I imagine if half the staff left a nursing home, it would be forced to shut down.
A friend of mine went to work for a small game studio in Oklahoma that'd gotten some acclaim for their quake mod pack. They took that momentum and started on their own novel IP as a quake licensee. They made a ahem mildly successful game named Medal of Honor.
Some time down the road, the owner of the studio didn't want to share the wealth.
As a result the top programmers, designers, etc, grouped up and negotiated a deal to become a 2nd party dev studio with a competing publisher. Nearly the entire company left with them. They couldn't take the IP with them so they rebranded their new game franchise as Call of Duty.
That studio owner literally made a billion dollar mistake by not simply being fair early on to the team. Never, ever, treat a team that has achieved rare success as replaceable cogs. If they've shipped, they can find more money people any time they want.
What prevented them from offering bad deals that are common today? Some examples I've seen:
- give lots of equity, but vesting over long timelines
- give no refreshers, if people leave, they lost lots of unvested
- stay private for a long time...equity is almost unsellable and theoretical only
- give lots of equity, but lag on salary and save big
- give lots of equity, but leave people with huge unfunded tax liabilities if they want to leave company
- give "lots" of equity which is worthless if people actually saw the cap table
I dont feel any of the above are good practices, but they are common practices for equity theatre
That wisdom applies to that specific industry. In gaming, the people you hire are the asset. However the same doesn't apply to all industries. Sometimes people are more and sometimes less replaceable. If you are running a fast food chain and manage to piss all your employees, yes, it is likely a problem, but if you hire new people and fix your behaviour it is likely that the business will continue to run as usual.
Could you clarify a few things? I don't think the story adds up.
Wikipedia has the followin information. Medal of Honor was made by DreamWorks interactive. [..] Filmmaker Steven Spielberg Spielberg founded DreamWorks Interactive in 1995. [1] And: Danger Close Games (formerly DreamWorks Interactive LLC and EA Los Angeles) was an American video game developer based in Los Angeles. [2]
This doesn't sound like 'a small game studio in Oklahoma'.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honor_(1999_video_gam...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Close_Games
Edit: It seems you were talking about the acclaimed: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault.
Made by: 2015, inc[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Games
Edit 2: Spelling
Quotation of the month. Devs should have this knitted into a pillow in their cubicles.
Under the boss they would have made more Medal of Honor, and maybe the next MoH's were not billion-dollar products.
Maybe had they gotten equity, we would never have a billion dollar CoD series!
An entire company 'quits' and just 're-does the thing' is almost assuredly theft of know-now and IP, but more than that theft of the operating modality.
It takes in incredible amount of work, risk, investment etc. to 'get something up and going' - with all of the parts working.
Any time you walk into a company you'll see what looks like 'things working' on some level, usually that took incredible trials and travails.
It's a bit like 'decent code' - it takes iterations, after which, it's 'obvious in hindsight'.
Every coder knows it's 'figuring it out' that's hard, whereas doing it a second time is easy.
Employees who tool 100% salary to start, without higher risk equity, and then wanted to 'trade after the fact' shouldn't be miffed - they just shouldn't have taken the job if what they wanted was equity.
It could entirely be the case of cockroach management giving horrible terms to everyone including underpayment etc. but these stories are often one-sided.
I'm working with a company right now that I've discovered has a seemingly 'simple' product. It took this young girl 4 years of struggle (and failure before) that, to get this thing where it is and establish all the sales relationships. I'm sure I could duplicate it quickly with minimal resources (I wouldn't do that to her), but it has dawned on me how much effort it takes to move things forward.
Here is the story, and it doesn't really speak to some kind of greedy action by 2015, the original game devs. More subtle than that. More like the original team, which was assembled by EA, liked working together, and were lured away by another studio as a team.
[1] https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/publishing/the-medal-of-...
FYI the founders of 'Call of Duty' were eventually fired on bad terms again.
I would reserve judgment on these situations.
Especially in entertainment and creative things, there are a lot of personality issues.
Imagine any software company CEO nowadays saying that out loud, no matter what they privately thought.
A daughter of my friend was not very happy in her job: a Silicon Valley company hired her as a security pro, but was using as a coder, which she hates. She was going to leave, but decided to wait ten months or so until her stock options vested. She and a big group of other engineers were fired right before the vesting moment.
