Twitter’s rapid and recent growth is causing the workplace to seem “chaotic” and some employees are finding their work sometimes overlaps work being done by others, according to an anonymous post on Quora written by someone claiming to be a Twitter engineer.
“The work culture is good, though chaotic,” the engineer said. “We’re on a ridiculous hiring spree, and getting to the size where communication is difficult, and duplicate work is starting to happen.”
There’s no way to verify if the poster actually works for Twitter, but the evenhanded tone of the post suggest its authentic. Among the perks of working at Twitter listed in the post: free meals, flex time, “Macbook Pros for everyone” and a flat organizational structure.
“Overall, Twitter’s setting a really high standard for what I want from my workplace,” the engineer said.
Late last year a series of media reports suggested Twitter was bleeding talent. Indeed, 2011 was marked by some high-profile departures, but that is to be expected from a company that grew from 200 employees in the summer of 2010 to more than 700 employees by the end of last year. TechCrunch may have had the best explanation for the departures: employees were leaving so they could sell Twitter shares.
Like any job, however, there are some downsides. The engineer is getting sick of being called “incompetent” by commenters every time a story about a Twitter outage is reported, as well as assumptions from programmer friends about being “really good” and assumptions from everyone about having insider knowledge.
And, of course, something akin to Facebook guilt can be a drag as well.
“People keep apologizing for not having an account to me. Seriously, it’s okay,” the engineer wrote.
