I've been on Hacker News much longer than I've worked at Twilio so set aside my bias for the moment and hear this from a fellow community member: Twilio is an awesome place to work. Our engineers work on interesting problems building really useful products and services (you should see what we have in store for the future). We genuinely care about helping our customers be more awesome.
Personally I've never worked at a place where my input has been so highly valued and I'm not particularly high on the totem pole (and I work remotely to boot). It doesn't matter. Everyone has something to contribute and everyone's contributions are equally valued. I've learned an immeasurable amount in just a few months from the ridiculously smart people I get to work with. This is the smartest, most committed crew of people I've had the pleasure of working with. They're fun people too.
Maybe working for someone else isn't your thing, but if your circumstances require you to do so, there are few better places to work.
If anyone has any questions about what it's like working at Twilio, feel free to contact me directly at jsheehan@twilio.com or ask your questions here and I'll answer what I can.
I've been on HN much longer than I've used Twilio, so trust me on this one: the product they make is jawdroppingly awesome, transformative, and will upend industries. It is on the same rough scale as email: this (or something very close to this) is going to save tens of millions of people their precious time, and make a lot of companies stupefying amounts of money. It brings the Internet to people who can't use the Internet, it brings computers to people who can't use computers, it eliminates whole classes of largely unproductive jobs. If you're a bit burnt out on CRUD apps and want to do something with impact, this is a great job.
P.S. After you get there, if you can zealously advocate for first-class Japanese support, you will be my best friend for life.
John, what is Twilio's position on remote working? The senior engineer's job looks interesting but I can't relocate right away (baby on the way, misses wants to give labour in the home country). I'd be willing to fly in for a couple of days each month.
My position as an Evangelist requires me to travel a lot, and I happen to live in a nice startup town (Boulder) so it's the right situation for working remotely. There's another Evangelist located in NYC. Outside of that, our core engineering team is all in San Fran, so those positions require being located there.
I live in Boulder as well and would love to be able to check out the intern position, if that's feasible for working remotely. I wouldn't mind traveling to the HQ every couple of weeks on my dime even.
They're not calling "all engineers" their calling all software engineers/devs/programmers/etc. I suspect that if I sent in a resume that documents my MIT MechE degree, MA PE license, 15 years of acoustical engineering experience, and basically 0 software development experience, it would take all of about 5 secs for it to wind up in the Trash folder.
Yeah, it's a nitpick, and go ahead and downvote me, it's just that I'm annoyed at the propensity for tech firms to equate "engineer" with "software dev". A software dev may be an engineer but the relationship is not reciprocal.
Am I the only one who gets a little befuddled when people refer to software developers as 'engineers'? Not that I feel software devs are undeserving or unworthy, it just doesn't seem to fit and confuses me.
Their appropriation of the word 'engineers', as if the type of engineer they are looking for was the only kind of engineer, also kind of offends me.
Is your argument that the only people who are allowed to be called "engineers" those who have a degree with the word "engineering" in the title?
Via Wikipedia:
"An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to design and develop solutions for technological systems problems. Engineers design materials, structures, machines and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality, safety and cost. The word engineer is derived from the Latin root ingenium, meaning "cleverness"."
1) Fallaciously or not, I typically associate engineers with the physical world. As I am familiar with them, engineers typically design tangible things.
2) I commonly hear of math and cs degrees being considered very closely related, and math is not engineering. It is vital to engineering, and I have mad respect for mathematicians, but a mathematician is not an engineer, hence why he is called a mathematician.
2.5) do cs majors really apply science? I thought it was almost entirely math and logic.
I'm having a bit of a time wrapping my head around this particular job title, is the ideal applicant a front-end developer or a web software engineer? The description is heavily in favor of the latter, and makes a passing reference to abilities in creating user interfaces.
While on the one hand, I understand the financial merits of wanting a staff member to maximize their contributions by wanting a front-end developer who can also double as a back-end developer, but at the very least shouldn't the job requirements be just as balanced? Or just go ahead and hire a person to focus on user interface and ensuring the integrity of effective user engagement, and having someone "build libraries"?
Maybe I missed the memo why this is such a popular trend.
"Front-end Developer" or "FE Engineer" are pretty standard titles these days. It essentially means you deal with the whole web stack (from Apache on up to CSS/JS) on servers that talk to a backend API. Your code typically won't deal with accessing databases directly or creating APIs.
Don't think of FE vs BE as HTML/CSS/JS vs server-side code. It is API client vs API server code. Architecturally, these stacks tend to be completely separate.
OT, but could there be anything more irritating than a giant "Feedback" button that hovers over the text you're trying to read?
How about if you clicked on it to give feedback about the feedback button and discovered that it didn't actually do anything except hide the embedded videos? OK, you win, I guess that would be even more irritating.
(Same behaviour in Safari 5.0.1 and Firefox 3.5.5 on the Mac, if anyone is interested.)
Thanks that is helpful feedback - definitely don't like annoying widgets and just stopped noticing it after awhile. I just took that out - it was supposed to be linking to our GetSat forums but was broken, as you said.
Personally I've never worked at a place where my input has been so highly valued and I'm not particularly high on the totem pole (and I work remotely to boot). It doesn't matter. Everyone has something to contribute and everyone's contributions are equally valued. I've learned an immeasurable amount in just a few months from the ridiculously smart people I get to work with. This is the smartest, most committed crew of people I've had the pleasure of working with. They're fun people too.
Maybe working for someone else isn't your thing, but if your circumstances require you to do so, there are few better places to work.
If anyone has any questions about what it's like working at Twilio, feel free to contact me directly at jsheehan@twilio.com or ask your questions here and I'll answer what I can.