Twilio reviews

3.9

72% would recommend to a friend

(2,074 total reviews)
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Khozema Shipchandler

84% approve of CEO

60% positive business outlook

Twilio has an employee rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars, based on 2,074 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Twilio employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Tecnologia da informação industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

2K reviews
2.0
Dec 7, 2021
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

No challenging work, rather very lame work, which you can finish in no time, hence awesome work life balance. If you want a company with decent pay and want to chill completely, don't care about career progress/increment, this is the place for you.

Cons

Explaining the title(HHH) here..... Let's first get this out of the way. No I don't just write negative reviews, I make sure to always post positive reviews too. Twilio is a great company no doubt, Twilio India also could have been so much more, but they have completely messed it up, and if you are even a decent developer this will be a complete waste of your time. * First H stands for Horrible Pay/Salary Structure: 1. The pay here is so much less compared to all the other product companies in India. 2. Your package will have ~50% stocks, which is a big lossy deal(assuming you are in 30% tax bracket), as cash gets taxed at ~32% whereas your stock will get taxed at ~42%, plus the stocks of this company has wild volatility, for example it has lost almost $160+ per share in the last couple of months. 3. Increment is meager here, ranging from 4-8% in most of the cases. * Second H stands for Horrible Work: 1. Mostly maintenance kind of work comes in India, and it is mostly small changes and bugfixes, all the core challenging/interesting/business critical features are held in US offices. 2. Higher management will tell a bunch of lies during hiring to attract and recruit people, but it's just a bunch of lies. * Third H stands for Horrible Higher Management: 1. Twilio has a core value called "No Shenanigans", but the higher management in India are role models for just the exact opposite of it. 2. As I said above for lying during recruitment, they do the same for internal things, they hide and lie as long as they can, giving lame reasons later to cover it up. 3. All the false promises they give you during joining, they don't hold up any of them and later when asked they keep saying they are looking into it. Even if all these things are ok with you, you can for once think of joining Twilio India core. BUT there is another company called Segment which Twilio has recently acquired, and they have teams in India for the same, if you even remotely find out that you are being hired for Segment teams, run with all fours as fast as you can. There is a great deal of politics involved in this company between the higher management and you will just be the victim of it all the time. To summarise, the purpose of this review was, I had been hiring engineers, and occasionally some of them will be really good, and it really hurts me to not being able to tell them about all this and they joining here and regretting later. So I wanted this review to stand as an eye opener for them, and if not via this review, at least do your own research to connect with people from Twilio offline/via friends, and get to know what you are getting yourself into and then only join. Honestly until you fall into the category of people I mentioned in Pros, I think you will get far better companies to join in Bangalore than Twilio.

2.0
Jul 1, 2019
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

-Talented, smart & experienced executive team -Leading CPaaS product -Stock performance -Aggressive commission plans (at least while I was there) -Commercial sales segment doing exceptionally well - most reps are far exceeding plan -Budding sales culture -Good alignment with marketing -Employees are friends with each other outside of the office

Cons

-More focus on looking good in front of the right people vs. actual performance -Executives will not own their mistakes, would rather offload blame and fire scapegoats -Dehumanizing, tyrant executives who will cut you off mid-sentence and bring down morale -Culture of judgment where you could be alienated for a mistake -Secretive, "big brother" leadership style where little info is shared with individual contributors -Leadership style is "do as I say not as I do" -Short term decision making > long term decision making (e.g. win the logo at all costs instead of focusing on margin, activation and solution delivery) -Zero empathy for any personal struggles experienced outside of the office -No mechanism for management feedback -Struggles with moving up-market (particularly Flex) - top enterprise reps are not 100% of plan -Internal battles continue to ensue over account ownership -Most remaining employees I've personally spoken with are staying because they feel handcuffed by RSU vesting

2.0
Dec 21, 2015

No career growth, poor management

Anonymous employee
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

Twilio is a place that attracts good people. People who are passionate, driven, and honestly care about one another. On an individual level, some of the best, most personable people come from Twilio and make the place feel like home. However, just because the people care about one another does not mean that the company will care about you or your personal growth.

Cons

There is no ability to move teams. There is a career growth ladder that’s largely a joke. Promotions are made through back room channels. If you’re an engineer without a CS degree, particularly if you’re a woman or POC, good luck finding people who are willing to give you the opportunity to grow (or an equal paycheck). There is no investment in growth, learning, or educational opportunities. Don’t expect to be able to join a team like Customer Support or Sales Engineering and move into Engineering! You’ll only be disappointed. Management is a huge problem. There is an excessive number of managers, and many who are first time managers who run their teams without proper training and support. The managers who are good at their jobs typically juggle 2-3 teams at a time. The rest hold personal grudges and push out people who don’t think exactly like them. There’s a lot of talk about being a DOer. Do the thing you want. Be the change you want to see. So there are a lot of motivated folks who work hard in their off hours to create programs that make the company look really good, but never get compensated for their time and efforts beyond a token thanks. So keep that in mind if you want to start a program within Twilio. Team breakdown: The Product department runs the show. R&D spends more time trying to churn out half-baked ideas than making thoughtful, careful decisions and investing in technical debt. Deployments take hours, sometimes even days. Engineering is so used to fire-fighting that there’s little chance to think ahead and invest wisely in technical decisions. Marketing is constantly fire-fighting and trying to find its voice. After 8 years, the company still doesn’t have a consistent message, target audience, or way to describe what it does. There’s a high concentration of bros on one of the teams in Marketing. HR is a mess and completely out of touch with the rest of the company’s needs. Sales is filled mostly with bros, although the BDR team and Sales Engineering seem to be heading in the right direction. Customer Support is an old boy’s club and everyone seems a little shellshocked at all times. Facilites is a gem, a diamond in the rough. If you’re remote, good luck! It’s not going to be an easy road and nobody will care about what you need in order to do your job. The Executive team is a mixed bag. Jeff, the CEO, is very passionate, but he’s more interested in becoming the next Amazon instead of building a great Twilio. Lee is a great CFO and runs a tight ship in Finance. Roy is a big company executive in a small startup land. The two don’t mix very well. Overall, the people are really great. The product is going places. But treat this place like any other job and don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s a family or they’ll invest in you for more than a year.

Viewing 19 - 21 of 2,074 Reviews

Glassdoor has 2,320 Twilio reviews submitted anonymously by Twilio employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Twilio is right for you.