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Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

blog.twitch.tv

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Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#211

Post by Vaslo »

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…

Setting targets for your business is not arbitrary. No business with investors just dials in an easy forecast. All investors demand growth with profit, otherwise they would put their money elsewhere. Goals are not set to make employee lives easy.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#212

Post by Vaslo »

yunohn wrote: post #185
camhart wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want to say, investors getting returns should be a goal of every for profit company (whos taken investor $$). Thats why investors risk their capital. That capital is responsible for the growth of most major tech companies. Its responsible for most jobs at tech companies. Not saying this is an excuse to treat employees poorly. They're just as vital as the capital (employee hours is often quite literally whats b…

Having money should not be worth more than doing the work. Same goes for landlords.

Except for this whole thing called “risk” that investors and landlords undertake as part of the process.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#213

Post by chatmasta »

vecter wrote: post #167
chatmasta wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s easy to comment like this from afar, but would you actually send this message if you were the CEO?

No, and the fact I'm not the CEO is why I can give a more accurate version of the statement.

However, if I were the CEO of Twitch I'd like to think I could produce a statement more direct and less impersonal than the one they did release.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#214

Post by dangus »

Panzer04 wrote: post #146
dangus wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 espec…

You want to make it even harder to get a job? The better the benefits you mandate for firing/leaving employees, the more onerous companies become about bringing on more manpower (and eventually, lower wages as a whole since they have to fund an additional 10% or whatever whenever someone leaves). You're arguing that companies should implement these measures at the cost of just hiring people? "Companies would actually…

This idea you bring up that the jobs will evaporate when businesses are regulated sounds logical, but it’s a trap.

McDonald’s didn’t wait for the minimum wage to go up to be motivated to install automated drink dispensing machines and self-service kiosks. In fact, the minimum wage adjusted for inflation was decreasing during the entire time period in which those innovations were deployed.

On the other end of the labor spectrum, companies like Meta had no problem hiring thousands of excess employees during a period of high wage growth and scarce tech talent.

When labor generates revenue, companies will hire regardless of regulations. When labor is unnecessary for revenue, no regulation will prevent a company from downsizing.

Extra, guaranteed severance pay and a reduced unemployment insurance bureaucratic burden would be a godsend for terminated employees. I argue that for most businesses it would be a minor adjustment to their standard operating procedures.

An analogy to your point: “Cars will be too expensive if safety standards are required.”

While it’s true that cars are more expensive than they would be without those safety features, the market has adjusted just fine and the societal benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#215

Post by vecter »

chatmasta wrote: post #213
vecter wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s easy to comment like this from afar, but would you actually send this message if you were the CEO?

No, and the fact I'm not the CEO is why I can give a more accurate version of the statement. However, if I were the CEO of Twitch I'd like to think I could produce a statement more direct and less impersonal than the one they did release.

Fair. What would you say?

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#216

Post by bigtunacan »

savingsPossible wrote: post #135
listenallyall wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You can be reasonable from your point of view, and still be evil and nasty and selfish. I'll bite the bullet: damn maximizing profits. It's a bad, inhuman goal. You got people creating things other people enjoy and are making money. That is more than enough, more than most people get. When you maximize profit at the expense of your workers, instead of just keeping it sustainable, you are acting like an evil, nasty, s…

It is possible to both understand why businesses operate the way they do and to sympathize with people who have lost their jobs as a result of how businesses operate.

If you really hate how businesses operate you have a couple of options. You can go work for a non-profit, a public university, or somewhere similar. They generally are lower stress, higher retention, but significantly less pay. That's the tradeoff.

You can unionize to get some worker protections, but of course this is Hacker News where no one wants to unionize because they think it's beneath them; nevermind that even film actors who make orders of magnitude more money have even unionized.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#217

Post by ryandrake »

edanm wrote: post #171
machinawhite wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you also employ people and managers and use your personal budget solely to make profit instead of buying food? Stop the weird analogies

It's not a weird analogy, it's a great analogy. Companies don't use their budget only for profit and not to "buy food", that's a ridiculous assertion. Companies get income, the use it to pay for all the operations that went into making that income, usually mostly salaries. Only what's left over is profit. And if a company sees that next year, when it expected income of 100m, it instead will only get 80m, that differe…

I think we are confusing derivatives here. No, when my income is growing from year to year, but just growing a little slower, I don't revisit my personal budget. I think these company leaders are seeing the second (or third) derivative starting to go down, and are panicking without actually losing money (base measurement) or revenue (first derivative).

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#218

Post by kup0 »

ipsum2 wrote: post #28

The CEO and founder of Twitch announced a week ago that he was leaving the company. It's admirable to see a captain going down with his ship. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35184011

Yes how convenient of him to step down days before having to make a difficult announcement and instead pawning it off on the new interim CEO instead.

So admirable. How this could be characterized as "going down with his ship" is absolutely wild to me

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#219

Post by yunohn »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #198
yunohn wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having money should not be worth more than doing the work. Same goes for landlords.

Then don't take the money. You don't need seed money to make a business. You can just spend all your time instead. You might get to the point where you'll value that money more. Or not.

Are you positing that companies should never go public?

Or even if public, that there is no physical limit we can impose on growth expectations?

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#220

Post by yunohn »

Vaslo wrote: post #212
yunohn wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having money should not be worth more than doing the work. Same goes for landlords.

Except for this whole thing called “risk” that investors and landlords undertake as part of the process.

And that’s exactly the problem - risk does not confer inherent value. The employees are also taking on significant risk - clearly, if things go even slightly south for investors, they fire the employees first!
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