Leaving Twitter
12 days after being told by my EM it could happen, something I’ve been expecting to happen for a few weeks has finally happened. Today I was told it is my last day working at Twitter.My EM hadn’t been inviting me to strategy meetings, afaik no-one has been offered a job on the team I was supposed to be seeding (apologies to those I referred), and, in my last few weeks, I was tasked with creating dashboards for management. The signs of the end were there.
I’d be very surprised if another staff engineer is offered the same role that was sold to me last year (and flabbergasted if they were outside the US) because part of what I supported as “best for the business” made a large part of that role unnecessary in the org it was in.
I feel a bit cheated because letting me go now means I leave with zero shares and zero bonus. Two weeks later I’d have had a 5 figure share grant, a few weeks after that I could be looking at a similar 5 figure bonus. Honestly I would have been financially better off by just staying at Google.
A couple of folk asked how this happened; The key things were a share vesting cliff (before which you receive no shares), and a contract clause which offers “payment in lieu of notice” (which means your termination date can be immediate, so you’re not employed on a pay-out date even if your notice period would mean you cross it). With these two things I was told today was my last day and that I wouldn’t be eligible to receive either the shares or the bonus.
Still there’s no point on dwelling on it. There are some great folk there, but there are also some things which I didn’t like, and I felt I learnt a more useful things in 6 months at Google, Deliveroo, or Facebook than I did at Twitter, so maybe this is a good thing after all.