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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

#131

Post by scurvy »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #129
scurvy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trying to be snarky, but when have you ever seen a company do "surgical" layoffs? Anything across the board is not surgical by definition. This is just a plain, simple RIF to stem the losses. There's nothing surgical about it. Surgical would imply killing off specific teams and products. This is across the board.

> Surgical would imply killing off specific teams and products. This is across the board. Perhaps I missed it but no where did I see any specific mention that this was either surgical or across the board. Care to elaborate? If they didn't specify it certain could go either way.

Earlier reports said 10% across the board.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#132

Post by BinaryIdiot »

nosuchthing wrote: post #75

"Moments" tab gives a good indication that Twitter has no idea where to go and is the sum of boring meetings with marketing consultants. Twitter had potential, but it appears stagnate as all they've done is created a new version of an AOL instant messenger chatroom with hashtags and 128char limit. Limiting the API tokens for 3rd party developers was a really foolish move.

Completely agree. "Moments" just has that damn indicator showing stuff is unread on it and it drives me nuts but NOTHING is EVER relevant to any of my interests or even the people I follow. I don't even understand what the point of it is; shouldn't it just be displaying things it thinks I want to look at? At least that makes the most sense to me...

Oh well, I don't think Twitter is going away any time soon but I don't really understand some of the steps they've been taking...and 4,100 employees? Yikes!

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#133

Post by BinaryIdiot »

pinaceae wrote: post #16

finally. completely incomprehensible why they needed such a large headcount. ten times more than whatsapp would be ok - but not this behemoth. all these designers do what exactly? ignore ipads, macs, etc. i love twitter, use it constantly to follow journalists, vcs, basically to get faster news than any site. i hope twitter can be cut back to the bone.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted; their head count was absolutely insane. Yes Twitter has some insane needs for scaling but 4,100 employees for a 140 character service with some basic ads? Absolutely far too many.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#134

Post by bandrami »

joshkpeterson wrote: post #112
rdtsc wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is out of the ordinary is the public markets' reaction? But is it? Maybe the public is realizing that tweets were just a cool fad for a while. For twitter to be profitable, I am guessing, there has to be people that want to use it, and (very important) people believing that people want to use it (so they'd pay Twitter for advertising). Compare with Google. Google provides something momre back (gmail, search, c…

I don't know, I'd be willing to bet twitter usage is up compared to 4 years ago. Also, stock price != coolness, and further coolness != making more money. Isn't that what this story is about?

But then again stock price != making more money. Particularly for non-dividend-paying firms.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#135

Post by scurvy »

kzhahou wrote: post #113
scurvy wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did WhatsApp have much in the way of storage needs? I don't think that they did. This is where the cost goes, durability. They were basically just a giant switchboard with some buddy lists (aka glorified MSN Messenger with SMS gateways). It's no wonder they were able to keep costs down and grow. They didn't have a lot of storage and persistence needs, just passing datagrams around the Internet between phones. Edit: M…

We are discussing the need for 4100 engineers, not storage costs.

Also, they have 4100 employees, not engineers. You know, legal, HR, finance, oh and engineers.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#136

Post by jldugger »

[deleted] wrote: post #128
hlfcoding wrote: post #30

That's truly surprising. I don't recall Facebook ever resorting to layoffs?

[deleted]

What on earth does market cap have to do with anything? Their margins are negative 30 percent, and their cash flow is like 150 million dollars. Increasing revenues doesn't mean a whole lot of you're losing money on every sale.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#137

Post by [deleted] »

jethro_tell wrote: post #120
lucianmarin wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just rubbish from developers that don't know what they are doing. I run Sublevel on a $5 VPS from DigitalOcean. Guess what, I optimized it to run smoothly in any situation.

I can't tell if you're webscale or trololololing, but I like it either way.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#138

Post by jsprogrammer »

untog wrote: post #62
jsprogrammer wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean? This is just a fact.

The company existed to make a return for the owners. The owners exited with $16 billion. That was the motivation of the owners/employees, not $14 million in annual revenue.

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