Twilio's first support hire joins engineering

My first task was to add a dismiss button on a Javascript popup. I thought the task would be easy, but each page actually has dozens of files of code fitting together to make a page work– style sheets, controllers, distributed all around the code base. (…) Instead of being off-put by how long it took, or being overly sympathetic, he just said, “Yup. That’s what development is. It’s very frustrating until it works.”

I'm currently in a similar situation, working on a project with a guy who uses libraries and frameworks I know very little about and it honestly frustrates me. I've had other things to do on the project so far, so I've postponed digging into it.

But it makes me wonder if that's how things should be. Often you're fine once you're beyond the breaking waves of setting up your environment and getting a grasp on the codebase, but before that, it can be very frustrating… especially, when you want to implement something, that you theoretically know exactly what you want and what you need, and you get slowed down by some problem with library incompatibilities or what not.

It says great things about twilio that they are willing to train and grow their employees. Other companies should take note.