Apple’s Phil Schiller, who runs the App Store, has deactivated his verified Twitter account. If Schiller has soured on how Elon Musk is running Twitter, that is potentially very bad news for Musk.Of course, physically keeping the place running is going to get harder. I know that Very Online Weirdo Elon Stans think that only the dangerhaired SJWs from HR have left, leaving clear-eyed techbro coders to carry the load unhindered but, uh, that doesn't seem to be how it went down:
So I have been watching the resignation notices for people leaving Twitter. Basically, it looks like all of the developers other than those on immigration visas are leaving. I see a lot of familiar names there, people who are experts in scalability who have published papers on how to scale things, experts in Internet protocols whose names are on IETF RFC’s, experts in algorithmic complexity with journal papers, and then just the average everyday Joes who keep the lights on. And I think: Twitter is going to crash...This is going to have bad effects when combined with cost-cutting on the back end, according to this piece from MIT Technology Review:
Alongside the minor malfunctions, the Twitter engineer believes that there’ll be significant outages on the horizon, thanks in part to Musk’s drive to reduce Twitter’s cloud computing server load in an attempt to claw back up to $3 million a day in infrastructure costs. Reuters reports that this project, which came from Musk’s war room, is called the “Deep Cuts Plan.” One of Reuters’s sources called the idea “delusional,” while Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey, says that “unless they’ve massively overengineered the current system, the risk of poorer capacity and availability seems a logical conclusion.”In response to this knowledgeable insider info, the Elon Stans can only come back with...
Meanwhile, when things do go kaput, there’s no longer the institutional knowledge to quickly fix issues as they arise. “A lot of the people I saw who were leaving after Friday have been there nine, 10, 11 years, which is just ridiculous for a tech company,” says the Twitter engineer. As those individuals walked out of Twitter offices, decades of knowledge about how its systems worked disappeared with them. (Those within Twitter, and those watching from the sidelines, have previously argued that Twitter’s knowledge base is overly concentrated in the minds of a handful of programmers, some of whom have been fired.)
...to which I can only respond:
