I think it's well understood that when people refer to Twitter's "bloat" they're talking about its bloat of extra employees, not its extra microservices.
I've told this example before, but my close friend and roommate did a year at Twitter in 2019. He was tasked with implementing versions of simple, relaxing JS games like Tetris which would be used by Twitter's moderation staff when they felt they had accumulated too much stress and needed a break. He was making $300k USD to copy an open-source version of Tetris to be played by paid staff! This was actually one of his more engaging projects, most days he said that he wrote 0 code at all. He got great reviews and was being encouraged by his manager to pursue the senior track; from what I could observe from the outside, there was a complete misalignment of goals at pretty much all levels.
Perhaps we disagree which is totally fine, but I think this type of allocation of eng resources absolutely counts as "bloat". You may see that work as comparable to a seatbelt or crumple zone, but I personally see it as more comparable to all the other expensive, useless nonsense which plagues modern cars.
This is an interesting example but I have to wonder if it may inadvertently highlight a disconnect between the parties involved.
I'm no expert in this area but many stories have surfaced over the years regarding high levels of stress and (in extreme cases) meaningful declines in the mental health of social media content moderators.
I recently encountered a twitter thread from an early LiveJournal employee (1) @rahaeli "about Trust & Safety work, the toll it takes on you, the things you see, and the human misery, suffering, and death that happens when you fuck it up, including murder and child sex abuse." and I am inclined to believe that, while relatively simple and un-engaging, managers and end-users likely would have found it important.
> He was tasked with implementing versions of simple, relaxing JS games like Tetris which would be used by Twitter's moderation staff when they felt they had accumulated too much stress and needed a break.
Oh my god, this is incredible. Thank you for this story.
I've told this example before, but my close friend and roommate did a year at Twitter in 2019. He was tasked with implementing versions of simple, relaxing JS games like Tetris which would be used by Twitter's moderation staff when they felt they had accumulated too much stress and needed a break. He was making $300k USD to copy an open-source version of Tetris to be played by paid staff! This was actually one of his more engaging projects, most days he said that he wrote 0 code at all. He got great reviews and was being encouraged by his manager to pursue the senior track; from what I could observe from the outside, there was a complete misalignment of goals at pretty much all levels.
Perhaps we disagree which is totally fine, but I think this type of allocation of eng resources absolutely counts as "bloat". You may see that work as comparable to a seatbelt or crumple zone, but I personally see it as more comparable to all the other expensive, useless nonsense which plagues modern cars.