Thread by @yacineMTB

I got fired today. I'm not sure why, I personally don't think there is a reason, or that it's important.

When I joined twitter, I joined because of the engineers I met in SF. They seemed happy. They were having fun. Engineers at play. Engineers that were enabled. It was good!

They seemed competent. They spoke clearly. They didn't make things up. They told me why they worked there. One of them said: "this is the only place where I can work with this scale"

The scale. The scale is just absurd. 1m qps shit makes your eyes bleed. Pagers, pagers, pagers!

I was ambivalent to joining before I visited. I had dingboard, and it was growing fast. For me, it was a little adventure. But after meeting those engineers, I wanted to go back.

You can take the boy out of big tech
But its hard to take the big tech out of the boy

I joined! Staff engineer? Sure, whatever! Stocks? Comp? Who cares! Canadian is less. Like i give a fuck. I'm here to have fun. I'm here to fix the bugs I care about. The bugs that bother me, specifically.

I wanted to touch. 1 million qps

Geohotz gave up. He said it was shit code! It wasn't! The twitter engineers of olde, the ones there at the time of my joining, and the ones that were long gone. They built an amazing thing. It was still running. After all of that damage, all of those blows..

It worked. Despite

I spent so much time going through commit history, learning about the history of twitter, figuring out why decisions were made. It helped me myself make decisions. It helped me learn. I shipped features. I hacked apple's font core text renderer 🔫

I fixed bugs. An ancient service that no one knows how to run anymore? Sure! I'm sure I can figure it out. Big, monster services. No one knows. The commits know.

I will go deep.
Long tweet notifications didnt work, before my first quarter. Can you believe it? Seems important!

So many things can not work, if people don't use the software. Really simple things to fix. They're sooooooooo easy to fix! Backend services getting spammed into literal death, timing out. A javascript bug. A react memo. A react memo! It changed the app from unusable to usable!

Just use your software! Open the network tab. Question why the spaces bar isn't rendering 50% of the time! Look at it for 5 seconds! Just read the code! It doesn't matter if you don't own the service. Just go and fix it! Nothing is stopping you

Measure. Graph.
More live viewers

it's so easy. To just fix tiny little things that basically break the app. I had a long backlog of easy to do but high leverage wins. That's what I do. I use the software. I measure. I figure out high leverage easy fixes. I don't do big migrations. I don't do big fixes.

2 weeks

2 weeks is all it takes. To justify your entire salary. At twitter, the scale is so big! That's what the engineers I met told me. Fun!

But one by one, they left. bye. bye. bye. and soon enough, I was playing alone. No more people.. that impressed me.. no more people.. to impress

a deserialization bug on performance! i found it! I rooted it! it's an odd tree traversal, deep in the stack. commit history from 2013, shit!

but no one to flex on

a sev1! on an unowned service! i fixed it!!

but no one to impress..

last week! I found a horrible bug that erroneously ruined people's reach! two more services, onboarded!

"who owns this service"
me! i own the service! its unowned, i called it, i answered it

but no one to impress..

what's the point. what's the point of stacking go/yacine with a few multiples of my income in impact? what's the point of going deep on a service, locking in 9-5 (no weekend coffee for me, sorry), if there is no one to read it? no one to read

go/yacine

@lexfridman could upload a 6 hour pod - only after i fixed a bug two weeks prior! why? because i cared to look. because I wanted to watch an andrew huberman podcast on X and it was clipped to 4 hours

it wasn't even that hard! I just learned, you can learn anything in two weeks!

@lexfridman you know what i learned? 1m qps is actually easier than 100k qps. at my last big tech wagie job, my last eng lead explained why

the scale swallows up the errors
the scale. swallows up the tails

but the tails! the tails are people like me
we are weird. we use the app, weird

@lexfridman we don't show up in the data
did you know that dms literally doesn't load for me? i get too many messages
dms on web
literally
doesn't load for me
i have a PR up that SHOULD BE MERGED (please merge it) that MIGHT fix it. but WHY is it broken?

@lexfridman it's broken because dms works for *everyone else*
big users aren't represented
users that post a lot. power users. users that send a gajillion replies and posts a day. right tail users. me users

@lexfridman notifications page used to time out 60% of the time for me

i fixed it

no one noticed. no one noticed that it was broken! it was literally just broken! for big users! but i fixed it. 7 services later!

@lexfridman WHY DOES IT STILL TAKE 5 SECONDS TO POST ON ANDROID
HOLY SHIT
FIX YOUR FUCKING
DOGSHIT
APP
DO YOU EVEN FUCKING USE THIS APP

@lexfridman WHY IS THERE A FUCKING TIMER
JUST REMOVE IT
IT SHOULD TAKE YOU
LITERALLY FUCKING
5 SECONDS
DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH POST CONVERSION YOU ARE LOSING

@lexfridman but of course, you can't know, unless you're a power user
if you're a right tail user. and i guess, you won't fix it, if you're a powerful engineer. a right tail engineer. an "i will onboard to fucking anything engineer"

@lexfridman you won't fix it unless*

@lexfridman a dm i got 3 months in or so
>I like how you will do anything to fix a problem no matter where it is

YES
BECAUSE I
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKING
USE THIS APP
I DONT FUCKING CARE

@lexfridman if you work at x and you want free alpha, go to go/yacine
look at all the things i didn't have time to do
please actually do them
I love this app and i love you! i need you to fix it!

@lexfridman AND PLEASE FIX THE FACT THAT I PAID FOR PREMIUM AND NOW I AM IN A BUGGED STATE

I AM A USER. PLEASE FIX BUG

@lexfridman anyways, most of the engineers that convinced me to join are gone now. retention of talent is really hard. the talent injection and weekend logo coffees from xai will help a lot

@lexfridman when extreme pressure (weekend logo xai coffee workers without kids) meets dinosaur shit (twitter codebase that suffered from SF valley 2021 politics) for a long period of time, that's how diamonds are formed

i love this app and i love elon

@lexfridman in fact, the one thing I will say is that elon is maximally aligned to humanity. i really really appreciate everything he's done. god, i love elon. he's seriously just a good engineer

@lexfridman ok that's it, i'm done. just one more thing

please fix the premium bug. i paid and i don't have a blue check and i dont have any of the features.

also, fix android and stop getting sniped on side projects that haven't shipped for over a year

@ciabattabdavid @lexfridman as in its a straw that breaks the camels back. is it the straw that is the problem, or the total load?