Microsoft to lay off 11k employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#201

Post by WWLink » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:02 PM UTC

shmatt wrote: post #101

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…

Corporate Americas' bloat has been the butt of many jokes for decades. Big tech is just as guilty. They still do want to keep high performers, which is usually why its not just a layoff announced, but a "re-organization", aka lets move all the high graded employees to other orgs and fire the lower graded ones

Naw I think it's more "let's get rid of all these heavily overpaid employees and replace them with cheaper ones" :D

Especially the ones that spend all day bragging about how they're a top performer on hackernews. :D

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#202

Post by honkler » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:03 PM UTC

rewtraw wrote: post #188

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…

Anecdotally, over the past few weeks the quality of ads I see on Twitter has deteriorated sharply. I used to primarily get ads from well known brands, but now I'm seeing ads for random products like rat traps.

I've been only seeing crypto-shilling and sports betting.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#203

Post by estebank » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:03 PM UTC

mardifoufs wrote: post #167

bentcorner wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter stopped working entirely for some 3rd party apps late last week. Dev communication looks extremely slim and the only comms has been a very vague tweet: "Twitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules. That may result in some apps not working."

But how is that relevant? Pulling the rug under third party apps is probably a bad move from Twitter, but everything seems to indicate that it was intentional and not just a breakage/outage caused by a shortage of staff.

Breaking SMS delivery, logins, increased number of 500 responses, failures in the recommendation engine, failures loading conversations and bugs galore, including displaying tweets of locked accounts you don't follow that someone you do follow replied to are some of the recent outages and bugs I can remember of the top of my head from the past 3 weeks.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#204

Post by aetherson » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:03 PM UTC

ctoth wrote: post #200

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…

> there's no reason why Southwest's advertisements should be shown in a negative light.. So basically there's been a team suppressing any really bad news about any company who advertises on Twitter? Am I reading that right? And you want them back?

That's not what your parent said: they said when there's any really bad news about a company who advertises on Twitter, that company doesn't want its ads shown right next to that news.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#205

Post by yCombLinks » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:04 PM UTC

gowld wrote: post #65

ethbr0 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assume a constant need to fire a decent chunk of the company. If you fire when everyone else is hiring, the market asks you if your growth prospects have dimmed. If you fire when everyone else is firing, the market says you're being financially responsible.

> Assume a constant need to fire a decent chunk of the company. Why? If you are so good at identifying poor performers, fire them, and reap the profits of being leaner, more effective organization. "The market" is a boogeyman used to rationalized everything.

Because every time you want to build a new product you risk that no one ends up wanting the product, or not enough people to justify keeping it going. Alternately once you have depleted all of your current ideas you don't have anything productive for those people to do.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#206

Post by dvt » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:05 PM UTC

adam_arthur wrote: post #148

objclxt wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. I don't know if deliberately breaking their developer API for third party clients counts as "shipping features faster than ever".

They obviously did that because the API is not benefiting them at all from a revenue perspective. If it were, they wouldn't have gotten rid of it. Twitter was run as a charity prior to the acquisition. Just as many VC fat tech companies were

> They obviously did that because the API is not benefiting them at all from a revenue perspective. If it were, they wouldn't have gotten rid of it.

Everyone hates on Dorsey because he essentially turned Twitter into a walled garden (killed third-party clients + RSS support), but really, how else are you supposed to make a startup that got millions in funding profitable? Just by giving your stuff away?

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#207

Post by Animats » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:06 PM UTC

Possibly a purge of the people who predate mobile.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#208

Post by RheingoldRiver » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:06 PM UTC

ctoth wrote: post #200

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…

> there's no reason why Southwest's advertisements should be shown in a negative light.. So basically there's been a team suppressing any really bad news about any company who advertises on Twitter? Am I reading that right? And you want them back?

I don't think it's that necessarily; instead, you could pause Southwest advertisements until the next news cycle for example, or look for keywords in tweets and avoid showing SW ads near such tweets (e.g. normally you want a SW ad near tweets with "airport" but for the next 5 days you want the opposite approach)

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#209

Post by lukevp » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:06 PM UTC

ctoth wrote: post #200

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…

> there's no reason why Southwest's advertisements should be shown in a negative light.. So basically there's been a team suppressing any really bad news about any company who advertises on Twitter? Am I reading that right? And you want them back?

No, I don’t think you read that correctly. The thing that’s removed is the advertisement, not the news. Eg if I tweeted “HackerNews sucks”, they would not want to pay to advertise on or near my tweet. They would rather advertise in a more neutral or positive space. Someone else could fill that advertising slot (eg. McDonald’s).

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#210

Post by merth » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 9:07 PM UTC

yalogin wrote: post #177

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…

Advertising revenue fell because of Elon's new "extreme right wing beyond conspiracy theories" stance. It is not because of the sales staff not responding to emails.

extreme right wing beyond conspiracy theory: water is wet