39 Replies to ““I’ve worked on Twitter for Android for 6 years””

    1. When it comes to software development, there is speed, quality and cost. You usually only get to pick 2 at the expense of the 3rd.

      1. It’s actually scope, quality and time/cost.

        Control one. Optimize the next one. Then you have to live with however the third one turns out.

      2. Ottawa Pete an RN

        Speed, Quality, Cost triangle (pick any two and live with the third) is well known in project circles. There are techniques for successfully achieving all three. Perhaps the subject for a different day?

        To me the key points are:
        1. They had six years to fix it. So the Cost, Quality, Speed trade-off shouldn’t have been an issue.
        2. Did they want to fix it. or were they too busy censoring information that didn’t fit their political beliefs?

      3. It’s not just software development. I heard the same thing in manufacturing 30 years ago. “Something can be made well, made cheaply, or made fast. Pick two.”

      4. Hey Pete, are you sure you’re from Ottawa?

        I remember ArriveCan, Phoenix Payroll, Long Gun Registry…
        Rule of thumb is lucky to get one of the three.

    3. Well, accurate is good, too. My work is basically saying to MGMT that faster isn’t always better.

  3. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was instructed to build the app the way it is. But he shouldn’t have outed himself on Twitter. He should have went directly to senior management with the explanation.

    You never call out the boss publicly. Now he’ll probably get fired for exercising poor judgment.

  4. That reminds me of back in the day Tesla had a mole that was leaking important information to the press. Elon made a company email, but it was different for each person. One space different.

    1. Many spaces, spread throughout the e-mail, each e-mail having a different (and globally unique) pattern.

      It was a brilliant move; the mole copied the e-mails verbatim and re-broadcast them, which immediately IDed who it was. It’s a good thing the mole didn’t care about presentation — if he’d tried to clean up the text before re-broadcasting, the IDing would’ve failed.

  5. Tom Clancy wrote about something like this in one of his Jack Ryan novels in the 1980s (Cardinal of the Kremlin, maybe?). It was called the “canary trap” – a classified document is produced but each copy has slightly different wording so when you find a leaked document, you know who leaked it.
    I wonder if Elon reads Clancy?

  6. I visited his Twitter account just for shits and giggles and so far he’s being very cavalier about his firing, giving Musk the “Salute” emoji in his reply.
    That said – I doubt guys like him have to worry about their next meal
    Criticizing your boss on a public forum? Hard pass.
    His ego got the best of him…he took the bait.

  7. L – Elon Musk, this is how a competent C.E.O. operates. If this modus operandi to seek and reward competence, while sleuthing out incompetence, is reinstated. Then the MAGA motif, of Make America Great Again is revived.

    If Canada, the U.K. Australia, N.Z. and Europe were to follow suit. Western Civilization’s current nihilist obsession with a death cult and suicide would also be reversed.

    Our vital signs are seemingly absent, but rising from the tomb, is a foundational narrative of Western Civilization, and it has brought us through Dark Ages before.

    Elon Musk is in the process of earning a seat around King Arthur’s Round Table. He slays dragons in their lair or baiting them to open combat. His quest is a worthy one, indeed.

    Godspeed, Sir Knight.

  8. The way I read the screen-capped Twitter thread, the guy seems to have been fired for saying Musk should have raised the question through internal channels. I read it as him getting fired for the snottiness of pointing out that this should have been asked privately, not for unresolved issues in the app.

    Knowing that there are non-life-threatening, non-liability-incurring issues with an app or product should not get you fired. There are lots of political and corporate-culture reasons in the pre-Musk-Twitter era that could have prevented even the product lead from repairing known issues.

    For example, with what I do, I know there are issues in the stuff I support. I know they can be fixed but they’re going to take time. Wankers above me keep saying “we can’t spend the time or there’s not enough of a return on the time”, so the issues don’t get fixed. Should I be fired for that? I wouldn’t think so. So instead, I just internalized the stress and let it burn me out mentally, let the burnout distance me from my wife, driving her into the arms and beds of the local firefighters, police, paramedics, high school football team, men’s choir from the local church, men’s choir from the church two towns over, and multiple Toronto Transit workers in, according to her OnlyFans page, buses, streetcars, and subway control cabs, let that destroy my marriage and estrange me from my kids as they now have dozens of new daddies who are infinitely far more interesting that some guy who just writes code, and then let that drive me to run away to rural Saskatchewan where I find that Brent Butt totally lied about the nature of small town life out west and where even here the provincial government has an energy deathwish and wind power fetish that will eventually kill us all in a long, dark, cold, winter of existential doom.

    Maybe it would be better if they’d fire me.

    2. He got fired because he was the guy in charge of the App, and was well aware of what is wrong with it, but did nothing. What good is a guy who makes no effort to fix a problem that he’s in charge of?

  9. Regarding the subtle alteration of information to reveal an information source. This is an ancient technique largely because it is so immediately obvious.

    The usual method is to tell the same story to several potential gossips with one small insignificant fact altered in each version. You then monitor the traffic to see where the story came back from. The technique may need to be applied several times before you can triangulate on the exact source of the treasonous gossip.

