Twitter lays off around 20, shuts down engineering office in Bangalore, India | Hacker News Reader

Twitter lays off around 20, shuts down engineering office in Bangalore, India

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120 pointsdoppp89 comments

I feel like "lays off" is the wrong term here. If you're closing an office of 20 people at a company of 3,800, that feels more like firing a team for not producing, not making bottom-of-the-stack-rank cuts because you need to free up budget.

What do you think generates more clicks and thus more ad revenue, a dramatization of occurring events or the actual truth?

Each of those 20 people have lives and families. Not producing by whose measurement? Who defines that ,they were obviously hired for a particular job and have been doing it for a while and pretty well if they weren't fired before.

I wonder how much help Twitter is giving them in looking for their next jobs.

Maybe they were given ample prior notice, then Twitter reported only the actual closure, not the plan.

Not producing by twitter's measurement. If it was their fault, or their manager's or maybe it was simply a bad decision to open that office there, is completely irrelevant. What if they didn't have families, would their discomfort mean less to you?

>Each of those 20 people have lives and families. Not producing by whose measurement? Who defines that ,they were obviously hired for a particular job and have been doing it for a while and pretty well if they weren't fired before.

Don't necessarily disagree on the human impact, but this is a strange reasoning.

>Not producing by whose measurement?

Obviously by the one who hired them?

>Who defines that, they were obviously hired for a particular job and have been doing it for a while and pretty well if they weren't fired before.

Nobody is fired until they are fired. So by the same logic, everybody who wasn't fired immediately did their job "pretty well". Alternatives not considered:

(a) they did their a bad or mediocre job for a longish time, but company only ever cared to fire when money got tight, cuts needed to be made, performance review was completed and they came up empty.

(b) they did their job bad for a short time, and they're fired as soon as it was discovered.

Of course firing is can be also because they were hired for a specific project that they completed and now they no longer needed, or because the project went south or went out of favour with Twitter management and Twitter wants to kill it, etc.

Or they do their job perfectly well, but it doesn't bring Twitter the money it expected, so they are canned.

>I wonder how much help Twitter is giving them in looking for their next jobs

None? Like most employees? Besides maybe a good recommendation letter?

There is difference between reorg and firing, even though the result is loss of job for the individual. The person is not evaluated at individual basis rather at team or org level.

Anyway, just for those using this as india = underperf team train of thought, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and every respectable company under the Sun has a India team, are they on par with mothership, I do not know, but if they are not, some one doing it wrong.

And you're okay with an employer not offering any help beyond a recommendation letter and you're okay with not knowing whether or not Twitter is a supportive employer? I'm not, that's why I brought up. Perhaps the beginning of my comment isn't so great but it is damned important that we know what kind of support employees and former employees will get when they're fired and something that needs to change in industry.

>And you're okay with an employer not offering any help beyond a recommendation letter and you're okay with not knowing whether or not Twitter is a supportive employer?

I'm all for employee rights, but how exactly is Twitter different than the average (or all?) employees in this, or in any other industry, in this case?

Do other employers actively help fired employees to find a new job?

Twitter is a supportive employer. Employer being the key word there.

If you're no longer employed by them there should be no expectation of support. Especially to spend resources to find you another job.

Nothing needs to change in the industry. Thats how the world works. You get fired, you find another job.

What sort of help would you want or expect? A severance package or help by having the employer pay a recruiter to pimp the former employee? Or something else? In any case I'm totally fine with the idea of no help being offered provided such an exit clause is not part of the contract of employment the employee signed. If you want some specific sort of help from your old company in the event they fire you for cause, require that to be in the contract before you accept employment.

If you're selling labor that I don't currently need, what kind of obligation did I take on and for how long? Am I supposed to apologize to Subaru for not buying another car this year?

Not necessarily. I'm a programmer and I have neither a life nor a family.

Your comment is unfair given the fact that we know nothing about the situation other then what is immediately provided.

I know it is much more satisfying to go with the under producing team in India stereotype but generally there is much more to it than just the team that was laid off. Who knows if higher ups at twitter had a proper vision/plan for the team and how much authority they were given for instance - both very crucial to getting things done.

