“It’s not that hard”

Sjmarf@sh.itjust.works to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 884 points –
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Maybe I'm out of the loop - what's he been saying about software?

One example that stuck with me is that he said some shit along the lines of 80% of Twitter's microservices being superfluous and he'll be shutting them off.

Yes, the dev teams just spent 4/5 of their time building shit no one asked for. It just annoys me so much, because anyone with basic reasoning should be able to work out that this cannot possibly be the case, but it's easy to give it the benefit of the doubt.

Well, except that many, many Twitter outages followed.

Well, except that many, many Twitter outages followed.

Yeah. As a software dev, it was pretty awkward explaining this to colleagues who rely on Twitter/X.

"It sounds like you think Twitter is a software company and that Elon is utterly unqualified to run a software company. That can't possibly be true, right?"

...Then we end up doing the "Concerned Padme" meme...

I've heard horror stories on the programming subreddits of incompetent managers that require their employees to write X new lines of code per week. Those code bases probably could have huge chunks taken off.

Clearly that hasn't happened here

When he took over twitter there was a bunch of stuff he was spouting about things like Twitter's stack needing a full rewrite and such. Going so far as to fire the engineer that challenged him on it during a live spaces thing if I recall correctly.

Ah yes I remember that. I thought maybe there was something new he was going on about specifically.

He would have to know what he's talking about to be specific.

You would think so... And yet months of instability on a previously rock solid platform says he did not.

He asked employees to print out their code so he could review it.

He also seems to have the idea that the best developer is the one who produces the most code. That shows a pretty major lack of understanding of how software development works. Sometimes the best day is when you produce negative amounts of code.

This post’s image man

It’s not that hard(tm)

Oh. This post's image has him talking types in January and the "obligatory" image above has someone saying he's been talking software in December, so I thought maybe Musk has been spewing about software for a few weeks or something.

December from '22 not '23. The image was from a few months after he took over twitter and was still going on about that stuff and how it was doing all these useless things that needed to be removed or rewritten. I just remembered another one about how he was going on about a single request to twitter causing thousands of RPCs or something? I think that's not really unheard of in a microservices infrastructure and it's not like they'd be synchronous. There's probably tons of calls that go to things like tracking, analytics, or cross DC sharing I would imagine for such a large and high volume service like twitter.

Okay gotcha. Yeah I just thought I missed a new headline or something.

needed to be removed or rewritten

Literally any developer can tell you that. It doesn’t even matter what codebase we’re talking about. It always needs to be rewritten.

Twitter is a software, he's been saying stupid stuff about how it works for the last year+

Okay gotcha. Thought maybe there was a headline I missed.