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

Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 481 posts

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#131

Post by jwilber »

adam_arthur wrote: post #108
dragontamer wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with seeming negligible external-facing impact on the core product. Twitter is said to have lost $2.5 Billion/year in advertiser money, largely because Twitter's sales teams have not been returning emails from worried Advertisers. That's a pretty huge impact on Twitter's #1 revenue stream (estimated to be $5 Billion in 2021). Twitter's core product is advertisements. Without sales staff to keep the advertisers, the…

Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. Don't think Twitter's revenue issues have anything to do with sales staff. Advertising channels/campaigns can and should be 100% automated.

Twitter has been objectively worse since the layoffs. I get tons of sex-bot accounts liking my posts that never existed before, the app constantly refreshes itself, there’s a few second loading message every time I view my timeline that didn’t exist beforehand, and my timeline is much worse than before (instead of seeing mostly tech stuff in the area of my interest, 60% has become fluff akin to my instagram story rec’s).

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#132

Post by dragontamer »

adam_arthur wrote: post #123
dragontamer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But not the features that retain advertisers. Which were the silent issues that no one talked about before. And indeed, advertisers aren't talking about it now. They're just leaving the platform in droves. There's no one _to_ talk about it with. Entire teams (including high ranking executives) that kept relationships with advertisers have been fired. Twitter doesn't even have anyone answering / categorizing the compl…

Advertisers dropped spending because they don't like Elon/his behavior. Not because sales staff were laid off. It's quite obvious to anybody looking at the situation objectively. Twitter has functioned fine after massive layoffs, and feature velocity has only accelerated. Too many developers have an inflated sense of self importance

> Not because sales staff were laid off.

There's plenty of advertisers who have blogged about "My emails to Twitter stopped getting answered" around the time of the 75% layoffs. This is well documented.

What do you want the advertisers to do? To just keep giving money to Twitter even when all their contacts have disappeared? There's some pretty basic behaviors that have nothing to do with politics here that Twitter is failing at.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#133

Post by colechristensen »

dragontamer wrote: post #73
ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #25

It's hard not to read some of these stories and not think that somehow some of these companies are free-riding on the ability to do some firings with minimal pushback because of the "well, look at what everyone else is doing!" climate that exists now. I'm having a hard time teasing out how much of this is driven by some sort of fundamental analysis of the economy, some collective BigCo CEO shared thinking, or, at my…

> with seeming negligible external-facing impact on the core product. Twitter is said to have lost $2.5 Billion/year in advertiser money, largely because Twitter's sales teams have not been returning emails from worried Advertisers. That's a pretty huge impact on Twitter's #1 revenue stream (estimated to be $5 Billion in 2021). Twitter's core product is advertisements. Without sales staff to keep the advertisers, the…

> So advertisers know that there's no hope for these issues to be fixed anymore, and are now leaving the platform.

Having worked in adtech for a while the more likely scenario is that lots of companies have turned off their ad spend. That isn’t “leaving”, ad spend is volatile coming and going with many motivations is not uncommon. Pausing your campaigns because the ad publisher is a bit broken isn’t permanent.

And whatever is “said” isn’t to be trusted, you won’t get real numbers from a private company and rumors. No doubt there was a big dip around the takeover, but the only thing I’ve heard is a few people complaining about the increased number of ads.

Probably some advertiser tools were broken and the people who’d been talking to those advertisers had been fired, but those are all temporary. Advertisers aren’t going to take some great moral stand unless there’s a clear reason that can be traced back to customers, disliking elon isn’t one of those things.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#134

Post by convolvatron »

bink wrote: post #53
qeternity wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they spend any amount much less $3b or $10b to keep people they don’t need/want?

Normally, hiring 11,000 people you "didn't need" would be a warning sign that management was incompetent and require much more than just laying off the unneeded workers. It would suggest that large reforms are needed in planning and hiring. But these days it's just dismissed as an "oops!".

no hiring process hits 100%. a healthy company deals with that reality incrementally. since many companies have adopted a policy of just generally not firing anyone for performance reasons, they just accrete these people, and when the opportunity arises (i.e. merger), they vent them en masse. I guess its easier to deal with the emotional/morale issues? probably legal too.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#135

Post by bagacrap »

Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet are sitting on extremely profitable businesses and huge piles of cash. (Other megacaps like NVDA, Meta, NFLX, maybe less so.)

