Bad approach from the other party though - they should have let Elon keep talking and display more ignorance instead of confronting him and pointing out that he's clueless. Just play along, and give him little nudges and more directions to take wild swings at. Keep asking questions about things he knows nothing about and let him give wrong answers with pretend-confidence.
This is not a real solution, and not a decision an experienced CTO would make. It’s been a programming meme since the early 2000s that rewrites are an alluring fix to problems, but underestimate the complexity of existing code. Joel Spolsky’s classic article is a great introduction to this line of thinking: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
So, the people sucked (he laid off 75% of them), the code sucks ( he’ll be rewriting it), many users suck ( he banned many of them), several features sucked (he’s changing things on the fly)..
So, did he buy Twitter just for the brand, and some users?
Well he’s the most followed user so it can’t be that. And he’s done a great job of destroying Twitter’s brand so far.
At this point maybe the best explanation for his behavior is it’s all a performance art piece to see how much damage he can do in as short a time as possible. Truly astonishing to watch in real time.
Incredible. He really should have just started from scratch. You know what has high feature velocity? Brand new projects. You know what doesn't cost $40b? Brand new projects.
That's pretty much what killed Netscape. The temptation for a new person to say 'throw it all away' is always there, it takes a lot of restraint to tell yourself that whoever built it probably wasn't a complete idiot so if you're going to rewrite it you will have to find an incremental path so that you don't end up re-learning all of the lessons from the past the hard way. The need to learn all those lessons the hard way seems to be the common element in Elon Musks' strategy so far so in a way this is consistent. But it will absolutely kill Twitter, if there was any way out so far (which I don't believe there was), just in a different way.
Musk is right in wanting "high velocity of features," i.e., the ability to evolve Twitter faster. How deeply he understands the technical details does not matter that much, as long as he has capable technical people working with him. It's likely that they are the ones telling Musk they need to rewrite big chunks of Twitter's infrastructure. Given that WhatsApp was able to grow to ~500 million users with only 32 employees, it's quite possible they're right.
I'm reminded of this confrontational interaction between a technical person and Steve Jobs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o -- in hindsight, Jobs was right: "You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology," not the other way around.
In Twitter's case, they've got to start with what's important -- being able to try out a lot of new ideas quickly and cheaply to find out which ones work. The exact details of how they accomplish that are of secondary importance.
> Elon is right in wanting "high velocity of features,"
He's proposing a ridiculous solution that will have the exact opposite effect of what he wants.
The only thing in common with the Steve Jobs clip is that both interactions are somewhat confrontational. Jobs is talking about how the user experience is important and engineering is secondary, Musk tries to solve Twitter's problems by asking the engineers to rewrite things that already work fine.
At Twitter scale. What stack would? Every new feature needs to work for 200m people in 100s of languages, across devices and browsers. Tell me what stack can support uncautious throw anything at the wall strategy. Hell tell me one team of 20 people that can do that.
> Musk is right in wanting "high velocity of features
The desire for velocity isn’t the part being criticized, Musk's proposed approach to that uncontroversial goal and the evident conplete lack of understanding on which it is based is.
> How deeply he understands the technical details does not matter that much
It does, given that he is very hands on on the tech decisions and has proposed handing over the CEO job while retaining control of “Software and Services”.
I wonder: Does he (a) truly believe he knows anything about tech, or (b) desperately try to maintain what he knows is a fiction, for his brand of the celebrity wunderkind?
If I assume he's smart, I'd think it's (b). But to do (b) well, he probably would have experts tell him what to say.
I remember him talking about how Hyperloop is an air hockey table in a vacuum - I'm not a physicist but that doesn't seem to make sense. I know that what he says about software makes zero sense. Does nobody tell him that? Does he really not see it?
It's important to remember that Twitter is not, in fact, Whatsapp. A person-to-person messaging app is going to be far less complex than a global social network.
Bringing up "Whatsapp only had 32 employees" seems like a lazy point to make to handwave away any actual arguments.
That's true. But: If Twitter was built using Whatsapp's tech stack (Erlang, which they've let go in the meantime) then chances are that they would have used a lot less staff than they did. It is extremely well suited to this kind of problem.
Eh... I don't really see it. Erlang is good for the WhatsApp problem; shunting binary blobs around between lots and lots and lots of clients, and maintaining some sort of shared state of what clients exist and whether they're online or not.
This is not really a problem that Twitter has, though. Or at least not a significant part of Twitter's problems; they do have to do some web-push stuff, and sure, they could use Erlang for that, why not, but it's not a big part of their problems. And as for the rest of Twitter... well, Erlang is notably bad at handling _text_, for a start.
Bad approach from the other party though - they should have let Elon keep talking and display more ignorance instead of confronting him and pointing out that he's clueless. Just play along, and give him little nudges and more directions to take wild swings at. Keep asking questions about things he knows nothing about and let him give wrong answers with pretend-confidence.