rise of cockroaches was the techcrunch headline, arguably this is a bit of a nod to that.
Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
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Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
thats a naive assumption, there could be a lot of hidden scaling issues when you think deeper about how it works
I don't doubt it's challenging to keep the thing up, but 4100 employees? And meanwhile WhatsApp has 50 or so employees in total.
It's crazy that it makes sense a billion+ company would need that few people now
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#23A sad day for Twitter, but a dose of reality for a lot of the fluffiness in the market at the moment. Companies need to have real revenue and produce real profit and then need a valuation based on sane multiples. Twitter got behind that curve badly and ultimately this is what happens.
Yes, it's sad for employees being let go, but it's good news for Twitter. I don't think Twitter is going anywhere; it has a huge user base and a lot of people think of it as a branch of the internet. By cutting surgically (removing, as you put it, the "fluffiness"), Jack might very well be able to bring some fighting spirit back.
Oh I agree, I didn't say I thought the company was going bust... just saying that this is likely the start of a lot more focus on the hard numbers of tech companies and less focus on hype-based valuation (although the later isn't going to disappear entirely). Just that question a a lot of startups hate "So how are you going to make money?" is likely going to start getting asked a lot more.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#244100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there.
> 4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there.
Absolutely! You could probably get a single rack to handle storage and broadcast of millions of tweets per minute, perhaps hook it up to a Teradata appliance to handle search and storage at that throughput. Throw it in a nice distributed database indexed by user. Then just another couple of indices for the hashtags and mentions, and the follows/follower graph. Throw in another few tables for handling API permissions, managing schema migrations while ensuring that data from day 1 is still as transparent as yesterday's logs, a highly replicated ad server hooked up to a realtime recommendation engine that analyzes an active user's current stream and recommends the most relevant ad (to maximize revenue of course), set up a few staffed policy teams to comply with the differences in global regulations, handle lawsuits and legal requests, and of course keep competing for more revenue with the likes of Facebook and Google.
It's pretty trivial.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#254100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there.
Without knowing the breakdown I assume that there are a lot of people working in marketing type roles where they are working with big business and celebrities to get them using the platform.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#26I don't use Twitter and don't have any friends that do. Am I just uncool, or is it super niche now?
Considering Twitter is still the first go-to social platform for reactions to news, I doubt it. Nonetheless, I've had trouble convincing my parents why they should use Twitter.
Being a big sports fan (#phinsup) I find that I get breaking news first on Twitter. Player signings, coaches being hired (#dancampbell) and fired (#firephilbin), etc. I also find a lot of interesting links on Twitter, that are things I wouldn't necessarily have found otherwise, because they're from sites that weren't necessarily always on my radar.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
thats a naive assumption, there could be a lot of hidden scaling issues when you think deeper about how it works
I don't doubt it's challenging to keep the thing up, but 4100 employees? And meanwhile WhatsApp has 50 or so employees in total.
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Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't doubt it's challenging to keep the thing up, but 4100 employees? And meanwhile WhatsApp has 50 or so employees in total.
It's crazy that it makes sense a billion+ company would need that few people now
Well a lot of other people are saying "It's crazy that a company with that few people and that little profit can be worth that many billions." Hence Twitter's problem at the moment.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#294100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there.
> 4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there. Absolutely! You could probably get a single rack to handle storage and broadcast of millions of tweets per minute, perhaps hook it up to a Teradata appliance to handle search and storage at that throughput. Throw it in a nice distributed database indexed by user. Then just another couple…
OK, I'm hearing a lot about hardware there but not seeing where thousands of people are needed to keep it all up. Again, WhatsApp -- 50 employees.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#30That's truly surprising. I don't recall Facebook ever resorting to layoffs?