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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

#151

Post by hugh4 »

aetherson wrote: post #121
xienze wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

Twitter is doing something vastly more technically challenging that WhatsApp. WhatsApp just delivers messages. It doesn't store them, and it certainly doesn't, say, try to make them available in a searchable away to everyone in the world. This isn't a knock on WhatsApp -- I use WhatsApp and don't use Twitter -- but Twitter's scale challenges are vastly more complex than WhatsApp's, which doesn't have many features th…

I'm still not sure how that requires a number of employees comparable to, say, NASA JPL.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#152

Post by thomasfoster96 »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #138
untog wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The $14 million is what justifies the $16 billion.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#153

Post by bdcravens »

mckiddy wrote: post #35

The second dotcom boom is coming to an end. Have fun everyone

Not necessarily. They have 4000 employees, which probably has a number of non-revenue-generating positions that many SV companies are wont to have. Like Python API WebSockets Diversity Developer Envangelists with full travel budgets to go to 49 conferences a year. (I just made that up, but you get the idea)

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#155

Post by jsprogrammer »

thomasfoster96 wrote: post #152
jsprogrammer wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The $14 million is what justifies the $16 billion.

I guess that is the argument anyway. FB also recorded it's estimate of the useful lifetime of the WhatsApp users it acquired as a finite intangible asset worth over $2 billion.

My point is that the transaction must be analyzed from the viewpoint of the owners (as that is what the poster I was responding to cared about, viz a viz total profit/revenue to Twitter). When you do that, WhatsApp cashed (well, assuming FB stock can be treated as cash) out more per employee than Twitter.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#156

Post by pmontra »

Scoundreller wrote: post #79
philipjoubert wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatsapp is an outlier in many ways and comparing them with any company will make that company seem bloated. As for the comparison, Whatsapp has no monetization model, no marketing and a simpler product.

WhatsApp charges a subscription fee after the first year of $1/year. When you have several hundred million users, that adds up. An effective monetization model, if unusual in SV.

They used to send me messages about that yearly few but they always ended up extending my membership for free every few months. Then they stopped asking. WhatsApp is de facto free.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#157

Post by superuser2 »

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.

The need for consistent, highly available persistent storage in a distributed system with a heavy write workload vastly complicates engineering effort. You're fighting fundamental issues like the CAP theorem. When you can't "just use Postgres" everything else gets a lot harder. Companies that have this problem tend to have a lot of engineers: Facebook, Google, Uber, etc.

Disks are slow. If you don't need to wait for disk, then you can handle a great deal more req/s per node, which means the point at which you need to become a distributed system is further away. Without the state synchronization problem, converting to a distributed system consists of little more than adding a load balancer.

Even in an environment that needs synchronized state, the services that can be stateless are much easier to deal with (and you try to make as much of your infrastructure stateless as possible).

Storage costs are not relevant compared to the costs of engineering distributed systems.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#158

Post by goodcjw2 »

bdcravens wrote: post #153
mckiddy wrote: post #35

The second dotcom boom is coming to an end. Have fun everyone

Not necessarily. They have 4000 employees, which probably has a number of non-revenue-generating positions that many SV companies are wont to have. Like Python API WebSockets Diversity Developer Envangelists with full travel budgets to go to 49 conferences a year. (I just made that up, but you get the idea)

Maybe judging a boom by twitter layoff is a bit too soon. However, the underneath mindset rings a bell: people starts to realize winter is coming, but not sure when...

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#159

Post by superuser2 »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #86
muzz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true if the layoff is specific to Twitter and not a harbinger of a general downturn

There is another bloated company with an unclear growth story right across the street from Twitter, and it happens share same CEO. How long can Square keep up its act?

Square has a clear business model, i.e. transaction commissions. I don't think it's particularly comparable to Twitter.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#160

Post by mbesto »

addicted wrote: post #39
toomuchtodo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet.

Facebook has 3 properties which have more users than Twitter (Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram). Facebook itself has more active users than Google and has another property, Whatapp which is also close to or just over that billion user mark. And they are already reporting profits. I doubt they will go the way of Twitter.

Massive profits in fact:

http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Facebook_(FB)/Data/EBITDA

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