Things got better eventually but it was definitely the worst way to treat a new hire.
It was a really great experience for me. I was about 16, and I think 40 was pretty young for the office. I don't know if I got much by way of mentoring as an IT guy (well, later on they hired another guy who was way better than I was and I did get some mentoring, but for most of the time I was there it was me and the office manager, who probably knew less than I did about most computer things) but there was a lot of /very important/ social mentoring I got. I learned how to (at least kind of) act like an adult, or at least how to interact with adults in a healthy manner. On a social level, the semi-technical guy who hired me was one of the best people managers I've worked for.
I think it was an all around win/win; I got treated like a human being (which feels /incredibly special/ to a high school kid.) and I learned how to more productively deal with less-technical adults, and I got out of some school. They got a reasonably skilled IT monkey for minimum wage.
After I got out of high school, of course, it was .com time, and I have not had reason to look back at government work since, just because I don't value stability that much and there's little chance I'd have the patience to wait it out long enough to get the pension. I still look back somewhat fondly on my time working for the state. (Or rather, the county.)
[1] my stepmother made me quit that job 'cause they had no workman's comp and I was being "exploited" for slightly under minimum wage. I was 15! it was far less dangerous than anything else a kid that age might reasonably do for fun, and they gave me discounts on used computer parts for the next three years, so I thought it was great. Anyhow, it worked out okay, but it's another side to "exploitation"
I was lucky, my manager thought about it and managed to get me to do it after a bit less than a year. Some people have been working here for years without the "new hire day" (in all fairness you don't learn a lot of practical things, but still...).
Doesn't WordPress.com do it with like a dozen people and their system is way, way, way more complex?
update: no, wait, in December 2010 they announced it's over 350 people now
http://blog.twitter.com/2010/12/stocking-stuffer.html
What on earth are they all doing?
A funny thing happened on the way to the solution. Try and picture this. On my first day of work, no one told me what to do. On the second day, the same thing happened, and on the third. That’s as much as I could take. I decided to meet with everyone I was coming in contact with to find out more about their individual talents and personalities, and to find out what was going on. Before I knew it, I was developing a picture of how things really were, and who needed what, and I became creatively involved in defining my own participation in relation to the skills I could bring to the table. In the process of doing this, I had complete access to everyone in the company, from other newlings to the President. Nothing but open cubicles no higher than 3 1/2 feet. I was allowed to learn, interact, and find solutions to every problem and need I recognized. I always found something important to do, and it became natural to provide effective solutions as needed. I am not a very unique individual, but I am effective because I am allowed to be. I also know it may be different for some people, experiencing this kind of freedom. I know that some people are petrified by this kind of freedom, and equate it to abandonment, and it drives them crazy not knowing what to do. I also know that even under the best of circumstances, people become sedate sometimes and settle in to patterns of repetition for false comfort. The answer, then, is to have them all switch places every few years, no matter how well they may be doing their job, because it is just as important to let everyone see their own position from someone else’s position. It also allows for the surprise of finding how much fun change can be when your creativity meets a new challenge. See what you end up with. It’s either this, or that.
More here: http://aditya.sublucid.com/2008/11/20/let-your-employees-fig...
On my first day, the person responsible for the project went on vacation and for next 10 business days, I was told to do research. That's about it. It was the oddest startup experience I have ever had. Other members of the group, asked me questions about how everything was going, but couldn't answer any of mine. So I indeed did research.
Wordpress.com is trivial compared to Twitter.
http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/01/06/new-years-eve-set-a...
I don't believe Twitter is trivial, but I think they're perceived as more complex than they are - WordPress + Reddit + Heroku only have like 10% that number combined. Apples to oranges, but those 3 companies would be doing more everythings per second than Twitter when you combine them.
WordPress.com is not as trivial as you might think http://en.wordpress.com/stats/
Certainly it's just a matter of scaling once you hit a certain level of volume, you just have to be able to bring more servers online into the grid.
Scaling from 10,000 users to 1 million is probably very hard.
Scaling from 1 million to 100 million, well you better have a pattern down that works with easy hardware replication (like google does).
What Twitter does is not hard, and they do it badly.
You tweet from your mobile phone app (maintained by twitter) or twitter.com, and that tweet gets posted on your public timeline. The tweet is parsed for mentions, and it is also copied on to the mentionee's incoming timeline and their mentions timeline.
The tweet is parsed for hashtags, and active searches (i.e. ones open on twitter.com, or via the APIs) and is also copied onto those timelines.
