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Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

bloomberg.com

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Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#71

Post by londons_explore »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #46
raz32dust wrote: post #19

I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry ins…

1. I think the infrastructure costs is probably more than you think. It’s probably the single biggest line item. They have to encode every video stream to multiple formats, and then deliver it globally. 2. The core product is pretty mature. 3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make. 4. Most of their revenue is split with content creators. 5. They lost their CEO about a year ago. New guy has to…

> Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make.

Every member of staff fired now has a beef with the company, and being a social media company those staff will probably be big social media users with quite a lot of influence. Some may set up competitors or just badmouth you and your product.

Elon discovered this the hard way.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#73

Post by matrix_overload »

madcadmium wrote: post #3

The remaining employee's workloads are about to increase 50%

People fundamentally misunderstand how this works.

For a large enough product company there's always a years-long queue of feature requests, fixes, optimizations, and other things to do. All of it will never get done! The doable amount of highest-priority items will get picked through a combination of pressures from different people and departments, and will get more or less implemented.

If you cut the workforce by 50%, instead of doing 30% of the infinitely growing backlog, you'll do 15%. Since most of the completed work gets obsoleted or thrown away due to various inefficiencies, there will be some effect, but it will be far from dramatic.

As for the individual workload, you'll carry as much as you let the company put on your back. And that mostly depends on your negotiating skill, and somewhat on the supply/demand dynamics of the current labour market. The latter will tough for the couple of years, but the former is up to you to level up.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#74

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

Brybry wrote: post #50
raz32dust wrote: post #19

I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry ins…

I think viewership peaked in 2021 and has been flat or down since then. [1][2][3] I know some of my friends watch Twitch less because the ad policy became toxic. [1] https://twitchtracker.com/statistics [2] https://sullygnome.com/longtermstats [3] https://streamscharts.com/overview#:~:text=Twitch%20growth%2...

Basing ‘peak’ of a streaming service on a time when people were forced to be indoor seems like a bad metric. They (probably/hopefully) won’t see that rate of growth organically, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the peak.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#75

Post by hot_gril »

minimaxir wrote: post #24
nicce wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More profits. Simple as that.

Even in late-stage capitalism, you do a 5-10% staff cut at most to trim the fat so-to-speak. A 35% cut indicates something with the business is fundamentally wrong. EDIT: I apologize for the completely unintentional derail.

I can see 35% of the workforce at a company with a mature product like Twitch doing nothing, or working on random extra features that no longer make sense when interest rates go up. Idk if you'd call it fundamentally wrong, it made sense at a different time.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#77

Post by refulgentis »

raz32dust wrote: post #19

I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry ins…

It's happening at every tech company, over and over again, quietly and loudly.

Unfortunately tech is probably the ur-contrarian and ur-isolated field, and from the reactions I see to this, I worry there will never be a systemic response by employees.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#78

Post by londons_explore »

asdfasdflkj211 wrote: post #26
raz32dust wrote: post #19

I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry ins…

You answered your own question. Twitch is solid and well-built. It doesn't need an army of well-paid engineers to maintain it and isn't seeing a great ROI on new features. Some companies repurpose all, many or some engineers when the spreadsheet says to, others fire them wholesale.

Not many people realise this. Engineers build stuff. When your product is feature complete, you can get rid of most of them.

Big tech companies keeping tens of thousands of engineers on staff despite their core product not seeing substantial changes for years are just wasting money.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#79

Post by summerlight »

raz32dust wrote: post #19

I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry ins…

I guess Twitch is probably not in an area of profitable business given the infrastructure cost of video streaming services, especially in that it cannot enjoy all the cost optimization like Netflix/YouTube due to its nature of live streaming.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#80

Post by aaomidi »

matchbok wrote: post #65
thot_experiment wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sell your soul. You have to be capable of looking at people and erasing their humanity/removing your empathy.

How dare those people build a business and create jobs! They must have no humanity. Geez.

Most execs aren't founders
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