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Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

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Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#221

Post by tomaskafka »

niftich wrote: post #18

Can we talk about Fabric again? Fabric [1] is a product done by Twitter but heavily de-emphasizes the Twitter association -- it's a value-added Twitter SDK that apps can build into themselves and get crash reporting (ex-Crashlytics) and ad network integration (MoPub) too. In the scheme of Twitter's self-reflection trying to figure out how to cut costs and find what it wants to do, do you feel Fabric fits into it? Do…

Fabric is an user tracking beacon. You cant sell targeted ads at scale without owning one.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#222

Post by tomaskafka »

niftich wrote: post #18

Can we talk about Fabric again? Fabric [1] is a product done by Twitter but heavily de-emphasizes the Twitter association -- it's a value-added Twitter SDK that apps can build into themselves and get crash reporting (ex-Crashlytics) and ad network integration (MoPub) too. In the scheme of Twitter's self-reflection trying to figure out how to cut costs and find what it wants to do, do you feel Fabric fits into it? Do…

Fabric is an user tracking beacon. You cant sell targeted ads at scale without owning one.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#223

Post by WA »

mdasen wrote: post #97
laluser wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they liable for those promises though? I am legitimately curious to know if they are contractually obligated to grow at a certain rate or be at certain valuation at this point in time.

They are not contractually obligated to grow at a certain rate. However, if the majority of your shareholders are members of the public looking to earn a return, they're your boss. You might be CEO, but if your priorities aren't their priorities, they'll replace you. Even if you own the majority voting control in the company, there's a certain amount of good-faith effort you need to put into growing the profits of th…

Insightful post, thank you.

I feel like Wikipedia is the only really high-traffic non-profit, but they're doing something that requires a lot less engineering (ie. most of the page can be easily cached and is the same for all users vs. Twitter).

WhatsApp comes to mind as an example of complex engineering (storing and delivering messages for millions) and they pulled it off with a small team at first. And more: once the core product is established/engineered, do you need as many people to maintain it?

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#224

Post by saiya-jin »

pud wrote: post #203
vog wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why this? Burnt-out entrepreneurs are failed entrepreneurs, aren't they? There's always a limit on how much time you can spend per day, and this limit is far below the time you are awake. Push it too far, and you do not only lose your working power, but also your motivation and your inspiration.

When an entrepreneur is excited about a thing she's building, the truthful answer to "how many hours per day do you work" is typically "zero or twenty-four, depending on what you consider work." I agree entrepreneurs can get burnt out, but at that point it's become a "job" and is probably time to move on.

you are incorrect in assumption that burnout can happen only once you lose passion for your work. one of endless examples in history - look up medical volunteers during WWI - passionate for saving lives all the time, yet burnout happened to many of those.

there are limits to stress your body can sustain, and your mind can be totally disconnected with it, pushing and pushing.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#225

Post by brooklyndude »

niftich wrote: post #113
Rapzid wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity, which ones have they developed?

Some software that Twitter has put out: [1] Heron, a realtime, distributed, fault-tolerant stream processing engine - https://github.com/twitter/heron [2] Finagle, a fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC system - https://github.com/twitter/finagle/ [3] FlockDB, a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database - https://github.com/twitter/flockdb [4] Gizzard, a flexible sharding framework for creating eventually-consisten…

Bootstrap too.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#226

Post by jqueryin »

One of Twitter's problem is not properly controlling their feed. I never use their mobile or web client. I solely use a highly customized Tweetdeck. With this experience, I never once see an advertisement. That's a huge loss for Twitter.

Perhaps it's just me, but I wouldn't have a problem seeing advertisements in my Tweetdeck feed if it meant they'd remain successful. I'd much rather see Twitter succeed as it's the only platform I use to keep up with thousands of professionals and news sources. It's entirely a different experience than Facebook.

I think the Twitter community should suck it up and accept the fact that they get served a couple of advertisements in order to support a news service and contend delivery network unlike any other in existence.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#228

Post by k__ »

trevelyan wrote: post #215
aub3bhat wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because your competitor can raise those million dollars, and eventually your 20k profit per month becomes 20k loss per month. You can build all your imaginary arguments about magical businesses that make 20k profit per month while being self-sustained with holocracy, cruelty free, authentic, organic etc. etc. But the reality is that doing big things at bigger scale requires huge capital. If you are willing to pass up…

This is a bitter comment, but it's so very true. The only thing I disagree with is the assumption that this is just a problem for companies that want to scale or - as someone commented down below - businesses that are "only" worth a few million a year and are presumably too small to attract VC attention.... Because maybe that holds for B2B businesses where no-one outside of the industry knows you exist, but for any B…

> This is a bitter comment, but it's so very true.

Only partly.

I mean, yes if you get competition you have to get a huge amount of money from somewhere, but the later you do it, the more money you get for much lesser 'cruel' VC wishes.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#229

Post by [deleted] »

nikcub wrote: post #199
rattray wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah, they only have 3800 employees and spend 2.7Bn/yr? That's 700k per employee. What's all that money for?

Stock options. It starts at the top: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cuplqd1XEAEre6n.jpg:large Being paid $72M p.a to oversee ~$500M p.a in losses. Great job if you can get it.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#230

Post by ryhamz »

mschuster91 wrote: post #206
retrogradeorbit wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats app comes to mind as a comparison. Far more complex. A billion customers. 35 engineers.

Nah, WA started as a 1:1 direct messaging service with next to no server storage - so all the backend had to do was to distribute the incoming messages to the recipient ASAP in order to keep storage load low. Twitter's backend is far more complex, you have a 1:n distribution (with n occasionally drifting into the double-digit million counts, like President Obama), and all the messages have to be archived and live sea…

Agreed. The keys to making whatsapp work were tuning an XMPP server for and the Erlang VM for performance, which takes a few very smart people, but not a large quantity.
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