100% agreed that running a network on the scale of Twitter, with all the strong interconnections, is extremely hard. Probably the hardest, moreso than even things like Facebook.
I do wonder what the thousands of engineers are doing. I imagine there's a lot of fire-fighting, but is it only that?
It could be the case that twitter is constantly falling over, still.
That's the thing, any time we raise eyebrows at the size of Twitter's dev team we're met with "well YOU try to operate a business at the scale of Twitter then!". I am, like you, genuinely curious what kind of work these people are doing all day. If they're prototyping new products, optimising poorly performing DB queries and API calls, building out frameworks (like Bootstrap), maintaining some internal admin UI etc.
I've read bits and pieces, heard rumours and it'd just be nice to see what's going on. Unless I see something like this I'm just gonna think "BOY that's a lot of developers" whenever I remember Twitter's headcount ...
I got an email from a recruiter last year asking if I wanted to come build the future of live video at Twitter. I think it's plausible many of them are working on new products that end up abandoned due to constant direction changes.
I do wonder what the thousands of engineers are doing. I imagine there's a lot of fire-fighting, but is it only that?
It could be the case that twitter is constantly falling over, still.