The "whole teams doing nothing" is a giant canard. Any large organization will have groups that can't remain 100% busy 100% of the time. Projects go from develo

The "whole teams doing nothing" is a giant canard. Any large organization will have groups that can't remain 100% busy 100% of the time. Projects go from development to maintenance and the teams don't necessarily jump immediately to the next project or take time planning the next project while doing relatively light maintenance work on the just released project. Even at Apple which runs very lean engineering teams, verging on understaffed, would have times of year where most engineers were doing nothing. After an OS released in the fall there would be a month or two of planning sessions for the next OS' features. It would be a lot of meetings of middle management with little input from ICs. After the new year work would begin in earnest but from October-December most engineers were spinning their wheels or doing relatively light work chasing down bug fixes for point releases for the recently released OSes. The idea that any team is going to put in a constant 40+ hours of typing code is farcical. Time needs to be taken to actually plan out projects even if you're doing some seat of the pants Agile bullshit. Putting everyone on a death march schedule for something as ultimately irrelevant as Twitter is just burning people out for no reason. There's no upside for Twitter's engineers to burn out. Unless they're being offered equity or bonuses or something their new "hardcore" schedule is all sacrifice and no reward.