X reviews

Chaotic: engineering has not been very historically run by strong personalities, which lead to an environment where individual tech teams decided what to build. This lead to a lack of consistency and and "anything goes" engineering mentality. E.g. there are maybe 6 different logging frameworks in production java code, another half dozen different key-value stores, mapreduce jobs are done via pig, scalding, hive, python on hadoop streaming, you name it. So if you're one who is bewildered by many choices, you'll be *very* bewildered at Twitter. It can be a hard place to start your engineering career.

- While communication is generally open, it can be hard to find the right channels to get information (I still struggle with this). - Internal tools aren't always a priority to help improve productivity (although I've been spoiled by Google's in a prior life). - Some whining and entitlement issues from a vocal (and often anonymous) few. - Unclear growth and development path for managers (but people are working on this). - Constant growing pains. Lots of them, but almost a pro in the sense that we've worked through many of them successfully. (Seen a fail-whale lately?) - Old-timer blues.