Middle management crapshoot - Anonymous employee X Employee Review

1.0
Oct 3, 2014
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The food's decent (although the snacks aren't really that good). People at the base level are decent and sharp. Fair number of celebrity visits, although it trends heavily towards entertainment celebrities and invites and access are controlled by a pretty tight clique.

Cons

All open plan, all the time. Office environment is rows of long tables, of which you get 2/3 a table and a small rolling cabinet. There is no privacy unless you reserve a conference room. Projects fight for spaces away from heavily trafficked corridors and people fight within projects for seats next to windows and away from corridors. Great if you like that layout style, but no consideration if you don't. Middle management is like playing Russian roulette. Read the low rated reviews, and you'll see bad middle management is the most common complaint. And since it's policy that no manager have more than 10 direct reports, there's a lot of middle managers. I've had the misfortune to have several managers here who were among the worst I've ever had. If you get a bad manager, you need to tough it out (and brown nose) while discreetly arranging to transfer projects. Neither the next level of management nor HR pays any attention to complaints about managers (save perhaps for diversity related issues). Saying, and giving examples of how, a manager doesn't know what they're doing is ignored. If a manager takes a dislike to you, unless you're truly irreplaceable, you're in trouble; they've even fired people just days before the vesting cliff who seemed to be doing a good job. While CEO Costello seems a nice enough guy, it's unclear if he's really up to being CEO. There's been a huge amount of turnover at the upper levels, possibly indicating a hiring problem, and the company as a whole, while not completely directionless and drifting, doesn't really have a strong sense of where it's going or how to approach its problems. And there's a definite disconnect between Twitter's supposed culture and values and how a not insignificant amount of middle management acts. Hackweeks, which have been reduced, result in many potentially useful prototypes that then never get followed up on.

Explore other reviews about X

5.0
Jun 11, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

great community for web engineers. lots of mentorship available sessions to knowledge share really helped with growth

Cons

lots of projects do not make it to production lots of hoops before projects have a chance to be developed or make it hopefully to production

4.0
Jun 5, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Good salary - High Ownership - Interesting Work - Get to learn more broadly of how things work at scale compared to other global social media companies - Equity Growth Overall I have gotten to take on really interesting work here and am alongside colleagues I respect and appreciate. Equity has appreciated significantly.

Cons

- Constant Layoffs/poor attrition rates - Understaffed - Lack of organization/communication from leadership

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