Example: Had a chance to work with a team from Poland couple years ago. Great people with lots of experience and skills. By purpose or not, they were just not well integrated into the existing team. They were never given clear targets, nobody ever thought what they had to offer and how they could fit into the overall structure. A project later everything got blamed on them and many from that team disappeared - many left because of the whole negative experience, some were let go. I would not say it was their fault for under producing really. It's not that simple when you don't get to define producing what is valued and what is not and you don't have much authority over changing things.

Conversely, my experience working with teams out of India has been bad without exception even when we had proper planning and authority. Which only goes to say that you can have bad teams anywhere.

I'm disappointed to see the same ingredients that led to failure with offshoring a decade ago now taking more firm root here than even during the dotcom boom: perception that 'coding' is a path to easy money and certain success, dime-a-dozen "coding boot camps" that teach how to make an Angular site but don't get into any fundamentals[1]. The perception existed in the waning years of the boom, but at least the most common path then was through a full degree.

While my perception is that the situation is improving in India (at least if you avoid the well known warm body suppliers), it's getting worse locally.

1. This isn't to say that there is no value to boot-camp style programs - but there are presently a whole lot more that exist solely to capitalize on a financial opportunity than focus on providing a foundation for skills growth.

edit: I should add that this was just an opportunity to express my general sentiment, and given the phrasing of the news from Twitter, I doubt performance was a factor.

> Which only goes to say that you can have bad teams anywhere.

Oh totally - much harder to find a good team in India if you are just another corporation looking to outsource. But if you are Microsoft, Google, Twitter or any other well known product company they have no trouble hiring the best and it usually speaks for itself.

I wanted to point out that you can do acceptably well with offshore teams by doing your research, hiring right people, doing proper planning, getting used to more communication than usual and encouraging the team take up authority. Most of these apply to any team but the communication part becomes of more importance when the team is offshore.

Not necessarily, one of my previous workplace did the same with the team in India due to some language barrier issue that has cost the company 10x of the savings on not hiring a native English speaking team somewhere else (for more money obviously). These events usually boil down to financial details. I bet Twitter made a calculation and it was not financially viable to maintain that team over there.

Indians have been speaking English for a real long time now! That's another stereotype/generalization that keeps getting thrown around! It's not the English - it's the culture that is different and there is relative ease of finding bad Apples over good ones. None of that is closely unique to teams in India. You can find perfectly well English speaking candidates here that don't fit as easily as anywhere else.

Point is if you want to have a remote team for whatever reason you can't expect it to magically save you money and do everything you need. It's a process, you have to have upfront investment in terms of efforts and trying things out. In my experience it works if you give it time and efforts and it can save you money if that's what you're after. And of course remote teams are not fit for every type of project either - so there's a trade off to be made depending on various factors.

Americans have been speaking English for a long time too but us Brits struggle to be understood by them.

A lot of the early outsourcing was on cheap bandwidth, early VOIP. This added to the misery of a Western consumer phoning up for tech support to that free phone number, to be on call for an eternity.

> Indians have been speaking English for a real long time now!

You might be right, but not the ones on my BigCo support calls.

What kind of investments do you recommend into remote team in order to make it successful?

I think only motivated people should be hired for remote jobs, because external motivation does not work well in remote environment.

For complex jobs that require lot of focus and perseverance where the employee is going to be remote and on their own, yes - nothing other than a highly self motivated, talented individual will work out.

But for the jobs that are moderately complicated and require a team - like in offshored projects for e.g. - giving that team their own local office to work, hiring a good manager to track their work/progress and provide local motivation, setting up communication infrastructure (Skype, Slack, Code Repositories, Bug Repos etc.), managing timing differences, having the team fly over to your main location or having your core team go visit them once in a while, identifying skill gaps and setting up training to address those, starting slow and initially giving team members clearly defined work which can be reviewed objectively and giving the team actionable feedback etc. can make it a whole lot easier down the line when workload increases and you can't afford low quality work. As an ongoing thing - communication becomes the main thing so making sure to have short, meaningful meetings to review, hear, appraise, provide feedback etc. are a must. (W.r.t communication - being clear and direct, not using culture specific lingo, making sure people understand what you are expecting from them and assigning timeline and ownership for key items verbally make a great difference.)

