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Twitter's high ROI engineering work

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27 points by steviesands · 12 comments

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rideontime

He really had no idea what he was buying, didn't he?

davydm

funny how the argument that Elon knows nothing by bringing up RPCs is backed by (in part) a trace diagram showing RPC's all over the place.

slow clap

  • zimpenfish

    > Elon knows nothing by bringing up RPCs

    As best I understand the Twitter spat, he was claiming the client was making 1000 RPCs to generate the home timeline - hence it being slower in India where mobile internet is slower. Except the Android dev pointed out it was actually only 6 (IIRC) calls from the client and slowness had nothing to do with that.

    • tjchear

      Didn't Elon clarify that he's referring to the RPCs between services in the BE?

      • zimpenfish

        Possible he did, I suppose, but I never saw it in any of the recaps / threads. But also wouldn't make a lick of sense talking about India vs US for speed...

      • guax

        So there is a specific BE only for a region that is slow but another that is not?

  • sn0w_crash

    These people are really good at “dunking on you” on Twitter

    Upon closer inspection, they’re full of s*t

sn0w_crash

The Twitter product has not meaningfully changed or evolved in 10 years.

Revenue and user growth and product stagnated. So who cares about optimizing a further 100ms improvement or what OSS they maintained?

The “interesting stuff” you see in this post is what many engineers love to do. Make work for the sake of work. It doesn’t always translate into growth.

  • usednet

    > The Reddit product has not meaningfully changed or evolved in 10 years

    > The Apple product has not meaningfully changed or evolved in 10 years

    > The WhatsApp product has not meaningfully changed or evolved in 10 years

    • sn0w_crash

      How are these good examples? Those product’s revenue streams and user bases have grown tremendously.

      Twitter’s workforce bloat has outpaced both its users, revenue, and its share price.

  • agentdrtran

    > The Twitter product has not meaningfully changed or evolved in 10 years.

    In the last few years alone they made huge changes like Blue, reader mode, ad-free articles, super follows, birdwatch, spaces/ticketed spaces, the list goes on.

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