Twitter's hiring binge brings it to 140 employees
Twitter has been on a hiring spree as of late, grabbing employees left and right for its engineering and business development teams. — The company just crossed the symbolic 140-employee mark, mirroring its famous character limit for tweets, according to co-founder Biz Stone.
Context & Ripple Effects
The 140-employee milestone caps a hiring run that started at least a year earlier, when Twitter signaled plans to ramp up its search and platform API teams in March 2009. Since January the company has paired the recruiting push with a quickening product cadence — Trends and Local Trends launched together on January 26, followed by Hovercards on February 3 — which is what the new engineering headcount is being hired to sustain.
First-order effects
- Twitter's engineering team gets the capacity to keep shipping features like Trends, Local Trends, and Hovercards at the pace it has set over the past three weeks.
- New business development hires give Twitter dealmaking muscle just as co-founder Biz Stone uses the 140 mark as a publicity hook for the company's growth story.
Second-order effects
- Rivals named in the same-day age-distribution research — Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn — face a competitor investing in both product velocity and partnerships, after a January study found one Facebook convert had already drifted back off Twitter.
- A talent bid this concentrated puts pressure on other Bay Area consumer-web companies competing for the same engineering pool.
Third-order effects
- The open question is conversion: the same January research found Twitter's new-user growth slowing and most existing users inactive, so the hiring binge bets headcount can turn attention into retained usage rather than just feature output.
- If the pattern holds, Twitter transitions from scrappy startup to scaled operator — with the API-platform investment foreshadowed in its 2009 hiring plans becoming the structure third-party developers build against.
The trend: Consumer web companies in 2010 are answering slowing user-growth data with aggressive engineering hiring, betting product velocity and platform investment can convert attention into retention.