- Excessive office politics (every company has it, but Twitter seems to be in a class in of itself)
- Executive churn creates chaos in the organization (new VP every 3 - 9 months)
- Quarterly reorgs
- No long term roadmap makes everyone obsessed with short-term goals
- Lack of coordination between divisions and teams
- Inability to execute and deliver
- Irrational behaviour (promoting someone and then firing them four weeks later)
- Twitter engineering, because of paralysis, can only deliver the most minor of features; most major new products and features are coming from acquisitions
Chaos sums up my experience at Twitter. Because of reorgs, I averaged 4 different managers a year. I witnessed multiple talented employees explicitly avoid a promotion because of the vastly increased danger it put their careers at Twitter in (hence, the extremely short-lived VPs). Because of the generous equity grants pre-IPO, they elect to keep their head down in obscure areas and vest, rather than apply themselves and be at risk. Ultimately, though, many of these employees get fed up and resign (even though they are leaving hundreds of thousands or millions of dollar in unvested equity). Twitter is bleeding its best talent.
The fear makes the organization extremely top-down and risk averse. No one wants to propose something novel only to fail and be shown the door. There is no management cover. All the way up the chain, managers will attempt to shift the blame to those below them.
