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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.
So, cut everyone except the management positions. What's left? NOTHING. And I hope he becomes CEO of Facebook in a few years, too.
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)...
It seems to me that...
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Twitter's spending has been rising and it's a good thing they're laying people off to cut costs because god forbid they allow people to make a living, own a house and have a family. I'd rather see profits go up by half a percent than help hundreds of people live a comfortable, happy life with a steady income!
Employing people shouldn't be a sin. It's enough of an insult we have to work like dogs our entire lives just to be able to eat and survive then you get shareholders who want more and more profit and are willing to screw us over to get it.
How many of these people being laid off will lose their home or significant other? How many will end up in a god awful job they'd sometimes rather be dead than go to? How many lives have to be ruined in the constant pursuit of profit?
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.
To make the original investors and owners rich.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
You forgot all the UX people whose job it is to randomly change Twitter's UI around for no real reason. Don't forget, Twitter is a modern web-based application, it needs UX because if there's one thing a platform based around sending 140-character messages shouldn't be, it's simple.
(No, really, they seem to love randomly changing their website and client apps. I guess so those 4100 employees can justify their existence. Alternatively they feel they need to mimic Facebook.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
This may be the tipping point the for Tech Bubble Version 2.0
That actually fits into my observations of industry - do something right and you get optimized out of your job.
In the latest quarterly report they reported about $500 million in revenues and about $630 million in cost (including administrative and R&D) for a total loss of $130 million.
Pretty incredible raking in half a billion on online advertisement and still make a loss.
In american companies its routinely accepted that they maintain 15% growth each quarter to be seen as profitable in the eyes of investors. traditional managers will try to maximize this by the product offered, but rarely does a product outside of things like fast-casual food or illegal narcotics offer anything close to this revenue trend. So, what do we do? infrastructure has to be repaired and replaced, and talented engineers in the most expensive city in america aren't cheap. eventually you reach a revenue plateau and have to resort to book-cookery to make the company meet the unspoken 15%. You cant cut project managers, mid management, or upper management because theyre implicit in maintaining the revenue illusion. So, you cut engineering, support, NOC, network and any other skilled craft because they get paid in non-trivial sums.
once this trend starts its hard to buck. uptime suffers, features are placed ahead of security and bugs, and what once was a well oiled machine now becomes, er, a slashdot of sorts. layoffs continue until morale improves, or more likely you find a buyer. After that your once proud brand just becomes another cog in the internet of things.
and for those wondering why you have layoffs in america instead of terminations? its because fired employees are entitled to unemployment compensation and laid off employees arent. Sure, they may never be rehired at that job, but the simple fact is companies do it to skirt a myriad of prtotections americans fought for in the early and mid 20th century.
Good people go to bed earlier.
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.
Twitter provides such a useful service, sucking up celebrities, politicians, journalists, SJWs, and all sorts of other unsavory characters.
If Twitter ever closes its doors, these uncivilized hordes will wreak havoc on the rest of the world.
And this is different than with other internet startups how, exactly?
It's not. This is Internet Bubble 2.0.
I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of those were the paid moderators charged with investigating flagged tweets and suspected code of conduct violations. A lot of that can't be automated, so it must be one of their more labor-intensive tasks.
Actually, it *could* be automated. What we are probably seeing is them about to do a roll-out of exactly that, and the current moderator staff scaled back to the point that they only have to deal with explicit moderation and tweaking of the automoderation software, for things which fall through the filters in the wrong direction, either pro or con.
My suspicion is that there was an internal "secret project team" utilizing "big data" techniques until they ended up with a trained-up model that (mostly) ended up with the same answers as the human moderation teams, and they are doing this concurrent with a roll-out, and will decide how many people to let go, subsequent to growing pains.
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.