Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 414 posts

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#171

Post by rtpg »

superuser2 wrote: post #157
kzhahou wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with the concept but I don't think Uber falls nearly in the same ballpark as something like Twitter on scalability needs. IIRC Uber's huge headcount is due to it having local recruiting/marketing teams pretty much everywhere

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#172

Post by biggest_lou »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #133
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.

Do you really think it's all just tweets and ads? Spoiler art: it's much, much, much more than that. Massive analytics stack, tons of distributed computing needs, lots of well-maintained OSS projects (Mesos, Aurora, Finagle, Pants, Bootstrap, Zipkin). I could name about 20 other things. The headcount may be a bit excessive but this is a caricature.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#173

Post by jonathankoren »

hugh4 wrote: post #148
wyclif wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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. It's not going anywhere in the next year or two. But in five years? Ten years? Twitter's main problem is that it has one product, and it's possible to get bored with that product. It's not really possible to get bored of googling things or buying things off amazon, but it's entirely possible…

>Remember when every man and his dog had a blog? (Or possibly a livejournal?) Remember when the word "blogosphere" was all over the news? What happened to all the blogs?

They became listservs. Ironic huh?

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#174

Post by on_ »

Twitter is undervalued, Jack Doresey can't run two stagnating companies in parrallel. Cut jobs, merge the companies (because Square's IPO isn't going to be successful and combine core competencies.

Square has been focusing on invoicing, cash advances, appointment scheduling, marketing features, and slicing and dicing business data, among others[0]

Strip these companies down to core competencies:

* Communications

* Real time information broadcasting

* Financial infrastructure

* Global penetration

* Advertisers/Brands/Companies

Not PG's What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?", but "What Apple is this the Ipod of?"* I don't know, but as someone who never got into twitter, I'm interested to see Jack take a shot with:

* both sides of the market in one place

* financial infrastructure

* customer tracking

* brand participation.

Likely result is a Merger of equals with no power struggle at the top levels. Everyone expecting this anyway so expect it to happen soon.

[0]http://fortune.com/2015/08/02/square-reinvention-ipo-dorsey/

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#175

Post by MichaelGG »

jliptzin wrote: post #97
smacktoward wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The truth is that with modern technology you can build a company that has hundreds of millions of high-volume users and yet is not very expensive to operate. Investors had to dump more than a billion dollars into Twitter to get it to where it is today.

Uh, most of that money was from the IPO and that was probably done because founders/early investors wanted to cash in. I'd say the vast majority of that funding was not necessary to scale to where they are today.

Really? Wikipedia shows they raised over a billion from investors before IPO (including individual rounds of $800M and $300M.) Of the $800M, half went to cash out.

I'd agree though that at least technically, to deliver the core user product, this money simply wasn't needed. (It might have been needed for advertising or building up contracts, etc.)

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#176

Post by nemothekid »

xienze wrote: post #17
menzoic wrote: post #12

Earlier 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.

WhatsApp can't tell me how many users were talking about Peanut Butter Sandwiches 30 seconds ago. WhatsApp can't alert me when people suddenly start talking about earthquakes, super bowls, or Elon Musk. WhatsApp doesn't need to fanout a message to millions of consumers, millions of times a day (and with multi-second latency to boot!).

WhatsApp also doesn't provide a CDN, mobile analytics/monetization/debugging platform. WhatsApp also doesn't contribute to open source like Twitter does (Storm, Bootstrap, Aurora).

Describing twitter as a "140-char" mailing list is very reductionist. OTOH WhatsApp problem is very well served by Erlang/Mnesia an open source distributed messaging library developed by telecommunications company who were likely doing WhatApp-scale 10 yeas before WhatsApp came around. While WhatsApp engineers are great, there is very much a "standing on the shoulders of giants" - giants who have well researched the problem of building a system that lets two or three individuals communicate. There wasn't anyone doing Twitter 10 years ago (well, maybe Google).

I don't mean to imply that Twitter is an efficient well oiled machine, but the comparison to WhatsApp is daft.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#177

Post by BinaryIdiot »

biggest_lou wrote: post #172
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you really think it's all just tweets and ads? Spoiler art: it's much, much, much more than that. Massive analytics stack, tons of distributed computing needs, lots of well-maintained OSS projects (Mesos, Aurora, Finagle, Pants, Bootstrap, Zipkin). I could name about 20 other things. The headcount may be a bit excessive but this is a caricature.

> Do you really think it's all just tweets and ads

No but that's the majority; I simplified on purpose but obviously they have far, far more people there than necessary.

> lots of well-maintained OSS projects (Mesos, Aurora, Finagle, Pants, Bootstrap, Zipkin)

As much as I love OSS it does not pay the bills.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#178

Post by Apocryphon »

kkhire wrote: post #105
Apocryphon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that how it works now? Companies with great products but not a sustainable long-term biz plan exit by getting bought out, and larger companies with a greater product but also no far-long-term biz plan buy those companies and survive by having them as fallback products?

That's how most industries are. Pharma/biotech is all about this

I guess the one upside about tech is that ideally you're in a field with technology that can tie together disparate products into one ecosystem, so it's not simply about making megacorps that are essentially giant holding companies that own random products and patents.

On the other hand, one binding ecosystem with disparate products can easily become either walled gardens or badly-fragmented loose confederations, so it's not the best situation, either.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#179

Post by nikanj »

sinxoveretothex wrote: post #149
bandrami wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Would you care to expand on this one? It seems to me that stock price is correlated with more money: if I have X stock options worth Y dollars each, I effectively have X*Y dollars worth of stock. If stock price increase by 1 dollars, I have X dollars more than I did before. No?

I think they mean the stock price of the company is not well correlated with the amount of money the company is making
Post reply on HN