But is any of this really stuff that should take 1000 engineers to build? Tweet length? GIFs?
I don't question that those engineers are working hard. I'm sure they're not sitting around twiddling their thumbs. And I don't question that there aren't some genuinely hard, complicated problems to solve at Twitter, particularly around scaling and security. But from a structural perspective, I do still kind of wonder if companies the size of Twitter and Facebook aren't just an extended, very public example of Brooks's Law.
Anecdotally, I've been in large teams and small teams and I work equally hard in both environments. But even with the same amount of work, somehow, more stuff gets done and more products get shipped from the smaller teams.
There's a ton of infrastructure to build and maintain at Twitter. Yesterday's solutions don't scale and need replacing. Yesterday's "just get it done, we'll worry about cost (or quality, or operational burden) later" have happened and it's time to fix. Lather, rinse, repeat.
This post should give you an idea of scale at Twitter. When I worked there, I spent about 2 months focused just on creating software to help automate the Clos migration mentioned. And there are just tons of things like this that are constantly being worked on.
Having made the same observation as you, I always preferred the formulation in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringelmann_effect. Although the Wikipedia article lists "loss of motivation" as a cause, it originally focussed more on coordination problems growing with group size–sort of a reverse Metcalf'.
In that sense it avoids the lazy cynicism of writing off whole groups of people as stupid or unmotivated (i. e. all of Dilbert). Instead, it's a starting point to consider how much we can still improve what's arguably humanity's claim to fame, the ability to cooperate.
I don't question that those engineers are working hard. I'm sure they're not sitting around twiddling their thumbs. And I don't question that there aren't some genuinely hard, complicated problems to solve at Twitter, particularly around scaling and security. But from a structural perspective, I do still kind of wonder if companies the size of Twitter and Facebook aren't just an extended, very public example of Brooks's Law.
Anecdotally, I've been in large teams and small teams and I work equally hard in both environments. But even with the same amount of work, somehow, more stuff gets done and more products get shipped from the smaller teams.