What the world's companies got right and wrong about people.

2007–2013

The company that owned mobile froze its best engineers in place — and lost the platform war before it noticed.

Europe · Mobile · Enterprise

2009–2020

The Keeper Test produced legendary performance — and a culture where 8% of the company was let go every year by design.

North America · Streaming · Enterprise

2017–2022

From 1,500 to 8,000 employees in three years. The hiring kept up. The culture did not.

Southeast Asia · Super-app · Enterprise

2013–2016

Removing managers sounded liberating. 18% of the company chose severance over staying.

North America · E-commerce · Scaleup

1999–present

One trained interviewer with veto power per loop. It became the most copied hiring system in tech for a reason.

Global · Cloud · Enterprise

2021–2023

The merger of Indonesia's two tech giants doubled the headcount and halved the institutional memory.

Southeast Asia · E-commerce · Enterprise

2017–present

A 35,000-person bank quietly built the best internal mobility program in APAC by treating it as a product, not an HR program.

Southeast Asia · Banking · Enterprise

2022–2023

Three of the seven founding employees left in the same quarter. The company never recovered.

Southeast Asia · SaaS · Startup

2020–2022

From accidental remote in 2020 to deliberate 'digital by default' — and a culture rewrite that survived the layoffs.

North America · E-commerce · Enterprise

1990–present

4% annual turnover in an industry where 30% is normal. The mechanism is older and less glamorous than it sounds.

North America · Apparel · Enterprise

2017–2019

Susan Fowler's blog post detonated the culture. The 18 months that followed are one of the cleanest culture-reset case studies on record.

Global · Ride-hailing · Enterprise

2019–2021

When Nadiem Makarim left for cabinet, Gojek did something unusual — and it worked for two years.

Southeast Asia · Super-app · Enterprise

2022–2023

How you do layoffs is remembered longer than why. Sea's 7,000-role reduction will define recruiting in the region for years.

Southeast Asia · Internet · Enterprise

2018–present

ByteDance hires 30,000+ engineers per year and keeps quality. The mechanism is calibration, executed at scale.

East Asia · Internet · Enterprise

2017–2019

The 2019 S-1 made the financial story public. The talent story had been broken for years before anyone wrote it down.

Global · Real estate · Enterprise

2019–present

How a Sydney-headquartered company hired 4,000 people across 14 countries without losing the bar.

Oceania · Design SaaS · Enterprise