Be careful who you fire: Twitter's culling of engineers is shocking

Culling engineering jobs is a bizarre act in a field where, such is the intense competition for staff, poaching is commonplace

Twitter's new chief executive, Jack Dorsey, must hope that none of the 336 people about to be let go by the struggling company are as valuable as John Bauer.

In 2002, Bauer was a programmer at Google who tweaked some code and turned the company it into a cash-generating machine. The tweak allowed key words typed into the search engine to appear in bold when they flashed up in adverts, alongside the search results. It more than quadrupled the number of times people clicked on the ads, and ensured Google's financial future.