Twitter Plans Company Wide Layoffs Next Week
recode.net
recode.net
If it's actually engineering I'm sure they'll all have jobs in a week but it's still hard to find talent so why wouldn't they just move people around?
Not necessarily. This information could have come from some low-level employee who happened to overhear a conversation between two managers.
The CEO and his inner circle of executives can't just lay off hundreds of employees on their own. They need to involve lots of lower-level managers in this planning, since upper management generally has no idea what each employee is doing and how essential they are to the company. So they ask each of their direct reports to make a list. And once dozens of people know that layoffs are coming, it's difficult to keep it a secret.
see image, nos. 76 and 81 also seem odd to rank higher - http://imgur.com/gNXJsoy
interesting because their earlier version of the story has a lot more mentions in my Twitter timeline than the Times story, which was later and has more background.
Twitter have been taking on staff faster than their userbase has been growing since their IPO. I guess the question now is how many they are going to layoff - 4,200 employees is a lot of people for something like Twitter.
Wow - what do all these people do?
As far as engineering, take a look: https://about.twitter.com/careers/teams/software-engineering
Many companies are much more complex than you might imagine from the outside. Also, a lot of it is meta-headcount: managers, facilities, food service, payroll, benefits, recruiters, lawyers, HR people, etc. all scale at least partially with headcount.
You'll notice many of the jobs are with companies Twitter has acquired or various platform-level projects, like Fabric, Vine, TellApart, Finagle, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
When you are a manger with 5 direct reports, you want to increase the headcount to justify your existence: you go around looking for projects, and direct reports.