So far we have not seen much in the way of the highly-anticipated earnings decline, and the current projection for Q4 GDP is around 4% growth, which suggests to me that Q4 earnings should be better than anticipated by the pessimists out there.

I would see this as a relatively painless opportunity to cut out low performers. Sure it sucks for those who are being cut, but my experience working at a FAANG tells me there are a lot more than 10% who contribute very little.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#136

Post by JumpCrisscross »

adam_arthur wrote: post #123
dragontamer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But not the features that retain advertisers. Which were the silent issues that no one talked about before. And indeed, advertisers aren't talking about it now. They're just leaving the platform in droves. There's no one _to_ talk about it with. Entire teams (including high ranking executives) that kept relationships with advertisers have been fired. Twitter doesn't even have anyone answering / categorizing the compl…

Advertisers dropped spending because they don't like Elon/his behavior. Not because sales staff were laid off. It's quite obvious to anybody looking at the situation objectively. Twitter has functioned fine after massive layoffs, and feature velocity has only accelerated. Too many developers have an inflated sense of self importance

> Twitter has functioned fine after massive layoffs, and feature velocity has only accelerated

Feature velocity for users. Not customers. Also, the deprecation of APIs strongly intimates Twitter Blue was a failure.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#137

Post by birdymcbird »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #25

It's hard not to read some of these stories and not think that somehow some of these companies are free-riding on the ability to do some firings with minimal pushback because of the "well, look at what everyone else is doing!" climate that exists now. I'm having a hard time teasing out how much of this is driven by some sort of fundamental analysis of the economy, some collective BigCo CEO shared thinking, or, at my…

msft is a business..not charity.

my experience at two big tech companies said this extremely overdue.

especially since about 2012.. lots of added head count. managers and sr. managers and directors #1 priority on increasing head count to grow empires and get promotions. it elephant in the room supported by easy US fed policy. uncomfortable truth these people dont want to admit.

what is vision for these new teams? if stock price is $100/share does director X’ org contribute $.50 or $1 or $10? many teams are negative contributors to this equation.

actually much of $ attribution and downstream impact was gamed. the founders and their protege slowly left and replaced with professional managers. no vision. no obsession with features. little thought to value. instead they see prestigious job. “i have 150 people report to me.” that kind of discourse mainstream. indirect way of bragging “look how important i am.”

maybe 15% of employees at both companies providing actual value building new things that bring revenue. another 15-20% just support legacy cruft with software patches. no feature work. no innovation. large teams of engineers and managers resting and vesting.

it is honestly entitlement and horrible joke. why these people entitled to $200-500k+ salaries??? its like this country built fake economic class of worker. little to no economic output.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#138

Post by NickC25 »

ejb999 wrote: post #57

I have a feeling Apple will be next - CEO announces he will be taking a huge pay cut in compensation was maybe an effort for him to preemptively show he is 'sharing the pain' (though 'only' 50M comp is not really much pain)

True, but didn't the amount of stock he took versus cash actually increase?

Could be wrong, probably am, but I thought I saw that his base pay dropped significantly but his stock options and grants were virtually untouched if not raised.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#140

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

adam_arthur wrote: post #108
dragontamer wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with seeming negligible external-facing impact on the core product. Twitter is said to have lost $2.5 Billion/year in advertiser money, largely because Twitter's sales teams have not been returning emails from worried Advertisers. That's a pretty huge impact on Twitter's #1 revenue stream (estimated to be $5 Billion in 2021). Twitter's core product is advertisements. Without sales staff to keep the advertisers, the…

Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. Don't think Twitter's revenue issues have anything to do with sales staff. Advertising channels/campaigns can and should be 100% automated.

> Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs

Desperation from the remaining devs? I mean, I can crank out crap as fast as anyone wants me to if it doesn't have to work right.

Post reply on HN