Austin 
Rod HiltonI want to expand more on the comedy of errors that led to the eviction of #Twitter from their Boulder, Colorado office.
The story that leads up to this building even existing is bizarre and hilarious, so here goes...
A thread 🧵
Twitter operated out of a Boulder office on Walnut St. for years, mostly housing the employees of Gnip, a company that sold Twitter data to enterprise customers which Twitter had acquired.
The Walnut office consisted of the top two floors, 3 and 4.
Over time the office morphed from being "Gnip" to being a genuine Twitter office, with folks from all kinds of teams working out of the office including Timelines, DMs, Health, and Tweets. Most of the teams were geo-distributed.
It grew fast.
By early 2019 people started cramming extra folks into the desks ("desk buddies"). People who were often in meetings (product mostly) were asked to hotdesk.
To alleviate this, Twitter leased the basement of the building, as floors 1 and 2 were leased to other companies. Construction on the basement location was pretty secretive, with the REW (Real Estate and Workplace) team wanting to unveil the new space in a grand opening when complete.
August 2019 the space opened and... everyone hated it.
Since it was in a basement, there were no windows. The entire area felt like some kind of Twitter-themed tomb with big glass walls or strange hanging "soundproof" panels separating work areas.
Nobody liked being down there because it was separated from the main common areas and all of the other employees. It felt isolated & lonely - coming into the office typically meant you wouldn't see anyone else from other floors except when you took the extremely slow elevator upstairs for lunch.
There was a great deal of drama as teams fought NOT to be reassigned to the "Twitter Dungeon" as it came to be called (REW hated this name and thwarted attempts to have laptop stickers printed).
It became the place to take meetings when the conference rooms on 3 & 4 were booked, or the floor with a guaranteed empty bathroom if the stalls were full.
People would come down to use the facilities, then ascend back to the surface world while we digital Drow asked if they had news from the up above.
The discontent with the basement location was strong and the office was still growing, so another attempt was made.
Twitter tried to lease the east side of the building but the landlord asked for too much money, so Twitter subleased the top floor of the building behind it.
Subleasing meant it wasn't decorated with Twitter design or outfitted like the main office. There were still logos of the company that leased it out.
It always felt like the fake office, which is how people referred to it.
This location didn't connect to the Walnut office, so walking between offices meant taking the one working elevator down to the ground floor, walking outside, going about one block around the corner, entering the Walnut office, and finally taking the elevator up 3 floors.
This office opened in December of 2019 in Colorado so it was cold or snowing often, which meant bundling up to go take a meeting or even get a printout, as the printer never worked and IT never visited.
Though there were windows, the work areas had no carpeting, so your rolling chairs would be constantly trying to smoothly inch you away from your desk towards the middle of the room, you had to clutch your desktop to stop from rolling away.
When we asked for carpeting to be installed, REW threw some random rugs on the floor that weren't cut to fit the room, so they would sort of just lay in the middle of the room or curl upright against corners and walls.
Everyone hated this office too, and the people who were assigned to it started asking if they could move back to the Twitter Dungeon because it wasn't looking so bad anymore.
Twitter Boulder had segmented into 3 classes. The upper class on floors 3 and 4 in the actual office (where all the execs, sales, and some engineers were located). The middle class in the dungeon. The lower class dumped into the unloved fake office where your company badge didn't even work - you had to carry a second one.
Twitter had been moving toward a "remote first" philosophy, and most teams were already geo-distributed. If you came into the office there was a good chance you'd spend most of the day in a conference room, if you could find one.
So increasingly people who were assigned to these locations were just happily working from home and "never going back."
The more your team worked remote, the more likely it was to be assigned one of these locations, which encouraged you to work from home even more.
In response to the antipathy towards these two expansions, REW announced in early 2020 that they would soon begin construction on a brand new amazing office space that would be permanent and pull people back into the office.
The Walnut location would close down entirely, as would the nearby fake office. This new building was being built specifically for Twitter Boulder, and would easily house all current employees as well as all the ones that were going to be hired in the next few years.
