While talking about start up culture a few days ago I was sent an email to a 6 month old article highlighting flaws in Twitter's HR strategy as seen by a former employee.
To make matters worse, Twitter allowed these early employees to hire their own teams. Some of these early engineers are actually talented, says our source, and that has created "pockets of excellence" at Twitter. But our source says some of these early engineers were more "lucky" than good. This source says the old adage that "A" players hire "A" players and that "B" players hire "C" players proved true at Twitter. This source says one group at Twitter that is not a "pocket of excellence" is the team in charge of infrastructure.
Emphasis added. Why? Later that day Twitter started having issues staying up
Twitter went down about 9 a.m. Pacific time last Thursday, due to a "cascading bug" within one of its infrastructure components, Mazen Rawashdeh, vice president of engineering, said in the company's blog. The service had fully recovered at 11:08 a.m. Pacific on Thursday.
I'm sure these two articles aren't at all related. Still, it's good that Twitter didn't decide to go the route of Zynga, Skype and Silver Lake Partners and find a way to screw over their employees who stood to make a lot from their options.