An Inside Look At Twitter (And Some Job Advice)

The technical details behind Twitter and the less-technical – but no less tricky – art of managing employees were among the topics of discussion when Twitter’s director of engineering Samuel Luckenbill ’02 and Twitter NYC engineering site lead Guy Dickinson visited SEAS Thursday. 

When Luckenbill joined Twitter in 2008, two years after its founding, the company employed 20 people. He’s now one of a few thousand employees. He spoke to Computer Science students about the computing wizardry that gives Twitter its immediacy as a news distribution service. For example, Twitter is faster than earthquakes, Luckenbill noted. When Japan was rocked by an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.1 in 2011, many in the region read Tweets about it before they felt the quake’s rumblings. 

Luckenbill also spoke specifically about Earlybird, the core retrieval engine that he helped develop. The retrieval engine rapidly ingests content and makes it instantly searchable to the more than 300 million active monthly users on Twitter.

Luckenbill and Dickinson also spoke to students in the Advanced Graduate Leadership Program (AGLP), focusing on the art of managing engineers. Rather than hiring managers from outside, Luckenbill said, he prefers to promote from within. 

“I find a lot success in identifying engineers who have the best soft skills on the team to promote,” he said. 

As someone who made the transition from engineer to a manager of engineers, Luckenbill said he learned a lot by trial and error. The key skill is looking at things from the other person’s perspective. “If you can put on that empathy hat in all these situations where you have conflict, and put yourself in their shoes, that helps a lot in figuring out what to do.”

Dickinson agreed that there’s a steep learning curve to the transition.

“The skill I’ve had to cultivate is to not treat organizational problems as engineering problems,” he said. “You can be tricked into thinking that they are because an organization is a system. But [organizational problems] involve people, and people have emotions and feelings.”

And for those who aspire to work at Twitter, Luckenbill offered some practical advice: Keep your resumes direct and to the point – you’ve got about 30 seconds to catch the eye of your potential employer. If you do, then the first part of the hiring process is a coding challenge, followed by one to two phone interviews. Do well on those, then prepare for a few onsite interviews, hopefully followed by an offer. Good luck!