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Twitter is a free messaging and also a micro-blogging service that has grown to approximately 175 million users all over the world after five years of existence.

The Twitter service was created by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone in 2006. Another name came up eventually in the person of Noah Glass, who was reportedly a developer in the company who was ousted from the group.

Anyway, while the system and process of Twitter is simple, there have been many engineers who went in and out of the company already. It is now a big company that hires hundreds of new employees in 2011 alone. But why don’t the people stay?

Here is a report from Business Insider:

We’ve asked a former Twitter employee. Does this source have an ax to grind? This source says no. This source asked to remain anonymous in order to be as candid as possible. This source told us Twitter’s turnover problem has two main, related causes: Twitter, as a company full of workers, has cultural flaws and structural flaws.

Cultural flaws:

1. Our source says Twitter’s workplace is a “self-congratulatory, complacent, environment.”

2. Unlike other maturing startups – like Facebook, for example, which are willing to reinvent themselves and their products – Twitter’s mentality has been: “This is our product, just perfect it.”

3. Our source speculates that the root of this product problem may be that Twitter was, essentially, an accidental success, and the people in charge of the product now assume their job is to not screw that accidental success up.

4. Our source says succeeding as an employee at Twitter is something of a popularity contest. The best anecdote our source gave us to illustrate this problem was a story about how, in October 2010, top Twitter executives Jason Goldman, Ev Williams and Biz Stone hosted a “#Twitterati” party at a Las Vegas club called Blush. It was not a company event, and not everyone from the company was invited. That was fine. The problem was that it wasn’t just top executives that were. Some of the people that went were assistants and other “random employees” who seemed to be mostly attractive young women. After the event went down, there was so much bad blood at Twitter over the party and who was and was not invited, that it became the main topic of the company’s next all-employee meeting. Several disgruntled employees stood up to complain that the party tarnished Twitter’s brand. One employee said that their family’s well-being depended on the success of Twitter, and that this was an assault on it.

Twitter’s structural flaws, or at least the ones our source believes the company has, are even more interesting:

1. Twitter started with mediocre engineering talent. That’s common in Silicon Valley. But Twitter compounded the issue by not successfully “promoting” early engineers out of the way. Google and other tech companies retain and “promote” early engineers without actually giving them more responsibility by giving them empty titles and fellowships. Twitter did not do this. It promoted old-timers into positions of power.

2. To make matters worse, Twitter allowed these early employees to hire their own teams. Some of these early engineers are actually talented, says our source, and that has created “pockets of excellence” at Twitter. But our source says some of these early engineers were more “lucky” than good. This source says the old adage that “A” players hire “A” players and that “B” players hire “C” players proved true at Twitter. This source says one group at Twitter that is not a “pocket of excellence” is the team in charge of infrastructure.

3. This source said that Twitter has not been enough of an engineer-driven company. This source said that at a good tech company, 50% of the employees should be engineers and that for most its history, this has not been true of Twitter.

It is interesting how this service of sending messages with only 140 characters called “Tweets” has changed the world and social networking. How long Twitter will stay will depend on the people working behind it. But I still hope that they will be able to work on their structural flaws because businesses, politicians, and even celebs use Twitter heavily.