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Twitter Plans To Cut About 300 Jobs As Soon As This Week: Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Twitter Inc. is planning widespread job cuts, to be announced as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the matter. The company may cut about 8 percent of the workforce, or about 300 people, the same percentage it did last year when co-founder Jack Dorsey took over as chief executive officer, the people said. Planning for the cuts is still fluid and the number could change, they added. An announcement about the job reductions may come before Twitter releases third-quarter earnings on Thursday, one of the people said. Twitter, which loses money, is trying to control spending as sales growth slows. The company recently hired bankers to explore a sale, but the companies that had expressed interest in bidding -- Salesforce.com Inc., The Walt Disney Co. and Alphabet Inc. -- later backed out from the process. Twitter's losses and 40 percent fall in its share price the past 12 months have made it more difficult for the company to pay its engineers with stock. That has made it harder for Twitter to compete for talent with giant rivals like Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Facebook Inc. Reducing employee numbers would relieve some of this pressure.
If 300 people is 8% of the workforce, that means there are something like 3700 people working at Twitter. That seems pretty ridiculous. What in the world do those 3700 people do?
ok and you need to go one the H1B black list
should be firing all their employees and going bankrupt.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
that Facebook's greatest achievement wasn't how it many users it gained, but how it turned them into profit.
I never really understood twitter, how can you make money off a 160 character message? there are billions of tweets, people arent glued to each tweet and miss a lot thats out there and usually just focus on the big trends .. unless they link products from tweets and get comissions on sales ... people arent really going to advertise. .. nice idea .. but where to go from here?
.. but twitter is just more like an announcement.... move on.
again
Facebook i understand, it allows people to share in your life, Instagram makes people jeleous of your life, or you want to share part of someones experience
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
That's idiotic. Google made money early and often. 5 years in, it was profitable.
Twitter has lost money every quarter of the 10 years it has existed and has no hope of ever reaching even break even status. Literally no revenue.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Nahh that's probably the big perk at Twitter these days. You get to censor people you don't like.
Twitter used to be free speech, but now it seems to be banning people right and left with the excuse "hate speech". In many cases the speech contains no insults whatsoever, and in many cases the speech is using clear terms in a non-insulting way to put forth a political view.
Google has several clear examples. For example, Scott Adams was banned from twitter for no apparent reason, and apparently gets banned from periscope [streaming app owned by twitter] whenever he starts talking about Trump.
Twitter is trying to engineer a "safe place" where no one can be insulted, and only approved speech is allowed.
It's bad enough that wikileaks threatened to start its own Twitter in response to the ban of Milo Yiannopoulos.
I think people are starting to realize that twitter's war on free speech makes it less interesting. When a celebrity with 9 million followers gets banned, that's 9 million customers who get put off and go somewhere else.
And I think that wikileaks will eventually be the answer. There's been no public announcement, but it's entirely possible that wikileaks *is* working on a twitter replacement, and of course it would be completely free speech.
By catering to the censors and thought police, twitter is digging its own grave and will get replaced by someone who's not afraid to stand up for free speech.
In a year or two, twitter will be on the cupboard of history, alongside companies (such as Google+) that restricted and pissed off its customers.
for Twitter. You can't fire your way to profitability.
#youregone
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
If 300 people is about 8% of the work force, that means that Twitter employs about 3,750 people.
3,750 people for a 140-character-at-a-time posting system.
What the heck do all of those people actually DO all day? Support? Moderation? Legal and Regulatory compliance?
There's a programmer shortage! We need more women programmers! We can't figure out why women don't go into these careers! It's all the fault of programmers assigned the male gender at birth! FEEL GUILTY!!!!eleven!1!
It couldn't possibly have anything to do with gaslighting asshole managers.
It's being replaced by Gab
How many from Trust & Safety/Abuse? Their Abuse/Trust & Safety department has helped cause Twitter's losses through arbitrary enforcement (or even defense of harassers such as Leslie Jones).
