If you're gonna condescend like in that last line, your spelling ought to be impeccable.
Security patches... so 10 full-time engineers ought to take care of that?
"Thousands of dependencies" was a mistake. The ideal is minimal complexity.
Any browser or OS decides to commit a breaking change (rare), you bring in contractors.
Scaling up and down (and out and in) is handled for you automatically by cloud services now without anyone lifting a finger. "Fells" weird to be explaining that on HN.
Bottom line, you don't need thousands of engineers to keep Twitter running for "the next few days to week or two (at most)."
When has the world NOT been changing? The leadership of Twitter changed also.
twitter is mostly run in their own datacenters, and does not have autoscaling. so capacity overall is more or less fixed, though how much capacity is given to each service seems to be human adjusted.
the lack of autoscaling at twitter, imo, is worrisome as it sort of hints that the system might not be as mature in the self-healing department as compared to other large tech companies. time will tell.
you are right though, you don't need thousand of engineers to keep twitter running a few weeks. you also don't need a driver for a car driving a straight highway (until it bends). how many engineers are needed for maintenance? who knows. I don't think we have answers, we just have what elon decided.
disclaimer: facts based on twitter threads/online reading, not a twitter employee or anyone with first-hand inside knowledge.
By what I’ve heard from people who worked there they do have autoscaling but it’s services running on things like Mesos clusters instead of someone else’s data centers. That can lead to some real cost savings but requires people to run, and most of them just left the building.
Security patches... so 10 full-time engineers ought to take care of that?
"Thousands of dependencies" was a mistake. The ideal is minimal complexity.
Any browser or OS decides to commit a breaking change (rare), you bring in contractors.
Scaling up and down (and out and in) is handled for you automatically by cloud services now without anyone lifting a finger. "Fells" weird to be explaining that on HN.
Bottom line, you don't need thousands of engineers to keep Twitter running for "the next few days to week or two (at most)."
When has the world NOT been changing? The leadership of Twitter changed also.