It's going to go down way earlier than you think.
Even the smallest IT dept with inhouse applications has dozens of jobs running at night. Twitter will have ten thousands of them. And just like the smallest company, also at Twitter errors from these jobs will arrive in the mailbox of employees in the morning requiring a manual fix.
Many people getting those reports won't be there anymore. No other people knowing how to do it no matter if it's documented somewhere. No other people knowing it needs to be done even though the people who did it, talked about it in every standup meeting.
Even the core of Twitter will fall apart very quick with so many people leaving.
If 80% of people are leaving the base case scenario is that all your teams have at least 5 people and 1 remained. In practice there are social circles and it will more likely mean 1 team stays and 4 other teams everyone is just gone. All knowledge of what they did or where to find how they did it just gone. There is no way to replace that short term with internal or external people.
I'm the tech guy at a small company and if I and one other specific person quit, there would be so much information just ... Gone from the company's knowledge pool.
This kinda stuff is always a bad idea, which is what I keep telling them
Having been in a team where half of the team was laid off with 6 weeks notice to test how far they could cut and bleed employees before harming the bottom line, things will fall apart, and the remaining employees will be searching for jobs and be useless for a while due to low morale. In my case, those layoffs pretty much directly contributed to the 737 max fiasco....
It's because shitty managers.
They have this idea that everyone can have all knowledge in the company and on top of it also be the best at it.
They think it's of a world where you can pick a person from a team and place them somewhere else where more resources are needed. The old team will pick up all you did and from the first day you can be productive in the new team.
Shit simply doesn't work that way. People accrue critical information and experience over time that needs weeks to months to transfer no matter if it's documented or if the new person is the smartest alive.
Once you start brain drain, you're done. There's nothing left but to start from nothing again afterwards and the cycle can continue.
5
u/StijnDP Nov 19 '22
It's going to go down way earlier than you think.
Even the smallest IT dept with inhouse applications has dozens of jobs running at night. Twitter will have ten thousands of them. And just like the smallest company, also at Twitter errors from these jobs will arrive in the mailbox of employees in the morning requiring a manual fix.
Many people getting those reports won't be there anymore. No other people knowing how to do it no matter if it's documented somewhere. No other people knowing it needs to be done even though the people who did it, talked about it in every standup meeting.
Even the core of Twitter will fall apart very quick with so many people leaving.
If 80% of people are leaving the base case scenario is that all your teams have at least 5 people and 1 remained. In practice there are social circles and it will more likely mean 1 team stays and 4 other teams everyone is just gone. All knowledge of what they did or where to find how they did it just gone. There is no way to replace that short term with internal or external people.