Pros
- SendGrid was great but the experience after the Twilio acquisition went rapidly downhill. Compensation and benefits are good; stock and ESPP were especially sweet as the stock price really took off. - Free food and beer in the office (in the Before Times anyway) were a nice perk, although Twilio started gradually whittling away at that and other perks. - Company continues to grow robustly in spite of flaws.
Cons
- The veneer of inclusivity and sensitivity and whatever the hell Twilio Magic means belies a real viciousness that took me by surprise after I’d been lulled into believing the facade. Unfortunately I took leadership’s Ned Flanders surface act at face value, only to find out it was a fraud. I wasn’t all that enamored of the SendGrid leadership that took their huge piles of money and left after the acquisition, but they were much better than their Twilio counterparts. There might be some managers in the organization interested in coaching their reports toward career development but that was certainly not my experience. Oddly, threats are not especially effective as a motivation and coaching technique. Weird, I know. - Twilio engineering had the reputation of growing too quickly to implement the kind of process and discipline needed for enterprise-level software development and it showed in the platform’s instability and number of outages.