And there's still attrition to deal with but it can be worked around by having well documented processes and keeping a good work environment. It sounds like a lot but it's a one time thing and some of these apply to local teams too. Finally keep in mind that you can't really magically escape all of s/w engineering problems just by having a local team - there's going to be complacent people, people with skills issues, communication problems etc. and the issues are not limited to remote teams although they do get harder to manage.

At what point in my comment have I made any generalisation? I was telling a story that was specific to a small group of people who happened to be hired in India. We had several other teams hired in that country doing just fine.

Do you think the people who got selected into a company like Twitter, had language issues or were incompetent? If you are not from India, I can assure you that you cannot possibly comprehend the size of the population, and the resulting competition.

Communication is essential for any remote team, but in particular for one that operates semi-independently.

The issues I ran into in the past were made worse by poor communication from both sides. However, once we got past those, the underlying lack of skills became apparent.

Agree 100%. In India, computer programming has been something parents pushed their children into as a high value career for a long time. In the last 7-8 years we've seen that mentality also take hold in the US as the economy has gone sideways and a lot of formerly-headed-for-finance are looking to make their fortune in Silicon Valley. It really ends up diluting the talent pool over time.

In these cases you really have to make sure you're hiring people with real potential as programmers, and that's easier said than done. Even after 20 years as a hiring manager I still get tons of false negatives and false positives.

Beyond that I think India imposes at least one big cultural landmine which is that subordinates are extremely reluctant to ever deliver any bad news. Effective management requires asking probing questions and reading between the lines, not something that every western manager has great experience or talent with.

Honest, unloaded question for you as a hiring manager: do you think accrediting body that is neither for-profit nor funded by for-profit entities could strike a balance in an industry as dynamic as software development?

Not to put words in the GP's mouth but as someone involved in hiring I find that idea intriguing, although I think how effective it would be would depend a lot on the nature of how it was implemented (isn't that always the case, though...).

The biggest problem with hiring experienced people for software development positions is the broad range of what falls under "software development". It's a very big field, and I think the breadth of the field isn't well appreciated by people working outside it -- including, particularly but not exclusively at large organizations, management and HR.

A good accrediting body might do a lot as a way of ensuring a baseline level of competence for new CS grads, and in particular it might help people coming from schools that are good, but not one of the "big names", by showing that their education is up to a consistent standard. I don't know if it would do much for hiring more experienced candidates, though. Too much hinges on evaluating the experience that's being claimed since graduation.

There is a similar news item about Skype shutting down its office in London.

There is no discussion about how bad England's programmers are.

If anything this tells me the average HN user is racist and statistically ignorant.

That's one interpretation.

Working with remote teams is always hard, worse the bigger the time difference is.

In you example, the Polish team underproduced, not by being incompetent, but by being remote. That doesn't make closing it down a bad decision.

> That doesn't make closing it down a bad decision

Of course not - but if management doesn't know the challenges involved in managing remote teams the incompetence is theirs. Blaming the team is not right in that case especially when they don't have authority that their managers do.

It just is. I work for a German company as a remote team in the US, and we certainly underproduce in comparison. Not by being incompetent, simply by being remote.

Time zone differences really hurt things. As much as we try to find ways to make the value the same, it isn't the people, it's the time.

I've implemented off-shore teams for North American companies three times successfully, and what we learned is that engaging an off-shore team is really an investment that takes time, money & manpower to pay off. Many companies don't fully account for the true cost of outsourcing as it impacts your business processes for your on-shore team. Case in point, we engaged a team in India, started with 2 engineers, and within 3 months (of a complex platform) they were producing in alignment with the current code base. A year later, that team had grown to 6 including 2 QA, and they were basically running the show with guidance from the senior developers / managers / customer service / product owners. Part of the on-boarding process was sending reps over to their India office to embed and work with them for a couple weeks and understand their working environment, challenges and hear their ideas for improvements to the whole process.

My cousin has a 50-person team in India (dislcaimer: I'm of Indian heritage) producing mostly mobile apps these days and in the early days his apps were of poor quality -- looking at his latest efforts, his team has really progressed and are producing decent apps with nice UI/UX and functionality. This process has occurred over the course of 6+ years.

In my observations re: raw creativity and talent, Indian developers do lag behind their Eastern European/Russian and now South American rivals... part of that is the cultural. i.e. unwilling to take risks. My exposure has been small (less than 100 devs from all over the country) However, you can guide them to be productive and follow the right processes to success & scale.

