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Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

blog.twitch.tv

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Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#111

Post by geodel »

kibwen wrote: post #104
lanza wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wait, I thought revenue was growing! How is that not sustainable? If you just leave costs where they are and let revenue grow, you are by definition sustaining/growing the bottom line. Come on man, if you don't understand how a business can be showing signs of unhealthiness while still increasing revenue then don't post. That's such a trivial superficial analysis of reality. I'm not going to pretend to know or unde…

We should be holding the president of a multi-billion dollar corporation to a higher standard than a random HN commenter. If Dan Clancy wants to lie to our faces with this egregiously milquetoast corpo-speak, he does not deserve serious or good faith analysis of his words. He's bullshitting us, plain and simple, and I see no reason to smile, lick my lips, and ask politely for seconds.

Huh. If multi-billion dollar corporation executive is not going to do a corpo-speak, I don't really know who is supposed to be doing that.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#112

Post by kneebonian »

ryandrake wrote: post #69
varunjain99 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, a company doesn't exist to just be profitable. But to maximize profits (mostly). So it's certainly possible that cutting costs - even when profitable - can increase short-term and long-term profitability.

So why didn't they do it a year ago? Or two years ago, or three? It would have increased profitability at that time, too. How did dozens of already-profitable companies all suddenly decide together to cut costs within 6 months of each other? I wish they would be more specific than the "macroeconomic environment" excuse. I swear these CEOs are like soccer players running around the pitch, just waiting for Mister Macro…

That is preposterous the big tech companies would never do anything like cullouding with one another to depress salaries and reduce expenses, that is absolutely insane and conspiracy minded, I mean they super swore pinky promised they wouldn't do it after that one time Google and Apple did.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#113

Post by dantheman »

ilyt wrote: post #101
lanza wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wait, I thought revenue was growing! How is that not sustainable? If you just leave costs where they are and let revenue grow, you are by definition sustaining/growing the bottom line. Come on man, if you don't understand how a business can be showing signs of unhealthiness while still increasing revenue then don't post. That's such a trivial superficial analysis of reality. I'm not going to pretend to know or unde…

Or, the investors want their returns. If you don't understand how perfectly healthy business can be gutted just because investors want better number on next year's sheets and don't care about long term then don't post.

If you look around most companies especially with the way hiring has been the last few years, layoffs != gutting.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#114

Post by throwawayinvi »

ilyt wrote: post #101
lanza wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wait, I thought revenue was growing! How is that not sustainable? If you just leave costs where they are and let revenue grow, you are by definition sustaining/growing the bottom line. Come on man, if you don't understand how a business can be showing signs of unhealthiness while still increasing revenue then don't post. That's such a trivial superficial analysis of reality. I'm not going to pretend to know or unde…

Or, the investors want their returns. If you don't understand how perfectly healthy business can be gutted just because investors want better number on next year's sheets and don't care about long term then don't post.

[flagged]

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#116

Post by peyton »

kibwen wrote: post #104
lanza wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wait, I thought revenue was growing! How is that not sustainable? If you just leave costs where they are and let revenue grow, you are by definition sustaining/growing the bottom line. Come on man, if you don't understand how a business can be showing signs of unhealthiness while still increasing revenue then don't post. That's such a trivial superficial analysis of reality. I'm not going to pretend to know or unde…

We should be holding the president of a multi-billion dollar corporation to a higher standard than a random HN commenter. If Dan Clancy wants to lie to our faces with this egregiously milquetoast corpo-speak, he does not deserve serious or good faith analysis of his words. He's bullshitting us, plain and simple, and I see no reason to smile, lick my lips, and ask politely for seconds.

The last guy fucked up and overhired. Now this guy is fixing it. What do you want him to say?

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#117

Post by chatmasta »

ryandrake wrote: post #58

> Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations. In order to run our business sustainably, we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce. Let's just take a moment to admire this paragraph. > "our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment" There's th…

Here's a better version:

> Everyone else is firing people. So it seemed like a good time to fire some people.

> We found 400 people to fire, which sounded like a good number because it's not as big as 500. None of them seemed to be doing anything useful, so we fired them.

> The product will not be affected and as a user you will notice no difference whatsoever.

> Signed, some anonymous guy who took over after our CEO stepped down this week so you can't blame him for firing people.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#118

Post by smohare »

dehrmann wrote: post #107
onlypositive wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, this is basically it. My team at work hasn't created any meaningful value in a year. We've shipped nonstop but the things were tasked to work on just don't work out or even if they are well received simply don't add up to our salaries.

This is going to get a lot of hate, but the common refrain about WFH is "my productivity is up." That might be true, but it doesn't mean you're producing the right things, and I've found that harder to do remotely.

[dead]

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#119

Post by lakomen »

listenallyall wrote: post #110
ryandrake wrote: post #58

> Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations. In order to run our business sustainably, we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce. Let's just take a moment to admire this paragraph. > "our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment" There's th…

Leave costs where they are? Inflation likely causing many of their inputs to increase. Employees tend to want raises, bonuses and stock options. Health insurance basically always goes up. Customers demanding more features/quality (i.e. faster streams, 4k) while bandwidth/server costs rising. Marketing visibility often set via competitive bidding or auctions. They already reduced what they pay to their content creator…

> How do you know Twitch isn't?

They wrote that they're profiting, in the initial post, just not as much as they'd like to. Profit isn't loss.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#120

Post by dangus »

lanza wrote: post #89
ryandrake wrote: post #58

> Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations. In order to run our business sustainably, we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce. Let's just take a moment to admire this paragraph. > "our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment" There's th…

> Wait, I thought revenue was growing! How is that not sustainable? If you just leave costs where they are and let revenue grow, you are by definition sustaining/growing the bottom line. Come on man, if you don't understand how a business can be showing signs of unhealthiness while still increasing revenue then don't post. That's such a trivial superficial analysis of reality. I'm not going to pretend to know or unde…

The truth of the matter is that companies aren't monetarily incentivized to avoid layoffs.

Layoffs cost almost nothing. Companies aren't required to pay full salaries or provide any healthcare/benefits for any reasonable period of time after a layoff.

I think even the 3 month notice period from the WARN Act is a pretty crap amount of time to provide for employees who have been terminated.

For a software company especially, they can pull a Twitter and leave the business on autopilot with the code that has already been written and axe most employees. It's not really a big deal to get rid of employees then hire them back 6 months later, but it really should be.

Also, companies like Twitter prove that the WARN Act can just be outright violated while employees are left to fight court battles they can't afford nor have time to fight.

Then you look at unemployment benefits where in most states the whole process is overly bureaucratic and wasteful system that doesn't come close to anything resembling a replacement for salary. I think that whole system would work better and be able to send more money to the unemployed if it was just automatic payments without all the overhead of having people on staff processing applications and answering phones to deal with questions, appeals, etc.

Instead, just continue all terminated employees' salary and healthcare benefits for 3-6 months after termination automatically on the employer's dime. Implement something like that and watch as our boom and bust economy gets a lot less mountainous. Companies would actually have to try and make an educated choice about whether or not to hire someone.

Companies should only be able to dispute unemployment in cases of clear and obvious misconduct. I don't even think that low performing employees who showed up and made some level of half-assed effort should have unemployment benefits revoked. Isn't the hiring of a low-performing employee the fault of the employer for not sufficiently vetting the candidate?

Maybe what I'm proposing is too extreme, I don't know, but I think the status quo is way too lenient on businesses.

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