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.

Comments

Really?

[HBI]

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.

Re:8%

[thinkwaitfast]

Empire Building

A managers salary is based on how many people they have under them, so if they are greedy, they'll hire as many people as they can. It doesn't matter if they do anything or not.

Re:8%

[gl4ss]

sales people.
"important bloggers".
"influential people".

you have to look at twitters history from inception to today.

first off it was hacked together on pretty shitty codebase, which made scaling the service EXTREMELY expensive. they've since moved to different codebase that for some reason seems to be just as expensive to run. even back in the day when similar sized irc networks(to what size twitter was back then) were ran for _pennies_ twitters network was 100x more expensive to run. it's kind of amazing how they managed to do that and not have anyone tell them that their ideas were stupid and that they could have saved a lot of money.

basically, twitter _technical_design_ from day 1 was such that it could not scale to be profitable - which is kind of amazing since there were off the shelf products even back then that would have done it way, wayyy cheaper and with way, way more features.

actually part of twitters early rise was tied solely to american telcos way of screwing over it's customers. namely that you buy text messages as a package _and_ that incoming messages are part of said package, which let twitter send you info kind of free (for them anyways).

I think another thing that happened was that they hired 2000 sales people without thinking what they were going to ask those 2000 sales people actually sell (and if they had something to sell why the fuck they would need sales people to sell it anyways).

another big fuckup from twitter was that they missed their sales window - being unable to scale to profitability would not have been such a problem if they had sold out to ms or someone else 5 years ago, though even then it might have been hard to get a sum out to pay the previous investors - what happened between 5 years and today? well everybody knows already that twitter is just.. twitter. it's not the next facebook - it's the next myspace - and even dimmer buyers know that twitters tech is worth shit ALL NOTHING. for example, if their tech would scale at pennies then all the limits about message lengths and content, client apps and all that would be understandable - but it has all the downsides of a highly optimized system without any cost benefits of such a system.

and well.. another reason to the high headcounts is simply this: the more people work under you the more money you will get paid (out of the investors money). it was just a way to pump out the cash from the sinking ship. ...or to put more simply: it began as a fucking one liner message wall script for bloggers by bloggers who never bothered to learn anything else because blogs. it was just links to blogs with couple of comment lines. made with _blog_ technology. by people who for some reason ignored _all_ cheap off the shelf scalable methods to achieve the same fucking thing when they made it. and it got popular enough that said bloghipsters could manage to get enough funding to run it for a decade burning money all the way(and pocketing a lot of it in the process).