Forgets to remove the corporate speak.
Twitter announces layoffs
401–410 of 410 posts
Re: Twitter announces layoffs
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everyone should take note of this person's excellent structure: he put the decision first. Going by my twitter feed, they implemented the decision first, with people discovering they were locked out of their twitter accounts and RAS before the announcement was made.
It's a hard problem to solve, but given that many of the folks being dismissed are engineers with elevated access to Twitter's data and services, it makes sense from a security and privacy perspective to disable access first. There's no good way to lay off 300 people at once. Hopefully Twitter actually follows through on the separation package and job search assistance. That's far more important.
Do former twitter engineers really need that much assistance in finding a new job? I'd assume people will be clawing at them.
Re: Twitter announces layoffs
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
Startup world? This is a public company with thousands of employees who can get rid of 336 of them. It's pretty far from the startup world. This is the corporate world, and it happens to companies with long histories when their environment changes.
To counter, Twitter is a growth stage company and while public, it's value is priced exclusively on future value. It is only a 9 year old company working out product market fit and has only had a few profitable quarters, I only noted feb 2014 but there are likely a few more. So is it a startup? Idk wtf a startup is but Twitter isn't a blue chip.
To counter, Facebook has been around the same amount of time, and would you call them a startup? Are you saying if a company is successful, they are not a startup, and if they aren't, we'll just keep calling them a startup until they die off like most other startups?
Re: Twitter announces layoffs
#404> Emails like this are usually riddled with corporate speak so I'm going to give it to you straight. I tried rewriting his email to live up to this promise: - - - Team, We're cutting our workforce to strengthen Twitter as a company. The team has been deciding how to best streamline Twitter, Vine, and Periscope to put their focus on the projects which will have the greatest impact. Moments, which we launched last week…
Dear Twitter, They're going to let me be CEO again, but as part of the deal I had to fire a bunch of people. Mostly engineers since I'm told there are many of them who cost too much and don't seem to impact the top line. Please let's all be nice about the whole thing, so it doesn't turn into a PR disaster. Jack
Dear Team,
What do you say... you do here?
Jack
Re: Twitter announces layoffs
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, according to a lot of newbie developers, twitter can actually be written in a weekend. /s
Whatever value Twitter has, the majority of it definitely isn't in its technical implementation.
Especially if they need thousands of people to maintain it, when WhatsApp needs 50 employees even though they process an order of magnitude more messages.
Re: Twitter announces layoffs
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
And at some places, the people who get laid off are the people who aren't friends with the right people in management. It has nothing to do with dead weight. I have seen this exact thing happen in a company I used to work for. It was the catalyst that made me look for another job. I'm not saying this is the case with Twitter, I don't know anything about Twitter as a company.
I doubt Twitter is making deep cuts so they can keep their friends. But it does help to like the people you work with.
I think you misunderstood what I meant, people are less capable technically, but more capable from a "relationship building" standpoint will often spend as much time becoming friends with management so they are not laid off.
This probably doesn't happen in smaller startups, but I've worked in several medium and large size companies and have seen it happen.
It doesn't matter if you're getting along with your coworkers, they aren't the ones making the layoff decisions.
Re: Twitter announces layoffs
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if your layoffs were 100% based on refocusing on certain areas, surely you'd (often) still want to keep the best employees you have in areas you no longer care about over the worst employees you have in areas you still care about, if you have to get rid of someone.
It's true that you do what you can to hold onto your top 1-5% of employees - but, I've been through two real layoffs - one at Netscape, and one at Loudcloud, very little differentiation occurs below that layer. At Netscape, when Microsoft effectively killed the browser-as-a-product space by giving theirs away for free, entire buildings were let go, and all the client side developers, and wan-dialer people, customer s…
Both companies had the same founders, correct? I'm not saying they are, but they could be idiosyncratic.
Re: Twitter announces layoffs
#408> The world needs a strong Twitter Really? Does it? I think Twitter needs a strong Twitter, shareholders need a strong Twitter even Twitter employees need it. However the world is, at best, ambivalent about Twitter, if it disappeared tomorrow a replacement would spring up within a few weeks if the world really needed a way to shotgun their messages into the ether.
It's funny how accurate Silicon Valley(HBO show) is - https://vimeo.com/98720197 Everyone wants to make the world a better place
That show is great and it really goes to show how the rest of the world sees 'us'. It is funny to see how accurate they are.
Re: Twitter announces layoffs
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Anymore" is just a word used to mean "now" anymore. (I kid, but seriously, I've searched for analysis on the use of the word 'anymore' in the positive (eg, as something other than part of a 'not...anymore' clause) and haven't been able to find anything. Any links would be appreciated, I am legitimately curious as to when and how this became a thing).
I have family in the southeastern US who use "anymore" like the person you're responding to did (and they have for decades). I don't think it simply means "now". There's a slightly different connotation that seems somewhat negative. Kind of like: "It used to be like this, but now it's like this... and I'm not sure I approve".
That's an astute observation. It always strikes me as jarring when the speaker leaves off the "not" in the clause.... but on the rare occasions it happens, it's always about a chance in society/convention which is clearly not considered a positive.
Re: Twitter announces layoffs
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, you can set up what are effectively Twitter proxies, and sure, the censors won't be able to keep up playing whack-a-mole. But then the users have to do the same thing, preemptively finding such proxies and jumping between them. I'd guess that that would be a good enough result from the government's perspective. And that's just read-only stuff. Post by email? DPI could drop packets containing emails addressed to…
> preemptively finding such proxies and jumping between them This is why it is so important to create protocols for communication instead of single-point-of-failure services. While it is still possible for bad actors to interfere with traffic, it is much harder to shutdown an entire network of federated servers. In contrast, a service can be disabled by simply throwing legal papers at the person running the service (…
I'm confused. It sounds like you're arguing against me, but you basically agree with me. Except for...
> Yes, though the model to copy is federated services like email.
I disagree. For one thing, DNS. How many average users will be able to reconfigure their systems to use a DNS server besides the one their ISP provides? And when the national government cuts off the nation's external Internet access, what good will 8.8.8.8 be?
It seems obvious to me that, for this kind of use-case, peer-to-peer, DHT-type services are what's needed. Federated is better than centralized, but it would still be easy to censor and block. Even P2P protocols could be blocked by ISPs blocking inbound connections to their customers, but barring that, it would be difficult.