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Twitter To Begin Layoffs (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Just a few days ago, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey returned to the company and took over the role of CEO. Now, the NY Times reports that the company will be facing layoffs as he cuts the company's costs. Twitter somehow manages to employ over 4,100 people across 35+ offices, so many investors are thrilled with the news. "Twitter's spending has been rising. In the last quarter for which Twitter reported financial results, costs and expenses totaled $633 million, up 37 percent from a year earlier. The layoffs will most likely affect multiple areas of the company, including the engineering and media teams, according to the people with knowledge of the plans." The company is also dropping plans to build a 100,000 square-foot expansion to its headquarters.
What do they do? I would have thought this is one business that could almost be run in the cloud with no human involvement (apart from the tweeters)...
Probably because they had no real business model beyond attract users for a long time which meant they needed to take on venture capital to pay for everything. The VCs know that the best way to get their payout is to take the company public and cash in on the IPO.
Yes, employing people should not be a sin. To Wall Street investors, however, it is a huge unforgivable one. Unless of course we're taking about H1-Bs from India. Then it's ok.
Bottom line: don't work for a publicly traded company if you can at all arrange not to. Your income is a lot safer that way.
That said, I'm surprised that a useless social networking company that caters to narcissists employs anyone at all, but that's kind of a special case. Then again, considering everyone under 40 has a portfolio consisting entirely of Facebook, Twitter, GoPro, and maybe Apple such a collapse repeated a few times could cause the ruination of a whole generation...
If you are part of a public corporation you can get stock options, stock grants an also invest in the employee share buying program where you get shares at a discount. In a private corporation you get nothing - just your salary. I much prefer to be part of a public company. That is how I made all my money.
Opened at 40, peaked at 70 struggling in 30s now. The last batch of stock options and restricted shares must be coming due to be sold. So some window dressing, get a price bump for a quarter? Seems like it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
UI people decided that "UI" wasn't pretentious enough, and so created "User Experience". The don't just fuck up the UI these days, they fuck up every part of the user experience.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The handful of twitter employees that I met were Type A arrogant twats. These were the sort who within 10 minutes of meeting them would tell you all the different ways they were better than you. First it would be the uber degree from the uber university. Then of course it was that they worked for twitter. Then it was their near perfect SAT that got them into that degree. Then it was where they described that they were doing stats except that they wouldn't even use such a pedestrian word such as ML but had to state it like the title of a serious research paper. Then they might tell you their name but not before telling you all the famous people they had recently met.
The feeling I got from them was that there was a coked up arrogance to them. That sort of god's gift to mankind attitude.
What would burn their balls though was when I would say, "Seeing that twitter will eventually peak in usage what comes next to justify that massive valuation? Surely tiny blogging doesn't justify that much value with so little revenue and pretty much no profit."
Usually they would tell me that it was secret. I would then ask if they were working on the secret. This is where their balls got scorched as if they were so important then why were they just working on a bit of data mining?
I met exactly one twitter guy who was only somewhat arrogant and he quit. Still a twat though.
So if I had to guess what their failing was; I would say that it was that they had a tiger by the tail. So they hired people with awesome resumes who went around telling people (and each other) how awesome they all were and thus it became a circle jerk as to how they were going to succeed. But the people they hired were more expert at pleasing teachers and going through checklists in life rather than actually producing anything of value. Had someone of genius assigned them a task they all probably could have done it very well. But on their own they could only massage what already existed.
Basically these were the kids with an A+ in chemistry and memorized the period table at the beginning of the year but had never just blown shit up in their back yard.
It's the 'cloud' paradigm, very typical of this stuff. The 'new economy' is stuff that can just GO AWAY, silently in the night. Something happens or somebody buys something or the company's just all execs and PR people, and it becomes like a Google technology millions of people lean heavily on: suddenly, just gone, nobody to talk to about that.
'Disruptive', no?
Twitter could just go away, and a bunch of Slashdotters would snark that nothing of value was lost. Not quite true. The real take-away point is that in the new economy, nothing of value is being made. It's shared fantasy sucking up all the capital that otherwise would have to go find real work.