All this time the CEO was generating absolutely politically correct sounds: people are our best capital, diversity is our strength, etc. She would be better off if he was honest.
Comarch CEO famous quote: "any developer could be replaced with finite number of interns"
This is Polish software company (quite big, one of the biggest) and since this quote went public, they don't have best reputation among developers. You go to work there only if you are actually intern fresh after uni.
At the same time, it really depends.... I'm pretty confident that there are very few engineers at FAANG that can't be replaced. I'd also expect there are very few engineers at Epic, Activision, Blizzard, Naughty Dog, Sony, Rockstar, Ubisoft, Valve, etc... that can't be replaced. Sure, if 30%-70% of the team left on any particular project it would probably die, but at least for AAA titles, there's usually no one person responsible for that title's success? Or maybe there is but it's limited to a few key people and not every person on that team.
IF you're at some indie firm with 5-15 people that's probably less true.
I mostly made this comment because in 1983 most games were made by 1 to 3 people max. By the end of the 80s there weren't many games that had more than 20 people on them and usually they took less than a year to make. It was only in the mid 90s that we started getting 30+ people teams trying to fill a CD with data and it arguably wasn't until the 2000s that we had games that it was common to teams of 30-100+ people multiple years to make.
Otherwise, get rid of any engineer and the minimum impact is 3-6 months code and culture familiarisation before they get up to speed with your particular application/code base/equipment. Can easily be more than a year - especially with some of the big systems.
So yes there is an impact on business performance, and a highly damaging one, far more often than is realised. Companies compete - and companies go under and get replaced, all the time.
The thing is these two things are linked - one engineer leaving and 30-70% of a team leaving. The quantity of who leaves does not matter as much - a project may be able to handle 70% of consultants, interns, junior and regular programmers leaving, but might die if the 30% (or 25%, or 20%) leaving is entirely senior/staff/principal.
One of the lead programmers who has been at the company for many years leaves. He is friendly with some of the other senior programmers and says he thinks the company is slowly going downhill, and he got a new job with better money, and with a saner schedule, work environment and work-life balance. Maybe one of the other senior people leaves for the company he left for. Then other senior people start leaving.
It's like Steve Blank's essay about how a company deciding to start charging fifty cents for soda led to an exodus of its best senior programmers. One lead leaving can be a catalyst for others leaving. So they are in a sense irreplaceable.
If a company is an oligopoly like Verizon/AT&T or the like, then they are privy to revenue and profits they don't have to compete for, and for companies in that situation people are more replaceable. Not for companies that have to be competitive though.
But oftentimes management ask if the project will be completed at all. And yes, the project will be completed.
But the real question to ask is often:
Will it be completed on time? On budget? With the same quality level?
And this is a complete different story.
You need to find a developer in the specific niche he was competent. Not easy because there is a shortage of developers. Then he needs to get up to speed with the stack and the processes used in the company.
So in theory yes, engineers can be replaced. In practice it's costly, with no guarantee of getting the same productivity, and the process to find someone will leave you with one person less for many months. When you have competent engineers that you want to keep, the last thing to do is to play the "I don't need you anyway" card.
Large game companies have now essentially become casinos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision#Purchase_by_Bobby_K...
In 2018 I met Frédéric Chesnais in NY, and learned about the latest things related the company. Here's an interview I found from 2019. [0].
It seems that the current CEO is now Wade Rosen. [1]
Company is still up and running.
[0]: https://frenchamerican.org/interview-frederic-chesnais/
[1]: https://venturebeat.com/games/atari-ceo-wade-rosen-interview...
turns out I was wrong!
If anything, other companies making good games for their platform aided them, and they were famously bad at seeing that. Engineers leaving to develop Atari software didn’t move the needle in terms of their collapse. Not giving individual credit on games is a tiny footnote in the book of things Atari management did wrong.
Only one of the two killed the company.
You'd think that losing key staff would kill the company overnight, but even in this situation, it took 4 years between being doomed and actually dying.
my understanding is that this gave rise to nintendo's tight control over developer licensees while atari was sold off and pivoted to home computers (specifically the st line) under jack tramiel.
Edit: Fan of Borland products in the 90s!
https://behindthetech.libsyn.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-a-craf...
Please do! Turbo-C 1.5 and Borland C++ were two of my all time favorite programming tools.
I just got done reading Commodore, A Company on the Edge and would love to read about Borland/Microsoft back in the day.
