Thing is, Twitter was profitable in 2019. Then the venture capitalists decided "Now is the time to increase your workforce by a factor of two. You need to start losing money again or you aren't trying hard enough!"
You can’t just shrink it. That’s the problem. They still think of it as a factory where everyone is just a robot.
Most places lack enough documentation and processes that shrinking the teams reduce knowledge. There is never an even distribution of skill sets etc. You kill off team dynamics. It’s not the same.
You can’t just slot people in and out without impact in software.
Heck, if you hire people because you might need them, give them nothing to do (as many people claimed happened to them) and then fire them it is the easiest of all.
If, on the other hand, you hire 100% more people, then fire 50% of the people and try to use that culling to get rid of a lot of older (and more expensive) employees, you can doom your company.
You've just rephrased the exact issue I had differently. It doesn't matter if it's a new division or not unless your organization doesn't interact.
People have to go via onboarding and other steps. It involves HR "people and culture", the internal IT teams, the reception, you might get assigned a mentor, etc. These interactions spread when people socialize.
It's also as people and possibly shareholders how you view the company. Watch any sports and a player in form in the right team can perform 10x better. These so-called minimal disruptions actually have an impact.
Meta was paying a higher salary because less people wanted to work there. I don't see all the negatives as "minimal consequences".
If you double the number of employees of some place in a year, you have a really large risk of completely redefining its entire culture. And a software business has basically 2 things, a culture and locked-in people.
Lots of places reported people having nothing to do, don't know what to do and lacked direction. The hiring standards also went down.
If you didn't follow conventions, your onboarding wasn't great or reinforced, then very few things in your system will be consistent.
Fine in what sense? There's less features, less capacity and more outages. They couldn't even hold someone's presidential announcement fine without it breaking. Is that fine?
As a business they've gained debt and lost a lot of income. Is that fine? With less income, less ads and less of everything it's a different scale. Something that's fine with 1 million users is not the same as 10 million.
I would say it's different - different ownership, different direction etc. Time will tell what the outcome is. Projects have been axed and new 1s will appear.
The changing of staff has definitely hurt Twitter. Whether they can recover is a different question.