What’s It Like To Work At Twitter? An Engineer Speaks Out

Lots of developers dream about it.

Engineers are jumping ship from Facebook and Google to do it.

But what’s it really like to work at Twitter?

Well, it’s chaotic, and as the company expands communication can be difficult. It can be embarrassing at times, but comes with lots of perks, including free lunches and dinners, and Macbook Pros.

This is according to a Twitter engineer who has posted this and more anonymously on Quora. Head on over there to read more and peruse the comments, but here’s the meat and potatoes.

It’s slightly embarrassing to read about Twitter outages on Hacker News, since the commenters like to talk shit about how we’re all incompetent.

My non-programmer friends assume I’m really good, which is silly.

People keep apologizing for not having an account to me. Seriously, it’s okay.

People think I have a lot of secret insider knowledge.

The work culture is good, though chaotic. We’re on a ridiculous hiring spree, and getting to the size where communication is difficult, and duplicate work is starting to happen.

Twitter has the standard perks you’d expect from a well-funded startup that values its developers: free lunches, and now dinners, MacBook Pros for everyone, flex hours (though individual teams may choose to do daily standups and thus force you to come in at a certain time every day), a lot of really smart, motivated, and competent people, a flat org structure, and ease of transfer between teams and projects.

Overall, Twitter’s setting a really high standard for what I want from my workplace.

Sounds pretty good to me.

(Source: Quora.)

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