Performance has been bad forever. Twitter has had forever to fix it. They haven't. By definition, the existing developers aren't smart enough to do it. The developer here is trying to throw smoke because he's embarrassed. He should be.
Or it could be that previous management was constantly prioritizing new features instead of performance gains and now he's getting unnecessary flak for it.
The worst thing is that by firing and laying off too many people on a team with so much legacy code, they might end up scrapping the app and doing a rewrite because it'll be easier than fixing it. So inevitably, it will run faster, and people will hold it up as an example of Musk being a "genius" . When really, it's exactly what the guy suggested doing, but instead of listening they fire him and force a situation where they have to do it anyways.
Blind assumptions count for nothing. If you actually read the tweet thread Eric (the former employee) gives a summary of the trade offs made that have given Twitter bad performance and suggested removing specific features to improve perf.
It doesn't matter if it's "thousands of RPC calls" or not. Eric's response is, "It's definitely not that! It's... well... we don't know... so just spend more money on servers." That response alone would have me fire him.
> By definition, the existing developers aren't smart enough to do it.
You have no evidence to support this. Performance sucks in other countries because product leadership with their hands on the wheel of the company never prioritizes "unsexy" investments in performance and infrastructure work (same as the new guy btw). That is exactly what Eric was advocating in his thread.
