I guess this is applicable to any social media platform or other similar systems. Is it because there are always bugs to address, so it’s never really running smoothly, or other reasons?
In: 153
Lots of reasons but I’ll give you 3.
1. Day to day fires. Projects at Twitter scale stress limits on systems in different way based on lots of factors and you need people around to adjust for those changes.
2. Security and privacy. Twitter is now a massive hacking target for bad actors around the world. If no engineers are around, they become a bigger target.
3. Tribal knowledge. Knowing how a system behaves and all of its idiosyncrasies, how systems work together, why decisions were made in the past, what lessons were learned on the way, all of these things, are more important to running a system than the bits.
Latest Answers