Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

blog.twitch.tv

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 240 posts

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#51

Post by tobyjsullivan »

mym1990 wrote: post #39
gretch wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Federal reserve interest rates. When interest rates are low, money flows more freely. When interests rates are up, it's harder to lend/borrow, money flows less freely, and the economy cinches up as a whole. This is a major simplification to a very complex system, but it happens because e.g. as someone with money, you'd rather just put it into a government bond that will for sure pay you 4%, rather than chasing specul…

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.

Is the commonality tech companies or high-growth companies?

(Virtually all high-growth companies are tech companies but I don’t think the inverse is true - unless that’s how we define “tech” now which is plausible.)

High-growth companies include both those that plan to grow fast and those that are growing fast. The general theory is nobody really knows how big such a company can grow. (eg, Amazon circa 2006 is dominating e-commerce. Can it get any bigger? Spoiler: yes it can.)

So these companies offer an opportunity: invest money to build more teams doing effectively random trials and see what sticks.

This is the investment opportunity the parent comment described and that’s the calculus that’s changed.

What I find interesting is the same trade-off applies to both profitable and unprofitable companies. Unprofitable startups are deciding where to burn their runway, weighing against the projected cost of raising on more. Profitable companies are deciding where to re-invest profits or whether to pay dividends to shareholders.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#52

Post by djent »

umeshunni wrote: post #27
jacooper wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Twitch is owned by Amazon? They don't need VCs?

Their source of revenue (i.e. advertisers) are often startups and DTC brands that were kept alive by VC money.

I have never seen an advertisement for a startup on Twitch.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#53

Post by ryanSrich »

gtirloni wrote: post #3

> Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment I must be living under a rock because, outside big tech self-inflicted wounds, I don't know what they are talking about. Is it Ukraine? SVB? Chinese housing market?

SVB as an excuse for any company turmoil is criminal. Literally nothing happened. Everyone got all of their money. If any company uses SVB as an excuse they must be named and ridiculed for lying.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#55

Post by ryanSrich »

mdavidn wrote: post #5
gtirloni wrote: post #3

> Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment I must be living under a rock because, outside big tech self-inflicted wounds, I don't know what they are talking about. Is it Ukraine? SVB? Chinese housing market?

The "macroeconomic environment" is the evaporation of available VC funding because higher interest rates provide more lucrative investments elsewhere.

Huh? LPs don’t put money into a VC fund for 4% returns that they can get on bonds. They do it mostly out of diversification. Usually looking for 10-100x. Why would that change?

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#56

Post by dathinab »

squarefoot wrote: post #36

I'd be curious to see how the sudden surge of available workforce is affecting the average salaries in the IT, compared to other fields that weren't touched so badly by the layoff wave.

There had been a huge deficit of qualified worker due to SV/FANG/.. sponging them up.

So we likely won't go to a oversupply situation.

But as under-supply decreases and in turn saleries should fall.

But then salaries had been in some contexts so high that most startups couldn't afford paying it, so just by accepting this salaries without them falling the average would fall.

So I don't expect the salaries for mid to high qualified IT workers to fall too much outside of SV, and especially outside of the US. Like it still will be a pretty well paying job, just not necessary through the moon high salaries.

Through it might get a bit harder for low qualified IT workers, much harder if they are unlucky wrt. current AI development.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#58

Post by ryandrake »

> 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 that passive, vague non-word again: "impacted". Such a milquetoast way to say "something happened" but without that pesky specificity.

> "user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations"

So, they are growing, but not growing faster than some [arbitrary] goal?

> "In order to run our business sustainably"

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.

> "we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce"

This is what I don't get about all of these layoff letters. It's always the same thing: We're growing, our revenue is growing, and [usually unsaid] our costs are growing. So why not just arrest the cost growth? Stop the bleeding, don't start amputating limbs. I can understand layoffs when your business is running at a loss, not when it's growing.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#59

Post by calderknight »

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…

I think the companies have employees to try to make more money. When things are going really well in the economy it's easy for employees to create/capture lots of value, so the companies hire lots of employees to do that. But when the economy slows down a bit, suddenly it's a lot more difficult for employees to create value, so it doesn't make sense not to reduce the number of employees.

Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

#60

Post by klysm »

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…

Because we’ve set up the incentive structures to make growth the most important thing. Shares increase when you grow - the revenue barely matters to the people in control
Post reply on HN