>There are no offices at Twitter. Everyone sits out in the open, even the executives, who freely roam about the floors, taking up residence on couches, at long tables, or in the cafeteria.
Sounds like a horrible place to work for me. I can't work optimally with people hovering behind me and getting distracted with noises.
No kidding, not a chance I would get anything done in such an environment.
Also, although well intentioned, that a company serves 3 meals a day, has snacks and recreation, makes me a little fearful that I'm not accepting a job but rather a lifestyle. Hopefully this gets cleared up in the interview process. Because I'm leaving at 5 unless there's a fire to put out.
It's called over-engineered culture fit. You've failed the culture fit portion of your hiring interview. Please find your own way out.
Remember (like, eight years ago) when you could get a job by doing good work and tolerating coworkers for a few hours a day? Now jobs mean you have to do good work, buy in to the koolaid, love your coworkers, and spend time with them before and after work too (or else you're not a "team player" or you're not "fitting in here"). You should definitely not hire people you can't stand, but there's a continuum between "this person has an abhorrent personality" to "no mad skillz pongpinging? NO HIRE!"
The startup tech industry is freezing out the leave-me-alone-i'm-working computer person archetype in favor of cheerleader/frat/bro/übersocial/drinkydrinky people. Who are you leaving behind?
The media has brainwashed (very smart) software engineers into believing that working as a programmer in San Francisco is like being a painter in Paris in the 1920s; that for $116,000[1] in one of the costliest cities in the U.S. you should forgo a meaningful personal and family life and instead make it easier for brands to surface their tweets in people's feeds. That having an interesting job and work/life balance are mutually exclusive things.
A lot of it has to do with extroversion vs introversion. The lone programmer working long into the night without seeing another human being is long gone. The work itself has become more social as collaboration tools get better and better. This necessitates programmers who, themselves, are more socially oriented. I'm not saying introverts can't be social. I am saying they don't excel at it, especially stuck in a 24/7 lifestyle that doesn't allow downtime without sacrificing your social status with the team. Having to choose between staying in your team's good graces and your own mental health is a horrible thing, but it's a choice a lot of us are being forced to make.
This does indeed leave the introverts high and dry. Speaking as a leave-me-alone-i'm-working introvert, I've seen this shift firsthand over the past 5 years. I'm convinced that, at this point, working another full time job isn't in my future. Contracting and a "lifestyle business" or two is where I'm headed. While I don't like the uncertainty of those two options, they're considerably less stressful for me than a modern office environment.
Agreed. And "just wear headphones" isn't a solution for those of us who'd rather not have to trade one type of background noise for another.
My current startup follows the "open floor plan" model epitomized by Twitter. To be honest, it's great when I want to socialize, and pretty terrible when I want to put my head down and concentrate on something.
After realizing that I wasn't the only freak/outcast/weirdo who preferred to work in a quiet(er) environment, we implemented a "quiet room" at our office. Basically, we converted a conference room into the equivalent of a library. So far it's working out pretty well.
I know offices are pretty much relics of a bygone era at this point, reserved only for the likes of Apple, Cisco, Oracle, and other tech giants who came of age before the 2010s. But there's something to the office that we've lost in its passing. Offices may not be cost efficient, and they may not inspire "collaboration" or foster "culture." But it's nice to have a place to go to get shit done.
[For the record, I suffer from a condition known as misophonia, which is sort of like a hypersensitivity to certain sounds. I have exceptional hearing, but I can't tune out background noises the way most people can. For those of you who've seen the new Superman movie: those scenes in which Clark Kent suffered from all the background noises involved in "super hearing" really hit home with me. I know I'm not alone here, but unfortunately, people like me are kind of screwed in the new workplace paradigm.]
As a fellow misophonia sufferer and veteran of a few open floor plan startups, I feel your pain. The quiet room sounds like a good offering on your company/team's part to strike a balance between open/collaborative workspace and quiet/get-shit-done space. Glad you have that option!
Thanks! And yeah, I'm pretty lucky we created that option. And it's only because I wasn't the only person annoyed with what was starting to feel like working in a high school cafeteria.
Had I been the only one, I'm sure I would have gotten some variation on "Just wear some headphones," or "I don't hear anything," or "That's weird," etc., which is basically what I've been told my whole life. :)
Yes, I would really like to hear from people that program in this type of environment. It strikes me as a madhouse. On the other hand, I have worked in labs on things like embedded computers, and sometimes having a lot of people around really helped you zero in on a difficult problem consisting of code touching more modules than one mind could ever keep track of. But by and large it is pretty tiring, and extremely hard to do anything that does not require constant communication.
I don't know - when I viewed those pictures I just got the sense of slaves or prisoners, shackled in their galley^H^H^H^H^H^H workstation, looking longingly out windows to the outside world, etc. I recognize I am just looking at a few photos and my impression is likely to be completely wrong.
I don't use my work network for banking, no, because IT monitor and proxy everything and I don't trust the IT dept. Mostly for personal stuff I use my iPhone. Not really any need to use a work computer for that. I don't read "sleazy blogs" at work, in fact I'm not even sure what you mean. If you mean porn, then ewww, no. If you mean things like techcrunch, theverge or hn (which aren't sleazy) then sure, I read those, but i don't need privacy for that.
if I did use the work computer for personal email, It's not like people are sitting on top of each other and 12pt fonts can be read.
This seems to me like kids and their sense of entitlement. Goof off if you want, all you want, but don't expect the company to provide you with privacy just so you don't have to feel bad about it.
