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Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

nytimes.com

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Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#61
post #36
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy that it makes sense a billion+ company would need that few people now

I wonder how many of the 4100 are tech. Probably less than half at this point. The rest are there to work with advertisers, publishers, celebrities. All to maximize profitability and all of them failing at it.

50% are tech

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#62
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2014, WhatsApp reportedly made $14 million in revenue. By comparison, Twitter made $479 in revenue in just Q4 2014. I think company size generally scales super-linearly with revenue, so a total staff in the thousands seems reasonable for a post-IPO company. Are you suggesting that WhatsApp's model of organization is the norm for a sustainable organization? I think it's a clear outlier in many respects.

Does it really matter what WhatsApp made in revenue? The owners got a $16 BILLION payout. Are you suggesting that WhatsApps business model was based on annual revenue?

> Does it really matter what WhatsApp made in revenue? The owners got a $16 BILLION payout.

Silicon Valley mentality at its finest.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#66
post #44
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> recommends the most relevant ad They're nowhere near relevant. I keep getting local-to-US ads, and I'm in UK (and geolocate as in UK too). Not as bad as showing alcohol ads to 5 year old children, but still pretty bad.

> They're nowhere near relevant.

This doesn't mean that there aren't teams of people trying to constantly make those ads more relevant. And since not everyone at a Twitter can statistically be incompetent, I'm going to assume that the problem is actually quite difficult, and perhaps requires a large team.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#67
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2014, WhatsApp reportedly made $14 million in revenue. By comparison, Twitter made $479 in revenue in just Q4 2014. I think company size generally scales super-linearly with revenue, so a total staff in the thousands seems reasonable for a post-IPO company. Are you suggesting that WhatsApp's model of organization is the norm for a sustainable organization? I think it's a clear outlier in many respects.

Does it really matter what WhatsApp made in revenue? The owners got a $16 BILLION payout. Are you suggesting that WhatsApps business model was based on annual revenue?

> Are you suggesting that WhatsApps business model was based on annual revenue?

Since WhatsApp was a revenue-generation corporation with a board of directors, like any other corporation, before their acquisition, and since I don't like to indulge in conspiracy theories, I'm going to assume that yes -- their business model was based on annual revenue.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#70

Genuine question - why do recruiters hire new people when the company is laying off?

@Whitenoice, recruiters hire them mainly because of their skill set. Keep in mind, most layoffs are because a department is being eliminated and the is no where for the employee to go but to take a severance and leave.

Not their fault they are being laid off you know.

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