It's no secret that the tech industry has a diversity problem. According to a 2021 Statista survey, women make up 29% of all functions in technology companies, and ethnic minorities make up 22%. The real question remains: what are tech companies doing about the diversity gap? Well, companies like Twitter are turning to apprenticeships to tackle the issue.
If, like Twitter, you want to create an environment that amplifies diverse voices through technology, the Twitter engineering program is for you. In this guide, you'll discover how to apply to Twitter's engineering apprenticeship program, Twitter's apprenticeship salary structure, how to prepare for Twitter's apprenticeship interview, and the reviews from former Twitter apprentices.
Twitter is a global microblogging platform and social media service owned and operated by Twitter Inc. This SaaS platform facilitates interactions among individuals by providing robust features that allow them to share their ideas. Through tweets containing 280 characters-limited, Twitter app users can share texts, videos, links, or photos. Twitter Inc is recognized by many as a leader in the social media industry.
As of January 2023, Twitter had a 12.34% global market share for desktop and mobile, according to StatCounter, making it the second most popular social media platform globally by the number of users. According to Statista, Twitter has 368.4 million monthly active users as of December 2022. Statista projects the figure will decline by five percent in 2024. Twitter’s corporate base is in San Francisco, California.
According to a tweet by Elon Musk, Twitter has 2,300 active employees as of January 2023.
According to its Q2 2022 diversity and inclusion report, Twitter’s workforce comprises 45.8% women, 53% men, and 1.0% non-binary. The report also showed that 38.5% of Twitter employees are White, 31.3% are Asian, 9.6% are Black, 8.5% are Latinx, and 4.3 are multi-racial.
As many have come to know, Twitter's history is quite controversial. While some argue that Twitter was a group effort, others believe Twitter resulted from the genius of Jack Dorsey and Noah Glass. In 2005, when Odeo was about to launch its podcasting platform, it experienced a massive setback, as Apple announced podcasting would be a key feature in its iTunes.
From that time, Evan Williams, founder of Blogger and CEO of Odeo, knew the company's future was fated. Hence, he called on his employees and co-founder, Noah Glass, who originally conceived the idea for Odeo, to work on a backup plan to save the company's future. Jack Dorsey, an employee at the company then, conceived the idea for Twitter. He shared this idea with Noah Glass, who coined “Twttr.”
In February 2006, Noah, Jack, and a German contractor, Florian Weber, told Evans about it, and Evans made Noah the head of the group. From then on, Jack, Noah, and Florian worked on the Twttr project, and Biz Stone, an ex-Googler like Evans, occasionally aided the team. By March, the team had a prototype for Twttr. Jack Dorsey made the first tweet on March 21st, 2006. In July 2006, the app, now “Twitter,” became available to the public.
Evans, yet to see Twttr’s viability, especially since the platform had less than 5,000 registered users two months after its launch, offered to buy out his investors to minimize their losses. After he succeeded, he changed the company's name to Obvious Corp and fired Noah. The exit of Noah brought on a lot of speculations about the true intent of Evans. In 2007, the founders incorporated Twitter, and Jack Dorsey became its CEO.
The San Francisco earthquake in August proved Twitter's usefulness in real-time news broadcasting. By March 2008, TechCrunch revealed Twitter had over 1,000,000 users, 200,000 of whom were active. The platform was being used to send out 3,000,000 tweets per day. The same year, the company raised $22 million as Series B funding, and Facebook made a bid for the company. Twitter founders refused the bid. The election riot in Iran gave Twitter the international status it needed. By then, celebrities–like Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey–and corporations had signed onto the platform.
Twitter issued an initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange on 7th November 2013 under the symbol “TWTR.” The company set its initial share price at $26 as it hoped to sell off 70 million shares for $1.8 billion, placing its value at $14.16 billion. However, Twitter opened for sale at $45.10 and closed with a value of $31.8 billion. At the time of the IPO, Twitter's CEO was Richard Costolo. The company also had an employee base of 2,400, a user base of around 231.7 million users, 15 rounds of funding of $12.9 billion, and 10 investments.
