I think that in general, there aren’t many examples of large portions of a large company suddenly switching what they’re working on (on a timescale of days/weeks), and this seems pretty hard to pull off without very strong forces in play.
I think this is actually easier and more common than you’d expect for software companies (see “reorgs” in the non-layoff sense). People get moved between wildly different teams all the time, and sometimes large portions of the company do this at once. It’s unusual to reorg your biggest teams, but I think it could be done.
Note that you don’t even need to change what everyone is working on since support work won’t change nearly as much (if you have a sane separation of concerns). The people keeping servers running largely don’t care what the servers are doing, the people collecting and cleaning data largely don’t care what the data is being used for, etc.
The biggest change would be for your relatively small number of researchers, but even then I’d expect them to be able to come up with projects related to safety (if they’re good, they probably already have ideas and just weren’t prioritizing them).
I think this is actually easier and more common than you’d expect for software companies (see “reorgs” in the non-layoff sense). People get moved between wildly different teams all the time, and sometimes large portions of the company do this at once. It’s unusual to reorg your biggest teams, but I think it could be done.
Note that you don’t even need to change what everyone is working on since support work won’t change nearly as much (if you have a sane separation of concerns). The people keeping servers running largely don’t care what the servers are doing, the people collecting and cleaning data largely don’t care what the data is being used for, etc.
The biggest change would be for your relatively small number of researchers, but even then I’d expect them to be able to come up with projects related to safety (if they’re good, they probably already have ideas and just weren’t prioritizing them).