I was part of a team that built Houseparty, a video chat application that had millions of concurrent users, and it had, at peak, about 30 great devs.
Twitter can survive Musk's cuts. It might not be pretty, and I think he's an ass in many ways (and I've interviewed with him!) But he's not wrong that it was bloated.
Yeah, no. I also worked at Google and also understand what real traffic is. Houseparty had millions of users, Google had millions of QPS. Twitter probably has millions of QPS, but our backend dev lead was from twitter, and Houseparty had more real load.
I won’t disagree that Twitter was massively bloated, but part of that is because they had so many different business areas of focus.
People like to oversimplify what it does, if it was only sharing tweets and images, sure you could get by with 20 or 30 engineers. But they are a self service ad network, a video upload site, a live streaming service, an analytics service and I’m sure I’m missing others.
Now, if you figure 20 engineers per service, plus moderation staff, sales, g&a, etc… you can easily hit hundreds (if not thousands) of people necessary to just keep things going.
Twitter can survive Musk's cuts. It might not be pretty, and I think he's an ass in many ways (and I've interviewed with him!) But he's not wrong that it was bloated.