Right. It’s not like if all the engineers walk out it’s suddenly going to fall over. It’s that when an issue comes up there may not be the expertise on hand to fix it. So the remaining twitter engineers should expect a rough time over the coming months.
You assume that small issues are ever prioritized in the first place. My experience with large tech organizations is that their priories are driven by internal culture, not best practices, just like any other company.
Although I haven't worked at Twitter, if it is anything like the places I have worked at, the small issues get ignored because nobody makes their career on things that don't show up on investor / shareholder / upper management radars. If it can get papered over so it ends up being someone else's problem in the future, what actually gets worked on is flashier things like redesigning the timeline AGAIN so users spend more time on the website or (in the case that caused me to work for small startups again) spend three weeks deciding on a super trivial design decision with 12 stake holders.
There must be some plan for this, though, right? If it were me and I were trying to do more with less I'd plan to cut some features (for instance, are Spaces that critical to the operation? Because it seems like running them would be demanding) and try to migrate things to managed services to reduce the operational load.
I don't have a DR plan for "mad billionaire buys the company", no, but I do agree with the OOM reaper logic - I start cutting the services that use the most resources that are least necessary.
I don't mean that they had one sitting around, but anyone who's stayed with the company has to find this their most urgent priority, I would think, between the focus on cutting operational costs and the simple fact that they have far fewer people around.
Well, that was a bit of a joke, but I have been around the block a few times and been on one side of a merger or other, and gone public to private and back (as an IC/soldier, never been management). The Twitter acquisition is the craziest thing I've ever seen; there's a reason it's big news.
These kinds of things have formal courtship type periods and legal filings that take months, and then they happen, and then executives plan on rolling out layoffs and cost cutting measures over years, not days or weeks, like the "plan" seems to be here. This really is madness, and I can't blame people for thinking the site might just wobble and collapse at some point, though as the author goes into in very nice detail, we do try and build resilient systems. I'm certainly curious how it all plays out, but you won't catch me making any guesses.
This kind of schedule and chaos looks more familiar for acquisitions of a small company I think. I guess it is strange for it to happen to a company of Twitter's size, but I think the big-news aspect of it has more to do with how much journalists use Twitter.
> I guess it is strange for it to happen to a company of Twitter's size, but I think the big-news aspect of it has more to do with how much journalists use Twitter.
I think you hit on the the main point: the reason this is constantly in the mainstream media is because the mainstream media so heavily relied on/still relies on twitter[1].
If this were any other large company imploding in a Musk acquisition we'd see fewer stories about it because it affects journalists less.
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[1] It's going to be especially funny if journalists complain that "#LearnToCode" type of tweeters aren't getting banned, and get told in response to go off and create their own twitter.
No matter where in the political spectrum one may lie, it's always satisfying to see a group being fed their own lines back.
> This kind of schedule and chaos looks more familiar for acquisitions of a small company
That's certainly possible and I wouldn't know what that would look like, and yep, in theory there are lots of financial rules and regulations regarding public companies that Musk made a bit of a hash of.
I can't agree that Twitter's journalist demographic was mostly responsible for this being big news, though I'm sure that plays a part. Musk brings the circus with him wherever he goes, but this was nuts even for him. And any $44 billion tech buyout would be news without those factors.
