By Sudarshana Banerjee
“Twitter, like 463, is comprised of good people who have created a culture and a mission that I steadfastly believe in and want to advance,” Sean Garrett wrote a year ago announcing his move to join Twitter. Garrett had been consulting for Twitter for a few months before that, so the move did not really come across as surprising. But this is. Barely a year into the job, Garrett says he is parting ways with Twitter.
Garrett is all praises about the Twitter team even as he leaves:
@SG: My 2 yrs at Twitter felt like 10 but they were my favorite of my career. From no press list to building a team that’s the best in the biz.
@SG: Thanks to @ev, @biz, @jack & @dickc for the opp & for building a business where communicating fearlessly to build trust is a core value.
@SG: Have I mentioned how much I love the sharp, emotionally intelligent & downright fierce @TwitterComms team is?
Garrett says for the first time since 1993, he is going to take more than a two week break between jobs. “No plans yet. Free agency. After creating and fulfilling a killer sabbatical list (suggestions welcomed),” he tweets.
Twitter has not been very lucky on the human resources front, especially as far as the head honchos go.
In an ironic twist, when a Quora user asks a few months ago, “Why are so many top people leaving Twitter to work at other companies?” Garrett himself refuted the very idea. “You could also ask why are so many people leaving other companies to come work at Twitter? The company now has more than 500 employees, up from 110 at the beginning of 2010. Indeed, in a 6/11 third-party study by Top Prospect (http://blog.topprospect.com/2011…), Twitter was found to have the best ratio of hires versus people who have left the company among technology leaders like Google, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, Amazon and so on. Twitter’s rate was 10.9 — or nearly 11 people hired for one person lost. And, here’s an internal metric: In the last six months, Twitter’s engineering team has grown by 3x with an attrition rate of less than five per cent.”
(Sudarshana Banerjee is consulting editor with techtaffy.com. She can be reached at sudarshana@techtaffy.com)