This seemed strange at the time, since so many people had started working from home that it was honestly feeling like everyone who wanted to be in the office could probably just fit back into the Walnut office top floors. There was no demand.
The new office would be much further away from the city transit hub which irritated people since the Boulder culture was such a proponent of eco-friendly transit.
But the 3D mockups did look nice, and it was clear this was not another temporary office.
Then 1 month later in March, COVID sent all employees globally to their homes to work. Every employee in all locations worked remotely except for a few isolated folks who were keeping servers running near the two data centers and headquarters.
The following May, Jack Dorsey announced that the entire company was Work From Home Forever - permanently. Even "when the pandemic is over"
There were some adjustment pains at first but after a few months folks became pretty comfortable working from home.
Most of the challenges were actually due to the pandemic itself like school closures, and the vast majority of the company was on-board with remote indefinitely.
Sometime around late 2021, after Twitter Boulder had been comfortably working from home for over a year, we got a presentation from REW about how much progress was being made on the new office location.
People were shocked.
Nobody wanted to rain on REW's parade but this building seemed like a huge waste of money during economic uncertainty.
The company had transitioned to remote-first, most employees wanted to continue working remotely indefinitely, and even before the pandemic it seemed unnecessary.
The silence was deafening. Everyone was backchannel messaging each other.
"Wait, they're still building this?"
"I thought this was cancelled"
"Who's gonna tell 'em?"
"What a clusterfuck"
In April 2022, Elon Musk started the process of trying to acquire Twitter.
The company was in a constant state of turmoil, with Musk trying to back out, a poison pill, the lawsuit, etc.
All the while Elon was talking about how many people needed to be fired and how much he hated remote work. A number of Twitter Boulder employees left.
Backfill hires had not been restricted to Boulder because of the WFH order. By this point even the Gnip-descendant teams were geo-distributed.
On June 13 2022, in the middle of all this uncertainty about the company's future, the new office opened.
People still could not believe this happened. Even the people opening it were almost doing so ironically, sheepish grins glued on their faces.
It seemed like such a bizarre corporate mistake - that the decision had been made to build it and the penalties for backing out were severe enough that they just kept on plowing ahead for 2 years, even though the space was going to be empty.
It honestly seemed like something that had just fallen through the cracks. Like the team designing and building it simply never got a memo to stop, and kept at it. Something that someone, somewhere should have seen as a line item and cut losses on it to save money in the middle of this acquisition.
It was almost unreal that nothing had stopped it from being completed. And it wasn't just a fake thrown together pseudo-office, this place was *gorgeous*.
Custom Twitter iconography everywhere.
People were asked to come into the office, largely so photos could be taken without it looking abandoned. It didn't work, even the grand opening of the space only brought about 15 people in, 2 of whom were required to be there to staff the front desk.
3 days later, Elon Musk was invited to a company-wide all-hands AMA where he was repeatedly asked about remote work and layoffs, to which he was noncommittal about his plans, though he did talk a bit about alien civilizations.
So there sat this new building. A huge, cavernous waste of money. A monument to a corporate inability to adapt to new information. A shrine to inflexibility. A mausoleum of sunken cost.
Countless art installations from who knows how many local artists, all for an audience of nobody, locked behind badge access.
Engineering areas filled with hundreds and hundreds of dual monitor setups connected to exactly zero computers. A sparkling new, modern constructed abandoned ghost building.
Musk completed the purchase of Twitter 4 months later, and almost immediately fired the entire Boulder team.
The TwitterBoulder Twitter account never even posted about the opening of its new office, the account seemingly abandoned since 2021 save for one Tweet the day Musk began buying shares, advising employees to take care of themselves.
The Site Lead was the only person who even mentioned the opening publicly, in a Tweet replied to almost exclusively by ex-employees wanting to "visit"
Doctor Memory@rodhilton The lone and level sands stretch far away…
Rocco Dimase@rodhilton Hotdesking is an invitation to work from home.
Abandoned America@rodhilton this is a fantastic, informative thread. Thank you. The story is both tragic and absurd
Nancy Williams Painter@rodhilton how hard to retrofit for housing?
