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Comment by relueeuler | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, all the takes on how Elon will have engineers shipping so many features is amusing. No sense of mounting tech debt and how that limits your ability to scale. Getting something quick out the door being your only objective. I don’t expect Elon to understand that dynamic, so he will just discover it the hard way when he is confused why all the sudden he can’t ship anything.

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> how that limits your ability to scale.

My guess is that after ~15 years or so, Twitter is probably either At Scale already or never will be.

> he will just discover it the hard way when he is confused why all the sudden he can’t ship anything.

Ship anything? The site works now. How much NRE is required just to keep relaying tweets and showing ads? My guess: not much.

My comment is more about where it is headed. If you have been following Twitter you can read accounts of engineers pulling all-nighters, working over the weekend and “launching” the verification feature. Then, read accounts of users trying to use it but said feature not working. A few iterations of this for different features/products, and it will quickly impact his ability to ship anything (likely due to no automated testing in place, poor design decisions, etc.).

Here is an example from a customer:

https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1588981510916276224?...

What makes you think that Elon does not know about tech debt? He looks like he have enough experience with tech companies to learn the basics.

Thing about tech debt is that you can actually take a loan if you need it. May be Twitter right now need to take that loan and pay it later.

Yeah, Elon managed to build one of the earliest and most important major web services, but since then he's just been farting around doing rocket science.

How is he supposed to handle a website that processes literal terabytes of data every hour? In real time mind you

Pretty easy compared to Starlink

When you have 8K employees that do nothing for years, you build up enough tech credit to spend it on a lot product features before having to worry about tech debt.

I don't understand this argument. If 8k employees were laying technical groundwork that can be transformed into product features more efficiently than greenfield work, how were they "doing nothing"? Twitter is a mature product used by millions, not every engineer is going to be shipping user-facing changes regularly.

This was my snarky way of saying that the company was doing nothing to improve its core product while massively overstaffed.

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