In April 2022, America’s wealthiest man and serial entrepreneur, Elon Musk, made a bid for Twitter but tried to wiggle out of the deal afterward. Following a court order, Elon concluded the purchase through X Holdings I, Inc on October 27, 2022, at $44 billion, turning the company back to Private ownership. After taking over, He noted that the company was insolvent. He fired the C-level executives, became CEO, and introduced new features to the platform, including an $8/monthly fee on Twitter's Blue subscription.
Twitter’s mission is “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers.”
Following its acquisition, Twitter 2.0’s mission is to promote and protect public conversation—to be the town square of the internet.
According to Twitter, it serves the public conversion. The company’s core values are interwoven into these three categories:
Twitter has provided a global platform for classes of individuals to interact with one another in real-time, regardless of social status, gender, geographical location, ethnicity, or political orientation. The company’s major source of revenue is its advertising services. Twitter also generates revenue from subscriptions, partnerships with developers and content creators, and data licensing (selling public data to companies) through products such as Twitter developer and Twitter business. Its competitive advantage is giving individuals and businesses real-time access to a large diversified audience.
According to Stackshare, Twitter has 37 popular technologies in its tech stack. It uses 24 application and data tools, five utilities, eight DevOps, and eight business tools. Some of its application and data tools include jQuery, Node.js, MySQL, React, Scala, Bootstrap, Redis, and ExpressJS. some of its utilities include Framer, HackerOne, and Lucene. Its DevOps tools include Grunt, Docker, Apache Aurora, and HAProxy. Twitter's business tools include G Suite, Jira, Zendesk, and HelloSign.
In the Summer of 2019, Twitter launched an apprenticeship program to provide next-generation leaders from underserved communities access to the tech industry. Twitter's goal was to create a technical workforce as diverse as the customers it served. Candidates for the engineering apprenticeship no longer have to go through the traditional pipelines before they can build careers in technology. The decision to launch the apprenticeship was in response to the state of its workforce in 2019.
In its June 2019 Diversity and Inclusion report, Twitter revealed that only 20.2% of its technical workforce were Women, 2.9% were Blacks, and 3.2% were Latinx. The engineering apprenticeship rotation program is one of many ways Twitter hopes to improve its hiring statistics by 2025.
Twitter’s engineering apprenticeship is a one-year-long rotation program. Twitter assigns participants to different units, including front end, back end, mobile development, and data science, in Twitter's engineering department across San Francisco, Colorado, Boulder, and New York offices. The apprentices will graduate at the end of the 12 months and may be hired into one of Twitter's engineering units.
Candidates in the apprenticeship program will build a robust knowledge of software engineering and data science before the end of 12 months. As a Twitter apprentice, you'll work alongside cross-functional engineering teams to improve user experiences. You'll write, review, and improve multiple lines of code to enhance the efficiency of software products.
You'll learn how to build innovative, user-friendly mobile and web applications and how to test run and oversee the deployment of systems. Apprentices attend Twitter-hosted engineering events.
While Twitter has not provided any data regarding the transition of its apprentices, it has shown through its Quarterly Inclusion & Diversity report that it’s making active efforts to increase the percentage of women and minority groups in its workforce. The Twitter engineering apprenticeship guarantees all apprentices who complete the 12-month training full-time positions in one of Twitter's engineering units upon graduation. Several apprentices have received full-time employment offers ever since.
Twitter pays its apprentices an industry-standard rate to build rounded skills in software engineering. While the company has not revealed a formal salary range, the reviews on Glassdoor show that software engineering apprentices at Twitter are well-compensated. On average, a software engineering apprentice at Twitter earns $181,417 annually. This figure covers $117,980 base pay and $63,437 additional pay.
Twitter apprentices have access to full employment benefits during their 12-month training period. You'll receive a technical mentor and a career coach throughout your training. According to the reviews on Glassdoor, Twitter apprentices can look forward to benefits such as free lunches & snacks, dental, vision & health insurance, maternity and paternity leave, 401k plan, stock options, wellness package, work-from-home, vacations & paid time off, and sick days leave.