Joachim Bondo@rodhilton @TPOHolmes Nice thread, thank you! See if you can get your hands on the two Wegner Teddy Bear chairs in the middle of the photo – if you can get them cheap. They’re about $20K US each depending on manufacturer.
Litzz11@rodhilton Elon stopped paying his rent and some salaries, so I find it hard to believe that this project kept moving forward because anyone was concerned about "penalties" for suspending the project.
@Litzz11 project completed before Elon finished buying the company.
@rodhilton Ah so they saddled Elon with a big chunk of the bill? Sweeet.
Joe Hill 🇵🇸🇺🇦
NorCal Lynne@rodhilton so much waste
David W. Jones@rodhilton Looks very pretty, and like something they can sell to recoup some of the money?
Saager Mhatre
@pettter@social.accum.se@rodhilton ...the floors weren't flat?
@pettter no, and the chair wheels were exceptionally slick. Any movement in your chair without your feet basically digging into the ground to keep you still sent you flying. And the rooms were tiny, you can see three of us were crammed in that tiny space in the previous toot, our chairs nearly touching.
aardvark@rodhilton Severance (but somehow you remember anyway)
Deuslaptop stickers
Always found them awkward. I mean, “…Is it one of those Express Yourself attempt at phone covers?” Always found them distracting.
Christian Lauf@rodhilton I like the term "digital drow". 😂 A very good metaphor.
> REW hated this name and thwarted attempts to have laptop stickers printed
That sold the story for me... the subtle, passive-aggressive protest of requesting "Twitter Dungeon" stickers and the operational thwarting of the attempt at rebellion! 😆
Phil Rees@rodhilton You don't recruit people to work in spaces like that. You just wait long enough and they noclip themselves in.
~n@rodhilton The soundproofing looks awful. First thing to improve the accoustics would have been a suspended ceiling with basotect. If they didn’t get this right, I don’t want to know what else they skimped on.
suksisauvasekoitin@rodhilton That looks like a kindergarten-themed prison
@suksisauvasekoitin yeah the dungeon was rough. Some teams actually preferred the fake office because at least it has windows, but the workrooms were ultra tiny - you can see in my photo how close the chairs are with 3 people.
Both were terrible, the dungeon at least felt like a real Twitter office.
LisPi@rodhilton That actually sounds like a major improvement over the other workspaces.
doublejay@rodhilton whats REW
a8e@doublejay Real Estate and Workplace team
joel b@rodhilton I’ve been waiting patiently for weeks to read this.
gz@rodhilton
Great story, thanks for sharing.
Batshit corporate mindset. It's everywhere though, not just the foul site.
Great story, thanks for sharing.
Batshit corporate mindset. It's everywhere though, not just the foul site.
Greg SpradlinSoon,
Reddit = Elon’s Twitter
Sören@rodhilton dang. this story rivals the pointless excesses of the Ion Storm Dallas headquarters
Kat Marchán 🐈@rodhilton woooooow what a mess
Rob Zazueta@rodhilton This is an enraging read. Wow. Thanks!
Jonathan Kamens 86 47Courtesy of @rodhilton, this is an absolutely insane thread about Twitter's fancy new flagship Boulder office that was built even though it wasn't needed, then sat empty for a year before Twitter was evicted from it for not paying their rent. Incredibly, that's the least crazy part of the story.
https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/110561579833908574
https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/110561579833908574
McSkinney@rodhilton
Evict Twitter Now!
Evict Twitter Now!
Max
sara mitchel@rodhilton
Gee imagine if all us poor people stopped paying rent.
Gee imagine if all us poor people stopped paying rent.
@rodhilton Thanks a bunch for sharing your insights and such a long and elaborate toot!
stewart@rodhilton What a story and saga 😂 ... thanks for sharing
@rodhilton that is one heck of a story. Thank you for sharing it with us.
roland (he/him)@rodhilton the new office was beautiful and great to work at. Sad to see it gone - especially under these disappointing circumstances 😔
John Wyatt 🐧@rodhilton thank you for posting this!