It might be that. Or it might be that, there are much more administrative costs to be recouped from just closing the office, than by firing a few employees there, a few employees in US etc.

I don't think its fair to comment on their performance without knowing the facts. Quite frankly, I'm surprised to see the "Indian programmers are terrible" prejudice common even on HN.

The challenge with an Indian office of 20 in Bangalore is you're not saving any money. The good employees are cheaper than in the US, but not enough to recoup the administrative and managerial overhead required for it. If the office is 100 people, and you're also doing it for access to talent, then it pays off. Independent of performance, if they didn't see the office growing, it can make sense to close it.

Exactly. Especially if you consider the total IT workforce in a place like Bangalore. It is not rare for 100 candidates to show up for walk in interviews even at small IT companies.

It seems weird that they would choose to do this. From what I understand, they're a company in need of something big happening for them. Laying off 20 people, who are probably some of the lowest paid on their staff, doesn't really seem to do anything for them as I can understand it. It's basically $0 in Twitter dollars. Why not just turn it into an R&D department and see if they churn out anything interesting? Otherwise, just don't replace them as they leave.

Having worked in the semiconductor industry (oh boy, annual layoff time!), once you start firing people, rumors start and morale tanks. Sometimes you have to do it, but I just don't see how 20 people in India helps at all, but will get rumors churning internally.

I guess it just seems to me like saying: "I've realized I'm going to have a hard time ahead of me financially. To that end, I"m going to start buying generic dish soap. I'm now saving about $0.3 / month!" You haven't fixed your financial problem, and now your dish soap doesn't bubble up like it's supposed to.

Please enjoy that labored analogy :)

>> It's basically $0 in Twitter dollars.

It's not when it happens to 10, 50, and then 100 teams

Right, but that's not what they're doing right now. They fired what are probably the 20 lowest paid engineers in their company. They've closed the office as well, but it was probably the cheapest real estate in their company.

Most people who have been in the position of laying people off that I've met have said that it's better to do it all in one big cut. Laying off team after team over a period of time is disastrous for morale, and you can expect the performance of your company to tank. If that's their plan, it's probably a bad one. If they decided to clean up their books (in preparation for sale or whatever), and this was all they came up with, then I think they've failed to send the right signalling to potential buyers.

Cheap does not mean good value for the money. Let's say it costs them 1M to run that office and they get 0.5M in value from that office. Well, shut it down.

Hell, it could have just been an experiment. Let's see if doing this is a good idea. If No shut it down, if Yes scale it up.

PS: Another concern is how much effort it takes to manage. It can be really expensive to have a small team in another country. Often your better off with either nobody or large teams.

I don't disagree with anything you said, but I think my main point might have been lost, so let me reiterate: The value saved is unlikely to outweigh the cost in morale.

I feel like this is especially true when you're talking about a small number of people with much lower wages. Twitter is getting a lot of negative press lately, laying people off is guaranteed to get press (as we see), and will start rumors flying. In exchange for that they've maybe saved a couple million dollars. You're welcome to disagree, but to me, it doesn't seem like a good exchange for them.

Firing a offshore team usually improves morale for the onshore teams.

This is the saddest thing I've read in a while.

It might be sad, but I have a hard time thinking it's true. It certainly runs counter to my own experience.

I don't know about your experience, but in my own case, the opposite of this is true, and in a major way. The last company I worked at fired tons of people overseas and it managed to cripple an already withered morale. It may not have hit people as hard as if the person sitting next to them was let go, but I assure you, it was not seen in a positive light.

Under the assumption that it will increase onshore hiring. But it prolly won't in this case. So onshore team will feel more insecure and keep thinking which low cost team is next.

Beyond the money it allows them to focus more on something else, which can be extremely valuable.

We're talking about a company with just short of 4,000 employees. I can't possibly imagine dumping 20 of them lets them refocus the company in any meaningful way. Their overall impact has to have been relatively insignificant.

>It's basically $0 in Twitter dollars.

It's probably a significant number in a VP's expense line who is under pressure to cut costs or allocate those dollars to another team.

2015 R&D: $806,648,000 2015 Sales, General and Admin $1,132,164,000

I can't imagine a justification for these numbers. Twitter seems like a small company idea.