Also, you have followers. So Twitter also copies the tweet onto the inbox timeline of each of your followers.
Not only is all this information published in real time on Twitter.com, but it is also made available via JSON API, Streaming API and Firehose API.
All tweets (on all timelines) are stored forever.
Twitter's scale is hard to fathom - all of this processing is way beyond what your Rails / Django app could process with a MySQL backend. MySQL replication wouldn'e even come close to keeping up with the sheer volume of events to be processed.
To make matters more complicated - Twitter is expected to scale to meet the demand of emerging world events (eg: Egypt, Iran, snowstorms, hurricanes, earthquakes, bushfires). These events don't evenly spread traffic across Twitter's network, but instead provide "storm surges" of localised intense traffic.
Oh, and Twitter haven't just launched an analytics product?
I think for sheer engineering at scale, there are maybe only about half a dozen other companies in the same league.
(Edit: grammer changes for readability)
Twitter has become impressive, but let's not overstate its achievements.
So with a good design you have groups of servers doing the different stages in the queue.
One you've got the pattern down for 100 tweets per second, the pattern should be reproducible by scaling servers in each queue to 1000 tweets per second, and eventually 10,000 tweets per second.
The database requirements may explain why it's all done in one datacenter instead of trying to do replication across the country/world.
http://www.quora.com/Twitter-Inc-company/Why-does-Twitter-ne...
I also discovered they have their own (but singular) datacenter:
http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/07/room-to-grow-twitter-...
But they are planning on adding more, which leads me to believe maybe that's what some of the new hires are for.
They don't have an ad sales force right?
They don't have a billing department right?
Maybe they have housekeeping and food prep people included in that 350?
I honestly don't know and my instinct could be very wrong, but 350 seems crazy high.
I'm sure there's more, this is just what came off the top of my head.
Exactly why quora is compelling. If you didn't know now you do
Sure when independent a single guy can sit there and create something like that solo, inside Twitter though there would be a lot more process and interaction to achieve the goals.
So why did you make the comparision?
I am just pointing out that ck2's summation of Twitter understates the complexity of the problem they solve.
Twitter's fundamental problem also is a harder one to scale than something like Heroku or Wordpress. For those hosted sites, you can shard easily by host, so that each of the 100,000 Heroku-hosted sites can get its own EC2 instance(s) and behave pretty much independently. You can't do that when the point of your site is that any action might instantly be broadcast to thousands of followers. High-fanout writes are not an easy problem to solve.
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Color me unimpressed.
At some point, I was collecting 40GB/day of financial data (and that's after bzip2ing them .. probably 200GB/day before); This was done on hardware costing $30K (which was two equivalent machines with 4GB, each having 20*1TB in a raid configuration -- this was a hot-backup configuration) and the operation run (coded, supervised, administered) by 2 people.
I'm extrapolating from your numbers: Let's say you have 70GB over 14 days = 5GB/day; Let's assume Twitter has 100GB/day of text twits (which, incidentally, means ~1 billion tweets per day which I highly doubt, as they took few years to get to the 1 billion mark, and last I heard they were at less than 100 million twits/day)
Then, at this day and age (numbers selected for 2 years ago, when they had their last infrastructure revision), what you do is buy 20 servers with 8GB of memory each (for, say $5K each), plus a little redundancy, and store all the latest twits in memory, and the most popular user's older twits as well; everything else on disk. Throw in cheap web front-ends that don't even need a local disk, load balancing, and a gigabit ethernet backplane. You're still under $200K in equipment.
Yes, the code is not going to be trivial, but for $100K and 3 months you can get a stunt programmer (I know a few who can do it and won't charge as much).
A run-of-the-mill RDBMS is the wrong tool for this job; Basically, run of the mill anything; but that does not make it incredibly hard.
I think $300K for hardware and software, you can get a Twitter clone that performs as well.
Twitter is successful, but that's not thanks to good engineering.
I've also done the 40 GB/day of NYSE TAQ data financial analysis thing, and the 1000+ trades/second real-time financial analytics thing. And I work on Google Search, and have a passing familiarity with how other Google products scale.
The scaling challenges of batch financial models vs. real-time financial processing vs. information retrieval vs. email vs. social products are very different. Even going from a model of the web where it's static and changes every few months (like Google of 2004) to one where sites get update every few minutes and users expect to see the updates immediately in search results (like Google of today) requires vastly different technology.