The majority of Borland products completed directly with Microsoft products at the time. If Microsoft had done an acquisition then they would have sunsetted most Borland products anyway so it would have been a pointless waste of money.
The color scheme I use for vsc++ still mimics turbopascal/turboc++ from the mid 90s.
It didn’t kill the company for several reasons, but primarily because:
1) The company had enough momentum, revenue, and cash in the bank that they could go on hiring sprees to replace everyone. The new hires had a lot of churn when they realized what was going on, so they just kept hiring until enough replacements stuck around.
2) Many of the employees who didn’t quit saw this as their opportunity to rise through the ranks and fill the voids. They weren’t wrong and it paid off for many of them in the form of rapid promotions and advancement. The CEO became more hands-off as he realized his micromanagement wasn’t helping, so they basically inherited a slightly better situation.
After this experience, I don’t really see a developer exodus killing any big company with good momentum and decent cash reserves. As long as a company has cash flow they can spend their way into hiring replacements as long as it takes.
When I lived in the UK, I saw one company that was like that. When I moved to Berlin, it's pretty much been like that at most companies. Various reasons from the tech being crap, the culture being crap, or managers being crap.
While the company normally survives for a while, since if you have the cash you can survive for a while no matter what. The company never really reaches it's true value. Most do end up being acquired by a competitor for very little money or going out of business.
I, being Deaf, would have been forced to stay with the mediocre ones because interviewing is difficult for me.
I am lucky that I don't need a job now.
Interviewing is hard. Notably Google’s digital interviewing where they insist that they call you for an interview. I aced all their backend questions so they kept trying to call me until I insisted that I call them. Then it went silent. Their loss.
This approach doesn’t leave us Deafies a whole lotta time to arrange for an American Sign Language interpreter to come and sit with us before the phone rings.
Granted, I don't know where you're situated, and from what I hear the hiring process in the US is sketchy, but this sounds like an easy problem to fix, if it's even a problem at all.
The continued success or longevity of an organization doesn't say much about how it's functioning, mostly because it doesn't address how much better it could have been doing or who is not in the organization.
I've personally been involved with more than one general contractor going under. When I was a young carpenter, I followed my best friend from job to job and contractor to contractor. When he walked off a job, the rest of us followed. He and I and a group of Dominicans (from Dominica not the DR) put more than one GC out of business because we'd walk and then we'd tell everyone we knew that they shouldn't work for said GC.
When I became older and my friend moved away, I took his place. It was so satisfying leaving a job and then receiving a phone call from the client a few days/week later asking me and the crew to come back and finish with promises that the GC would be out of the picture.
It's incredibly difficult to find skilled tradesman in the Caribbean that will show up sober each day and perform quality work. We always had the long end of the stick.
Sounds like the archetype of "being a manager means being angry at people. business knowledge optional"
There's a lot to unpack in that sentence. Care to elaborate?
workers show up sober, that's not the problem. Problem is they are not trained in the trade.
Never heard of vibrating concrete. Or curing times.
Setting pillars by 'eye', not even using a plumb line.
Carpenter delivers the doors unfinished. These are outside doors.
Door lock mechanism installed wrong, such that the door locks (once) but cannot unlock.
The painter was decent, but his background was as a Venezuelan helicopter mechanic. Left Venezuela for economic reasons.
Workers showing up without the basic tools for the day's work, so had to supply them myself. Obvious stuff like blades for the angle grinders.
Oh, and coordinating supplies and work, nah, not really a thing.
The biggest challenge I've had is that trade schools and certifications are inconsistent, so it's not easy to vet candidates; a lot of hiring is intra-island, requiring significant up-front investment in people without knowing that they'll work out; and equipment and regulations (especially electrical) are highly variable, making it hard for a crew to deliver consistent quality.
That context gives a lot of room for crews and contractors to take advantage of inexperienced project managers and investors, and since the corrupt teams aren't brought back they tend to be the ones which are available for the next gig. When you find a great team you treasure them and even find work to keep them busy and happy between projects.
It's actually a remarkably similar dynamic to H1B engineer mills in the US. Many H1B engineers are brilliant, the best of the world looking for a challenge in America. But many are pawns in outsourcing meat markets.
FYI, that’s a trap. If there is a jobsite accident that afternoon, you are liable for allowing someone who’s been drinking to work.