> Twitter seems like a small company idea.

It appears to be bankruptcy of ideas.

Well, $200K/employee, 4K employees (roughly), and you're at $800M pretty fast.

Still an astounding number.

A lot of people seem to be commenting that a 20-person office would hardly move the needle at Twitter. They're right, in general - the total numbers are too small to be layoffs and it covered an entire office so is unlikely to be performance related (in an individual sense). The logical inference then is that this team was hired for a specific project, and that project isn't working out.

If they were sales, then they were likely hired to try to break into a specific market (probably something geographically close to their office), and when they failed to make the numbers the project was axed. If they were engineering, it was a side project that has now lost its budget.

Something like that.

The real question is why does Twitter need 3 offices in India

It seems the whole company is freewheeling

It's likely to be sales office or a government relations office.

Sales.

The headline says "shuts down engineering office" so it sounds like it is engineering rather than sales.

Lots of Indians in tech work their way into management and then try to bring home the bacon back to India. They continue identifying as Indian nationals even after going through grad school, green card, etc. You may not have noticed but there was/is a large wave of placing Indians in executive positions at tech companies, so I don't see why this is so mysterious. Did people think they were going to open offices in Omaha?

Until they get US citizenship they do remain Indian nationals. And for Indian origin people it can easily take 10-15 years after graduation to get US citizenship.

Also identifying with India and actually going back and living in India are two vastly different things. Most of them will talk and plan but never leave for India as facilities, money and comfort of the first world will be just too much leave. Of course some of them may go for CEO/very senior position to establish office in India and then come back after some time.

Green card holders and those seeking permanent resident status have presumably announced their intent to become Americans. If they are trying to use their position in America to send jobs and offices back to India then that's their power that corporations have given them. But, they should lose their green card and/or visa as a result because their loyalties are obviously not to the US. They just want a green card to exploit American businesses, not to become a citizen.

What is mysterious is the fact that's 3 offices

  We thank the impacted individuals, less than 20 persons, for
  their valuable contributions and are doing as much as we can to
  provide them a respectful exit from our company.

Epic.

Yeah, no loyalty to employees. Get used to it.

It's the "less than 20 people" that rubs me the wrong way. I think something along the lines of feeling bad at having to do this would go over much better and sound sincere. Writing "less than 20 people" makes them seem insincere. The last part of the sentence is nice. I wish they had reworded the first part.

"less than 20 people" also implicitly assigns a value to 20 people. Should read "fewer than 20 people."

(ok im sorry for nitpicking)

As with a lot of such corrections, the fewer/less dichotomy is wrong:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog/archives/003775.ht...

I agree. Even just writing "We thank the X affected people." would have been better. The "less than 20 people" interjection makes it sound like they're trying to minimise the importance of it and making a point of it being such a trifling little firing-round that they couldn't even be bothered checking the exact count.

That statement is a case study in poor corporate communications. It would have been way more elegant if they said something along the lines of:

'We thank the 20 persons affected by this change for their contributions and we are committed to doing as much as we can to provide them with a respectful exit from our company.'

Not perfect, but at least this way it doesn't seem like like they're trying to minimize those who are affected. But, I'm a technical writer and my hobby is to make fun of the material folks in the communication and advertising departments churn out.

I think it is rather hard to fight a rumor of 100 without sounding a bit insincere to the 20..

>It's the "less than 20 people" that rubs me the wrong way. I think something along the lines of feeling bad at having to do this would go over much better and sound sincere. Writing "less than 20 people" makes them seem insincere.

Being insincere is a professional requirement for writing a press release. A press release is meant to reflect the company and make it look good in its actions, not reflect the sincere feelings of the person writing it.

And to me the company seems insincere. I now have a negative association in my brain for the company. Prior there were no negative associations in me with regard to this company. The company does look good with this press release. At least not in my mind.

Twitter was looking good to anyone after maybe their first 2 years or so?

If Twitter has other offshore employees that were underperforming, now that they've shown a willingness to let people go even though they probably cost less - it'll make the rest of the offshore employees work harder to keep there jobs.

And Twitter needed an "engineering office in Bangalore, India" because?

Same reason it needs 3,800 employees to run what is essentially an internet forum/messaging client.

We will never find out what that reason is though....

