Twitch

It's very clear that Twitch believes the best way to have productive engineers is to make them happy.

I'm often asked in 1:1s for feedback, pain points, and general well-being. My managers have been very transparent with their own goals in managing, and I feel comfortable bringing up anything on my mind with my manager, even touchy subjects.

Twitch has done a great job keeping its startup gaming culture after the Amazon acquisition; playing games at your desk is commonplace. Where another company may have employees walking by say things like, "Games in the middle of the day, eh?", Twitch employees instead come at you with, "What deck you running?" or "WHAT A DEAD GAEM".

On the business side, the company cares deeply about broadcasters, and it's refreshing to see business goals align so well with making users happy. Risky products that we're unsure about often go through talks with broadcasters for feedback, and the Partnerships team has gotten really good at facilitating these connections.

I feel proud to work at a company that's so well-loved by its content creators.

Emmett is one of the smartest people I know, and I could listen to him talk for hours.

Twitch employees are very open to ideas, arguments, and being wrong. Dozens of times I've joined an ad hoc conversation I overheard and, within minutes, directly affected a product with my input.

The postmortem culture, in most areas of the company, is well-intentioned and blameless. Problems don't often come down to "I screwed up, won't happen again"; they correctly go beyond that into "Together, we've built a system that allowed a screw-up to take down the site; how do we fix that?". Some areas of the company lag behind here (the video team's culture is infamous for being isolated from the rest of engineering and its ideals, for better or worse), but in general, it's good.

I said above that Twitch has kept its startup culture, but there are other things that it hasn't kept. Initially, Amazon was completely hands-off with the acquisition, which was great. But very, very slowly, they're creeping into the scene, needing to approve all compensation adjustments, wanting to build coordinated products, Amazonifying all Twitch laptops, teaching us about interviewing, requiring periodic security training, and getting Amazon badges and turnstiles, etc.

Each case individually isn't a big deal and is backed by good reasons (lots of these are 'we need to fix ' and Amazon already has so let's use their solution), but I can't deny that over time it becomes more and more apparent that we're an Amazon company whose large decisions need to go through our friends in Seattle. For now, this doesn't affect me a ton, but I imagine within a couple of years I'll be ready to leave for something smaller.

Identify and fix the issues that cause people to think of Amazon as Big Brother. This isn't an easy thing to do. But if the creep keeps happening at the same rate, people will leave.