X reviews

- new products and features often don't ship - not a meritocracy After the IPO there were a lot of high-level firings, and each of those induced a re-org and blew away the product and feature development that occurred underneath. So, a lot of times yo'd see a feature developed, then abandoned or delayed, then attempted again six months later by another team. On acquihires, problems arise when there's an obvious conflict of interest (e.g. someone high in the company is old pal's with the acquihired company's CEO), when good people are displaced and/or fired to make room for acquihired folk, and when acquihired folk parachute into the org with outsized titles and compensation, screwing over everyone who came in the front door and who had been working honestly. Tolerance and encouragement of this sort of cronyism is destructive not just to rank-and-file employees but to all shareholders. Twitter presents itself externally as this hyper-ethical company super-concerned with noble ideas like user safety, but on the inside odd things happen, like a time a bunch of employees were fired with no notice and the survivors were told they could not ask questions and that no explanation would be given. Given these conditions, employees are incentivized to leave the company as soon as they vest some stock and the learning slows, which happens at the two year mark, on average.

The company is now controlled by a thin-skinned megalomaniac billionaire who doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s already destroyed the collaborative culture of Twitter. He constantly accuses employees of not working hard enough while they are pulling all-nighters to build his hair-brained product features that will not make Twitter more profitable. It’s sad to see a company with such potential implode. Avoid at all costs.