Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees

Post by pcurve » Tue, Mar 21, 2023, 12:52 AM UTC

gretch wrote: post #11

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?

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…

Post by TylerE » Tue, Mar 21, 2023, 12:52 AM UTC

varunjain99 wrote: post #63

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…

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.

Post by TylerE » Tue, Mar 21, 2023, 12:53 AM UTC

gotoeleven wrote: post #66

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…

You would also be angry if they wrote "we fired our 400 worst employees because we decided they're not worth their salaries" which also happens to be exactly true. Up there with anti-whiteboard-interview screeds, the critique-the-tone-of-a-layoff-post comment is a mainstay of the hacker news comment thread: as tiresome as it is uninteresting.

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 21, 2023, 12:56 AM UTC

tidepod12 wrote: post #68

hronic379 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Lots of false equivalence here. > What cash back do you get on your credit card? 2.625%? High yield savings account? Money market fund? 4.6%? None of these actions by me directly result in the loss of livelihood or uprooting of lives of other people. If you told me that by moving my money to a high yield savings account, it would result in my friends or family members losing their jobs, you bet your ass I wouldn't do…

Post by TylerE » Tue, Mar 21, 2023, 12:58 AM UTC

coredog64 wrote: post #45

runnerup wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Amazon (owner of twitch) care about that? They have tons of cash and revenues are still quite strong. AMZN isn’t looking for VC funding, they are the whale. Net income is hard to judge — yes it’s down but not only is Amazon famous for reinvesting all profits and claiming $0 of net earnings, but they’ve also been writing off a lot of one time charges for severances related to these layoffs.

Amazon needs to provide attractive returns to shareholders just like a unicorn. If you $AMZN is not up 5% YoY, then sell it and park it in a 6 month T-bill or I series bond. And as holder of $AMZN, I can tell you that they are definitely not up 5% YoY, let alone the 15% that they generally try to get to.