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I agree with what you're saying that it's not exactly what we're seeing which makes it not as simple. However, I've seen this play out in many a big companies

I agree with what you're saying that it's not exactly what we're seeing which makes it not as simple. However, I've seen this play out in many a big companies where there's a big mess going on. Answer is always similar pointing to -> "clearly it's not simple" and that's kind of the whole point. They made it not simple. 3k ENGINEERS, my sweet dude. THREE THOUSAND. By any and all account that's half as much as current chrome team or in total if you account for open source contributors as well. If robot is to believed that's also a headcount of windows and macos core teams. What is even going on, I don't even..

hilariously 5d ago
Taxes, compliance, regulatory bodies, logistics multiplied by X countries X products has an amazing way to bog you down. If you have money and problems money solves (eg you could hire more people to do something) you do not have a problem (except for people on the internet making arguments from personal inexperience)
- cucumber3732842 5d ago
  > If you have money and problems money solves (eg you could hire more people to do something) you do not have a problem If you have money there's a greater chance that someone in that X by X matrix might see you as a juicy target to go after so your expensive handling of every item in that matrix needed to be better still.
- Keyframe 5d ago
  I get that, I truly do since I see it all and every day. We're talking engineering hands here though. Presumably programmers and infrastructure and SRE.
- RobKohr 5d ago
  I think there is something like Parkinson's Law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." This is more like the engineering team scales to match your budget. It is why successful companies, when starting out and getting to their defining project completion state have significantly less engineers then 10 years later when they are massively more successful. The cost of having the engineers is nothing compared to the profits, so why not hire more so you can defend your position. Are 80% of them needed to keep the system going, I think Elon showed that you can prune most of them away and the system will keep humming along (ignoring some initial problems). The trouble is bureaucracy, lack of technical knowledge at the top, and the hazy difficulty of identifying what is needed is really difficult, and if you mess it up, you could ruin a billion dollar business to save a hundred million dollars in salaries. That is the crux of it. You can't know who to cut, and even if you are really good at it, you will still create problems and create ill will. Elon was pretty successful, but it did have some momentary problems. If his negative cult of personality didn't get in the way, it would have been better off.
  - klrefg 4d ago
    Twitter is an empty shell though. Yes it technically works, that’s about that.
    - foldr 3d ago
      I certainly wouldn’t go anywhere near Twitter these days, but the question is how much of that is to do with engineering failures and how much is to do with the overall change of culture and moderation practices that Musk has introduced.
foldr 3d ago
Very much this. If you have 3000 engineers (and all the associated non-engineering roles that inevitably come with that) then you have guaranteed that no problem will ever be easy to solve. Possibly you might be able to solve some extremely difficult problems that you couldn’t solve with fewer engineers.

hilariously 5d ago

Taxes, compliance, regulatory bodies, logistics multiplied by X countries X products has an amazing way to bog you down. If you have money and problems money solves (eg you could hire more people to do something) you do not have a problem (except for people on the internet making arguments from personal inexperience)

cucumber3732842 5d ago
> If you have money and problems money solves (eg you could hire more people to do something) you do not have a problem If you have money there's a greater chance that someone in that X by X matrix might see you as a juicy target to go after so your expensive handling of every item in that matrix needed to be better still.
Keyframe 5d ago
I get that, I truly do since I see it all and every day. We're talking engineering hands here though. Presumably programmers and infrastructure and SRE.
RobKohr 5d ago
I think there is something like Parkinson's Law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." This is more like the engineering team scales to match your budget. It is why successful companies, when starting out and getting to their defining project completion state have significantly less engineers then 10 years later when they are massively more successful. The cost of having the engineers is nothing compared to the profits, so why not hire more so you can defend your position. Are 80% of them needed to keep the system going, I think Elon showed that you can prune most of them away and the system will keep humming along (ignoring some initial problems). The trouble is bureaucracy, lack of technical knowledge at the top, and the hazy difficulty of identifying what is needed is really difficult, and if you mess it up, you could ruin a billion dollar business to save a hundred million dollars in salaries. That is the crux of it. You can't know who to cut, and even if you are really good at it, you will still create problems and create ill will. Elon was pretty successful, but it did have some momentary problems. If his negative cult of personality didn't get in the way, it would have been better off.
- klrefg 4d ago
  Twitter is an empty shell though. Yes it technically works, that’s about that.
  - foldr 3d ago
    I certainly wouldn’t go anywhere near Twitter these days, but the question is how much of that is to do with engineering failures and how much is to do with the overall change of culture and moderation practices that Musk has introduced.

foldr 3d ago

Very much this. If you have 3000 engineers (and all the associated non-engineering roles that inevitably come with that) then you have guaranteed that no problem will ever be easy to solve. Possibly you might be able to solve some extremely difficult problems that you couldn’t solve with fewer engineers.