Twitch FAQ

Pros

Talent people, good benefits, mission-driven, lots of opportunity to grow

Cons

Depending on your org, the product folks can be a too numbers driven and inexperienced with working with design.

Pros

- Company supports WFH employees - Generous benefits, paying for phone/wifi costs, decent extended care - Cool company culture, separate from Amazon - Able to leverage a lot of AWS tech

Cons

- Not completely independent from Amazon, so same RSU vesting schedule etc.

Pros

alot of fun, free food and colleagues are awesome

Cons

hard to grow as the main bulk of the users are based in the US

Pros

Free Subs, and the ability to ban cringe streamers

Cons

No benefits, carpal tunnel not covered by insurance

Pros

- Work-Life Balance: Unlimited PTO and global weeks off, No meeting days, generous policy around work hours and location. - Chill, Interesting People: Colleagues have a general vibe of easy-going, approachable, helpful and fun to be around. Lots of outside-of-work hobbies, talents, and accomplishments makes for a lot of intriguing conversations and stories. - Amazon and Twitch Benefits: Some benefits like health insurance, RSUs, etc are a nice copy-paste from Amazon. Other benefits are more Twitch in nature (unlimited PTO, opportunity to work at TwitchCon, streaming rooms at offices). -ERGs / Clubs / Community at Work: Twitch has a wide range of ways to connect with your communities at Twitch. ERGs are called Guilds and have executive sponsorship, leads, events calendars and a decent cadence of development and social happenings. Plenty of events for wellness, social, and fun curated at the company, office, and interests level. And for anything else you can’t find, it’s probably a very engaged or dedicated Slack group of coworkers who geek/nerd out on things with you. - Interesting Work: There aren’t a lot of companies like Twitch and even fewer in the livestream space (an even more specific technology and culture space). A lot of the strategies, policies, decisions here have to take into account creators and communities, economics, regions, and brand which makes for some complex navigation and mental gymnastics. - Accessible Information and Visible Leaders: All Hands, leaders who take on Q&A and forums regularly, constant update comms and Slack, peers who can find what you need or jump in to help. If it exists somewhere in the company, you or someone will help you find things. - Awesome Food: If you’re fortunate to live near an office location that has a kitchen and kitchen staff, you are in for a big treat. Hot breakfast and lunch, snacks, coffee and cookies, and sometimes to-go food as you’re headed out for the night. As a former Google person at their HQ with free food, Twitch meals take the cake and crown. - Swag: Free stuff makes me biased, but Twitch company and guild swag is pretty awesome and arrives frequently in the mail.

Cons

Limited Growth and Development: A lot of emphasis on levels and job families as a carryover from Amazon. Notoriously difficult to make the jump to L7 and above (roughly senior director) and levels and job families have pay bands and compensation ceilings. Not a lot of opportunity to work on things above your level, not a lot of room for leveling up on certain teams due to smaller team size and long tenures at the company. Met a lot of people who sit in their roles and position on the ladder. There is a good amount of support for lateral moves or working in other teams, but Twitch has limited space at the top which tends to be given to newcomers outside of the company (boomerang employees also common for leveling up). Inexperienced Leaders: Lots of former content creators at the company with limited experience in business and frankly at any company other than or larger than Twitch. Others are broadly from the industry. Some came by way of early Twitch community or OG streamers, others by acquisition. The business acumen and experience here is pretty limited which is reflected in decisions and rationale or for investments and programs. Despite the Amazon paper writing (narratives) culture, there is resistance to new ways of working that runs counter to status quo, “intuitive” or “former Twitch partner here, this is what I think”. - Big Barriers to Business Maturity: Company is at an inflection point. Most of our future growth will continue to be in ads revenue, subscriptions, micro-transaction-y things. That said, growth is predicated on scale. And getting to scale requires doing things differently, effectively, thoughtfully (dig into the details), quickly. This is not how Twitch works right now, and there are growing pains which adds to some of the tension between leaders and teams (already seeing the writing on the wall with more tenured staff who want to grow or who prefer a less corporate-vibe leave and go elsewhere). Limited Onboarding and Employee Success: Twitch is very unique in terms of the service, community, culture. The onboarding is alright but a bit limited, got better onboarding from talking with people. Learning curve is steep as hell, expect it to take 7-9 months to ramp up and figure out that everything means, why things are done a certain way, who to go to for things (especially institutional knowledge). And be prepared to have things not make sense.

Advice to Management

Develop and invest in your people, bring in experienced leaders, manage and communicate change more effectively, and approach decisions and the rationalization of big decisions with more critical lens and actual feedback from creators and community. Put a line in the sand on areas within the company that need to be reorganized, transformed, optimized or scaled and be deliberate about those mandates, investments and timelines.