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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

#231

Post by tomjen3 »

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.

Well sure. I don't think many people think all those people were sitting around twiddling their thumbs all day, but none of those open source projects ultimately benefit Twitter. If those had been OS api clients it would seem prudent (except twitter doesn't like third party integrations any longer).

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#232

Post by x1024 »

petercooper wrote: post #225
amix wrote: post #206

I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well. I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.

I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is very different. Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they're almost always one-to-very-many. If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that's 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are li…

Perhaps that is the lesson to be learned? That technology with limits... scales?

If you want to "do social", do it for small groups. Nobody really has 40 000 friends, so why bother with the use-case that is literally only used by advertising companies?

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#233

Post by tragic »

TheBlueDot wrote: post #227
TheBlueDot wrote: post #223

Well, there goes my weekend/week. As someone who joined Twitter recently this sucks. I left a great job to come work at Twitter because I believe in what they're building and now a few months in I might be looking again. :-( To be fair, the first week I was asking myself what all of these people do. I wish the company had been more transparent with this but I understand why they can't start telling people there will…

Also, it's amusing yet disturbing the disconnect. Just three days before this leak everyone was told we're doing well, we're going to grow and hire more people and build these great new things. They also had a big talk about leaks and then went on to show 4000+ people the full product plans for the next year. Then, sorry, we're firing a bunch of you. Oh yeah, don't leak anything we just told you. :-O

> They also had a big talk about leaks and then went on to show 4000+ people the full product plans for the next year. Then, sorry, we're firing a bunch of you. Oh yeah, don't leak anything we just told you. :-O

I find this mindset frankly mind-boggling. I work for a significant corporation, and we recently changed CEOs. The trade press was reporting the change three months in advance; and anyone who cared to know about it on the shop floor probably did. But they didn't tell us ... presumably because it would get leaked. Which it, of course, did anyway. It seems to be almost an unconscious corporate reflex to treat the bulk of your staff like morons.

My feeling about Twitter is that there was an opportunity to seriously monetise it around the moment it started getting serious traction for PR. The celebs had given it critical mass, and Coke and McDonalds had to follow.

Now, however, the shills are basically just given an enormous amount of free advertising space with a not-great premium option on top of that. (A promoted tweet is not as good as an embedded tweet in a 'proper' news outlet, which will be part of the PR package, sold together to a client as advertising-equivalent exposure.)

They could still do something like start charging per tweet per thousand followers for content promoting a specific product or service (a made up back-of-the-fag-packet example, I'm sure there are better ways), of course, but it would be much harder given the expectations that have built up around what the platform is.

EDIT: clarity

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#234

Post by tajano »

I predicted Twitter would be the next unicorn to cut staff and offices ten days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10300002). To be honest, I didn't think it would happen quite this fast.

But 4K employees, 2K engineers to support Twitter? If they were still in a rapid growth/innovation phase, perhaps they could get away with this. But rapid growth is over.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#235

Post by [deleted] »

petercooper wrote: post #225
amix wrote: post #206

I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well. I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.

I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is very different. Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they're almost always one-to-very-many. If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that's 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are li…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#237

Post by aandrieiev »

x1024 wrote: post #232
petercooper wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is very different. Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they're almost always one-to-very-many. If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that's 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are li…

Perhaps that is the lesson to be learned? That technology with limits... scales? If you want to "do social", do it for small groups. Nobody really has 40 000 friends, so why bother with the use-case that is literally only used by advertising companies?

Perhaps because providing ad companies with the tools like these is the way to monetize the service?

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#238

Post by silverbax88 »

yid wrote: post #24
xienze wrote: post #9

4100 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…

4100 employees is completely out of whack with reality. And for those saying they are incorrectly trying to scale to $20 billion...thinking you will be a $20 billion dollar company in the future (even if it were true) would not justify hiring that many people now.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#239

Post by Eridrus »

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.

I'm not much of a user of "Moments" myself, but I'm guessing it is primarily targeted at new users who sign up and go "what now" and don't know who to follow, etc.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#240

Post by petercooper »

x1024 wrote: post #232
petercooper wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is very different. Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they're almost always one-to-very-many. If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that's 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are li…

Perhaps that is the lesson to be learned? That technology with limits... scales? If you want to "do social", do it for small groups. Nobody really has 40 000 friends, so why bother with the use-case that is literally only used by advertising companies?

I don't think the final question is realistic. I have 20K followers (not huge, but far beyond who I could realistically ever "know") and get huge value from it as an individual, not as a business. It would be so boring (to me) to only be able to talk to people one knows closely.

There are numerous non-company non-celebs-in-the-Hollywood-sense-of-the-word people who have huge followings on Twitter who get a lot of value from that and who their followers also appreciate: people like DHH, John Carmack, Marco, Sam Altman, Scoble..

There is a definite space between "people you know personally" and "blast ads to 2 million customers" in social and Twitter fills it really well.

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