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My job is literally unraveling shit like twitter, trying to keep the lights on with minimal knowledge
The complexity of twitter and the degree of layoffs they’re rumored to have will be extremely difficult to come back from without experiencing some sort of catastrophic failure first. Will require an absolute assload of people to fix it, more than 1x the people who were fired. Maybe 2x. And they’ll have to know what they’re doing. Remains to be seen if those catastrophic failures will be unrecoverable
It just takes one missed maintenance task to bring everything to a pile of rubble, and my understanding is that not only did they fire everyone who does the maintenance tasks, they fired everyone who knows who was supposed to do the maintenance tasks
I think all the people talking about programmers thinking they’re unreplaceable need to learn what ops/infra/SRE/security teams do and what happens when you get rid of them
Thank you. Working with a code stack you’ve not seen before is like learning a new language, and if the language of documentation (if indeed, there is any documentation) isn’t your native language, then it’s gonna be rosetta stone levels of confusion.
It’s not operating normally - it’s perceived to be operating normally, but it’s a ticking time bomb for catastrophic failure and they laid off all the firefighters
It’s also absolutely hemorrhaging money and losing revenue, advertisers are fleeing the platform and a lot of standing business deals have been cancelled because there’s no one left arranging them. It’s not taking down videos with DMCA claims because no one is left to deal with them, which is going to get it into legal trouble. The government is mad bc they fired the CIA regime change team. Capital might not care about long-term technical stability, but it does care about short term profits, intellectual property, and the ability to enforce its hegemony
In no way will this be looked at as a “success”
that is, definitionally, not institutional knowledge. maybe they can keep the wheels from falling off for a while by finding cheap, disposable labor, but that’s only creating exponentially more problems. like i understand and agree with the vague sentiment that computer jobs are all made up bullshit, but that’s because their products are useless/evil, not because labor is somehow unnecessary to production or because they’re not legitimately professional.
It’s also true that a lot of the ancillary labor that goes into these companies is bullshit in someway. Like every boss having a secretary to berate, or the marketing department. They do work, but it’s of no discernable benefit to society. Software engineering is an intellectual labor, and a potentially very valuable one at that. But it’s best value is for building the kind of infrastructure that would destroy capitalism, so instead we do stupid shit with this labor.
Ah of course you are right, unless, of course, you turn out to be wrong
The employees there are being forced to work 60+ hours a week now
And it’s been less than a month
Maybe, but don’t forget that whatever geniuses are desperate enough to take that job will be following the orders of a man who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.
For example, Space X has some good engineers on their team, I’m sure, but the shuttles still leaked piss because Musk is the one calling the shots in the end.
As long as capitalism gives unearned leadership power to the rich and stupid, there is nowhere for these places to go but down, eventually.
