It's from someone doing incorrect percentage math. Twilio laid off 11% in September, then another 17% this week. You can't just add percentages; the actual total percentage from pre-September levels is around 26%.
Regardless, though, it seems to me a bit disingenuous to suggest that an outage now is correlated with a layoff from 5 months ago, let alone causal. Even with the more-recent layoff, Twilio is still well above its 2020 employee count, which should be more than sufficient to keep things running (and then some).
(Disclosure: former long-tenured Twilio employee; resigned a year ago.)
It’s unknowable to an outsider, and I agree the claim that the outage is related to the layoffs should not be made.
That being said, a 5 month delay is not at all surprising in the time between critical people were laid off and major issues arose.
Most systems are designed to run on their own (developers like to be able to go on holiday). The real problems arise when those systems are changed, and/or upgraded.
Given that we're talking about Flex, I guarantee you that those systems are changed and upgraded way way way more often than every five months. (I would be surprised if they went an entire month without any significant deployments, let alone five.)
Regardless, I'm glad the title has been changed, as it was just unnecessary editorializing.
Well I think the issue is changes compounding over time.
Any engineer at the company can add a small extra feature here and there to a system where the expert is gone.
But the issue is when that expert was maintaining a vision over their part of the platform, and keeping all of the smaller changes in-line with proper architecture for that system (knowing why we don’t do x, etc). The expert is able to push back against features that may cause problems, or suggest better ways to solve the goal. Laying off that expert will mean the things that they were protecting in the past are no longer protected. So the newbies comes in and add some change that creates an n+1 query, which might not be a big deal. But then they change some other functionality later that makes it n^2+1. And by not understanding the system, their changes compound over time to bring major issues to the system.
But small changes are fine. That’s why it takes so long for quality to suffer when you remove the experts.
And you don’t always know who the experts are either, especially as company leadership. It’s not always the person with a big title. Managers may know better, depending on how technical they are.
