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

211–220 of 481 posts

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#211

Post by blueelephanttea »

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 mean you are very clearly not reading it right since the commenter's comment had nothing to do with suppressing news and only had to do with where paid advertisements are placed.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#212

Post by kristopolous »

tikhonj wrote: post #121
anonporridge wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mass layoffs give you the opportunity to quickly purge poor performers without as much paperwork. It's advantageous to have regular rolling layoffs because of this if you can justify them by economic conditions. There's also an effect of wanting to do smaller, pulsating layoffs over the course of many months or even years rather than one massive layoff of the size you actually need, because ultimately no one knows ex…

> Mass layoffs give you the opportunity to quickly purge poor performers without as much paperwork. It's advantageous to have regular rolling layoffs because of this if you can justify them by economic conditions. I've heard people say this, but it seems contrary to how layoffs are run in practice: • entire teams or divisions are often laid off with no eye towards individual employees' tenure, experience or skills •…

I've never seen a cold and calculated layoff. It's always been exasperated irrational arm-waving risk mitigation. The "good" people aren't kept - instead it's the ones that can navigate the political waters.

For every one competent executive there seems to be 3 deluded narcissistic idiots who will slash and burn people who are overqualified and under-utilized for the positions they've been incompetently assigned.

Now before you think I'm a victim of layoffs, I'm actually the political navigator. I constantly survive layoffs as I see the most talented people get let go and the best teams get broken up and reassigned, it's nuts.

One of the best techniques is to get yourself into what I call a "management island" - essentially you have either 0 or many bosses, just not 1. The next one is to be associated with a small bet - essentially a cheap investment that may yield a great long-term payoff, preferably related to the company cash cow. A third technique is to not attend too many events. Vagueness works in your favor. People should know generally but not specifically what you do. With details comes critiques so keep it ambiguous by staying quiet.

If you survive a layoff then you must not let a good crisis go to waste. Use the fog of the firing and the power vacuum to resituate yourself into this political dynamic as the dust settles. Of course these techniques only work at large companies.

I learned all of these techniques from years in management. There's more but that's a good start

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#213

Post by kradroy »

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?

You have it the wrong way around. The advertiser will ask for the ads to be suppressed or removed from negative contexts, because that's part of the service they pay for.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#214

Post by colechristensen »

pavlov wrote: post #181
colechristensen wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wh…

> “Probably some advertiser tools were broken and the people who’d been talking to those advertisers had been fired, but those are all temporary.” How is that temporary if — as it appears — the new management has fired the engineering teams which developed the ad tools, and also has no intentions of hiring more people to replace those ad sales teams?

Is it not obvious?

Are you suggesting that Twitter is not going to have developers work on ad tools any longer? Are you suggesting that sales and customer relations for advertisers are just no longer going to be jobs that anyone does and Twitter is going to just hope and pray they get ad money?

Yes lots of reorganization happens, lots of jobs were lost, but, duh, the work is still going to be done, even if there is a re-org gap.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#215

Post by iosono88 »

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.

[dead]

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#216

Post by syngrog66 »

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.

rat traps: me too. the bucket with the trick plate dropping them down?

over the past 2 to 3 weeks the ads shown to me have gotten more and more small fish, bottom of barrel, and wildly unfitting for me. and weird.

its easy to predict the ones I'm seeing are by advertisers bidding much lower $ than the previous average. reasonable to extrapolate and predict Twitter's advertising income has likely crashed. I've heard from enough other people all experiencing the same shift over the same period

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#217

Post by ReflectedImage »

adam_arthur wrote: post #160
morelisp wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Advertisers dropped spending because they don't like Elon/his behavior. I mean, yeah? If someone fired all my contacts at a company and didn’t return my emails as my revenue dropped as a result of their changes I would also stop paying them?

Thanks for confirming

Twitter has lost 75% of it's employees, 50% of it's revenue and gained 25% more debt.

It's gone from a break even company to financial ruination.

Twitter is shutting down data centers and offices. Elon Musk has single handedly collapsed the company.

Twitter will shortly be either bankrupt or personally funded by Elon Musk's bank balance by the end of the year.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#218

Post by cmorgan31 »

heywhatupboys wrote: post #183
yalogin wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Elon's new "extreme right wing beyond conspiracy theories" stance wow that sounds insane? I wish you would have had a source attached to this (an actual source btw, not some online journalist writing an opinion piece)

You are asking for the impossible. It would take a fiscal quarter for a source that isn’t an opinion. Perhaps the OP should not include Elon’s insane approach to content moderation as a new stance but simple negligence by the adtech strategy they’ve devised. In either case Elon’s going to need to adjust in some capacity or adopt the chum ad approach to monetize his content.

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#219

Post by applejacks »

simplotek wrote: post #150
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?

> Why would they spend any amount much less $3b or $10b to keep people they don’t need/want? I understand that HN is a US-centric forum, where neoliberalism dictates the baseline and the interpretation of all things in life is reduced to a simplistic transaction in a theoretical free market. However, society is comprised of people with family and a personal life and hopes and dreams and aspirations. Hiring someone ha…

Is it neoliberalism specifically, or even just generally living in a capitalist society? (Which hey, I'm happy enough to live in a capitalist society, it has been good to me, but I definitely notice myself evaluating nearly everything through a financial or transactional lens).

Re: Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

#220

Post by vkou »

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.

Do we have an independent source that doesn't have a history of dishonesty confirming this? Does it have a creative definition of 'shipping', 'feature', and 'faster'? Are there any long-tail dangers that have, or have the potential to blow up in Twitter's face from it?

My car goes faster and gets better MPG ever since I stripped out the weight of the braking system...

Post reply on HN