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

8%

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:8%

[alvinrod]

They have people skills.

Re:8%

[rudy_wayne]

What in the world do those 3700 people do?

Certainly not anything that generates any profit.

Re:8%

[Anonymous Coward]

No shit. If I had a goal, "I want to build Twitter, every feature, and I want it in 30 days" I can't conceive of needing more than 50 employees. That isn't just developers and UI people and sysadmins, it includes the janitors, HR people, a few accountants, the marketdroids, and enough suits to manage them all. Double the team to have it running at Twitter scale with an NOC manned 24x7. Double the team again for something I'm overlooking entirely, and then tell me what the heck those other 3,500 bodies are doing in chairs every day at Twitter HQ...

Re:8%

[sittingnut]

What in the world do those 3700 people do?

engage is sjw activism under orders?

problem with twitter is, its leadership does not seem to know what it does.
if it is a facilitator for expressing and communicating( a micro blogging site, media site, or whatever, it calls itself), it should not be putting any limits on any of that unless specifically asked to do so by courts after due process. instead, irrationally, its leaders seem to think expressing and communicating will be helped by a creating a "safe space" where some people's feelings and sensibilities will be privileged over others.

depending on 'delicate' people who must be protected from words( who are by definition spongers on more robust people), for profits, inevitably leads to ruin. this was predicted by many and will happen.

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%

[Anonymous Coward]

Then explain to me please why certain women can cry #killallmen and aren't banned but a scientist making a joke about women and men falling in love at the lab can have his positions terminated? I think you missed the OP's point that SOME people's feelings are protected and others are trampled.

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).

Re:8%

[jcr]

it's kind of amazing how they managed to do that and not have anyone tell them that their ideas were stupid

I have no doubt that plenty of people have told them exactly that. It would not surprise me to learn that they fired anyone who did so, though.

If Twitter were an engineering-driven company, they wouldn't be lousy with SJWs.

-jcr

Re:8%

[Mashiki]

Obligatory XKCD reference

Here, let me fix that for you.

All Hyped Up and No Where To Go

[muphin]

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.
again .. nice idea .. but where to go from here?

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 .. but twitter is just more like an announcement.... move on.

Re:All Hyped Up and No Where To Go

[Hognoxious]

Perhaps they haven't discovered strlen() and they have to manually check that they don't go over the limit?

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:Really?

[AmiMoJo]

They had a great pitch - broadcast text messaging, set to become the big new communication platform. Easy for investors to understand, millions and millions of users... Throw in some ads and rake in the cash.

Problem is ads don't pay much and people hate them. Problem is that they couldn't deal with the trolling, and their initial claim to be a more or less unlimited free speech platform was naive at best. Some of their ideas were clearly half-baked too, like becoming a platform for companies to reach their customers and provide support. Users are very sensitive to insincere marketing and will mock it mercilessly, and who wants to handle their support issues in public? Hashtags seemed like a great idea but quickly devolved into spam and trolling.

They actually have a good platform underneath it all. The current US presidential election benefited immensely from the candidates being able to tweet and reveal their true nature, rather than just carefully scripted talking points on TV. There is just no way to make huge amounts of money from it, and they have not been able to diversify.

Re:Companies that never made money and never will

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I'm old enough to remember when people said that about Google.

I remember when Google came out with text ads, and people laughed at the very idea of an ad that didn't blink garishly, have eye-gouging animation, or invite you to punch a purple monkey. After they made 73 kabillion dollars off of those ads, people stopped laughing.

Re:Companies that never made money and never will

[Xenographic]

That's because idiots thought Google gave away free search and didn't know it was raking in money with AdWords because they never looked at any financial statements.

Twitter is a pure money sink that is trading on their fame. I'm not even sure how they would monetize it and I don't think they know either.

The cupboard of history

[Okian Warrior]

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.

Re:The cupboard of history

[Johnny Mnemonic]

"For example, Scott Adams was banned from twitter"

--"I would regard it as treason"

lol no. He knows about as much about the Constitution as his favored candidate knows. Treason is a capital offense from the constitution, one of few, and this is not that. It's doesn't even violate the First Amendment, although it might be censorship.

I don't know anything either way about the trueness of his claims of being shadowbanned by Twitter, but it's not treason, and it's not a First Amendment issue, and it's not even remotely illegal. If you don't like their platform, don't use it.

It'd be pretty funny if Scott was able to prevent the sale of Twitter, though.

Re:Companies that never made money and never will

[PopeRatzo]

Twitter is a pure money sink that is trading on their fame. I'm not even sure how they would monetize it and I don't think they know either.

I'm old enough to remember when people said that about Facebook.

3.7k Employees?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

we need more programmers!

[vel-ex-tech]

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.

Trust & Safety/Abuse needs to go.

[sethstorm]

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.

They won't take our money

[Anonymous Coward]

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.