I want to expand more on the comedy of errors that led to the eviction of Twitter from their Boulder office.
The story that leads up to this building even existing is hilarious, so here goes...
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 that Twitter had bought.
The Walnut office consisted of the top two floors for employees, 3 and 4.
Slowly 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, Trust&Safety, and Tweets. Most of the teams were geo-distributed.
Mid 2019 people started cramming extra folks into the desks, doubling up space and having people share desks with a buddy.
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 team wanting to largely unveil the new space in a grand opening when it was done.
Late 2019 the space was done 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 weird 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 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.
Eventually the Twitter Dungeon (REW hated when you called it this, and an attempt to get laptop stickers printed was thoroughly thwarted though some did get made) became the place to take meetings when the conference rooms on 3 and 4 were booked, or the floor with a guaranteed empty bathroom if the stalls were full and you had to take an emergency shit.
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 leased the top floor of the building behind 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 and 3 and 4 in the actual office (where all the executives were located). The middle class in the dungeon. The lower class dumped into the unloved fake office where all the branded wall decor was just printouts of the Twitter logo taped to the walls.
More and more people who were assigned to these work locations were just working from home. Twitter had been moving toward a "remote first" philosophy anyway, and most of these teams were already geolocated. 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. I actually got in trouble with my manager, who was located in San Francisco, for not "badging in" enough.
Early 2020, REW announced that they would soon begin construction on a brand new office space. The Walnut location would close down entirely, as would the nearby fake office. This 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.
It would be much further away from the transit hub for the bus system, which meant it would be far more inconvenient to get to, and people were upset that they were building a parking lot, as it would discourage eco-friendly transportation.
But the 3D renderings did look pretty neat.
Then, 2 months later, COVID had spread through the United States enough that Twitter issued a stay-at-home directive.
The entire company stayed home except for a few isolated folks who were keeping servers running.
Within a couple months, Jack Dorsey announced that the entire company was Work From Home Forever - permanently.
There were some adjustment pains at first but after a few months folks became pretty comfortable working from home. Most of the issues with remote work were actually issues of dealing with the pandemic itself, and the vast majority of the company was on-board with remote indefinitely.
Sometime around 2021, after Twitter Boulder had been comfortably working from home for about a year and a half, we got an update from REW about how much progress was being made on the new office location.
People were stunned.
Nobody wanted to rain on REW's parade but this building seemed like the biggest waste of Twitter's money imaginable. The company had transitioned to remote-first, most employees wanted to continue working remotely indefinitely, and even before the pandemic hit it was looking unnecessary.
The silence was deafening. Everyone was backchannel messaging each other: "Wait, they're still building this?" "I thought this was cancelled" "What a clusterfuck"
In April of 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 of the deal, the board trying to stop him with a poison pill, the board then forcing him to buy the company.
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 due to the uncertainty, cutting down the already-shrunk number of people there.
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. It seemed like such a bizarre corporate failing - 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 said "no, axe that" 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 was extremely beautiful as far as office spaces go.
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 an all-hands AMA where he was repeatedly asked about remote work and layoffs, to which he was noncommittal about his plans.
So there sat this new building. Just this huge, cavernous waste of money, a monument to a corporate unwillingness to change course in the light of new information. Countless intentionally designed art installations from who knows how many local artists, all for an audience of nobody. The engineering areas filled with hundreds and hundreds of dual monitor setups connected to exactly zero computers. A brand spanking new, modern constructed abandoned ghost building.
Musk completed the purchase of Twitter 4 months later, and almost immediately fired the entire Twitter Boulder team. The @TwitterBoulder Twitter account never even posted about the grand opening of its new office, the account seemingly abandoned since 2021 save for a single Tweet the day Musk began purchasing shares of the company, advising employees to take care of themselves.
I'll bet the vast majority of ex-employees reading the headline "Twitter evicted from Boulder office" are picturing Walnut St, completely forgetting that the headlines are referring to the new office, one they never stepped foot in or likely even saw.
It is stunning to think of all the people who were paid money to design & build this office, all to have the company kicked out of the space without anyone ever even using it.
There have been so few people to ever step foot in that building that I would imagine everything is still in absolutely pristine condition, but branded with Twitter design that now has to be ripped out by a landlord who constructed the building just for Twitter, and never collected a dime.