On all the islands I worked on, it was rare to find people actually from that island who were capable of that kind of work.
The Dominicans and the Haitians were fine, but the US and European guys mostly treated it as one big vacation. They would stay out all night partying and then come to work and do just enough to not get fired.
As another commenter mentioned, those guys knew they could always find work elsewhere even if only temporarily because skilled trades were in high demand. So they could quickly move on until they burned another bridge.
I was on one job in Antigua where the project managers were able to avoid this completely. They flew in hundreds of people from Indian and had them live in a “tent town” where they never left except to go to work each day. No alcohol or drugs allowed.
Myself and two others were flown in to install all the cabinets and other mill work. With the except of the stone guys from Turkey, we were the only non Indians on the entire project.
Im from the Caribbean.
Railway operation has huge start-up costs and large economies of scale. I think a long term solution depends on the nationalization of track or at least the separation of train and track ownership, with track operators required to provide nondiscriminatory access. Not gonna happen but one can dream.
Again, all guesses, but I'd like to hear what someone more knowledgeable has to say
Lesson: Don't piss off FAANG execs, they can throw what amounts to unlimited resources against you.
Fortunately for the startup, it turned out they were massively overprovisioned and didn't really need all those intelligent engineers and executives. Startup ended up closing their Bay Area office and moving engineering to South America. The undead zombie corpse husk is still chugging along.
The startup still somehow went public during the pando, but the IPO eventually became an embarrassing flop. Turns out a business based on surveys isn't that lucrative, after all.
I was at a company that lost a lot of employees to a competitor. The founders ended up generating similar myths (supposedly based on information from trusted sources) to explain away the exodus.
The reality was that they couldn’t accept the idea that anyone would give their employees such large raises, so the only explanation they could think of was that it was some sort of evil retribution plan targeting them personally for something.
The reality is that FAANG execs aren’t going to spite-hire random engineers at exorbitant rates just to fight a petty battle. Even at FAANG scale, budgets are still finite and compensation plans aren’t approved in a vacuum.
I’d take that explanation with a huge grain of salt. It’s more likely that the company ended up on their recruiters’ radar and they simply offered the engineers FAANG market rate compensation.
I'd love to drop names but it would be unwise. The decision maker executive is now an even bigger big wig at another BigCo, and they are still as huge of a douche canoe as ever.
Never underestimate the power (or fragility) of the human ego.
Also, El Fandango didn't hire the junky engineers. They poached all the best ones, and the average level of talent at the startup was quite high. The comp was so good that most of said engineers are still at El Fandango even today.
It appears to be pretty common.
The dragon doesn't really give a shit about $30 mill, in the grand scheme of things it's less than nothing, especially when an "important" person's ego is in play.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Power-Law-Venture-Capital-Disruptio...
Well, that says a lot.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/silicon...
It’s also common in rehab centers. You can’t take Medicare patients without a minimum staff count. If too many nurses leave, patients can’t be accepted and you end up bleeding.
Basically any job that primarily requires human capital.
Turns out if you cut nurses' compensation and retirement match during the pandemic, ask them to work overtime due to understaffing, and then don't restore benefits or give them raises to match inflation after... they walk.
Who knew?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/us/thedacare-lawsuit-wisc...
^ is the only recent one in acute care I’ve heard of but it doesn’t really fit your other details (limited service line, multiple role groups, ambiguity around actual impact).
With land that valuable, and a land value tax/higher property taxes he'd have been run out of business years ago and replaced by one or more economically efficient companies.
Seems like still in best interest to have employees for factory.
the software is basically unupdated for quite some time outside of their new cloud only inferior products, and i've tried reporting bugs to the support multiple times and every time they just are clueless, drop the issue entirely, or find some trivial way to argue its not actually their fault when it clearly is, like an on demand bgp crash under specific common private as peernig config as one example.
They had a wonderful product for the price point in multiple areas, and basically all their replacements have been inferior and often flaky.
Do you have any anecdote on human talent exodus causing a failure, or are you riffing on the company in general?
Even the simple stuff needs constant attention so they didn’t end up with a major paper jam and having all the ad stuffers and delivery drivers sitting around waiting.
The founders were flabbergasted. I spoke with the others and the reasoning was the same. We were all very seasoned senior engineers, but the founders didn't trust us and handed us kanban tickets like short order cooks because they had PhDs. It was demoralizing.
