From the perspective of an engineer, how are things at Twilio? Specifically in the data platform/elasticsearch teams? Is the work interesting? Do you have a lot of ownership over your projects? How is the culture? How is work life balance?
+1 👆
Asking unfinished, broken questions on HackerRank. Bad culture.
why is it a bad culture?
Broken screening questions → no way to reach Twilio mgmt → they say you performed badly but the question required some library import which is impossible to integrate into HackerRank → mgmt won't hear you nor fix it → bad culture.
Not a fan of Hackerrank in any company, but a lot use that as a bar raiser. And not all teams within Twilio use Hackerrank and the onsite isn’t Leetcode heavy either.
Twilio is awesome. Culture is extremely inclusive & you can really be yourself. Also tons of flexibility with being in the office & work from home - as long as you’re productive, you won’t have any issues there. As a Twilion, I am constantly surrounded by great people & engineers that make me better. Also, the Data Platform team at Twilio is under great leadership & have a lot of high visibility projects leading the way. Regarding Hackerrank - it’s not the end all be all decision in hiring. It’s a tool that has helped take away some early on interviewing hours from us as Engineers. However, it is not the only test that drives the decision making in hiring engineers & does not dictate our culture at Twilio.
Not sure about the specific road map for the team, but like most platform teams, it has a lot of existing systems being offered as a service to other teams within Twilio and have new products in pipeline(the hiring manager might give you more details on that). There’s some recent reorg in the team and the team comprises mostly of very senior folks who have been with the company for long, so you might have to push harder to get a good chunk of projects to prove yourself and bring about any change to the team/system/process etc. Like most teams in Twilio, the amount of ownership is totally dependent on the individual, try to make realistic but achievable goals with the manager and get constant feedback from team on your progress. Culture is very inclusive, open, great work life balance, super smart but humble colleagues.
This feels like Google before it became big.