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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

#341

Post by VLM »

mason240 wrote: post #278
abrodersen wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love history podcasts! What's your site?

Thanks! It's History-Podcasts.com. I am a couple of months behind in putting in new shows, but there are over 200 there now.

That's a nice site. I remember when the entire marketplace was "The History of Rome" several years ago.

Consider ultra narrowcasting. I don't think the British History Podcast guy (who is awesome to listen to BTW and officially VLM endorsed) is going to demand the full $100 to advertise and would surely result in orders of magnitude more than five clicks, for example.

As a user of your service I'd advise that a big problem with podcasts that are essentially volunteer operations is long dry spells. The bulgarian history podcast, which is much more interesting than it sounds, although the intro music makes my kids cry, had a roughly five month dry spell this spring where I unsubscribed in my podcast catcher because I thought the podcast had completely died. Cool, its not dead. Now I should resubscribe although the point of this story is you need to automate or productize or make more efficient that process, not just dumb luck that I run into the guy who runs the site on HN so I click around some of my old favorites and holy cow the other BHP is back, thru pure luck.

There must be some kind of technological magic that could be spun somehow to help volunteers having a dry spell from having their audience melt away. Reminder service on the web or email to let people know dead podcasts have been resurrected? You might even be able to generalize this magic, whatever it is, to let people know about resurrected open source projects or similar.

"Its not dead, its just pining for the fjords".com or something

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

#342

Post by artursapek »

gozur88 wrote: post #136
artursapek wrote: post #6

I've always sort of had this question that continues to feel naive - but I'm not sure I know the answer: why do so many companies feel like they have to grow perpetually? Why can't Twitter just be happy being Twitter, knowing its limits and making a stable profit? Instead it's more users, more VC money, more staff... constantly burning as quickly as possible. There's a ceiling on every business; it's all bound to com…

>Why can't Twitter just be happy being Twitter, knowing its limits and making a stable profit? The short answer? Because they don't make money. I guess it's possible you could grow your company to a point where you say "Okay, we've filled our niche. Growing more doesn't make sense, so we'll just extract as much cash as we can." The problem is you have to make money to do that. Twitter doesn't make money and never has…

I think if Twitter settled down and optimized they could probably be making a healthy profit. That's sort of what I was getting at in my OP.

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

#343

Post by drspacemonkey »

mattmanser wrote: post #235
teej wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After years of being increasingly hostile to 3rd party developers, Twitter finally decided that you needed their permission to have more than 100k users of your twitter client. That announcement was bundled with tightened rate limiting and stricter controls over how you could display tweets. This was the final stake in the coffin for many Twitter clients. https://blog.twitter.com/2012/changes-coming-in-version-11-o..…

There was a period here on HN where every week or two they'd be a story or an Ask HN about someone hitting the limit and having to shut down. To add a bit more to the context to the parent, all these third party clients made it possible for people to use Twitter how they wanted to, to tailor it to them. Twitter decided they wanted you to use it in their way. It was a big shift in the culture of twitter. It's hard to…

The rate limit was bad, but the maximum user limit was a complete killer. Basically, if your app was a success, Twitter would shut it down. Overnight, it became a bad investment to make an app that tied into Twitter.

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

#344

Post by vog »

vog wrote: post #237
saiya-jin wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you are incorrect in assumption that burnout can happen only once you lose passion for your work The assumption is not only incorrect, but I believe it is exactly reverse: Losing passing is one of the consequences of a burn-out. It is not a cause, but instead one of the (most visible) symptoms.

To those who downvoted this: Do you care to explain why you don't think that burn-out leads to losing passion?

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

#345

Post by bluthru »

kbart wrote: post #177
bluthru wrote: post #166

Twitter should have a tweet quota and charge people who tweet too much. People who chase hashtags and reply with reaction gifs have turned it into low-brow garbage.

I'm pretty sure tweet count is used as a growth metric somewhere, so it's not gonna happen.

Too much tweeting caused them to summarize and ignore chronological order, so one would hope they realize that too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

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

#346

Post by VLM »

criddell wrote: post #325
user5994461 wrote: post #261

3800 employees, $2700M spent a year. That's 700k per employee. IT'S FREAKING INSANE! There are only 4 tech companies in the world who ever made more than $700k in revenue per head, in any recent years: SoftBank, Microsoft, Google, Apple http://uk.businessinsider.com/top-tech-companies-revenue-per...

I don't understand how Twitter ended up with almost four thousand employees. If I had to guess how many people worked there, I would have guessed at least an order of magnitude less than that. When Facebook acquired Instagram, didn't they have something like 15 employees?

