Management focuses on results instead of building a great company
Pros
The core product is awesome and the Twitch community loves us for what we do. It feels great to enable thousands to make a living while doing what they love. While the company culture has dissipated over the years, it is still generally a fun place to work, and most people who work there are passionate and cool. Vacation policy is lax, benefits are great (although relatively standard for a SF tech company). If you love video games and nerd culture you'll probably enjoy working here.
Cons
We hire new product managers all the time, yet lack a unified product vision. Even with our small army of product managers, it seems as though our CEO and one or two close to him make almost all major product decision. Products commonly launch feature-bare, often lacking some of the most basic functionality you'd expect. This is a result of extreme pressure from management to launch as many features as fast as possible in hopes that it might improve minutes watched. We launch too many bad products because of this. We lack a strong culture. There is no true north to set our gaze upon. No lofty ambition to help people express themselves and build community with our platform. As far as I can tell, Twitch's sole purpose is to grow minutes watched, by likely impossible (or at best unrealistic) margins month over month, year over year. That's not sexy or exciting or inspiring or making the world a better place. This extreme focus on metrics has caused us to make decisions that don't benefit our users. Career development is a struggle for most. Twitch is more ready to hire directors and VPs from outside rather than promote those with institutional knowledge from within. I can't tell you the number of times I've been asked to submit a proposal ("OP1") for where I'd like my team to grow, what roles I'd like to hire for, and what we'd like to accomplish in the next year, only to never even see a shred of meaningful feedback. The next year, you're asked to submit another OP1 with 0 retrospection as to the previous year's lack of movement. This has happened not just once or twice, and has left me feeling as though I've stagnated in my personal career, and failed my direct reports as a manager. Inter-departmental communication is poor. Very few teams (outside of science) share updates, leaving little opportunity for feedback, collaboration, analysis of successes/failures, or simply patting eachother on the back for work well done. Even though I've been at the company for many years, I still don't believe I have the avenues to pitch new initiatives or give feedback on others. Even worse, on more than one occasion I've had to deal with newly hired product managers or business unit owners making substantial changes to products and areas my team owns, without my consent or even advanced notice. How does this happen you ask? Because of mandates from upper management pushing a product or idea because they think it will drive minutes. Recurring theme here.
