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KikisGamingService t1_j8epnm6 wrote

Oh hey, I work at Twilio and a few of my coworkers have been laid off. AMA I guess

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CasualMonkeyBusiness t1_j8fz6gl wrote

The fuck is a Twilio?

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KikisGamingService t1_j8g5q8r wrote

Twilio owns a bunch of APIs for calls, texts, emails, etc. Basically when you call your Uber driver back, it's probably a Twilio number. When your doctor messages you about an upcoming appointment, also probably a Twilio number.

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mdonaberger t1_j8f92i3 wrote

What kind of bonuses did Twilio's leadership get this year?

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KikisGamingService t1_j8j7fm5 wrote

I just heard that the CEO brought his own salary down to minimum wage as a cost saver. He said he does not need the extra money himself and rather have it to build the company.

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LivePossible t1_j8fkwnz wrote

Did teams feel bloated to you? From the outside the conferences seem like exorbitant spend, is that a fair assessment?

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KikisGamingService t1_j8g5yme wrote

In my org, we were already understaffed before and more understaffed now. Especially with other teams that we rely on losing many people as well.

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djredcent t1_j8ezp1h wrote

Which depts were impacted and what does the split to 2 BUs mean for the folks remaining?

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KikisGamingService t1_j8g5uap wrote

Most departments were hit at least somewhat. The two business units don't mean much for the majority of people working here.

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djredcent t1_j8ir8rt wrote

How are you guys internally viewing one BU being headed by your old CFO (trad focused on “efficiency”) and the other by a Rev leader (trad focused on growth)?

Thanks for the AMA. I hope you and your colleagues take the time needed to recover from this shitty situation that prob had little to do with the great work you do day to day.

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KikisGamingService t1_j8j480n wrote

As far as we can tell, the data and communications units are being split and they still share many departments. Twilio for a while now has kept pushing towards "becoming profitable", so this is kind of expected. Sadly, I am not high enough on the ladder to know too much about the details.

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Goal_Post_Mover t1_j8gd68p wrote

What cloud providers do you guys use?

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KikisGamingService t1_j8ggh0f wrote

Depends for what you mean. We are the cloud provider for a lot of people. Also, most services go over standard phone and messaging routes, where no additional cloud provider is needed. Some of our hosted services sit on AWS afaik.

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bubba-yo t1_j8h7aus wrote

Sorry, man. Before I retired I used your services a lot. They were great. Hope you land safe and soon.

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Victawr t1_j8ih2wi wrote

Check out DevCycle.com if you're a dev

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KikisGamingService t1_j8ioau3 wrote

That looks pretty neat, never heard of DevCycle before!

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Victawr t1_j8iq12y wrote

Ha! Didn't expect a response to my shameless plug.

Yeah, competing with launchdarkly. I bring it up because as a ton of teams are absolutely slashing budgets and team members, we're growing and have purpose built the tool to be affordable for teams that might be going through that. So we stopped charging by seat and don't gate features.

Thought I'd throw it your way, your team might find it useful + cheap!

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TerminallyillStepDad t1_j8iqnma wrote

How bad is the scamming/fraud via twilio? There is a spa in my town that uses Twilio to spam all random local numbers with texts, without an option for opt out. I didn't immediately see a simple "report abuse" feature within Twilio.

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KikisGamingService t1_j8irqje wrote

Depending on the type of messaging used, there will be a lot more spam filtering coming to them. They need a proper business registration for a A2P 10DLC registration on a normal US number or toll-free verification on a toll-free number. If you are receiving fraud/scam/spam messages, the best thing you can do is to report it to your phone carrier. There are multiple routing providers involved in each message and each one has filtering rules.

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TerminallyillStepDad t1_j8iu4ti wrote

Oh yeah I definitely did all that, the carrier and ftc. I was just surprised unlike other VOIP type services there wasn't an immediate report form. I was always sus of twilio after this... 🧐🧐

Thanks for responding!

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KikisGamingService t1_j8j4whg wrote

All of our messages are forced to have opt-out. Responding with "STOP" should disable any messages coming from that number.

However, Twilio does have a fraud investigation team and you can reach out to them here: https://www.twilio.com/help/abuse

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3nl t1_j8j8y77 wrote

This is going to make things so much worse for customers.

What's been going on with your partner SSO these days? I'd say at least 50% of the time when I try to get in to add an IP to an API key or verify a sender coming through from Azure, it just fails to work or if it does let me in, occasionally will tell me I don't have access to a particular setting. Miraculously, two days later it just starts working again. Funnily enough, the billing never seems to fail!

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KikisGamingService t1_j8jd8oq wrote

Definitely create support tickets with every issue you are running into. If support cannot fix things, they get moved to engineering and if enough people mention something not working, it will become a big deal internally. Sadly, from what I can tell, most of the steps here have lost some of their workers.

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