I know it's preposterous to say stuff like that on HN which has a weird love for these companies, but some of the absolute worst engineers and PM's I have had the unfortunate punishment to work with went to Stanford, did some sort of management training seminars in Stanford or worked at some of these companies.
It's not because they are worse than other engineers. It's that because since they went to those places, people immediately attach some sort of competency to them that may or may not exist, and more often than not, does not.
Most of them are just average engineers like everyone else, but the worst of them are average bad engineers with an absolutely unwarranted confidence akin to that of snake oil salesmen, that uneducated leaders believe in simply because they don't know any better, not least because of societies unwarranted, constant advertisement of their competencies.
Out of all the dev jobs I worked, I was much happier at places where the deadweight engineers weren't making up a giant chunk. Because not only it is a bit demoralizing to work in that environment, all the prioritization and incentives for the deliverables get screwed up for me as well.
I get that my previous statement was a bit vague, so let me elaborate. New features, timelines, approaches, etc., they all get prioritized and decided based on what the heavy majority of the devs and managers feel is important. Oh, and managers take into the account what their devs want too, to a degree. At this point, you probably realize that the whole situation turns into a tyrrany by the deadweight majority.
No, I don't want to do another refactor of a perfectly good codebase just because someone wants to do some pretense work for a few hours a day, especially since we have already done a major refactor/rewrite not that long ago. Doubly so when reasons for it cannot be articulated with anything but a buzzword soup that makes zero sense anywhere outside of the performance review.
Why does it seem like every company on earth is either a hellhole where you get three days off a year or a ridiculous hugbox where all your employees are spoiled children who play ping pong at work and eat on the company dime?
I don't have that much faith that it is that easy to always identify the slack or that it will be enough to make Twitter profitable, but it also seems a bit uncontroversial to say a lot of these companies having hiring patterns of a growth company in a low-interest rate environment even though their core product is relatively stable.