Ask HN: How long till outages if Big Tech employees suddenly got Thanos-snapped?
Given the recent mass layoffs and resignations at Twitter, it raises an interesting question: At what point will critical systems start failing and Twitter’s Fail Whale will return?[1] When will there be an outage?
While the layoffs at Facebook, Google, Amazon, Stripe, etc are all certainly being managed far better than Twitter’s situation, it is an interesting question to understand the relationship between tech workers and the production infrastructure of modern tech companies.
One would hope that most companies have used systems equivalent to chaos monkey + modern devops engineering to build automated resiliency into their systems without requiring much human intervention. But.....
So how long do you think it would be until X systems/products at any given Big Tech company would degrade in service or experience an outage if they lost all their workers?
While the layoffs at Facebook, Google, Amazon, Stripe, etc are all certainly being managed far better than Twitter’s situation, it is an interesting question to understand the relationship between tech workers and the production infrastructure of modern tech companies.
One would hope that most companies have used systems equivalent to chaos monkey + modern devops engineering to build automated resiliency into their systems without requiring much human intervention. But.....
So how long do you think it would be until X systems/products at any given Big Tech company would degrade in service or experience an outage if they lost all their workers?
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-story-behind-twitters-fail-whale/384313/