End of days for twitter
Four days before the 2022 world cup of Fifa corruption. Elon Musk has put a difficult proposition to his newly purchased staff at Twitter.
The choice:
- Start working to death and take a gamble your hard work can make twitter a product so great it digs me (Elon) out of this debt hole I put us in. OR,
- Quit, take 3 months severance pay and that’s that. You have until 5pm on Friday to choose.
So, allegedly in the New York office of twitter, they were playing “it’s the final countdown” in the office.
75 to 80% of the staff quit. The core team quit. Ops quit, Payroll is all gone. They wouldn’t have anything close to an active security team right now. Building services is gone and everyone got locked out of the building. Shit’s getting wild. There’s never been a better time to tweet and a worse time to be on twitter. It’s really something.
Twitter is still working. And it will continue to work until it doesn’t. A good analogy, would be running a car without oil. Friction will start to happen, Until it overwhelms the system.
It’s going to be fun and interesting watching this.
From a disaster recovery perspective, you’d (as Musk) would hope you had rock solid change management, stacks of code that was built to be readable. And lots of cross socialization of specialties inside the organization. So the remaining rump of staff could keep the lights on. However, in real life no one really plans to loose 80% of their staff. But you may hope to plan and train, so that if a significant number didn’t turn up to work on monday things would be ok. Kind of like how everyone in an Infantry unit know’s how to do the Machine Gunners job if they get killed. This is like that, but a lot more people a missing in action.
But knowing tech, Twitter is probably a lot more siloed than a military unit. People build kingdoms in tech. Twitter is one of the biggest users of the JVM language Scala which is a functional Java variant. So that’ll be fun to learn for those that pick up the wreckage.
A lot will already be automated. Computers can run for a long time without needing human help. But every once and a while, something happens that puts a lot of stress on the system. Like large events, Such as twitter dying in public and consuming itself. Or the Soccer World Cup. That second one starts in 4 days.
Someone will need to do something manual, and it won’t happen. Back pressure will build. Tech debt held in check by human robots will start to stack up and come calling. And it’s not the sort of debt that can be paid for quickly.
And then something on the core system will either stop working, or get so slow and buggy that people just stop using it.
And that’ll be the end.
I was driving out to a park to walk my dog, looking at the pedestrians along the way I was struck at how they all seemed happy, they didn’t know what they were missing. Something was happening on the internet!
This will be impactful. In a good and bad way. If twitter does die, I look forward to seeing the impact on journalism.
Anyway, others will write a lot more about the impacts. In the mean time. I expect by Tuesday the 22nd of November 2022, Twitter will start to be in such a bad way that nothing will work and people will be throwing more apocalypse parties like they were today.