Well whenever you take a break from coding you would know that everyone around you knows you are not working. This can be needlessly stressful and would probably lead to people overworking themselves and burning out.
no no, it's not an issue of people actually caring how much you work. I agree that people aren't going to call you out or tell you to work more. It's more of a self-consciousness about taking breaks. People are much harder on themselves than they should be. We try to project an image that we are hardworking and that we don't waste any time at work.
If people were always looking over my shoulder I wouldn't be comfortable having HN open in a window/screen for half the day
Not to sound stupid, but this question has been on my mind. Why does Twitter have so many employees? Wikipedia says it's 900+ as of last year. Instagram had 13 when being bought out by Facebook, I think I read recently they are up to 50. I'm kind of a small town guy, with the 2 biggest software shops in town being ~50-60ish people that are WAY established compared to Twitter or Instagram. It's never made sense to me why they are so large. But they have cool offices, and seems like a place I would want to work.
Support, marketing, sales, partnerships, there's a lot of things that Twitter engages in that are people heavy and wouldn't be present in a software shop. Take a look at their jobs page for an idea of the sort of people they're using: https://twitter.com/jobs & https://twitter.com/jobs/positions
Besides programmers there is probably a small army of sys admins to handle their data centers in additional to daily operational IT, business development folks working with partners, the entire ad/sales platform, lawyers and accountants. Plus all of the facility staff for that crazy office (kitchen staff, janitorial, gardeners, etc).
I agree though. That is a lot of people and it's hard to wrap my brain around that since I work at a very small software company of less than 10 people.
1000 employees per product (many of them small) seems asinine to me. I could definitely be wrong, but this seems like extremely low productivity. Does anyone have any insights into this?
A huge number of those are in operations, building the data centers and making them scalable and reliable. They're not supporting or allocated to a single product, they're making possible the platform that all those products run on.
At the time Instagram was bought by Facebook, (and still I think) they didn't have any kind of ads and thus no need for sales people and a reduced need for engineering, product management, biz dev, etc. as well.
Media outlets hadn't really picked up on Instagram yet (at least, not as a tool to use themselves), so no need for media relations people. They didn't really need biz dev people yet like Twitter certainly does. (e.g. you need people to make the integration of Twitter in other platforms like iOS and OS X happen)
Also, Twitter is older than Instagram. Over time, if success is still going, it's somewhat normal to increase your staff just because there are things you can improve all over the place (product-wise as well as company-wise).
And now that Instagram is part of another company, it's hard to compare the numbers since they might take advantage of Facebook resources here and there which are hard to account for.
True, but I'm also saying that Instagram had 13 employees at the time of being bought out. I don't have any numbers of users they had at the time but I know they had 1M+ new users on their Android launch. Which makes me assume a large iOS crowd.
If we figure that the engineer count scales linearly to the user count (which I don't actually think is true), then you've just justified twitter having 2,600 engineers. That is, if Instagram had 13 engineers for 1 million users. (they likely had less engineers but more users though).
Well I used the term software shop loosely. Both are fairly large in their reach nationally. The one I worked at did hosting in the building as well. No more than half a dozen on the IT staff, hosting hundreds of clients who had numerous employees. Obviously no millions, but they had what I would say is a lot more complicated product.
When you have a clear vision of your product, you don't need a lot of people to execute. The only thing in my experience doesn't scale well is customer support and sales. So, an early start up could do a lot with a small number of employees.
Now, once you need to generate revenue, you will need to add people (a lot of them) for sales and support. It gets worse if the revenue model doesn't prove to work well, then you'll need to hire more to try out new things in the hope that you get to something before your funding runs out.
Great article, I appreciate you sharing. I don't want to sound presumptious, but sometimes in articles like these where we are looking back at our original thoughts on something, they can be clouded by our current beliefs. I really am struck by this line: "But I went home that day and realized that Twitter, and the ensuing social media explosion, would dramatically alter the landscape of not only what I do through my blog, but design, fashion, lifestyle, culture, everything. I later voiced my concern to our staff meeting, but no one else seemed to think Twitter an issue." But when you click on the link about Twitter from 2007, there is one line about it.
There isn't much point to my comment besides, I wish the author had written more about how Twitter was going to change things in the past.
How does Twitter view their API? is it treated as a profit center or a cost center? It seems there are lots of companies using it to build Twitter clones, and nobody is paying for it since it's free. And they've been offloading the "hose" to companies to Gnip/Datashift so they can resell the data. Is their API still a top business area for them?
I think Twitter is moving towards advertising with their MoPub acquisition. Twitter has your identity and users have no expectation of privacy (unlike facebook or google), so people think that they have a unique advertising advantage.
I think the license restrictions on its firehose partners will become more strict as Twitter realizes it can go vertical and use the data itself to create platforms for social media analytics and advertising.
HA... "Hey boss, I finished a feature that will allow Syrians to go to Twitter and voice their displeasure!". Boss: "Does it increase revenue?", You: "No.. it might increase traffic costs a bit though. But think about what this will do for democracy, human rights and freedom! doesn't that make you proud?" Boss: "You crazy"
Having been a part of similar conversations to this at Twitter, I can say with complete confidence that you are wrong. The "...in a way that makes us proud" part of that company value is taken very, very seriously.
> I went home that day and realized that Twitter, and the ensuing social media explosion, would dramatically alter the landscape of not only what I do through my blog, but design, fashion, lifestyle, culture, everything.
Sounds like a horrible place to work for me. I can't work optimally with people hovering behind me and getting distracted with noises.