The main thing about scaling that I've learned from working at a couple places that require it is to go into it with a fresh mind each time, and really pay attention to what the requirements are and what you can cut corners on. There're some general principles you should know (eg. Jeff Dean's "Numbers you should know", memory is much faster than disk, cut out layers of abstraction that you don't need), but in order to apply them effectively, you really need to pay attention to the details of your problem domain.
If you think you can solve Twitter's scaling problems, they're hiring, they're pre-IPO, and they're probably giving out decent chunks of stock.
TLDR; It is not the vertices in the twitter graph but the number of edges in it that is unprecedented.
RSS strikes me as an almost identical process other than the time subscribers wait to check for new content, and there are feeds with millions of subscribers. So now the problem is reduced to doing it in a timely fashion.
This is why I wonder if they're really that immensely complicated - isn't Google doing much the same thing, and possibly even at a bigger scale at one point, with their reader and FeedBurner?
Another company with a ton of employees.
Probably not that many on the FeedBurner team itself, but a lot of people at Google working on the general problem of keeping things unreasonably responsive at massive scale.
Jeff Dean's rule of thumb is that you should build a growth factor of 10 into the design, but any more than that and you will probably have to re-architect anyway. So going from 10,000 to 1 million and 1 million to 100 million are probably roughly equivalent in difficulty.
You will have to have something that deals with mapping URLs in the unified logical name space of your site to the individual servers that the particular blogs on--that's the part that you can't just throw machines at and get good results.
With the social sites, you can't isolate things easily, because what a given person sees at any time is drawn from an ever changing set of content from other users, with each viewer drawing from a different set.
edit: Correction, ~880 reads per second.
But I agree it's a fraction of 7k/sec peak for twitter.
However, twitter does not have to parse html, has no plugins to execute or templates, and has a max string length of 140 characters which is trivial.
Each post/comment published on wp.com takes many, many more cpu cycles than twitter.
My figures: 900,000 transactions (500,000 posts + 400,000 comments) / 86,400 seconds per day:
~= 10 transactions per second on average, though like twitter, activity probably has a power law distribution corresponding with US daylight hours.
Reads: 2.3 billion / month Suppose a 30-day month, that's 86,400*30 or 2,592,000 seconds per month.
2,300,000,000 / 2,592,000 ~= 887 pageviews per second.
I was incorrect by an order of magnitude, though the same uneven traffic patterns caveat applies.
My point was that twitter's scale and problem complexity are not unprecedented and that small, motivated teams have solved them before. Parallel queries and transactions for DB2 on z/OS were developed by small teams in Poughkeepsie, NY and Perth, Australia. Google's infrastructural software was designed by a small group of very bright people, and so on.
If we compare the groups actually working on the problems then I expect that twitter will have comparably small groups of engineers directly facing the scaling problem. And I also repeat the point that bigger problems have already been solved. Twitter's issues are not unprecedented if you are prepared to look outside the Journal of Stuff I Remember Seeing on Highscalability.com.
Once again I will reiterate I am just pointing out that ck2's summation of Twitter understates the complexity of the problem they solve.
I agree about that.
> go into it with a fresh mind each time, and really pay attention to what the requirements are and what you can cut corners on. There are some general principles you should know: memory is much faster than disk, cut out layers of abstraction that you don't need, etc - but in order to apply them effectively, you really need to pay attention to the details of your problem domain.
(slightly edited) - This is golden.
However:
> If you think you can solve Twitter's scaling problems, they're hiring, they're pre-IPO, and they're probably giving out decent chunks of stock.
I know I can solve Twitter's scaling problems (I don't think the solution I posted is the end-all-be-all, and for all I know that might not be where their scale problem is -- it is just perceived and argued about this part, which is not very hard).
However, Twitter's abysmal uptime (for the kind of sevice they are providing) had no bearing on their growth in 2008-2009. And even if by re-architecting Twitter they can save $2M/year on operations, it would be dumb to do that before they're in the black for a while and can identify their real profit and loss centers.
Also, those stock are not worth quite as much as people think when you take everything into account. (I've got a successful exit as a non-founder behind me; I'm intimately familiar with all the gory details including taxes, dilution, etc -- Whether options or RSUs, if you are granted anything of value, you have to pay full taxes AT THE TIME OF THE GRANT).
My point was only to show how non-impressive the problem twitter is (supposedly) facing. It's a repeating discussion:
- Twitter sucks
- No they don't, they do xxx and it's damn hard
Don't know why I even bother anymore. A company that had (maybe still has?) their millions-of-views-a-day pages created in Ruby doesn't care about solving scale issues.At Google, you guys throw out closing paragraph tags from the main page when it is clear it renders fine without them.