Twitter’s Chief Operating Officer to Step Down
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Twitter gets fairly good ratings on Glassdoor overall, but settles on a 3.2/5 for senior management (ie, even Google's 3.9/5 rating is reflective of poorly regarded senior management). In order to think of management as good (according to Glassdoor), they need a 4.0/5. If they get a 4.2/5 or higher, then they can be considered elite or special.
That is, they need to get rid of their crap middle management that's likely getting in the way of everything and driving it all (slowly) into the ground, then use the space that creates to get people in who know what they are doing and that are about progressing forward.
And then most junior managers never end up seeing it. Took me a while before I did - I liked my boss, even, but then they left and someone new came in, and the difference was night and day. Being able to come into a new place and figure out what details to focus on and what to not, identify common problem areas, identify people to delegate to and trust, get upper-management support for you when necessary, figure out where you're still uncomfortable and how to get you to start stretching yourself there... it's not stuff I knew I was missing. And I could've gone another decade without knowing it, probably!
Late edit: the more I see of the skills it takes to be good at it, and how easily it can be a thankless role, the more I'm kinda terrified even more of that jump than the dev->manager jump.
Perhaps a silly question, and definitely tangential, but do you have resources / pointers on where to learn about these kinds of skills? Or is that what MBA's are for? (sounds snarky but meant sincerely)
Here's your chance to engage in some information arbitrage and profit.
Drucker wrote A LOT. Assumption from your question: you have yet to gain much, if any, idea about what good management is. If so, The Daily Drucker [1] is a good, easily digestible entry point to the entire body of Peter Drucker's work.
Deming came from a statistics, systems, and manufacturing background, which at a glance, makes his work seem from a different world. That couldn't be more wrong. His principles are broadly applicable. Toyota and much of Japanese industry post-WWII learned from Deming and built their businesses on his principles. The easiest place to start with him is with his 14 Points [2].
Read a bit. Compare it to what you have seen or not seen in your work experience. Read more.
I spend a lot of time thinking about management and the more I learn, the less convinced I am that there has been anything truly new since these two thinkers.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Daily-Drucker-Insight-Motivation-Gett...
Ratings according to Engineers: executives = 66/100 and managers = 75/100.
Either way, whoever's bad should go.
Adam Bain built Twitter's ad business from scratch to a respectable ARPU on a product that many thought was not conducive to it. It's arguably one of the only achievements at Twitter since the original concept was born.
He is the fall guy for flattening revenue while user growth and product remain stagnant, while other execs increase their own spending by $1.5B a year and make zero improvement to either of these metrics.
They are the ones who need to go - that they're not being held accountable is bad.
So even if 200 people worked on that it doesn't explain what the other few thousand are doing.
It was incredibly irresponsible of the board to allow him to come back in the CEO role, and they need to put an end to it.
Also, many complain about Twitter's user experience, overall product, and lack of desire to tend to its users and their needs.
Essentially, it seems they just stalled out, are slowly drifting deeper into mediocrity, and aren't going anywhere. Though with growth still present (as their stock price is now more aligned with their projected growth rate) and a large (billions in IPO proceeds) cash cushion relative to their size.
Clover Go, Paypal Here, etc are eating their marketshare and can beat them on rates all day long, except for customers that don't make sense (high Amex/Visa Infinite usage), and First Data and their ISOs are happy to let Square lay there and bleed out from those "customers".
It's inevitable that a lot of executive positions get filled by personal connections, and it's inevitable that board members reward their friends, etc. Despite that, many businesses end up being run pretty well. However, the Twitter board has extremely irresponsible and negligent -- far more so than is normally the case.
I don't think any executive reshuffles or new CEOs will help, because the board contributes as much to the problem as anyone else.
I was appalled at the board's mismanagement and ineptitude throughout the company's life.
1 - they might give you big bags of cash
2 - they think they can be the ones to turn it around (what, execs, big egos? unrealistic expectations? complete faith in their self as savior of mankind? surely you jest.)
3 - their career doesn't end at twitter
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cuplqd1XEAEre6n.jpg:large
not bad work if you can get it :)
Twitter suffered enormously under his leadership. It lost users, potential revenue, potential profits, and people.
He seemed to not care about all the trolling and abuse problems.
This is good news.
Do you guys ever get tired of me pointing out that it will still be a Unicorn when it trades at 1/10th of the price and has a sustainable business model? We call those success stories, but lets be honest, its the share price you are worried about.
is there hope? can anyone confirm?
You're leaving money on the table with zero sales staff.
You would need quite a few engineers just to handle tweaks requested by legal and CS. Just a few engineers to handle the mature (ie probably spaghetti) ecosphere of systems in their architecture is never going to scale. Nor to just stop it falling apart, never mind progressing any new features.
From their talks about their architecture, their massive "Source" repository etc its sounds like they had 1000s of commits per day across hundreds of systems. Ie like many larger companies. To keep up that velocity would need a lot of developers and overhead staff. Even if they cut away "nice to have" systems, sunset a lot of apps and projects, and focused only on a lean core that would still be a huge architecture, which needs X amounts of staff to maintain and progress. What X is a I don't know. Maybe 50, maybe 200, maybe 1000.