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Twitter isn’t worried about reliability?

May 22, 2008

This afternoon a former employee of mine told me he interviewed with Twitter a couple of weeks ago. The most interesting thing the folks from Twitter told him was they they weren’t worried about reliability. I won’t go into the details of his interview, but ‘not worried about reliability?’ Huh? I didn’t really believe him until I ran across their job openings. They only have THREE open positions? Check out their current openings:

Operations Engineer (server management)

Systems Engineer (backend software development - java, ruby, c/c++ on unix)

Executive Assistant (assistant to CEO)

Front End Engineer (ui work)

Perhaps they should considering adding these:

Database Architecture Expert (mysql)
- someone like: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/0/a6b/705

Enterprise Architect (apache)
- someone like: http://www.linkedin.com/in/randyterbush

Web Infrastructure Architect (apache)
- someone like: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimjag

Large Scale Computing Expert (clustering and such)
- someone like: sofia

Site Reliability Engineer (duh)
- someone like: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/1/782/46b

Advice to startups: realize that when you interview someone and don’t hire them, they will go out into the world and tell people about your company.  You don’t want smart people running around suggesting you are a) idiots, b) rude, c) clueless or d) all of the above.  Consider this, you will likely interview 10 people for every one you hire, by the time you reach 100 people, you will have interviewed 1000 people.  What sort of impression did you leave with the 1000 you didn’t hire?

Written by Alexander Muse · Filed Under Blog, Startups 

Comments

3 Responses to “Twitter isn’t worried about reliability?”

  1. Scott Whigham Says:
    May 23rd, 2008 at 5:48 am

    Maybe $15mm will buy a few more job openings. I hope so!

  2. Mr Business Golf Says:
    May 26th, 2008 at 8:19 pm

    So where is the money in Twitter for them to do all of this hiring of people who are not to worry about their product or service being reliable?

  3. Eathan White Says:
    May 26th, 2008 at 9:39 pm

    I see their product potential and the reliabilty problems, but what is the value of this product come from? Are they going to get us hooked on something and then add something later?

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