I utterly fail to understand how this would yield anything other than.
Ooh they use tabs here rather than spaces! And that experimental code over there contains an unused variable! This A/B testing pipeline has minimal test cases! They ship in a day without a Q/A pipeline.
All of the above would happen if any company were acquired by any other. The code style will be different, and the dev practices will be different. Companies optimized to ship quickly will appear low quality to those who optimize for quality, optimizing for quality will appear as a slow moving dinosaur to those who move fast.
Why? One of the production goals of software is to minimize inventory time. Software that is written and not shipped incurs capex without revenue, unlike tech debt - I can put an explicit number on this cost. Similarly, software that goes unshipped also does not get customer feedback. It may be worthless.
There’s a balance here - but it’s not at all obvious what the balance should be in every business.
You're right, every business is different, and that goes for software businesses, too. I'm thinking that Twitter's central position re the dissemination of information, and its international scope make it a fairly high security operation, in this day and age, whether it wants to be or not.
Ooh they use tabs here rather than spaces! And that experimental code over there contains an unused variable! This A/B testing pipeline has minimal test cases! They ship in a day without a Q/A pipeline.
All of the above would happen if any company were acquired by any other. The code style will be different, and the dev practices will be different. Companies optimized to ship quickly will appear low quality to those who optimize for quality, optimizing for quality will appear as a slow moving dinosaur to those who move fast.