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The "why hasn’t the site gone down" stuff is the wrong conversation. The engineers built a train engine, and this robber baron held up the train and forced the engineers off. Inertia will keep the train going for a good long while because they did such a good job of building the train.

At some point the engin’s fluids will run out and need topping off. There's a warning system though so someone'll get notified before the engine blows up, so it's entirely possible this hardcore crew of H1Bs pulls it off. (Great job replacing the SSL cert!) At some point the train’s boiler will need retrofitting. A new team could successfully replace the boiler, but doing it while the engine keeps running just isn't an easy job.

The handful of devs and SREs at Twitter will do their damnedest to keep the train, err, site running. They might even succeed. That doesn’t prove the site was over-engineered, it means they built a damn fine train engined that successfully pulled the whole train up and over the mountain pass.

Twitter wasn't run like a lean start-up type business. Because wasn’t one. Society needs better than that. The vulture capitalism mindset is what's wrong with this county. What's the barest minimum I can pay people to work for me? Not; what can I pay them to let them live prosperous lives but what's the bare, subsistence minimum.

America needs a middle class and these people were part of it. You don’t get a middle class by injudiciously paring things down to a not-even-skeleton crew that’s going to be worked till they burn out, only to get fired.

Twitter was only $14 million from profitability in Q2, and any idiot can randomly fire people to find that much in that large an organization, but cutting costs like that is to misunderstand the situation entirely. Just like starving yourself isn't healthy and won’t improve your self image, randomly cutting costs like that saves money, but doesn’t result in a healthy business.



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