Forwarded from HN Best Comments
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed,...
>I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore".
It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company. Sure, Twitter's product is twitter.com the website, but most criticism of it and ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running: they revolve around 'product' features and sociological ideas on how to organize the community of users, what kind of content to allow/promote and what to censor.
Likewise, when people talk about the value they see in Twitter, nobody talks about the great distributed system that runs behind the scenes, because its only role is to provide users with the actual product: people go on Twitter to keep up with the news, see funny posts, feel connected with other people during major events or while watching a TV show. The tech is only relevant in that it allows this to happen. By that logic Walmart is a tech company because I can buy stuff on their website.
Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product is like if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas.
Sure, if you want to build new features fast you'll need software developers working hard, but much more importantly, you'll need people who understand the product and the users (in their various different communities and habits). That expertise is much harder to quantify and it seems clear that Musk deems it irrelevant, at least judging by the rollout of his most recent features and the utter failure of Twitter Blue
andyjda, 8 hours ago
>I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore".
It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company. Sure, Twitter's product is twitter.com the website, but most criticism of it and ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running: they revolve around 'product' features and sociological ideas on how to organize the community of users, what kind of content to allow/promote and what to censor.
Likewise, when people talk about the value they see in Twitter, nobody talks about the great distributed system that runs behind the scenes, because its only role is to provide users with the actual product: people go on Twitter to keep up with the news, see funny posts, feel connected with other people during major events or while watching a TV show. The tech is only relevant in that it allows this to happen. By that logic Walmart is a tech company because I can buy stuff on their website.
Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product is like if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas.
Sure, if you want to build new features fast you'll need software developers working hard, but much more importantly, you'll need people who understand the product and the users (in their various different communities and habits). That expertise is much harder to quantify and it seems clear that Musk deems it irrelevant, at least judging by the rollout of his most recent features and the utter failure of Twitter Blue
andyjda, 8 hours ago
👍3