job cuts are justified.

> If the current state of affairs at Twitter keeps up, it'll probably be a slow descent into chaos.

It's not like Twitter was bug free before. How many times it annoyingly refreshed the timeline while I was reading something, or when it shows notification that it failed to send the DM, and when you retry it says "you've already wrote this", or you open the reply dialog, but it freezes, has no send button at all, so you have to re-open it. All of this was happening to me pretty regularly long before Elon came along.

As we all know, just hiring more people is not necessarily the solution to every problem, and to me it seems it was exactly what Twitter tried to do in the past. Now they deconstructed it to the bare bones, which will clearly show what are the core problems and requirements. They basically turned Twitter back into a startup. And from that new starting point they can hire again to cover the needs as they arise. If they succeed it will be a huge success as they'll end up with far more optimal team (and huge savings), and of course, if they fail to catch up with problems it will be a huge failure. We'll see how well Musk can manage it...

Twitter had 7,500 employees. most of the roles you mention (security engineers, code reviews, data architecture, HR, internal audit teams, content moderators, scrum master) are not bloat. So the question is what are the other 7000 people doing?

>Bugs will creep in,

https://twitter.com/IlluminatiGanga/status/15946097904324444...

new members joining in 1970. hmmm.

I think Twitter was stuck in a not-especially profitable niche. They shift into fast-mode to get out of it and find a better spot, then they can shift back into stable mode once they occupy a better equilibrium.

That said, there are lots of bugs in Twitter now, today, when they presumably had the benefit of being in stable mode for a long time. For example, Twitter regularly refreshes and loads new tweets while I'm reading them, pushing the tweet I was in the middle of reading out of view. That seems like a pretty silly bug to exist in a mature product. I regularly reach a state where I have to kill the app and relaunch it because all of the "back" commands just minimize the app instead of taking me back to the timeline. I could go on.

data architecture is bloat?

Have you implemented a system which stores hundreds of billions of pieces of media content and makes different slices of them immediately available to hundreds of millions of users?

> and I can keep going

You focused mostly on additive bloat, there's also multiplicative bloat in the form of multiple teams focused on building separate versions of the same product to increase likelihood of success and empire building where leaders don't actually have a remit large enough to support the team size they have, but they have woven a narrative that defends the necessity nonetheless. Put everything together and teams are very easily 6x+ larger than they absolutely need to be to get a product into market.

How difficult can a platform like Twitter be? I am convinced you can run the entire tech stack with a team of a 100 people.

The whole point of the article is twitter was designed to be resilient. (and it shows, twitter has great uptime). And the whole point of resiliency, beyond not negatively impacting customer experience, is to buy engineers time to fix things when stuff breaks.

What we are watching is a massive failure event right now and the question really is if there's enough time for twitter management to fill in the gaps before there's an outage.

Your post made me think of this discussion about how mature organizations naturally have to pivot towards maintenance:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-praise-of-maintenance/

Based on the recent disclosures it seems that any new security issues pales in comparison to the current ones.

if 80% of knowledge is missing due to 80% of people being gone then the team who built it failed to document or automate themselves out of a job, meaning even other people on the team in the good ol' days would still have faced the same issues and merely had to chase down the original authors. that doesn't sound like it would be completely true. maybe 5-20% of un-documented knowledge walked out the door? completely rough guess. but even 0.5% of knowledge can sometimes be critical.

They will stagnate and have more failed launches than Space X.

I'd argue that growth relies on stability, and if you don't have stability, you'll randomly lose growth.

> The article touches a really small [...] subject.

That's how it couldn't prove the claim.

We are entering the windows ME era of Twitter