What happens if Twitter’s top engineers leave the company?
As Elon Musk’s endless, on-again, off-again purchase of Twitter continues to wend its way to the logical conclusion—that Musk takes ownership of the company that he’s professed publicly multiple times not to want—a key question becomes all the more pressing: What happens to the Twitter employees who have already decided they want out?
Insiders claim that many Twitter employees are unhappy about the potential of working under Musk, with multiple employees saying they intend to leave the company should the entrepreneur take over. Several current and former employees have told reporters that Twitter has pursued an informal policy of attrition among its workforce to cut costs by not backfilling roles as people leave.
It all begs the question: What happens if Twitter’s top engineers decide to leave the company?
It’s a proposition made in the New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast, that a brain drain of Twitter’s five top engineers could prove terminal for the company. “There are people inside Twitter who say, ‘If these five engineers leave, we don’t know how to restart the servers’,” said host Casey Newton.
But is there any truth to the rumor?
“I don’t think this is that much of a concern, really,” says Manu Cornet, a software engineer at Twitter, who joined the company last year after 14 years at Google. Cornet says that important processes within the company are well-documented to such an extent that any brain drain of top staff—were it to happen—would not materially affect the product.
Here Cornet brings up the company’s “bus factor,” referencing the hypothetical risk measurement assessment that asks how many people within a company would need to get run over by a bus for the organization to fail. “It is certainly much, much higher than five, even if you pick the five most senior, knowledgeable, and productive engineers,” he says.
“Honestly, even if half of the engineers leave, I would think most of them would do it responsibly, and make sure there is a plan for things to keep running smoothly after they leave,” Cornet adds, saying that the concept of any exodus doesn’t trouble him as he thinks it wouldn’t affect his ability to do his job. While he admits documentation at Twitter isn’t perfect—“far from it, of course, as in many companies,” he adds—“it’s good enough.”
That’s not a view shared by everyone who has worked at Twitter. “Twitter’s reputation for engineering is awful,” says one former Twitter employee, who left a post as an engineer with the company earlier this year and spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It’s known internally that people are circled around projects so quickly that no one knows how to fix our key products because the person who tweaked the algorithm last is building… I don’t know, an OnlyFans competitor.”
That said, the same former employee suggests that an overhaul of the engineering team wouldn’t be as bad as some might fear. “There’s just years of broken, unworking product, and maybe a refresh would help start addressing problems,” they say, adding that, within the company, the engineering team belongs to a “privileged group,” with higher pay, lighter workloads, and a more vocal culture than other teams.
Those who have more hands-on experience with Twitter’s codebase say that the reality may lie somewhere in between. “Twitter, like every other complex product you can think of, isn’t one system maintained by a single team,” says another former employee, who until June 2022 was a software engineer at Twitter. “It’s a large number of small systems. A lot of those are maintained by surprisingly small teams, so often underfunded and stretched thin,” they add. The engineers in those teams also have years of institutional knowledge about the internal system—from how it’s built and how it works to any repeated issues that it’s had in the past and how to avoid them or work around them.
“When those engineers leave, it’s a huge loss,” says the former engineer. “In my experience, leadership in tech companies have so often unfortunately seen individual engineers as easily replaceable, completely missing this picture and not doing enough to retain talent.” (Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.)
Cornet, for his part, believes any rumors about the engineering department’s reliance on a few key figures comes from a skepticism of the department’s relatively small staff size: Because Twitter isn’t a sprawling company like Facebook—whose founder has said lately that he believes the company is carrying dead weight—there might be a suggestion that any departures would be felt more keenly than others.
Twitter’s engineering team has historically been very lean: In 2015, the company was criticized for making the bulk of job cuts to its then 4,100-strong workforce via its product and engineering departments. However, the company still has 3,023 people working in engineering, according to LinkedIn data—three times the number of the next-most popular department, business development.
Despite that, people left the company during the interregnum between Parag Agrawal’s ascent into the CEO role and what now looks like Elon Musk’s impending control of Twitter. The former Twitter engineer says many tech firms view engineers as replaceable cogs and could even see their exits as a positive: attrition, rather than costly layoffs, saves money.
“Unfortunately, this is a pattern that we have seen in several tech companies this year,” says the engineer. “The reason why this is so shortsighted by tech execs is that while, yes, they accomplish their goal of cheaply reducing the size of their staff, the people they’re often losing are the ones who can more easily find another job elsewhere: the most talented and valuable engineers.”
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