    I once used the method myself using invoice information. A particular sub-contractor’s invoice was altered with a specific value. We were able to track down exactly who was communicating with who in order to rig their bids.

  10. I received a investment marketing pitch letter once from a company I didn’t recognize.
    Right off the bat I noticed that the formatting of the names was identical to my Bank of Montreal statements — a formatting I saw only on BMO correspondence.
    Called a BMO VP downtown Vancouver and he was in my office 30 minutes later to examine it. It seems that break away employees had stolen BMO data and set up a small rival firm. They must have missed their ethics course.

    1. Velocity is how frequently you can deploy new versions/features in your app. Performance is how quickly the app performs its functions.

  13. Twitter 2FA is broken. If you log out, you cannot log back in. Elon needs to focus on small incremental changes.

    2. Elon has lost his mind and is burning Twitter and his 44 billion dollars on an amazing midlife crisis.

  14. I see a lot of people here suddenly became experts in software engineering overnight.

    Musk is a terrible executive. He’s short-tempered and likes to fire people for not giving him the answer he wants. That kind of unchecked ego is dangerous to a company. Tesla and SpaceX stay in business because they’re subsidy farms, not because they’re well-managed.

    Froehnhoefer said he worked on Twitter for Android for six years, not that he was in charge of Twitter on Android for six years. Musk firing a senior engineer who tells him, honestly, that the reason the app is slow is that management wanted a feature factory instead of solid product engineering is ensuring that from that moment forward people will only tell Musk what they think he wants to hear.

    1. Exactly right.

      Secondly, the client server example Musk used is questionable. I explained to Kate after the post that sure, if it was designed for a connection to the server for every element of the user home page (the example cited) then yes, bandwidth will be used. However just setting up a collector procedure on the servers that gather up the users junk and returns it, then writing a new remote call on the client to call the collector, separate the objects and send each object to the clients original functions is not a big change.

      I read this more like Musk playing PR, not engineering.

      That being said, calling out your boss in public is stupid and thus deserving of being let go.

      1. While 1200 RPC calls over HTTP would certainly explain slowness, I would be staggered if the app functioned at all it that’s what was actually happening. Just the TLS handshaking alone would cause the phone’s battery to melt out of the case. Even if it was using something like gRPC, it wouldn’t help much at that scale and gRPC has only been production usable for less than five years. If Froehnhoefer is right about the feature factory vs. performance engineering conflict, I doubt the Twitter client was rewritten to use gRPC while he was working on it.

        just setting up a collector procedure on the servers that gather up the users junk and returns it, then writing a new remote call on the client to call the collector

        That’s literally GraphQL, and it exists to solve this exact problem. The graphql-java repo has significant contributions from Twitter for performance, so that’s clearly what they’re using for the Android client. Which means Froehnhoefer is right about why the app is slow and Musk is full of it. Imagine my shock.

    2. I spent most of my career at an employer with more than 10,000 employees.

      I think the expectation of just about employee was that if you publicly called out the CEO for how he should have done something, you deserved to be fired.

      This is a situation where who is right or wrong is secondary. If that level of impertinence were tolerated, managers understood that the company would self-destruct and everyone would end up out of a job.

      This exchange sent a message from Elon about his expectations.,

    3. The guy said Musk was wrong, it isn’t slow. Then when Musk says, ok, then tell me how I’m wrong the guy admits iy is slow, and he had six years to fix it. I’m totally in Musk’s camp on this. The number of non- or barely working employees Twitter had is mindboggling.

      1. No, he said the reason the app was slow wasn’t what Musk said it was. And from the tiny little bits I’ve seen so far, I’m more inclined to believe Froehnhoefer’s explanation for why it’s slow than Musk’s.

        I think the expectation of just about employee was that if you publicly called out the CEO for how he should have done something, you deserved to be fired.

        That’s fair, but it’s also true that the software industry has a lot of problems with that that are only being exacerbated by the current white-hot job market for software engineers. Just the other day I sat in on a meeting where an intermediate Node.js developer aggressively demanded the CTO justify the company’s SDLC auditing and security policies. At a company that is legally a bank. He kept his job.

        The software engineering industry is completely, utterly unlike any other, including conventional engineering. That is to the software industry’s detriment, IMHO, but it is what it is.

    4. Finally, someone with a brain. I love Musk-Space X is taking us to the stars-but he’s ruined himself with this midlife crisis to make Zuckerberg’s ‘MetaVerse’ look like no biggie.

      Oh and the 8$ fraud factory. And the advertisers running for the exits.

      1. When UnMe shows up to congratulate you, you’re supposed to pray for an asteroid, not take a bow.

  15. excuse number 3 , always blame the network

    the company I used to work for had a global technology infrastructure team that worked across US, EUand AP to keep things performing and in synch and not blow each other up. Meanwhile the app developers would do what they liked, outsourced with no standards and then complained that the network was the problem. Sound like he was to focused on chai lattes and diversity to get anythng done.

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation