> I was partly expecting the rest of the article to explain to my why exactly it wasn't just bloat
Same here. I guess his header was on point in why Twitter is still up; but I was also interested in hearing about why Twitter actually needs all those people. If it can be run with 50-80% of the staff gone, that does sound like some bloat at least.
Slack space leads to innovations, like developing infrastructure automation and improving capacity planning. SRE as a practice needs slack space for operations teams to work on improvements and fixes in addition to BAU fault fixing, deployments and patching.
