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Full-timePart-timeWORK/LIFE BALANCE is a true focus here (in 56 reviews)
Smart people committed to their work (in 54 reviews)
Can sometimes drive you crazy due to the lack of work/life balance and everything that's being said about the company in the media (in 15 reviews)
That upper-management chaos of course trickles down (in 16 reviews)
I have been working at Twitter full-time (Less than a year)
Pros
Incredible learning resources, inspirational leadership, strong values & fantastic culture, amazing work spaces, solid work life balance. A place where there is always something to learn and talk about. Firm commitment to diversity and equal pay for genders. I've been here a few months, and am incredibly impressed with the direction of the company, how it invests in it's people, and the resources and opportunity at Twitter. It really is a fantastic place to work.
Cons
Can be highly competitive. which can be detrimental to the collaborative team process
Advice to Management
Keep up the great job investing in your people! Encourage collaboration.
I have been working at Twitter full-time (More than 3 years)
Pros
Work with smart, committed & passionate colleagues who will become like family!
Cons
You get very use to all the perks and food
Advice to Management
NA
I have been working at Twitter full-time (More than a year)
Pros
Culture, Benefits, Challenging work, perks, etc. There are always exciting things to work on unlike Facebook and Google which are too big and too specialized.
Cons
Location in SF is a bit sketchy but once you’re in Twitter, it’s amazing. That’s about it. Great place to be.
Advice to Management
Keep focusing on culture and people.
Helpful (1)
I have been working at Twitter full-time (More than 5 years)
Pros
The company CULTURE breeds innovation and self expression. I have always been encouraged to use the platform as myself and not hold back. That says a lot about a company and leadership. Communicate Fearlessly to Build Trust is a core value we live by.
They are always offering TRAINING in various areas from job skills to life skills, giving us the opportunity to grow beyond the core responsibilities of our role. I've been promoted a number of times over my 5 years and every time I felt fully prepared to accomplish my new goals and start finding new ones.
WORK/LIFE BALANCE is a true focus here. My teammates and I don't do well at our jobs because we put in the most hours. We do well because when we are at work love what we do, but we know we can leave at the end of the day and focus on the other parts of our lives that refresh us.
Cons
You're in the spotlight as the employee of a company that is seen, heard and talked about everywhere. That means you will get a lot of question, and even more so, have to hear a lot of outside opinions on how the company should do things... including from the driver of every rideshare you get in if you let slip where you work.
This can be a con from time to time, but often it is a pro once you talk things out with the latest opinion provider.
Advice to Management
Keep marketing the "Why Twitter" and continue the exponential pace of work on safety on the platform. After 5 years I have seen it come a long way in the last year, but keep the pedal to the metal on this project.
I have been working at Twitter full-time (More than 3 years)
Pros
Smart people, delicious and free food, awesome product, and a fun atmosphere.
Cons
Large gap between ICs and getting into management.
Advice to Management
Move quicker on new products and innovations to the platform. Don’t just copy what the other platforms are doing. Stay unique to twitter and the platform will grow.
I have been working at Twitter full-time
Pros
Work/life balance, mission-driven company, strong/transparent leadership, passionate/collaborative coworkers
Cons
Need more mid-management support and product/eng resources
Advice to Management
Get more resources to ship product improvements faster
I have been working at Twitter full-time
Pros
Overall the company is good
Cons
There is no proper direction
I have been working at Twitter full-time (More than 5 years)
Pros
Culture - smart, driven, yet team-oriented people (this is a rare combination). I genuinely love who I work with (and our motto of #LoveWhereYouWork is honored throughout the company)
Mission - people at Twitter love the product and what it is doing in the world
Cons
There's always outside noise as everyone (especially the media) likes to give their opinion on the company and the predictions about the business.
Advice to Management
If you can make the product easier so my Mom can use it, we will bring in a lot of new users (and given another person to participate in our conversations that is always about what is happening on Twitter! )
Helpful (4)
I worked at Twitter full-time
Pros
The cafeteria is fantastic. Delicious, plenty of variety, lots of healthy options. The kitchenettes throughout the building are great, too: thoughtful setup, good snack variety, plenty of drinks, and excellently maintained.
