Working as a test automation engineer in '91/92 (although as an intern), I wrote a program that controlled a test rig for seat belts.
The machine was basically a home computer running a repl with BASIC, beefed up with a handful of input/output ports to get data from sensors and operate pneumatic actors on the rig.
No graphics beyond what you could do with ASCII on a monochrome monitor.
In the end it came to ~2800 lines of code including comments.
Design principles: a) make it work and b) make the code as readable as possible.
Work-life-balance: it was a normal engineering job, so basically a 9-to-5 thing. Although I did put in a saturday appearance at the end to get everything done (including manuals) before my stint ended.
All-in-all it was as much fun as one could have in test automation at the time; writing the program from scratch and adapting the rig where necessary.
It's always interesting to read such articles. 7,500 Employees? Bah, too much! 100 Engineers will do!!
I raise you to 50 employees, the number WhatsApp had when they reached 1 billion users.
So where's the mistake the author makes? Simple: Twitter is a globally active social media application and, as such, falls under local jurisdiction in a lot of countries. E.g. in the European Union, Twitter has to remove content flagged as "terrorist" within one (1) hour. 24/7. Yes, on Thanksgiving Day too.
And that's what the bulk of employees will be: content supervisors. Moderators.
Or "age verification" agents - Britain has it's "Online Safety Bill" in place, and it applies to any social media site accessible in Britain.
The machine was basically a home computer running a repl with BASIC, beefed up with a handful of input/output ports to get data from sensors and operate pneumatic actors on the rig.
No graphics beyond what you could do with ASCII on a monochrome monitor.
In the end it came to ~2800 lines of code including comments.
Design principles: a) make it work and b) make the code as readable as possible.
Work-life-balance: it was a normal engineering job, so basically a 9-to-5 thing. Although I did put in a saturday appearance at the end to get everything done (including manuals) before my stint ended.
All-in-all it was as much fun as one could have in test automation at the time; writing the program from scratch and adapting the rig where necessary.