So ~$900/month for bandwidth alone.

The disk and CPU costs for me are worth it, much better to pay $600/month and let that be someone else's headache. But the bandwidth makes this totally a nonstarter.

Out of curiosity, what are you moving?

I'm also not sure how these smaller datacenters somehow charge so much less for bandwidth.

I'm not claiming that such a model is guaranteed to be perfect or even as good as a pollster, but it sounds in principle like a reasonable thing to do, if you take appropriate precautions to reduce bias.

Now given the Twitters nature then is there such a model that is even approximately accurate?

Or in other words, what relevant data Twitters collects and how accurate it is?

If the alternative is maintaining a single index, won't the time it takes to update it at least be the time it takes to update per-user indexes? The former naively sounds like updating a single, gigantic binary search tree, the latter seems like updating a hashmap of UserId/BST pairs.

"Secondly, this approach requires the system to maintain as many indices as there are users with each stored in a separate file. With over 300 million users, keeping track of so many indices in production would be an operational nightmare."

..Why?

Anyway the stuff about shared documents is enough to make per-user indexing probably a bad idea, but I don't understand the reasons they provided above.

  resultOption match {
    case Some(x) => println(x)
    case None => println("error")
  }

  if (resultOption.isDefined) {
    println(resultOption.get)
  } else {
    println("Error")
  }

  import java.util.Optional;

  public class Scratch {
      public static void main(String... args) {
          Optional<String> foo = Optional.of("foo");
          Optional<String> bar = Optional.empty();

          System.out.println(foo.orElse("Error"));
          System.out.println(bar.orElse("Error"));

          foo.map(Print::print).orElseGet(() -> Print.print("Error"));
          bar.map(Print::print).orElseGet(() -> Print.print("Error"));

          foo.ifPresent(Print::print);

      }

      static class Print {
          public static <T> T print(T val) {
              System.out.println(val);
              return val;
          }
      }
  }

Otherwise wait for your performance review. If you don't get one, ask for it.

"That's very disappointing to hear that we're struggling so much as a company. I was (hoping|expecting) for X.

<pause>

Is there any advice or direction you could provide to me where I might help ensure we do better as a company going forward? I'd like to set up a plan of what I can to help and revisit compensation in the next 1-3 months."

And at the same time, start polishing your resume and interview skills.

I would think of this approach as a probation period for any company that I work for. If an employee isn't doing well, they're put on probation. Why not do the same for any company that is vying for our technical abilities?

If they're doomed and / or you don't trust them (i.e. does it seem like the managers also subject to low pay?), start looking.

But if you feel like the company can afford it and they're just shutting you down, the proper response is, "Seeya."

Are you the reason the company had less of a rough year than they could have had?

Either way, find yourself a company that isn't having a rough year.