The office space is very well designed. Good lighting, spacious layout, and lots of little nooks for when you want to get away from your desk. Ergonomic furniture, including standing desk setups, is easily available. Location is very commute-friendly.
Corporate IT is shockingly good. On your first day you get a laptop that's perfectly set up. Network coverage is excellent everywhere. Video conferencing works reliably. Problems are rare and resolved quickly by friendly, competent support staff.
Colleagues are generally smart, friendly, and pleasant to work with. They almost all love and care about the product they work on.
Compensation is competitive, with a twice-yearly raise cycle, and benefits are solid.
It's great to work at a company with such a prominent, meaningful product. If you can get something done at Twitter (which is by no means guaranteed) you can have enormous impact.
Cons
The management is implausibly bad. The CEO, Jack, is good at the "company figurehead" part of his role. But he simultaneously runs another large tech company, Square, meaning he runs Twitter in his spare time. He has 20-odd direct reports and no time to supervise them, so the executive level appears to be Lord of the Flies.
That upper-management chaos of course trickles down. Everybody has a story of working hard for months on a project only to have it canceled at the last minute due to executive infighting, high-level turnover, or pure fickleness. Reorgs and emergencies are too frequent and frequently ineffective.
The chaos also allows bad execs to thrive. Particularly terrible was Ed Ho, who runs the entire consumer-focused side of the company and can be seen in the news promoting Twitter with claims that, from the inside, appear at best stretched. Polite but cold in public, he's a dismissive, controlling jerk in private. He talks a good game about collaboration, but in practice he is widely know as a "my way or the highway" guy, forcing out dedicated, experienced contributors. He has steadily climbed the ranks, making it ever harder for people with different views or approaches to find ways to stay at Twitter.
This managerial mess of course ends up creating technical messes. Twitter's feature velocity is much slower than comparable software shops due to extensive technical debt. Frequent priority changes leave plenty of junk behind in the code base. Engineers with promotion ambitions know that they'll be rewarded more for creating fancy new technology than doing mop-and-bucket work, making things worse. This drastically reduces the effectiveness of the many good engineers working there. One of my engineer colleagues said shipping software at Twitter was like "swimming in mud" compared with other companies they'd worked at.
This was complimented and enabled by an HR organization that was at best unhelpful and lackadaisical. I understand that many large-company HR shops see themselves as there to help the company, not the workers. But even by that standard they were below average, eager to avoid engaging with anything. I know of at least one racial bias incident where they were very anxious to deny that there even could be a problem, suggesting without any investigation that it must be a misunderstanding. (Kudos, though to Blackbird, the African-American employee resource group, whose response was instant, vigorous, and appropriate.)
Much of this might be forgivable if the organization were effective. But one of the striking things about Twitter is how little it gets done. Note, for example, that when a tweet gets popular, the tweeter will say something like "RIP my mentions!" The notifications interface, though, remains unchanged, useless at high volume. Or consider the lack of an ability to edit typos in tweets, an enormously popular request. Their big recent change is expanding tweets from 140 to 280 characters, hardly a technical miracle. And so many features get launched and then never touched. Compared with Facebook, which is continually tinkering and improving, Twitter gets so very little done. And few at Twitter even seem aware of the problem, let alone are willing to discuss it openly.
Advice to Management
Jack, get a strong COO, one who will effectively run the company while you stick with the ceremonial role. Let them rein in the bad actors and create a stable set of priorities so that long-term investments (including cleaning up historical mistakes) can be made. Give cross-functional teams real problems to solve, insist that they ship early and often, and then get out of their way. Focus teams on pleasing users, not executives. Make OKRs less a pointless bureaucratic ritual and more the main tool of keeping teams on track, so that team independence is matched with low-overhead accountability.
I have been working at Twitter full-time (More than a year)
Pros
Great work/life benefits
Awesome benefits
Transparent leadership
Amazing internal opportunities
Company full of intelligent, passionate people
Work from home
Fun, strong culture
Cons
Remote offices lack same level of opportunity as larger offices (SF, NYC)
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