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What in the Heck Are 7,000 People Doing at Twitter
I just do not understand the numbers of people at Twitter. There cannot be a need for this many people. I think the positive people left at Twitter are going to be a lot happier with the deadwood gone.
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Published in General
Nicole Ruiz, a young and thoughtful VC investor, remarked that “jobs at Google, Meta, etc are the government jobs of our generation”…ie, they have exceptional benefits and have (at least had) employment security.
To which I note that most government jobs, except at the highest levels, have not offered a lot of scope for individual agency and creativity.
I never seemed to have that problem. I don’t think anyone who came after me was able to do the kinds of things I did, let alone do them “better.”
When research scientists are doing complex work in mid-range precision tracking and discrimination for missile defense, there is plenty of room for disagreement and improvements.
But if I had been doing that kind of work, there would have been nobody do to the things I did in business programming. :-)
So you’re telling me Ricochet could survive with less than 7,000 employees?
Hard to believe, isn’t it?
Could this be the model for draining the swamp?
Just go into each department and 75% of the middle managers and higher?
There are 1.8 Million full time civilians employees, plus 680 000 at defense. 2.2 Million Annuitants for a grand total of 4.4 Million…
Middle management is important to run a big organization.
Contractors are doing the actual work.
Elon Musk is draining the swamp.
I entered the software development field in the early sixties. It was a relatively new need for commercial banks that still employed people to manually perform operating functions to service deposit accounts and loans on machines designed to be operated by an individual to handle a portion of the volume to be processed. My generation of software developers displaced many workers in these types of jobs. The computers to which the work was shifted operated mostly in batch mode using punched card, paper tape, micr checks and deposit slips, and magnetic tape for input and magnetic tape and disc drives for data storage.
Now that I’m retired, and have abandoned almost all forms of leisure activity and entertainment, I like to keep up with Donald Trump and Elon Musk as they work to clean the swamps. Musk is better at it since he goes in with specific knowledge of the environment, appropriate personal skills, and he owns the company. It is fun and entertaining to watch. Donald Trump has the right idea but a much more formidable task with swamp creatures who are much more dangerous than the flakes running away from Twitter and it is not fun but serious business.
Yes, DJT’s effort is deadly serious. As in, The Swamp considers him a mortal threat and would like to see him dead.
We should all remember that Trump didn’t say “Drain the Democrat Swamp”, just “The Swamp”.
Former Speaker Paul Ryan calls himself a ‘Never-Again-Trumper’ (msn.com)
Another fool with delusions of relevance. He is so 15 minutes ago.
A couple more astute observers of the situation:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1593434329153245185.html
In 2000 I was told, “We have a situation. Go find the problem areas and fix them.” Hard lesson learned is that you can’t do that without ticking off a few people.
Yes, but they’re not setting policy or feel free to leak to the press.
So we could get rid of most middle and upper management staff, without losing functionality.
I bet you will find that a significant part of the work by bureaucrats, being overseen by middle and upper management, is what we call red tape, having gotten that way through agency regulation developed because that is the way Congress writes legislation today. Congress legislates delegating a very generic authority to government agencies who in turn write extensive and comprehensive regulatory procedures to occupy the bureaucrats making sure they are followed or at least pretending to do that.
In simple image form, for convenient sharing:
You don’t understand why there were 7000 at Twitter. I don’t understand why the world hangs on to social media for dear life or what Musk does on a daily basis………
I have gradually come to the opinion that if you can’t figure out how to clean up the last guy’s mess, you don’t know how to redo it from scratch, either. I have learned this from observation of projects huge and small. I have never seen a complete rewrite that didn’t omit important functionality of the software it replaced.
That’s just based on my experience–maybe others have observed different things.
Because they don’t have lives?
That’s odd, I always included MORE functionality when I re-wrote some other programmer’s garbage. My assumption was that the previous one barely knew how to do what he did, let alone anything additional.
Oh, sure, a rewrite will include more functionality. That doesn’t contradict what I said. If your organization depends on the old functionality, the new and different functionality will not make up for the loss. If the old software didn’t work well enough to be of any use at all, that’s a different matter.
My observations come from watching huge organizational projects that cost high level executives their jobs, Google Play store apps, and lots of things in between.
I didn’t mean that I made it different with more – but also different – functionality. I meant that it had the same functionality as before, and then some.
