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.
