Angepinnt Der "Dinge die ihr einfach mal mitteilen wollt" Thread

Pros:
Twitch has a strong community and managed to grow to a $1B valuation before being bought by Amazon. In the constant criticism of the CEO, this simple fact is forgotten: he did manage to lead the company to where it is now. And if you think that’s an accident, the SF tech scene is littered with companies who have failed to break even a $10M valuation.

The perks are great; free food, snacks, bar. Subsidized gym, commute. Massages. A great welcome gift package that includes a nice set of headphones or earbuds to maximize office productivity. The compensation is above average for the Bay. The support of the Amazon mothership gives a little more job security rather than hoping that the CEO can keep raising capital.

Cons:
Until recently, the product direction was a Russian nesting doll of dumb ideas and people, each hidden inside the other. As much as I will sing Emmett’s praises for getting Twitch to the point of sale, he hasn’t been the right fit to take Twitch to a $10B or $100B valuation. Moreover, he is blind to his weaknesses, including micromanagement, public beration, and losing touch with the core product.

That has changed mildly, with the hiring of a couple of experienced leaders, but one (the quasi-CTO) has already left quietly, and there’s no rush to find a Chief Product Officer. Unfortunately, the lack of solid technical or product leadership have become bottlenecks for growth and efficiency throughout the company, and they’ve been directly responsible for attrition.

The technical stack needs help. Some engineers have managed to carve out areas of well-functioning practices, but those aren’t propagating to the rest of the company. The data infrastructure is laughably barebones for a company that literally belongs to AWS. It’s tough to tell if the lack of development there is from leaders who keep getting told “no” to investment, or from leaders who simply never think to ask. Regardless, the “first job out of college” leaders have left a significant mess behind them, and they’re uninterested in cleaning it up.

Amazon has a well-known promotion / bonus problem, which definitely causes losses of our top talent. But the total comp is still better than any other company, so poaching by startups has been relatively minimal. The issues with the interviews I have taken is that I don’t want to deal with a better workplace for a lower salary. So I stay.

Advice to managment:
Communicate. You seem to forget that almost no one in the company is privy to your conversations. The decisions and directions you choose in 5-10 person meetings need to be communicated properly, and widely, and repetitively. Find a mission and hammer it into everyone’s head.

Commit. The general consensus, from Glassdoor or Blind, is that people don’t really know what’s going on. And you’re not clarifying. Our metrics, our org, and our priorities seemingly change weekly. Initiatives are promised on a whim and dropped. The Curse acquisition was announced to much fanfare and has been quietly swept under the rug.

Prune. Make some tough, tough, tough decisions about pre-acquisition people. A lot are great. They built the product and care about it. Twitch wouldn’t be what it is without them. But some have checked out. Identify who those are and either push them aside, or ask them to leave. They are throttling growth.

Delegate. Don’t be afraid to hire people who are smarter than you. The CEO God-King myth always overlooks the Sandbergs and the Schmidts who provided the steady hand in the room. Twitch simply does not have that, and if we want to continue growing and to maintain our independent identity, we need to get it.

Invest. Hyper-growth brings all sorts of pains with it, and the first thing to suffer is infrastructure. As that gets throttled, entire job functions find themselves unable to perform. There’s a reason we’re hemorrhaging engineers and data scientists. Identify a leader who wants to scale our technology, and invest in helping them do that as their number-one priority. This spit-and-baling wire approach isn’t going to work much longer.

Solve. Now we are genuinely being scrutinized for our headcount. Which means we’re going to fight for limited resources that continue to dwindle due to attrition-without-backfill. When conflicting priorities come up, solve those conflicts. Don’t expect the people below you to do it. Multi-billion-dollar companies don’t self-organize into greatness.

If you aren’t capable of these things, please step down.

allet Jute