One prime example: at my first serious programming job, in fact, one of the daily tasks of some of the manufacturing people was to enter the “ticket numbers” of “lots” of material that were used in a certain process. The original program only allowed for entering one ticket at a time, which was a big waste of time. Especially since the “tickets” came bundled for which machine and shift had used them, but the program also required the machine number and shift to be re-entered for each “ticket.”
I re-wrote the program so that it could accept an entire batch of “tickets” at one go, for a particular machine/shift, and process them while the operator was re-bundling that batch of “tickets” and getting the next batch ready. *
But it was still possible to do one ticket at a time, if someone wanted to be stupid.
*The main person who did that job was so happy about the improvement, she became my “girlfriend” for a while.
That’s good, then. My first real program done for others’ use over a period of years (i.e. not a one-off) was a rewrite of a program that never was finished and never used. The original used some low-level language stuff that was beyond my ability at the time, while I only knew how to write in Fortran. So I re-did it from scratch. This had the advantage of being able to move it to a new hardware architecture when the time came. It was in use for many more years than I ever would have expected, even after canned software packages came along that could do a lot of the functions a lot more flexibly. But there were some functions made especially for this lab that had hired me that continued to be useful, so they kept using my software many years after I wished it had gone away (because I was called in now and then for some software modifications).
Oh absolutely congress has delegated all of its powers away.
The politicians insatiable desire to be re-elected has made them systematically allergic to accountability. They only pass the laws, the unknown and unelected administer it. (if and when they desire) The politician is absolved of all responsibility. The entire system, of congressmen being in office for decades would be shocking to the founders, the entire society is antithetical to what they envisioned.
Mark Twain once remarked that politicians and diapers needed to be changed frequently, and both for the same reason. If the voters wont do it, I guess its necessary to have term limits in government. Not just elected officials but into the bureaucrats as well.
In Utah in this recent election the forces trying to promote Evan McMullin over Mike Lee tried their very best to fault Lee for having sponsored very little legislation that was passed over the twelve years he has been in the Senate. In fact, a great deal of Lee’s time has been spent in an attempt to recover the Article I responsibilities the Constitution puts on the Congress, so he understands his job better than most of his fellow Senators and certainly better than McMullin.
Yes, I like Mike Lee.
My best stories of improving a program without a complete re-write, for that same job, would be the payroll data entry program: hours worked, etc, for each employee, each week.
That computer system used “smart” terminals and displayed screens including fields for each data item that allowed for filling in only allowed lengths of text, or a number.
The standard way of writing those programs was to “position” the input field/cursor to the next item, for each item. But the way most such screens were done, the cursor wound up at the next field anyway. And if you’d already started to enter data there when the “reposition” happened, the terminal would beep. (In addition to the cursor going back to the start of what you already started typing.)
Most people might not be fast enough for that to be an issue, but someone who does it a lot – such as the payroll “clerk” – would unleash a storm of beeps for hours when it was time to do that job.
I “adjusted” that program so that the re-positioning was skipped unless there was a problem with the previous entry. (Number of hours less than zero, or something.)
Peace and quiet! And another much happier worker.
Also, the “number of days worked” defaulted to 5 for a standard week, but for a short week for everyone (because of a holiday, for example) or if people who used a certain machine only worked a few days, the default had to be changed. Every. Single. Time. (Which was especially rough if EVERYONE worked a short week.)
But I didn’t make it just so whatever input was made became the default after that. Because if only one person in line worked 3 or 4 days, it had to be changed back again…
So I made it so that if the days-worked was changed to the SAME different number, like 3 times in a row, that became the new default.
When you work systems that stay in the field for a long time, you face platform upgrades, OS upgrades, regular deliveries of software to meet new requirements. If you are integrated into a system-of-systems, it’s a royal pain. The customer had legislated that a third-party package was used for inter-process communications. Of course, it didn’t run on the new platform, and we were dead in the water. This is a situation where working with really sharp people is great.
I developed an emulator that replaced the communications package and it worked well enough for us to start porting our code. I tested it on the standard hardware and there were no problems. On the new platform that was MUCH faster, occasionally lock-ups occurred. This is a multi-processing system that had both time-critical and real-time components, and no they are not the same thing.
Our system architect who had initially thought the emulator was a waste of time, but who saw it work and became supportive, checked the code and found a subtle race condition. He fixed it and we were back to porting and testing. Well, almost. It still locked up, though much less frequently. I checked his fix, found the flaw, and managed to correct it. The code was running years later. A good example of team work.