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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.
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.
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.
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.
You're not form the US are you? Having been laid off, and having received my severance package, and having been entitled to unemployment, and having been entitled to a fair few other things, I assure you, you don't know what you're talking about.
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.
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.