my anecdote, i dealt with 2 managers, 2 tech leads, an architect type person that would jump in randomly, the skip level that would jump in, plus if i got embedded on a project, i had more leads, a pm, more managers to deal with. when i first started at twitter i was 3 people removed from jack, when i left, i couldn't even tell you what the chain was anymore.
to the second point, i dont think i had a single good manager the entire time, i had a lot. the only one that wasnt terrible was the one that phoned it in and didn't bother me and just let me work. i never reached out to a manager there for technical advice.
I hope people get a chance to watched the video if/when(already?) is leaked. It was embarrassing for him. That was so weird, he is incompetent. He has no ability to explain himself or share his thoughts in a way that makes any sense. Showing up 10minutes late to start with a weird 15min ramble... how is that a good idea?
I watched the whole thing by (friend leaked it to me). Was pretty unremarkable, mostly softball questions, and to extent he took controversial opinions he expressed them in very soft ambiguous ways. Remote work being a good example, he’s saying someone can be remote if they do great work which raises the question of what great work is. But if anything he downplayed his insisted on RTO by saying he pushed for it at Tesla since you can’t make cars remotely unlike software.
If you hate Elon , that’s your opinion , clearly many Twitter employees don’t want him. But if you think that if these videos are leaked people will agree that it was embarrassing, you will be disappointed. It was an extreme dry and boring interview and if there was any aspect that stood out it was how low energy the whole thing was.
The only question is raises is how incompetent is this journalist. the source code is locked. It's not everyone is committing stuff...
What I'm learning from this how little anyone posting shit on the internet actually knows. Misinformation from incompetence or just trying to be a know it all everywhere.
i don't really have an incentive to do that, i just wanted to comment on how inaccurate this was written and share a thought about our "news" based off my knowledge. The author shouldn't have written this if they don't understand what they're writing about. Or cant verify their leaked information.
Probably most news is misinformed if you think about.
still speculation without being an employee (even if it did some research from blogs which seems to be more then most do) twitter should just write their own post and shut everyone up already. idk why the company is so secretive about everything. its clearly not doing them any favors
I'd love for twitter to take a more active role in this, but from what I understand, twitter employees are forced to be pretty tight-lipped about these things.
I tried to reference as many of the official sources as possible (in addition to drawing on my past experienced at Amazon + Facebook).
Twitter, in general, is a remarkably open company internally. Because it leaks things like a sieve and has people dig into its products for new stuff, this ends up being the case externally as well. Most major A/B tests are announced via the various official Twitter accounts, for example, and employees regularly tweet about or solicit feedback about new features. Editing tweets, for example, had a concerted effort to avoid it from leaking externally (specifically compiled out of builds rather than being behind a feature flag, codenames, documents mostly put behind “do not distribute internally”) and it was still a somewhat open secret, since you could stumble upon it in the codebase or when searching for bugs. Companies that “care” take far more extreme steps to hide things than Twitter does, or I would argue even knows how to do. It’s not in their DNA.
With that said, the timeline is somewhat secret sauce but mostly it’s just a glop of various parameters that aren’t very interesting to share. Like, how are you going to even describe it to someone? It’s easy to talk about changing a button color, but “we promote retweets 10% more now” is boring and not really something that most people care about.
yeah these companies act like were all protecting the coca cola formula or building nukes or something. like really, its blocks of text being put in order. the hr, pr, comms, leaders or w/e seem so disconnected. im sure there is some bs reason like were protecting the company, i think its misguided being so closed off though and missing the bigger picture of building trust with users.
> yeah these companies act like were all protecting the coca cola formula or building nukes or something. like really, its blocks of text being put in order
The Coca-Cola formula seems like a pretty good analogy, honestly. Most people can't tell the difference between different cola recipes, and there probably isn't anything in the recipe itself that's responsible for the company's success. Not as much as marketing, and simply being in the right place at the right time, anyway.
"A former Twitter employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters said the company has considered an “algorithm marketplace,” in which users can choose different ways to view their feeds. But efforts to offer more transparency have proved challenging, the person said, because of how tied Twitter’s algorithms are to other parts of the product. Opening it up could reveal trade secrets and invite abuse, the person said."
its almost like its a place where people can interact directly.
thanks for calling out scale and engineering problems btw! sometimes i think people think we're sitting around all day throwing darts at a wall of pictures of conservatives to pick who to ban next.
I don't think you can make a judgement about a company. I think its really about the team and manager.
My first team at twitter was horrible, from the team members to managers, toxic and stressful. I was stuck doing after hours work, and oncall was miserable with constant off hours pages and no one had desire to do something about it.It was terrible for my mental health. I couldn't wait to leave. I switched teams and it was like joining a new company, unbelievable. People respected my opinion, no one was an asshole, everyone was polite and friendly. There's constant stupid shit going on with the directors and vps, doing reorgs or w/e trying to justify their existence i guess but none of that effects me. Plenty of of coworkers and friends at work have had similar experience. Some teams are truly hellish nightmares and some are great.
I thought the kernel was pretty stable. My first team at twitter I think we ran into 2 or 3 kernel bugs that year. I couldn't believe it but for some problems the blaming the kernel is a real debugging step (and even the bios lol). I think I had two perf problems turn into upstream patches thanks to the kernel team.
It's not only about bugs, but if you know your workload and your systems you can do some tricks a general purpose kernel can't do to tweak it for your needs and get a benefit here or there for your code.
