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Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

blog.twitch.tv

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Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#121

Post by _alex_ »

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…

Zero growth or negative growth (real or nominal) are both cases that not keep pace with expectations.

What about that paragraph makes you think things are gangbusters but they have to lay people off?

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#122

Post by sigstoat »

peyton wrote: post #116
kibwen wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> What do you want him to say?

there's nothing that makes the HN comment section happy about these corporate communications. if some CEO literally fell on his sword in personal apology to these folks, they'd gripe about the blood stain.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#123

Post by listenallyall »

lakomen wrote: post #119
listenallyall wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They wrote that they're profiting, in the initial post

no, they didn't

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#125

Post by listenallyall »

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…

> Or two years ago, or three?

Because 3 years ago (2020), their average concurrent viewer count increased from 1.26 to 2.12 million and average monthly streamers grew from 3.6 to 6.9 million. Both nearly 100% growth. Then the next year they both grew by about 30%. The company, for good reason, probably thought they needed more people -- more support staff, more payments to process, more server admins, more HR people to support those other people, etc. But in 2022 growth declined, both viewers and streamers. It is still Q1 of the next year, a perfectly reasonable time to lay people off as future projections have been lowered.

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitch-statistics/

I know it's more fun to rant on HN and try to make corporate executives seem evil and nasty and selfish, but if you did a bit of research you'd see it is all pretty justifiable.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#127

Post by throw8383833jj »

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…

Jack welsh school of management: you've got to reward the top 20% and layoff the bottom 10%, about once a year. this is very much possible when there's an oversupply of labor.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#128

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#129

Post by odux »

dathinab wrote: post #50
maerF0x0 wrote: post #38

Twitch is an amazon property. This is likely simply an extension of the amazon layoffs.

unlikely as AFIK Amazone hasn't fully folded Twitch into it's structures additionally: Firstly Twitch due to historic reason is less likely to have any personal bloat. Secondly running a streaming platform isn't cheap (media live cross decoding, high data transfer, more requirements for the data transfer due to less buffering, still moderation and copyright detection, some licenses with big copyright holders etc.) an…

It is part of the larger Amazon layoffs announced today though: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/update-from-ce...
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