Twilio reviews

- The veneer of inclusivity and sensitivity and whatever the hell Twilio Magic means belies a real viciousness that took me by surprise after I’d been lulled into believing the facade. Unfortunately I took leadership’s Ned Flanders surface act at face value, only to find out it was a fraud. I wasn’t all that enamored of the SendGrid leadership that took their huge piles of money and left after the acquisition, but they were much better than their Twilio counterparts. There might be some managers in the organization interested in coaching their reports toward career development but that was certainly not my experience. Oddly, threats are not especially effective as a motivation and coaching technique. Weird, I know. - Twilio engineering had the reputation of growing too quickly to implement the kind of process and discipline needed for enterprise-level software development and it showed in the platform’s instability and number of outages.

I've worked for other companies that have this problem. I've seen it come crashing down before. Every week the CEO gets up in front of the company for the all-hands meetings and is just so bubbly enthusiastic about how fast they're growing, and isn't this great, and thanks to everyone for all the hard work, and go team, and isn't the amazing growth just INCREDIBLE, and yay for us, etc. The problem is once the obligatory cheers die down, EVERYONE HAS TOO MUCH TO DO. The rah-rah atmosphere is a two-edged sword. It makes so that people feel they aren't being a team player if they stop and say "Wait a second, we're growing so fast we aren't doing very many things really well, and at this pace, it won't be long before we aren't doing ANYTHING well." Meanwhile, employees are getting silently burned out, pressured to feel that this is such an oh-so-very-special place to be lucky enough to be that a few jugs of midnight oil burned for the cause is nothing we should be complaining about. Twilio is something of a cult, and people are expected to work very long hours and often in a slapdash fashion "for the cause". The company has an unusually niche technology stack, so most people coming to work here have a steep learning curve and have to acquire a larger-then-average amount of proprietary knowledge. Which means the people who have already climbed that learning curve are not easily replaced.