> Same reason it needs 3,800 employees to run what is essentially an internet forum/messaging client.

That's a very cynical way of looking at it.

The part of Twitter that you use "is essentially an internet forum/messaging client". True, but what about the analytics, targeting ads, moderation, logs etc.

Twitter most likely builds custom software,libraries for internal use. What about their development and maintenance?

TL;DR : There is a whole lot more than the seemingly simplistic product that you use.

>That's a very cynical way of looking at it.

Considering WhatsApp, with 50 employees, was sold for perhaps more than Twitter will, it's also a valid way to look at it.

>Twitter most likely builds custom software,libraries for internal use. What about their development and maintenance?

Development of what? Compared to something like the first UNIX, which was built by 3-5 people at AT&T, Twitter is an order of magnitude less challenging, including the whole server infrastructure and the mobile app. Unless they built all those from scratch.

> Development of what?

Custom software(libraries, custom patches to OSS, forked branches of OSS).

Sincere question: have you ever worked at a larger company?

When I was at Etsy, people always asked why we had "so many employees" for what seemed to them like a simple e-commerce website. These people were always from smaller companies.

I don't know a ton about the technology behind WhatsApp, but if I had to guess:

1. WhatsApp does not have an advertising platform.

2. WhatsApp does not provide you with analytics for anything.

3. WhatsApp doesn't need a team (or at least as big of one) dedicated to anything related to big data or machine learning. Think of Twitter's "Trends" and "Who to Follow" features.

4. Searching Twitter is a much more difficult problem to solve than searching through just your own personal chats.

5. I may be wrong about this, but doesn't WhatsApp not store anything/much on its servers, and instead relies on your phone? I'd imagine that reduces a lot of overhead.

6. I'd be willing to bet that Twitter has (and needs) way more admin features for dealing with things like harassment, illegal content being posted, etc.

I could probably go on, but this should give you an idea. All of these things require people to make happen. Designers, developers (front-end, back-end, mobile, dev ops, and more), PMs, you name it. Also, given that Twitter is just a bigger site/app in general, it takes more work to handle things like internationalization, for example. It's no sweat getting "Send," "Chats," and "Settings" translated, but think about translating your entire advertising and analytics platforms.

It's a lot of work.

>Sincere question: have you ever worked at a larger company?

The largest tech company I've worked for was around 100 people, but I've also worked for a (no tech) organisation of about 20000, and have done projects for businesses with IT departments in the 1000 people range.

That said, not sure what unique insight it would give me. As a programmer I can kinda evaluate the work behind Twitter. And I've seen companies that have done equally or much more impressive stuff, technology wise, with 1/10 or 1/50 the resources. Nothing about Twitter, including the scaling, is rocket science.

That's why I brought up WhatsApp -- itself is an example of this very thing.

I've read this (1), (2), (3). Fail to see why you'd need > 500 people total for all of those, plus sales and support.

> As a programmer I can kinda evaluate the work behind Twitter.

That's just the Twitter you see. There is plenty you don't see: back-office systems, their strategic decisions and product roadmap. All of which have a material impact on staffing.

> That's why I brought up WhatsApp -- itself is an example of this very thing.

While the core functionality of WhatsApp and Twitter might seem technologically similar, businesswise they aren't (weren't?). Twitter, for better it for worse requires analytics and ads, which WhatsApp did not have. Additionally, even the technological similarities are superficial as WhatsApp is mostly 1:1 messaging whereas Twitter is M:N

>That's just the Twitter you see. There is plenty you don't see: back-office systems, their strategic decisions and product roadmap. All of which have a material impact on staffing.

Well, knowing HN rules on profanity, I better not evaluate their "strategic decisions and product roadmap" thus far.

>Additionally, even the technological similarities are superficial as WhatsApp is mostly 1:1 messaging whereas Twitter is M:N

True. But I'm pretty sure being M:N is not some unique challenge compared to being 1:1 for hundreds of millions -- especially since WhatsApp had 1/60 the people and, from what I know, 1/100 the funding to make that 1:1.

It's not that it's the same challenge, but is it that much of a challenge?

Well, there goes Twitter. It was a nice experiment. Pack it up.

Seriously, why is this news...

They need to figure out a way to start monetizing Bootstrap.

20 down, 2000 to go?

Sorry. Wrong thread.

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