
Twitter SVP Chris Fry Breaks Down How His Engineering Org Works - adidash
http://recode.net/2014/01/02/twitter-svp-chris-fry-breaks-down-how-his-engineering-org-works/
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amix
While Twitter a is cool service I can't imagine what 1000 engineers can do all
day long? Based on this maybe they are building their organization wrongly and
following their footsteps isn't the correct way to follow.

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noelwelsh
If you've worked on online software you might have some appreciation of the
masses of unseen services that are essential for running the system. All web
apps, except in the early days, are icebergs. Payments, analytics, control
panels, monitoring, deployment etc. -- there is just a huge amount of stuff
that goes on that the user typically doesn't see.

~~~
amix
I have actually built and scaled a system similar to Twitter called Plurk
(which has millions of users, billions of data items and similar use cases as
Twitter). We built this with a team of a few developers and one sys-admin.
While Twitter is at a much larger scale, I really doubt you need 1000
engineers to solve that problem, because even at Plurk's scale we built
automated systems for scaling, monitoring, backups etc. (e.g. sharded the
databases, used master-master MySQL setups that supported auto-failovers,
nagios for alerts etc.)

You may say: but they have mobile apps? But so do a lot of other companies
that don't have 1000 engineers. You need a few really great mobile devs to
build great mobile apps, again based on my experience.

I think what has happened for them is that their structure isn't that good and
they have scaled too fast (and in this process they have hired a lot of B and
C people that aren't that good). It's a least my conclusion based on the
limited information I know about them.

~~~
hythloday
If Plurk has 5 developers serving 1 million daily users, and Twitter has 1000
developers serving 100 million daily active users, you only have to believe
that scaling by 2 orders of magnitude is twice as hard for it to be a tie in
terms of developer:user ratio.

(I suspect the write load is rather different - the figures I can find for
Plurk suggest 8 billion messages in total - Twitter writes half a billion a
day.)

~~~
csbrooks
The big advantage of software though is that you don't have to maintain a
fixed ratio of developer:user like that, though. Sure, your employee count
should increase as user count does, but far less than linearly.

~~~
hythloday
I'm not sure this is in practice true. Twitter have to start writing or tuning
their own scale-specific software, need more analytics, application security,
developer productivity, partner and sales engineering etc. _proportionally_
than they would do at 1% of their size. Certainly they could run 100 Plurks
with many fewer than 1000 engineers but I'm not sure that's the best way to
characterize Twitter.

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random2
"Breaks Down How His Engineering Org Works" is an exaggeration. "Offers a
glimpse" would have been more appropriate:

1000+ engineers that include (perhaps a majority) of people working on
reliability/operations.

Mobility - engineers _can_ move every quarter to a team that has an open
position

Peer-feedback (360?) promotions based system (this is rather popular)

I guess I was hoping for something more about the actual structure and
interactions, but it's mostly saying it's not too centralized, nor too
distributed and that it's "like a school" and they're using lean/agile
methodologies.

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jtchang
Chris mentions the 3 things that motivate people. Good video about this from
RSA Animate if you haven't seen it yet:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc)

~~~
noddingham
I've been trying to use Dan Pink's ideas on motivation for a while now, it was
good to hear someone at his level mention them. Hadn't watched the video in a
while, thanks for linking it.

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jph
He highlights Twitter EventParrot and MagicRecs, both compelling experiments:

EventParrot for news alerts:
[http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/10/4823278/twitter-
eventparr...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/10/4823278/twitter-eventparrot-
account-news-alerts-rumor)

MagicRecs for notifications:
[http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/24/4767290/twitter-will-
notif...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/24/4767290/twitter-will-notify-you-
about-popular-people-and-their-tweets)

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narsil
Regarding the dig at stack ranking: it's really just Yahoo now. Microsoft
abandoned it 2 months ago. [1]

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-
kills-s...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-kills-stack-
ranking-internal-structure)

~~~
reeses
Every company is stack ranking and every good manager (and many bad ones) have
their teams ranked in the event that they need to cut or have the opportunity
to improve the team through training, promotion, etc. ("What would you do if I
gave you four open positions?")

You have that guy who you're putting on plan because he's late with his
deliverables, doesn't really 'get' the purpose of the
department/group/company, and kvetches all the time about one thing or
another? You've ranked him.

That woman you're trying to mentor as much as possible so you can promote her,
maybe even to your peer level? Ranked.

There are people who are essential to an organization at different times.
Keeping the lights on? I've cut everything but devops and maintenance,
including myself. Sometimes you can save someone, but you can't transfer a
problem.

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coldcode
1000 engineers is not a very lean organization. Maybe they sit around all day
and try to figure out some way for Twitter to actually make money? Or maybe
they count everyone tech related as an engineer, like designers and QA and
build automation, etc? Google says Twitter has 2,300 employees.

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mathattack
I like their counterpoint to the idea that you have to dump all the managers.
It really is about managerial effectiveness.

I also like their idea of a free market for transfers within the company. This
is a big departure from many large companies where your boss has to sign off
on your move. Ultimately that creates an environment where you need a job
offer in hand to switch.

~~~
yawz
Well... it looks like there needs to be an opening first (which is the obvious
thing, I guess) and also who decides when there is a single place but 4
applicants? It sounds like the team would decide. After what? interviews?

~~~
mathattack
That's usually how it works for internal transfers. If the person is well
known enough, then the team (or manager) may decide without as formal an
interview process.

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alpastor
He has no eyebrows.