He was, however, a huge asshole and alcoholic. Wasn’t able to let it function without him. Went from a couple of million dollars profit to closed when I quit. He couldn’t find other devs. Tried to outsource it but just failed.
I quit because he tried to treat me like shit. Like he treated his other employees behind the scenes (the guy was very sneaky). So I left.
Then tried to offer me a cut but I wasn’t gonna partner with such asshole. There isn’t enough money in this world.
Last I heard he was trying to launch a similar product but failing horribly.
The product wasn’t complex but required specific knowledge of different things. So it was rare to find people with that knowledge who were also effective.
Within a year or so of the acquisition there was a trickle of departures that eventually turned into a mass exodus. There's almost no one left in the org who was part of the original company at this point.
So it goes. Many good engineers and companies spun out of that original one, and found greener pastures and new opportunities. Still, at the time, it felt like a massive waste of a group of truly talented people, to try to corporate-ize them and scare them all off in the process.
I think you are right, but only under assumptions that the market for talent is liquid (ei it's relatively easy to hire).
Counter example: What if you are running an AI company that is trying to solve self-driving and top 3-4 researchers quit? I'd argue that you don't really have a company at that point.
Worked at a company where something like that happened (although a different field). The company simply pivoted to a different but related area, hired new people experienced in that field and kept going in a new direction.
def interesting to learn about industries that I'm not in. thanks for sharing
I worked for company A, company A got merged with company B since they were both owned by the same mega corp. Company A and Company B were in the same industry but served different needs. They were both companies in the EV industry but one was aimed at drivers and the other aimed at charging station companies. When they did the merger, it seems part of the thinking was to get rid of the IT staff at company A. So obivously, they basically all left. Major issue was they decided to do a rewrite. So they ended up having a bunch of developers who didn't know the business, could barely read the old code, etc rewrite this company's application. Because they had no idea about it, they didn't realise how unrealistic the expectations were or even the fact it was a rewrite. It was framed as a migration. We move this app over here because we have the core features and we can just add on a few more. Except they didn't have the core features. They put the legacy system in to maintainance only and hired consultants to maintain it. Which led to it breaking down constantly and client demands going unmet. While that was happening all the business people started to leave. So all the people who understood how the business side of thing worked, had connections with clients, etc left. This resulted in all the strategies and plans that the company were making were based on a business world that didn't exist. They spent 12 months telling each other, they would do this and that and the industry needs this. Then when they released and went to market with pre-existing clients they found out all of this was nonsense and they needed to do all the stuff the old business teams were doing.
By the end of it, the mega corp that owned them realised they screwed up the company too badly so decided to sell. In the two years since the merger they had spent at least 30 million on the new platform. Spent 15 million before that on building it up before doing th merger. Originally bought company A for 8 million. Company B, I'm not sure how much they spent there but realistically probably a total of 40 million easily. It was generating profit too before it got merged with Company A. They tried to sell it for 400 million. Got nowhere. Reduced the price to 200 million. Nothing. Ended up selling it for 75 million while clearing the debts for the company with a "gain" of 50 million.
I thought at first that you were talking about Disney Streaming / Hulu
Of course, in these cases, the monkeys are often incompetent in the context of operating the business, so customers leave (or die). And THEN the business shuts down.
Many businesses will indeed complain about not being able to find monkeys to staff the business. What they mean is that they are unable to find monkeys who will work for peanuts when other businesses are paying monkeys in bananas, or something they like more than peanuts.
Irresponsible owners overleveraged themselves into situations where folding or bankruptcy were the only options once they couldn't afford their liabilities. There are a lot of companies that go under if for some reason their revenues dip for a long enough time.
Like COVID!
Unfortunately, strong and scummy/"well-connected" businesses were both rewarded during this period — for different reasons.
It's basically the same mentality when they either not backup or they never test the backups are working.
First you have Price's Law - half the people actually doing work rises with the square root of the total employee count. It's a variant of Pareto law. So as you grown bigger, the critical path of viable operation depends on fewer and fewer people per capita.
That group is also the group who first to see problems and least likely to put up with BS so they are the first to leave when things go downhill. The bigger the organization, the fewer people who need to leave to destroy it.
This is one of several dynamics that assure a role of startups and entrepreneurs because large companies can never be safe or stable or eternal.