Twitter Apprenticeship Selection: How Are Cohorts Chosen?
Twitter engineering apprentices have a few things in common:
Twitter Apprenticeship Program Interview: Is the Twitter Interview Hard?
Twitter's apprenticeship hiring process is straightforward. The Twitter apprenticeship application process starts with an online application which usually opens and ends in the Spring or Summer. Once your application has been reviewed by a member of the apprenticeship hiring team and is deemed satisfactory, you may be invited to participate in a take-home HackerRank coding challenge and essay. Expect questions about algorithms and data models. You should visit the HackerRank website to practice coding exercises.
Twitter contacts those who pass the technical assessment stage via email for a 1:1 phone call with a Twitter apprenticeship manager or department leader before they can continue to the final rounds of the interview. Twitter apprentices usually take part in two interviews within one month: one to test their technical competence and the other to assess their cultural fitness. The apprenticeship usually begins between October and January, so you should expect your offer letter and Twitter merch a month or two before onboarding begins.
Twitter hires a minimum of 16 apprentices each year. In 2019, Twitter’s engineering apprenticeship first cohort was launched with 16 individuals from diverse educational and work backgrounds. The company plans to increase the number of apprentices per cohort in the coming years. While no formal data supports this claim, Twitter has kept to its promise of hiring apprentices each year. Twitter will recruit its fifth cohort this year, 2023.
Twitter Apprenticeship Cohort Frequency: How Often is a Cohort Hired?
The apprenticeship cohorts are hired every year to Twitter’s engineering rotation program. They’ll spend months learning alongside engineering professionals in various technical teams, including IOS, Android, Web, data science, and backend. For 2023, the apprenticeship program will hold in the Summer, so you should expect calls for applications between April and July 2023.
Yes, Twitter is an excellent company to work for if you’re looking for a technologically forward company that uses Software-as-a-Service to amplify human voices and issues. According to employee reviews from Glassdoor, Twitter has a 3.4 out of five-star rating for having supportive workers, good culture, significant benefits, good management, good work-environment pre-acquisition, growth opportunities, and work-life balance. Forty-three percent of reviewers agree to recommend Twitter to a friend, and 16% approve of the CEO.
No, 25 isn't too old to apply and land an apprenticeship at Twitter. There are no age limitations for Twitter engineering apprenticeship applicants. There are also no demands on career gaps or former job roles for candidates applying to the program. Twitter has hired several apprentices above 25 years of age into its engineering rotation program and plans to continue doing so.
You should expect to work hard during your apprenticeship. Software engineering apprentices collaborate on projects such as writing documentation, reviewing codes, troubleshooting bugs and errors, and actively participating in company events. Apprentices may undergo periodic appraisals to monitor their progress. You'll also need to commute to work as the apprenticeship isn't virtual. However, employees and apprentices could look forward to transporting and lunch benefits before the acquisition.
No, being an apprentice at Twitter isn't stressful. However, it can be challenging because you'll deal with real-world customer problems, unlike in a coding bootcamp. However, you'll receive all the support you need to succeed. Twitter apprentices have access to the full benefits full-time employees enjoy. They also have a mentor and career coach to guide them through all the difficult changes.
You should also look to Twitter's Engineering Blog and Twitter’s Developer Blog to explore topics on Twitter's tech stack, projects, employee development, and helpful product updates and tips.
To discover news about Twitter’s expansion plans, public liaisons, corporate policies, charity efforts, or its diversity and inclusion hiring goals and accomplishments, you should check out the Twitter Company News page.
You can get news about Twitter apprenticeship programs from the Twitter Careers website.
If you don’t want to track and monitor the Twitter apprenticeship program for yourself or are looking for support in an apprenticeship application, you can join apprenticeship.io to learn more and get support to land an apprenticeship program.
Learn more and sign up today.
