Do they have 20% time?
Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
351–360 of 414 posts
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#352Earlier 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…
WhatsApp has the benefit of running off of Facebook's infrastructure. Facebook certainly has plenty of employees.
WhatsApp was huge before Facebook acquired them. That's why Facebook acquired them.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#353I 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.
Several SF tech companies have been polluted by former investment bankers. I presume pushing paper and face time have become even more important.
Doesnt anyone think that twitter laying off is an attempt by Dorsey to "streamline" and "focus on core competency" as he takes the official CEO reigns again?
Like he wants to come in with a drop in OPEX such that he has some flexibility with finances by dropping some staff?
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#354Earlier 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…
WhatsApp also appears, at the moment, to have a much simpler business model - you buy it. No advertising technology, no audience/data teams and, probably most significantly, no sales team to go out and get people to use the platform. And no big agency handholding people, no data scientists, no customer success account managers. I'd be curious to see what the breakdown is between tech and sales at Twitter.
That business model is almost certainly out the window after the Facebook acquisition. They renewed everyone's license automatically, and are probably going to remove it entirely.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It didn't help improve the interface much. For example, on this site the interface shows me quickly who is replying to whom. A billion dollars in and Twitter still can't do this. They tried to be the world's largest chat room and basically came up AOL.
And the UI changes they have made are demonstrably worse, such as their seemingly random threading, constantly losing page scroll position, and repeating earlier tweets.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#356Honestly, this is really bad news for Twitter. A tech company is all about finding and retaining top technical talent. That's what enables you to "build fast teams that learn even faster".
As far as I'm concerned, I would not want to go to work for Twitter. Whenever I hear about layoffs, I think of mismanagement. When the managers have run the ship aground to the extent that capable engineers that were hired to build product are now going to loose their jobs, there have been some huge errors and missteps. Getting back from that is going to be very difficult, and imagine now trying to attract technical talent to a company that has just cut technical staff; the best and brightest are going to have better options so Twitter is going to be at a disadvantage in the general labor market. This means they will have a harder time finding people, keeping people, staffing projects. And they will have a harder time completing the projects they do have and with enough speed, creativity and quality to compete against startups and other companies with more agility, motivation and access to better workers.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#357[deleted]
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#358Honestly, this is really bad news for Twitter. A tech company is all about finding and retaining top technical talent. That's what enables you to "build fast teams that learn even faster". As far as I'm concerned, I would not want to go to work for Twitter. Whenever I hear about layoffs, I think of mismanagement. When the managers have run the ship aground to the extent that capable engineers that were hired to build…
When the creators of Bootstrap framework left Twitter, I took that as a bad sign. Creative people easily get bored and need to challenges.
With Jack coming back as CEO, I don't necessarily agree with layoffs overall being bad. He could have a solid plan and reorganizing and prune workers who perhaps have atrophy from lack of excitement or whatnot can be healthy - even though surely disappointing and upsetting to some.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#359When Twitter got going, RSS was marred by political infighting:
http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...
And that is part of the reason why walled-gardens like Twitter sometimes do well. Sometimes open technologies are crippled by politics. Sometimes centralized decision making is faster, and can get more innovative stuff out the door. It took many years for specifications like Atom to mature. Meanwhile Twitter developed a huge eco-system of 3rd party apps.
But there is a counter-argument. Twitter later killed off much of the eco-system of 3rd party apps. And that suggests the weakness of central decision making. No one has the authority to kill RSS. And that suggests the strength of decentralized decision making.
But it seems clear, when an idea is young and immature, centralized decision making often has a speed advantage over what committees the industry sets up to try to work out a specification.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 val…
Soooo... RSS? Isn't that what you've just described? You could run that on a pretty small web server....
Well, we did. I was a blogger for about 7 years before Twitter came along. Twitter pretty much killed it for me as the masses went there.
So you're not wrong, but the people went to Twitter. Even Google killed Reader. I go where my audience is.