Lyft, Uber Pirates Key Twitter Employees Amid Turmoil

Popular ride services Lyft and Uber are pirating key engineers and managers from Twitter to personalize their apps better.

VentureBeat reports that there are already 25 former Twitter workers who joined Uber since January of last year. This includes top managers like Raffi Krikorian, who has been working as an engineering lead at Uber beginning March. Some of the major reasons why these talents are transferring from the micro-blogging sites to the ride services are Twitter's management problems and the 44 percent stock fall for the last 12 months.

Just this April the social networking site reported that its stock dropped at 18 percent during the first-quarter revenue as it struggled to attract and retain more users and investors, according to Bloomberg.

As noted by ManagementToday, Dick Costolo has stepped down as Twitter's CEO last July 1. Though the company claims that his resignation is all about "stable, smooth transition", everybody in Silicon Valley sees it as a jargon smokescreen to hide the company's management turmoil.

Amidst all the problems Twitter is currently facing, Uber and Lyft seem to have poached their top workers. Lyft reportedly pirated 15 employees from the social networking company, including top engineer Peter Morelli. According to tech recruiters, it is a big number of people exiting in just a short period of time.

Tech recruiting firm Dave Partners' CEO, Dave Carvajal, believes that ride-sharing companies are attractive because they disrupt the transportation business, just like how Twitter disrupted the communication industry.

Hired's head honcho, Mehul Patel, also added to the notion saying, "Twitter is having harder times and there are only a few places in town that are larger companies that are going to go public. Lyft and Uber are some of the best of those places."

As Twitter faces turbulence, its employees are seeking other outlets where they can recreate their early success. Apparently, Lyft and Uber has appeared timely in the picture, luring the workers to board their firms.