Twitch

• Perks in line with other SF tech companies
• Decent salary and benefits
• Flexible work schedule
• Some good people
• Games? I guess?
• Nice office if you're in Bush or Sansome. God help you if you're in 2EC.

• Widespread lack of confidence in executive team
• Employees openly mock CEO
• Cliqueish
• No career progression
• Low diversity
• Not-Invented-Here syndrome
• Massive technical debt that's only getting worse
• Stack is so fragile that any big event of real importance entails a company-wide code freeze because otherwise, we're guaranteed to go down
• Reaction to instability is to slap restrictions on engineering teams instead of addressing fundamental architectural and cultural problems ("operational excellence" -- el oh el)
• HR is unprofessional; actually included a curse word in a company-wide e-mail.

Many, if not most, core employees at Twitch, including managers and directors, have never worked anywhere else. It shows.

Twitch decided to triple in size before investing in a solid foundation built on tooling, DevOps, quality control, and building an engineering culture.

Twitch does not have an engineering culture. When most people talk about culture at Twitch, they're talking about the food.

Writing code is not engineering. A lot of people don't seem to understand this.

Do you want documentation? A knowledge base? Best practices? Mentoring? Some standard kind of bug tracking or requirements management process? Tests? Local development environments? Staging environments? Continuous integration?

Forget it. Forget all of it.

There's variation here on a team-by-team basis -- some are better than others -- but that just underscores the point that there's no coherent culture across the wider engineering org. It's chaos.

As a result of this lack of coherence, not just every team but every project ends up spending 60-70% of its engineering effort on deployment, monitoring, alerting, and metrics. Everything is bespoke, and there is massive duplication of effort all around.

Every project and every line of code written only makes the situation worse than it already is. God help our skeletal DevOps and systems teams.

An enterprising individual could write a whole new antipatterns book based entirely on case studies taken from Twitch.

The executive team has no understanding of how software development works at scale.

The executive team needs some adjustment.

Product development should be massively slowed down or halted entirely until we aren't going down every other month. We desperately need an empowered CTO who understands how to build an engineering culture. Even with the proper investment and focus, it's going to take a long time to dig out of this hole.