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Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

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Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#221

Post by pcorsaro »

Rastonbury wrote: post #191
pcorsaro wrote: post #108

Every one of these companies doing layoffs says something like what's in this update: "user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations." I find it really hard to believe that all of these companies assumed that growth during Covid was sustainable and would just continue into eternity. I have a small restaurant supply business. Our revenue was up almost 50% above our best year ever. We knew there was n…

I'm curious if you own any stocks, did you own then sell any tech companies or after covid up to mid 2022?

Just index funds for the most part. I don't attempt to time the market really. I assume you're implying that if I had known things were going to slow down I should have made a fortune trading stocks. I'm not saying anyone had a crystal ball for when the market was going to slow down. I think that's kind of a fools errand for most retail investors. All I'm saying is these companies keep making statements saying that growth didn't meet expectations. It just feels really disingenuous to me is all I'm saying.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#222

Post by savingsPossible »

bigtunacan wrote: post #216
savingsPossible wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Unionize and vote (if there is someone to vote, I don't think that is usually the case in the US)

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#223

Post by savingsPossible »

Panzer04 wrote: post #149
savingsPossible wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maximising profits might come at the expense of the worker, but it benefits the economy as a whole. The reason maximising profits is such an excellent goal is because it indirectly leads to maximising profit per worker (especially in lean times, when there's less cash to go around and you focus more on efficiency as opposed to revenue). The highest net benefit to society comes from having the highest possible product…

If the metric is important (and it might well be! -- I bet it is) it needs not translate into more profit for amazon.

Say you want to maximize efficiency, and you think revenue per worker is a good proxy. Then you can use the extra resources for: * charitable donations * keeping the employees and putting them in an open-source charitable division

I agree that market forces are powerful and can be used to do good things. I disagree that this fact should be used to justify evil behavior and greed

(also, laying A off and hiring B is ok -- they are not, they are reducing the workforce)

(also, the argument is symmetrical. If they had not hired, and were profiting too much, I'd think that almost as greedy and evil -- the difference is the disruption of the life of the person fired)

(also, firing A and giving the money away to some charitable cause is ok)

(also, profit maximization pure and simple is ok, as long as the government has the balls to take a lot of it and redistribute, to keep capitalists from concentrating too much money -- concentration leads to distortions, in the sense that the needs of the ultra rich are prioritized. The point of having a healthy economy is to have people in general live more and better lives.)

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#224

Post by misssocrates »

arrty88 wrote: post #157
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…

They were staffed for 10x and only seeing 2x. Probably shutting down a lot of growth projects that aren’t showing promise.

"Those who thought it was free money are now discovering that they have to pay for it retrospectively." -Nassim Taleb

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#225

Post by misssocrates »

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…

Because interest rates went up.

When money was free they overhired. Now that's it's expensive they have to unwind.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#226

Post by mym1990 »

gretch wrote: post #49
mym1990 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is the case, why are layoffs currently mostly in the tech sector and not everywhere? Unemployment budged .2% from Jan - Feb but this is hardly indicative of anything.

Because tech ballooned the most during the covid reaction. e.g. META has roughly doubled in headcount since 2020. Now it is laying off a fraction of that new headcount. I'm sure there's a similar stat for Amazon/Twitch. And think about how much stuff people were buying on Amazon when everything was closed. Think about how many hours of twitch were watched when it was illegal to do anything else. You can't look at e.g…

Everyone responded with essentially the same thing: that tech over hired, which is not something I am disputing. But parent comment mentioned the economy cinching up as a whole when interest rates rise, but we are not seeing that(yet).

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#227

Post by dehrmann »

bart_spoon wrote: post #209
dehrmann wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does this have to do with WFH? The point is that teams are tasked with meaningless projects, which they deliver on, but because the project was meaningless, they get axed for not producing value. They were doomed from the start, due to the strategic initiatives management mistakenly decided they should work on. This is occurs for both WFH and in person work.

My theory is it's harder to be critical of meaningless projects and align on what's meaningful when remote.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#228

Post by listenallyall »

bigtunacan wrote: post #216
savingsPossible wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The vast, vast majority of actors in SAG make far less money than software developers. Only a small percentage earn enough to not require some other job.

Yes, famous actors get paid millions, they aren't really the people SAG is trying to protect.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#229

Post by bigtunacan »

listenallyall wrote: post #228
bigtunacan wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The vast, vast majority of actors in SAG make far less money than software developers. Only a small percentage earn enough to not require some other job. Yes, famous actors get paid millions, they aren't really the people SAG is trying to protect.

Most famous actors didn't start out that way so I would still argue it is.

It also doesn't change the fact that software engineers largely tend to be anti-union while simultaneously protesting things unions are designed to protect.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#230

Post by justapassenger »

bart_spoon wrote: post #210
justapassenger wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can understand layoffs when your business is running at a loss, not when it's growing. Do you revisit your personal budget only once you run out of money, or once your income changes?

Mass layoffs aren’t the same as revisiting a personal budget. They are fairly drastic measures. To use your analogy, a layoff while revenue is growing is like continuing to get raises at work, but when this years raise isn’t as high as you expected, you start pawning off possessions for the cash. If times were dire, perhaps it makes sense. If you are still making money, it seems more prudent to tamp down on new purch…

Employees are huge ongoing cost.

You leased expensive new car, expecting to get a big raise. Big raise didn't happen. Do you keep the car?

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