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Comment by fesoliveira | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what kind of systems you worked on in your career, but even simpler systems with smaller userbases than twitter are quite complex if you are new to it.

Twitter serves their service to the entire world, with multiple layers of systems working in conjunction in order to make things work smoothly. A new engineer that has not been working on it for no more than a couple months would likely be unaware of how the different systems communicate and interact. A change like this will have have a lot of unintended consequences, and not having a senior engineer with lots of context leading the change will undoubtedly cause these kinds of issues.

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> A change like this will have have a lot of unintended consequences, and not having a senior engineer with lots of context leading the change will undoubtedly cause these kinds of issues.

Having a senior engineer with a lot of context is worthless if the work environment does not promote open communication. You don't want to be the senior engineer or leader who shows "poor judgement" by opposing the mercurial owner "for no reason" if you're overridden and the feature launch succeeds without a glitch; no one gets fired for implementing a request that came straight from the top.

This is why non-rushed, scaled roll-outs are essential for large system: had they tried this on 1% / 5% / 10% of random traffic first, they could have caught this. Yet again, if the directive to roll it out to production came from the very top, you set that gate to 100% immediately.

“Trying to make a pigtail out of these unbrushed hair may unscrew the ears”. Sorry, yep, twitter is big. But if preventing tens of doomed requests before a login requires a senior engineer with lots of context, then the program was screwed up long before the layoffs.

I don't disagree, but: Twitter was big and it worked. Then someone created incentives for many people who know the code to leave.

The one's left don't know all the code (how could they?), but were forced to change many things about the site at a "just do it" basis. This error didn't happen because someone was too stupid to remove the code, it did happen because the connection to another thing was removed and the failsafe on the landing page doesn't have exponential backdown built in, not something you can necessarily know or investigate before, when an executive breaths down your neck and wants you to just do it.

This is about the new managment, not about engineers.

Your argument is that it is a non sequitur to say that the right skilled people are not at twitter, using the argument that the right people with the available skills were not involved in this feature.

You seem to be confusing knowledge and skill.

Twitter could be packed with extremely skillful senior engineers who don't understand the product well enough to predict complex outcomes of planned changes.

Likewise you can have a "poor quality" 1x employee who has knowledge of how everything within the stack is glued together; where there is chewingum and where there are steel beams.

They are potentially more vauable than the 100x engineer who has intimate knowledge of how googles shipping container datacentres work.

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