Twitter's race for stability: VP Mighdoll out

Twitter's VP of engineering and operations Lee Mighdoll has reportedly left the company.

According to Silicon Alley Insider, which has been doing a bang-up job staying on top of the Twitter corporate shuffling, Mighdoll has left the company. Silicon Alley Insider's Peter Kafka reports that Mighdoll and Twitter decided the match "was not perfect."

Twitter's biggest mission right now is to find stability in its service if it wants to become a real business. The problem: It would help if Twitter could find some stability in its technology management group first. If Twitter is going to scale, it is going to need to bring in some big IT guns soon.

Also see: Twitter turmoil: when does it end?

The departures of Mighdoll and Twitter’s lead architect Blaine Cook don't help the uptime cause. Sure, those two execs will get a lot of blame for Twitter's outages, but you have to wonder if the service can actually scale as currently constructed. After all, Mighdoll was hired because his "demonstrated experience creating sophisticated back-end software along with his genuine enthusiasm for building global systems that operate at scale made him an easy choice. His outstanding leadership skills and happy disposition made him a must-have."

That was a little more than three months ago. What did Mighdoll see in Twitter's technology architecture, process and project management that made scaling the service mission impossible?

The big question: If Twitter were built today would it have used the same infrastructure? If the answer is no that means Twitter in its short life is already saddled with legacy technology and that's a project management nightmare. You only get one shot at an IT greenfield and Twitter may have guessed wrong.