Your broad point is obviously correct (most outages are caused by code or config changes) but there are still classes of failures that can happen without any real changes, like various performance degradations (maybe your table grows too large) or occasional catastrophic failures from things like disk space or id overflow or something.
There's also the stability of third party systems: forced deprecations, security EOL, etc. The cert expiration stuff people have been mentioning is in this category too. I wouldn't be surprised if something does slip through the cracks at Twitter in the next 4 or 6mo.
Yes and no. I think we'd all agree that large tech companies have tons of really obvious staffing inefficiencies. There are many teams working on what are essentially vanity projects and many other teams have more staffing than they realistically need.
On the other hand the slash and burn Elon approach seems objectively terrible. Indiscriminately firing most of the company kills morale and is likely to send the company into a hiring death spiral where your good employees leave and you can't attract good talent. This won't automatically kill the product or the company but it's not going to lend itself to big positive successes in the future.
Why would you assume it's about politics instead of the whole "shitty asshole boss who has open contempt for you and your coworkers, who is promising to massively overwork you, who might fire you any moment and has already fired half your peers"? I think you'd have to be completely insane to want to work there right now.
Not sure why this is downvoted, it's accurate. Sam made a lot of money in crypto from 2017 to 2019 before founding FTX. He also went to MIT, not Stanford, and I think is a good example of someone who had privilege (via being born into an upper middle class family to intelligent faculty parents) but still went through meritocratic routes.
Sorry but this reads to me like someone who doesn't really know what they're talking about. First, I think you have totally mischaracterized or misunderstood that interview. Second, he is obviously a smart guy; I'm not claiming he's a unique generational genius but there are plenty of third party validations of intelligence (MIT, Jane Street) even if you can't tell from the way he speaks. Finally the comment "the real badasses are at RenTech" is laughable insofar as they don't hire undergrads. I would say more accurately that many of the real badasses went to PhD programs but that besides that Jane Street was a highly desired career choice for this graduating cohort.
Yes, people know him. He's a math-y guy (and seemed like a reasonably nice and genuine person). He wasn't just a Jane Street intern, he worked there for a few years full time before striking out on his own. Doesn't seem so hard to explain to me--smart dude with some experience in finance et viola.
There's also the stability of third party systems: forced deprecations, security EOL, etc. The cert expiration stuff people have been mentioning is in this category too. I wouldn't be surprised if something does slip through the cracks at Twitter in the next 4 or 6mo.