I'm in the same boat - there's no way I would have worked at Twitter a year ago; but now I would consider it. Elon's acquisition has made me much more optimistic about the outlook of the company. If Twitter has a mass exodus after the acquisition, I'm sure there's a wave of open-minded engineers ready to take their place.

Twitter: 500 million tweets a day. WhatsApp: 65 billion messages a day.

Is writing better spam filters / bot detection really so fun sounding? I don't get the fascination, it just seems like one of the most boring websites in the world. (Not being sarcastic)

It is up and running for a long time already, written and rewritten and rerewritten.

Twitter: 500 million public posts a day.

WhatsApp: 0 public posts a day.

This might be comparing apples to oranges, as one is more like a global town square, and one is more like a postal service.

You know there's a lot more going on inside a company that serves that kind of traffic than just spam filters, right?

Sure. And I know it isn't directly comparable to WhatsApp but it isn't mind boggling scale really.

You want to work on the adtech side of it there's quite a few of those exchanges similar in size around, they just aren't house hold names. Where is the fun? I'm genuinely asking.

What happens to comp in a large private company like this? Do they just pay lots of cash netflix-style?

I've seen companies in similar situations stop issuing RSUs but also not increase cash comp in order to encourage people to leave as their RSUs vest.

Why would you want to encourage employees to leave? I understand there’s desired attrition of bad employees but isn’t most attrition undesirable? How do you build product by pushing out experience?

In the case I am most familiar with, private equity is involved. They want to get rid of the expensive people and replace them with people in cheaper locations because they view people as interchangeable.

It is going about as well as you can imagine.

My understanding (outsider / second hand) is that Musk reduces wages. Others may have better info.

I imagine Twitter employees' RSUs are getting bought out as well and it would make sense to just stop issuing more RSUs.

Yes

wait for the acquisition to happen and then use the same methods you'd use to get an interview at any other company.

Why wait until after the acquisition? Have Twitter also announced a hiring moratorium?

It's often better to be hired by the new guard rather than the old guard in situations like this. Your entire department/team might get the axe.

Because there is a high chance of layoffs post acquisition and when that happens they won’t go asking if you were a “new” twitter person or not.