Related to this: most startups last no more than 5 years but large corporations seldom live beyond 20-25 years. The handful of corporations that do are super rare and mostly living on borrowed time. Usually the only thing keeping larger companies around beyond 20-25 is one or a few very charismatic leaders/executives - as soon as they go, it comes crashing down. Hewlett-Packard is a classic example of this.
Huh, interesting point. Natural conclusion is that as companies grow, they become more and more fragile to core people leaving.
At some point we all realized the profit the company was making with us and demanded better conditions, they rejected our claims and we planned to leave all at time they had to deliver the projects and get paid. Nothing got delivered, they didn't get paid and just went out of business.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a competitor buy them just to acquire their customer base and acqui-fire the current team.
* nursery where I buy plants couldn’t find laborers over this past spring/summer and decided to close up shop. It was a pretty big operation as they go. Owner was near retirement age and the land is probably worth 10x the business at this point so just decided to call it quits because he couldn’t do the basic stuff of caring for plants/moving them around.
* dog boarding/kennels/grooming seems to be hit very hard on labor shortage. The place I board our pets is at 50% capacity due to labor shortages, probably a downward spiral
* several/most restaurants in downtown area never reopened because of no staff
* I work for a healthcare company and we actually have nursing homes temporarily closed as mentioned as an example. We almost had to close a few of our ICUs with ventilators during peak Covid because we had no staff. In some cases, FEMA nurses actually came in to help keep it open. Anything with a mandated staffing ratio is challenging at the moment. It’s improving as Covid cases improve though.
Platform was 8086, Motorola 6502, 16KB RAM, RS-488/RS-232, and assembly languages.
Surely enough, we broke away and and many of us joined Gasboy, Inc.
The budding star of a startup at many gas and oil conferences was then no more.
Had numerous offers (due to my networking of my business card being handed out at conference). Them recruiters were all initially shocked at my price tag but insisted then.
I instead went into 1980s primordial cybersecurity and never looked back.
40 years later, there is at least 6 of those credit card paypoints at every gas stations throughout the world.
And I am glad I did. I liked what I contributed to the safety of the computing world.
Off topic: And most designers are still an idiot, security-wise.
This is only true when the rank and file employees have a relationship with the clients. National nursing home chains will be just fine if they churn through 50% of their staff. A local mom-n-pop business that runs because each of the employees has a strong relationship with the entire community will not survive the damage to reputation. Rank and file programmers are replaceable.
On the other hand, an artistic endeavor without the creative source will fail (see new Metal Gear games or new Star wars movies). A field that needs technical breakthroughs will fail unless you have the 1 of the 10 people capable of making that breakthrough happen. A small-ish company that relies solely on visionaries as their identity will die without the visionary (Jobs 1.0)
I can't think of many other companies where the rank-n-file are not replaceable. Slow death is always possible, but the above scenarios practically guarantee failure.
> Small group of experts form Boutique Consultancy focused on specific technology (Cloud, SaaS Product, Framework, Open-source tool, etc.); Headcount = ~10 employees
> Experts start making referrals and mentoring analysts in specific technology; Slight diversification in offerings; Headcount = ~100 employees
> Boutique Consultancy makes major splash with huge client; Hire like crazy; Maybe accept additional investment; Headcount = ~300 employees
> Boutique Consultancy gets acquired by Global Service and Consulting Provider; Assurance that branding and leadership will remain; Buyers interested in "synergy deals"; Headcount = ~300 employees in +100,000 employee network
> Original experts and early employees take acquisition payouts and find/found new Boutique Consultancies; Buyers satisfied with acquired brand and customer base; Headcount = ~100 employees
When it happens to post series-A companies it's usually just a team that leaves such as what happened when Bumble recruited the entire Barcelona-based engineering office of another company.
During the early days of the covid lockdowns, before nursing home staff or residents were vaccinated, many staff quit en masse to work as covid test center staff. The hours were better. The job was less complex and less demanding. The pay was comparable.
Then when the remaining staff began to contract covid, they were down to a few core people working continuously to provide care. Many recently (and not so recently) retired nurses returned to work until they could figure things out.
There isn't much to learn about enterprise staffing here except that when the chips are down, people who are truly devoted to their jobs will go to extraordinary lengths to make sure it gets done.
I feel it's a pity these people are often (in my country) poorly compensated for the incredible effort they make.
