Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#131

Post by flukus » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 3:51 AM UTC

dbg31415 wrote: post #104

forgettableuser wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jonathan Blow gave a talk to Berekley college students a few months ago, complaining about the poor quality in modern software. He picks on Twitter in one part, showing the graph of the number of employees by year, challenges their claims to the complexity of implementing Twitter, and mocks a UI problem he just had. Twitter starts at 7 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k56wra39lwA

http://i.imgur.com/U4mHId3.png Thanks. Good video.

How do you even grow like that? The current staff during that spike must have spent most of their time interviewing people.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#132

Post by moderation » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 3:51 AM UTC

niftich wrote: post #113

Rapzid wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity, which ones have they developed?

Some software that Twitter has put out: [1] Heron, a realtime, distributed, fault-tolerant stream processing engine - https://github.com/twitter/heron [2] Finagle, a fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC system - https://github.com/twitter/finagle/ [3] FlockDB, a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database - https://github.com/twitter/flockdb [4] Gizzard, a flexible sharding framework for creating eventually-consisten…

[7] Mesos, abstracts CPU, memory, storage, and other compute resources away from machines (physical or virtual), enabling fault-tolerant and elastic distributed systems to easily be built and run effectively. - http://mesos.apache.org/

Mesos was invented at UC Berkeley but developed and battle tested at Twitter.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#133

Post by flukus » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 3:52 AM UTC

rodgerd wrote: post #63

dbg31415 wrote: post #2

How many people does it really take to run Twitter? If they need more than 100 people I'd be really shocked.

> How many people does it really take to run Twitter? Given that the Salesforce buyout fell over because Salesforce didn't want to be associated with the alt-rightists and other assorted neo-Nazis running around the service, apparently more people in their abuse team than they currently have.

Their abuse team is going to be their downfall.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#134

Post by _wp3r » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 3:59 AM UTC

CardenB wrote: post #118

danieltillett wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a bootstrapped SAAS business and I make far more than $20K a month profit and have done so for years. The key is choose a niche that is large enough to make the level of profit you want, but too small to attract VC funded competitors. The sort of market size you want is in the range of $5 to $20 million per year. Big enough to be worth the hassle, but too small to attract the big guys.

What's your point? Twitter isn't in that niche, obviously.

I would suggest that Twitter is a niche. It is in a brand management and customer engagement niche, and without some giant platform change, I think that trying to profit by increasing the number of eyeballs is always going to be challenging to the bottom line if the business value does not dramatically increase. The noise in twitters ecosystem from all those users, while interesting and good for research data sets, will eventually be a counter business/profit feature. The value proposition for users, in my mind, has been access and audience, but the value should have been focused on authoritative sourcing and customer recovery/engagement as soon as they took outside investment.

Not disagreeing or anything your comment just brought this to mind.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#135

Post by coredog64 » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 4:01 AM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #119

jdavis703 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point wouldn't bonds make more sense? Seems like the risk vs. reward balance is skewed the wrong way if you own a piece of stock that stays flat.

If inflation shoots up, your bond will have the same payout but one can at least hope that dividends rise accordingly.

On the flip side, if the company goes bankrupt, bond holders are at or near the front of the line to be made whole.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#136

Post by gozur88 » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 4:15 AM UTC

artursapek wrote: post #6

I've always sort of had this question that continues to feel naive - but I'm not sure I know the answer: why do so many companies feel like they have to grow perpetually? Why can't Twitter just be happy being Twitter, knowing its limits and making a stable profit? Instead it's more users, more VC money, more staff... constantly burning as quickly as possible. There's a ceiling on every business; it's all bound to com…

>Why can't Twitter just be happy being Twitter, knowing its limits and making a stable profit?

The short answer? Because they don't make money.

I guess it's possible you could grow your company to a point where you say "Okay, we've filled our niche. Growing more doesn't make sense, so we'll just extract as much cash as we can."

The problem is you have to make money to do that. Twitter doesn't make money and never has. They can say "Well, we're still growing, and that costs money, but at some point we'll monetize that growth and make tons of money," but it's only credible as long as they're growing.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#137

Post by intrasight » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 4:18 AM UTC

siquick wrote: post #66

mason240 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spent about $100 trying to promote my history podcast curation site on Twitter, and only got about 5 hits.

In comparison to FB ads (and my experience), Twitter ads are absolutely useless.

And since FB ads are useless, that's saying something

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#138

Post by cookiecaper » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 4:25 AM UTC

intrasight wrote: post #137

siquick wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In comparison to FB ads (and my experience), Twitter ads are absolutely useless.

And since FB ads are useless, that's saying something

The ads on both platforms are primarily useful for gathering a following local to the platform. For example, on Facebook, you want to buy likes/engagement with your page, not outbound stuff. On Twitter, you want to buy followers. Once you have a following, you engage with them and use the content you post to drive them to your site where you (presumably) make money from them.

The ads on the social platforms are not worth anything if you're using them as general CPC ads to try to drive traffic to your site. In fact, I've found this is even true for Google/Adwords.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#139

Post by xenadu02 » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 4:28 AM UTC

I still maintain that screwing over client developers had something to do with it. At the very least it didn't help them "control the twitter experience". Every time I see one of their new ads about how much Twitter loves developers I laugh out loud. There is zero chance I'll ever integrate Twitter into anything I do, period. I'll fight against it anywhere I work and encourage all my peers to do the same.

Did everyone forget they didn't even invent the word "Tweet"? Nor did they write their mobile clients. They had no idea what they were doing and stumbled into success. Then the MBAs turned around and stabbed us in the back.

Twitter can fuck right off.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#140

Post by zedred » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 4:28 AM UTC

niftich wrote: post #18

Can we talk about Fabric again? Fabric [1] is a product done by Twitter but heavily de-emphasizes the Twitter association -- it's a value-added Twitter SDK that apps can build into themselves and get crash reporting (ex-Crashlytics) and ad network integration (MoPub) too. In the scheme of Twitter's self-reflection trying to figure out how to cut costs and find what it wants to do, do you feel Fabric fits into it? Do…

And think about how much this costs Twitter! The Fabric SDK allows apps to do phone number verification (SMS/Voice calls) for free. This is usually the single greatest cost associated with running any app that does phone number verification (often even above engineering salaries). Multiply the number of SDK users by the cost of SMS/voice delivery, and that's a ton of money out the door every month.

There were some rumors that Twitter has tried to spin off Fabric into another home, but it sounds like potential buyers balked when they saw the costs associated with it.

The prevailing theory is that Twitter originally saw this as a way to collect user data in the mobile app paradigm in the same way that the Twitter "follow" and "tweet" buttons do in the web paradigm. It sounds like it hasn't paid off, though.