Cut those departments, remove the blocking tools, and make Twitter a better company.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I do wonder if the people being let go are going to all be "non-diversity" individuals, meaning all white guys. If not at the time of hiring, they certainly have a case for discrimination when being fired.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Then they can extend their paywall across it and we won't have to see so many links.
After all, they were silly enough to by Wirecutter.
Its unlikely they are a sinking ship.
They have 258 positions currently open in sales, concurrent with laying off 300 people.
Intuitively, that means that the people being ejected are mostly underperforming sales account managers.
Other jobs are in machine learning, data analytics, and data scientists, which likely means that they are also having content control problems with troll and sock-puppet accounts, and they have little understanding of network effects, despite being a "social network".
Or... it means they have a tender offer, and want to reduce the PPE numbers to inflate (temporarily) the asking price for the company, in the same way that Word Perfect laid off all their people working on future product releases, prior to selling themselves to Novell.
I was hoping it would be 100%.
Since Twitter has become the mindless echo chamber of the regressive left it has no place in modern society and is in fact doing considerable damage. It needs to die as soon as possible.
In my business, a small media in Brussels with around 100k monthly uniques, we allocated a 2017 budget for advertising and outreach; it's not a lot (1FTE and €50k), but it's by attracting many businesses like us that a tech company can be profitable. We've pretty much ruled out "traditional" web advertising because the returns are pretty small and our FTE has been experimenting with cross-posting our content on the social media platforms and paying small amounts for premium exposure.
With 30€, we find that we can increase our reach on Facebook by about 10x (from a baseline of 1000 followers), which increases visitors to our website by about 2k. LinkedIn is a close second. With twitter, we found that the same 30€ increases reach by 3x and brings in around 400 visitors.
We thought the discrepancy was so huge that we must be doing something wrong. Our social media guy tried to contact their local sales team in Brussels to get advice. They never answered. He called, they told him that they weren't going to talk to him unless he spent at least 5.000€.
By contrast, Facebook and Google have both sent representatives to give us classes on using their media tools... before we even hinted that we were thinking of spending money with them. We're going to allocate tens of thousands of Euros to each of them. It's not a lot, but it certainly was worth their time. And that's why their profitable and Twitter isn't.
So yeah, this doesn't surprise me one bit.
I'm in a business that needs to have analytics on my social media users. We'll pay for these analytics. In fact, we do pay FaceBook and Google Analytics for intelligence.
Twitter won't take our money because we're too small.
...of value was lost.
Retweet stuff to bring more people to twitter?
Twitter should have been sold to Trump, Inc. The man has made Twitter pretty hot - every MSM channel checks it out for his tweets, more than anyone elses. So they should just sell it to him, and let one of his family members manage it. Or make Corey Lewandowski or Steve Bannon the CEO of the operation.
Since when has Trump been anti-gay that Milo owes it to anyone to oppose him? I could understand if you said that about Cruz or Huckabee, but it was never true about him even when he was a Dem (he praised Michael Huffington for leaving Arianna for a man), and it hasn't been true about him as a Republican. Trump has been attacked - sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly - for being racist or misogynist, but one thing one can't say about him - that he's homophobic. If anything, it's he who has transformed the GOP from what was perceived as a homophobic party to a party that now opens its doors to the LGBT community.
Are the notices going to be 140 characters?
IMHO, twitter has been propped up by the dying industry of live tv. Broadcasting companies took to Twitter as a way to engage with their audience, in realtime, as shows are aired. This helped to keep their dying business model a float with advertisers, as they could now show specific user counts (based on engagement). As a programmer, we've gotten a lot of goodies published which help to answer "twitter scale" issues. But honestly, I'll be glad when it's gone. While "web scale" is certainly a thing, there's been several years of praying towards Twitter without regard to the fact it hasn't made a profit in 10 years.
I made this: http://www.bpftpserver.com
*nm*
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
die fast twitter
Its difficult to make a profit from Twitter which will keep bean counters contend.
Twitter should have positioned themselves as Craigslist. Then they would have been a valuable service and might have lasted. For that to happen the people behind Twitter should be less greedy.
Tat Tvam Asi