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Amazing and effective engineering culture

Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Twilio for 4 years
January 19, 2016
San Francisco, California
5.0
RecommendsPositive OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros

Management really values engineers’ time and supports them when they want to pay down technical debt or focus on scalability.

Small team structures, like at Amazon, emphasize ownership and teach many skills hands-on—writing the code, deploying, and ops management. (There is on-call for some software engineers, which may be a con for you).

Very seriously takes some of the principles of agile/modern software development, such as committing to and checking-in on betterment from retrospectives, and using “we” phrasing when referring to outages and incidents. "Be Humble" is a corporate value, and it is lived out pretty well.

Cons

Interviews take up a lot of time, 1-2 hours a day really add up.

Not so good at distributing tasks, such that senior engineers aren’t overloaded.

Advice to Management

There is more focus on recruiting excellent candidates than on creating work structures that distribute responsibilities well and break up silos of knowledge. This keeps us constantly short-staffed in the end.

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