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

Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 347 posts

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#91

Post by popcorncolonel »

user5994461 wrote: post #14
chollida1 wrote: post #3

I think its valid to ask if Jack Dorsey is the next executive to leave. The moment Anthony Noto went to Twitter, all wall street could talk about was that he was brought in to sell the company. Who ever the next CTO is, they're going to have some tough decisions to make. Twitter already has to pay out an extreme amount of compensation in stock options just to get and retain talent. I don't want this to seem inflammat…

> Twitter already has to pay out an extreme amount of compensation in stock options just to get and retain talent. Lay off then no need to pay it. There are 4000 employees, which is about one order of magnitude too much.

You suggest they lay off 90% of their employees?

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#92

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

rahrahrah wrote: post #45
chillydawg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not a social network? It's an advertising brokerage.

Yeah? And Facebook isn't a social network either, it's an advertising brokerage? And Google isn't a search engine, it's an advertising brokerage? The Financial Times isn't a newspaper, it's an advertising brokerage? Spotify isn't music streaming, it's an advertising brokerage?

Didn't Facebook recently get called a "free content ad network"?

I think that term describes most of those companies well, as it incorporates their business model. They just vary in what kind of content or service they offer with their ads.

I dont think it's unfair to call a business what it is -- just like we do with farms or investment firms, though they greatly differ in how they go about that business model.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#93

Post by kristianc »

skewart wrote: post #67
x0x0 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good point I'd still suggest that, even though twitter obviously needs advertisers, someone with a deep understanding of users and how they use twitter would lead to more user growth / more engaged users. Which is probably the thing twitter needs most.

Maybe. But at the same time, Twitter has a lot of influential and/or affluent users, which a lot of companies would like to reach. Maybe they shouldn't try to grow absolute user numbers and instead focus on being a publishing platform for influencers (keep in mind that lots of people who aren't Twitter users see popular tweets on other platforms). Then they could focus on providing great advertising and targeting for…

Twitter offers those products already - it offers promoted trends, custom emojis, and custom moments to a small pool of 'Premium' advertisers at $100-250k a pop.

It's a good way to control the quality of output, but it isn't a good way to make mega millions, as these big companies and influencers only have so much advertising budget to go round.

Consider also for someone like Trump or a Kardashian, the ability to reach 17.6M followers (and however many more through retweets + national news) for free with no filtering is a huge draw. It's hard to get them to pay for what they have already. Start to introduce features (as Facebook did) that make it more difficult for people to see tweets, and both the end consumers and the influencers themselves will revolt.

Focus less on absolute user numbers and the quality of the product declines (you have less data to train your targeting algorithms on), and the site as a whole becomes less of a draw for influencers too.

Not saying T shouldn't offer 'Premium' content to media companies, but going all in on large advertisers seems like a route to the poorhouse.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#94

Post by mynameishere »

argonaut wrote: post #87
aresant wrote: post #7

Bigger to me is the VP of Product - Josh McFarland - just bailed out 30 minutes ago too: https://twitter.com/crazyfoo/status/811331557608652800 AKA outside of Dorsey, who is a split / shared CEO, who is in charge of Twitter?

He was A VP of Product. Not The VP of Product. The head of product is Keith Coleman, who was preceded by Edward Ho (interim, now also (interim?) head of engineering) and preceded by Jeff Siebert (both of whom are still at the company).

So, they have one product but multiple VPs of product? Sounds like some trimming was in order.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#95

Post by kristianc »

tapoxi wrote: post #89
rahrahrah wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah? And Facebook isn't a social network either, it's an advertising brokerage? And Google isn't a search engine, it's an advertising brokerage? The Financial Times isn't a newspaper, it's an advertising brokerage? Spotify isn't music streaming, it's an advertising brokerage?

Financial Times and Spotify make money on subscriptions.

Actually Spotify lost $194m last year on subscriptions.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#96

Post by makomk »

chollida1 wrote: post #3

I think its valid to ask if Jack Dorsey is the next executive to leave. The moment Anthony Noto went to Twitter, all wall street could talk about was that he was brought in to sell the company. Who ever the next CTO is, they're going to have some tough decisions to make. Twitter already has to pay out an extreme amount of compensation in stock options just to get and retain talent. I don't want this to seem inflammat…

Twitter's problem isn't just that they have to fix harassment, it's that they have to do it without touching social justice activism that sure looks similar to it from the outside, right down to the doxing, threats, and smears. Oh, and they'll get no sympathy for getting this wrong as the difference is apparently obvious... except that everyone defines it differently (usually based on who their friends are) and simply assumes the world shares their definition. Good luck.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#97

Post by argonaut »

mynameishere wrote: post #94
argonaut wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was A VP of Product. Not The VP of Product. The head of product is Keith Coleman, who was preceded by Edward Ho (interim, now also (interim?) head of engineering) and preceded by Jeff Siebert (both of whom are still at the company).

So, they have one product but multiple VPs of product? Sounds like some trimming was in order.

Facebook has multiple VPs of product. So does Google. This is common...

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#98

Post by cpollard0 »

mynameishere wrote: post #94
argonaut wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was A VP of Product. Not The VP of Product. The head of product is Keith Coleman, who was preceded by Edward Ho (interim, now also (interim?) head of engineering) and preceded by Jeff Siebert (both of whom are still at the company).

So, they have one product but multiple VPs of product? Sounds like some trimming was in order.

The public facing platform is just one of many products twitter offers. They also offer advertising that is probably considered its own product...

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#99

Post by nerfhammer »

vdnkh wrote: post #70
blackaspen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter's Github: https://github.com/twitter Apache Aurora, Bootstrap, Storm, Heron, Pants, ThriftMux, DistributedLog, Apache Cotton, Iago, just to name a few.

Your post implies they made the libraries you listed, but they certainly didn't make Mesos or most of those things.

I think Mesos is the only one from that list they didn't make, they were just an early adopter on that one

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#100

Post by argonaut »

qq66 wrote: post #72
argonaut wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, that makes total sense. There are multiple VPs at engineering firms. People always complain about how big Twitter is, how they can't believe how many employees Twitter has, but people don't realize Twitter has two "users": actual "users," and advertisers. Twitter has to dedicate a huge number of engineers, product managers, marketers, account managers, etc. to dealing with advertisers, setting up the ad auc…

Yes, but speaking as someone who has used Google's great advertising tools as well as mailed a money order to a niche forum owner to run an ad, the advertisers will put up with anything if you can deliver converting users.

Yes. But when 1% optimization means millions in revenue, you're going to throw a lot of engineers at the problem.
Post reply on HN