Snekay VLM skill, don't tell anyone... business leaders will pretend internal organization is confidential, so all the twitter.com website reports is 40% of personnel are technical and if you've been around the block a few times, thats a way of saying 60% are in sales. So secret of them like trying to peer into the NSA. Then HR posts 50 bazillion job openings totally dropping the docs on every strategy the company has ... if I know which cities are hiring data center operations employees and what skill set they want, then I can tell you where the data centers roughly are, and in some cases exactly how they operate.

So don't tell any business leaders, let them stay in the dark about secrecy, but I can tell you purely as an outsider using their own websites for "about" and "careers" they have about 2000 people in sales, about 200 in engineering support of sales (aka data engineers). About 600 in operations (even 24x7 what is that small army doing?). Several hundred software developers of various requirement sets. A couple hundred deep research R+D types. My numbers are wrong and not in a quantity large enough to matter, at least for investment decisions.

In a way your estimate is about right, takes a couple hundred front line people to literally make it roll. Everyone else is trying to sell or support or develop or otherwise glom on. And are more or less disposable in that they aren't needed day to day to make the place roll. Yeah yeah I know, no accounting dept will get noticed after a couple quarterly taxes are missed, but just on a pure "who needs to show up tomorrow or else the doors close forever" that number is only in the hundreds.

I've been doing this since the 80s for my own investment purposes and stock trading based on published newspaper job reqs and more recently based on job postings is not legally insider trading. If I were to apply and gather data with or without signing a NDA that would be open and shut example of insider trading, so I never invest in companies I apply to work at, just to keep things perfectly clean.

I do extensively research jobs I apply to, and that sometimes freaks people out when I walk in and have insider level knowledge of their operations just from reading the last couple years of employment ads. Gotta keep the power level masked when its unnecessary. "wait wait wait, how could you know we're secretly opening a new engineering center in XYZ when we haven't even told our current employees they're all getting downsized?" "Well you put an ad in the paper to hire them in XYZ so what do you think I should assume, not my problem if your employees don't read the papers."

I was originally inspired by blackhat social engineering stuff from decades ago.. if they're trying to hide the make and model of the minicomputer you're dialing into, don't spend days trying everything when you can just read off the info from the employment ad for the "rsts 10.0 sysadmin" in the newspaper a year ago or whatever.

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

#347

Post by ng12 »

tootie wrote: post #128
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 a good product, but all Apple has to do is wave their hands and it's dead. If/when they launch their own product, third-parties fun will be over.

Fabric's been supporting Android since very early on. I'm sure they don't want to compete with Apple but it certainly wouldn't kill the platform either.

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

#348

Post by drspacemonkey »

mason240 wrote: post #278
abrodersen wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love history podcasts! What's your site?

Thanks! It's History-Podcasts.com. I am a couple of months behind in putting in new shows, but there are over 200 there now.

I don't know if you're taking show suggestions, but I'd like to recommend The Dollop. The Dollop is a bi-weekly* American History Podcast. Every week, Dave Anthony reads a story to his friend, Gareth Reynolds, who has no idea what the topic is going to be about.

It's hysterical, and has a huge following. They do live shows and everything. Just finished up a tour of Australia.

*(bi-weekly means whatever Dave wants it to mean)

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

#349

Post by TylerH »

Angostura wrote: post #213
Analemma_ wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have answered this before, and what it boils down to is: because they took VC money, and then went public. If you bootstrap a business from nothing and grow it on its own, then sustainable growth and stable profit is fine. But Twitter got VC and IPO money with a promise that it would have Facebook-like growth in return. I think the analogy I saw used was that they promised investors a Porsche and instead deliv…

I was at a startup in the UK before the first dotcom bust and we took VC money. It was extraordinary. A key metric that the VCs seemed to be interested in was head-count. We had this system that effectively acted as a trading exchange and I was sitting there saying 'hang on guys, with a little bit of work, this can pretty much be automated and you can sit back and watch the money roll in' but there was tremendous pre…

Measuring company growth by number of people employed is a clear indicator of why the dotcom bust was a bust.

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

#350

Post by napoleond »

forgetsusername wrote: post #327
napoleond wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> barely profitable Patrick wrote "year in review" posts going back to 2006, and they include full numbers, so you can see for yourself. Profit margins in 2014 (the most recent review) were at a whopping 60% across all his businesses. (See here: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/12/22/kalzumeus-software-year-... ) > closing down He sold his SaaS businesses, and they are operated by other people. Here's a podcast episode…

> whopping 60% across all his businesses Software built by 1 person will always have good margins. According to his numbers, BCC was making $60k in good years. 60% of that is $36k, which is a fraction of what a solid Dev can make (and an even smaller fraction of what he patio11 was making consulting). Clever side project income for sure, but not a staggering work of business genius.

Sure, and I suppose "barely profitable" could be interpreted as "producing a small amount of absolute profit", but I read it as "barely producing more revenue than expenses", which is obviously incorrect in this case.
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