Elon Is Twitter's Chaos Monkey

jareds 3 years ago |

> Elon somehow is able to cut through all that BS and ship a new feature in just a week to all his users. How? What does he know that the rest of the industry don't? I think he understands something that might sound obvious on the surface: Twitter is just a fucking website. Literally no one will die if they fuck up. Is that true? What if DM's or other private information gets leaked do to a code change? This could provide enough information to target individuals for murder depending on what the new info is.

mikkergp 3 years ago |

Elon Musk had to sell $4 billion dollars in Tesla stock in order to keep Twitter afloat. I’m not disagreeing with the core premise of the article really, nor am I really challenging Musk’s genius! but Musk can say fuck you to everybody because he has fuck you money! If he is a genius it is is in understanding the whole context, not in the individual risks he takes.

> Elon somehow is able to cut through all that BS and ship a new feature in just a week to all his users. How? What does he know that the rest of the industry don't? I think he understands something that might sound obvious on the surface: Twitter is just a fucking website. Literally no one will die if they fuck up.

Sure if your company can survive without revenue or reputation, go for it! It’s just a fucking website.

Yes we need more bold leaders driving change, but if almost any other CEO had done this the company would be dead already.

papito 3 years ago | |

"Just a fucking website" is what Elon thought when he asked for code reviews. Just a few Perl CGI scripts stitched together by some Bash and some CRON jobs, fourth largest system in the world by traffic. You know, a website!

yamazaki 3 years ago |

Agreed that Elon is making Twitter iterate and ship much faster, but not sure the price he is paying in loss of "tribal knowledge" will be worth it at the other end.

JPLeRouzic 3 years ago | |

I have no opinion on Musk or Twitter and know nothing about the organization of Twitter, but IMO "loss of tribal knowledge" is a polite way of saying "lack of documentation" because a few people held knowledge in hostage in order to increase their prestige and status.

mikkergp 3 years ago | | |

Documentation has limits. It’s not like you come out of med school ready to be a doctor. There’s certain types of knowledge most easily modeled by the search engine in your head. Heck the information may even be written down! But in a multi systems failure which page of documentation from the 18 different involved services do you read to figure out how to bring it back up?

Do you think someone brand new to a team with documentation in hand will be as effective as someone who’s been there a year?

fenier 3 years ago |

The author does gloss over the fact that Twitter has FTC Consent & GDPR requirements to meet, which means it does have to slow down during feature development at the risk of fines.