So from 86000 last year they'll be going to 60000ish this year? That is pretty severe. For those of us in mature industries cyclic layoffs are just how things are but 25% shrinkage is scary.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of...
It allowed the company to meet regulatory obligations. However, overtime, customers would leave because of the poor service.
Meta can likely run effectively with even less Engineers. However, the lack of exciting projects will prevent them from attracting top talent. Overtime their product offering will become less interesting than their competitors.
Napster, Tumblr and Yahoo are still around, however, they are a shadow of what they once were.
I thought HN's refrain 2 years ago was how ridiculous it was that a simple product that didn't need to add features had a large headcount + how many businesses would be better off running stable instead of for growth.
Well, here we go.
In my view (early Twitter user, briefly worked at Twitter years ago), definitely yes. Twitter spent years bumping along and riding on their network effect. But that can't last forever. Twitter should have been energetically using their strengths to expand beyond their core product. For basically the same reasons that Google needed to be more than a search company. And toward the end of Jack's reign, they were finally showing signs of progress toward a decent level of product experimentation, so I had real hope for them.
> And they are not as funded by advertising which is a win for many
That is "pony in there somewhere" levels of optimism about Musk wrecking relationships with Twitter's major source of revenue: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/17/advertisers-see-elon-mus...
No need to argue against a person, instead of the objective scenario I proposed.
All this bloated legacy code is still there and would have to be rewritten.
The teams that over-complicated the simple app wanted to show that they do something. When they are gone, their bloated code will not magically become small.
And no I dont think that Twitter layoffs were performed well. Just observing that those two things are not a contradiction.
On a side note: after upgrades of many apps or programs or websites that do them worse I often think that a lot of people complicate things or change things for the sake of showing that they are doing something.
It's mostly not for this year's revenue.
Related to this, the government now requires accounting Software Developer salaries to be amortized over 5 years, instead of all being booked in the year you pay them.
Edit: oops, the R&D portion of SWE salaries.
Edit2: Related to ensuring competition, this means that if your competitors slow down then you can too. If your competitors lay off, then you probably can to.
This is being discussed in another thread [1].
2021 was an abnormally high jump in revenue from 2020 for Meta. 2022 was a drop in revenue, but roughly a return to trend (there's a quite linear line from 2016 to 2022 revenue-wise).
It looks like they hired based on a wrong guess about Covid revenue growth acceleration being a longer-lasting thing than it was, and now that their revenue growth path is back to their old trend, they can't justify all of that.
There’s probably some Elon effect happening here too (“if he can do it, I should be able to do it too!”)
"If you're not trying to run some sort of glorified activist organization and you don't care that much about censorship, then you can really let go of a lot of people, turns out," -- Elon Musk..
"I think we will be feature complete — full self-driving — this year," in a podcast interview. "Meaning the car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up and take you all the way to your destination without an intervention, this year." -- Elon Musk, 2019
He says a lot of self-serving shit, there's no reason to cite him like an Oracle of Delphi.
Not many companies have eternal R&D.
At some point they move to exploit over explore.
Maybe they were really hiring too much?
I work for a telco that runs a national physical phone network, a high-speed home Internet fibre network in about a third of the country, retail stores across the country, call centers, a full sales & marketing team, plus a huge IT operation, and we are less than a third of that headcount.
To be fair, Meta is a global business with billions of users, so I'm sure it takes people to run all that, but it's still hard to rationalize.
Folks who haven't worked on products that cross jurisdiction (and for a company that has a LOT of attention on it, due to being so much in the press) - it's just a completely different scale. Heuristics for headcount in a single country just don't really work.
No one outside of twitter was predicting it would just suddenly collapse, but instead a slow degradation of quality (ironic given that twitter is being marketed as the "#1 most accurate source of information on the internet")
The top tweet under every "More Tweets" section is always a childish Musk tweet with a 420 or 69 reference in it
I find that very ironic. For years I have seen people complain about "target ads" and companies like twitter spying on everyone.
Now if they are not targeted some how that is also bad...
Amazing....
Though I will say I have seen a dozen HPE GreenLake ads on twitter and still have no idea what they are trying to sell me...
>> instead a slow degradation of quality (ironic given that twitter is being marketed as the "#1 most accurate source of information on the internet") The top tweet under every "More Tweets" section is always a childish Musk tweet with a 420 or 69 reference in it
These are not mutually exclusive... I find new twitter to be very informative and entertaining
“We” like relevant ads and to be specific context-specific ads.
This isn't true: according to sources I've read, attempting to slowly boil a frog will result in the frog jumping out of the pot. Frogs aren't that stupid, though humans apparently are.
This analogy is insulting to frogs. We should just change it to "When you boil the human slowly it tends to stay in the pot."
Care to expand? Not a heavy twitter user, but somehow I saw more bugs pre-Musk(specially with changing network/VPN) than post-Musk.
And what accounts are those?
We can use the accounts from advertisers and firms that have shared they no longer work with Twitter too.
Twitter was never worth that, realistic valuation before the buyout announcement was closer to 25-30 billion, and they most likely were going into poor financial results that would have tanked the value further down to probably 20 or less.
>We can use the accounts from advertisers and firms that have shared they no longer work with Twitter too.
Lots of virtue signalling, many have come back, and most cut their ads spend for other reasons and on all platforms but used the twitter controversy to score some political points with the ESG crowd.
As for "the ESG crowd", who do you really mean?
1: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-12/elon-m...
Well people like the clearly biased and terrible writer that wrote the article you linked to for one...
>>Recent articles[1] suggest the top ten advertisers have not and that revenue is down pretty far, so I suspect that's not quite right.
that same report your article is citing says they project Twitter Ad Revenue to be 2020 levels, and he Cut costs Massively, so if he getting 2020 levels of Revenue, and has lowered costs believe 2020, then we can look to see if that would make the company profitable and it seems to me that would be a good possiblity.
Ohh know he does not have the Ultra Political activist marketing directors at these brands that are just one marketing misstep of becoming the next Bug Light....
Time will tell who is right, but I will always hope Free Speech wins over censorship.
Yeah, and the CyberTruck shipped in 2020. You clearly aren't on Twitter despite your white-knighting. The ads are hilariously bad from scams to Alibaba level products.
>I will always hope Free Speech wins over censorship.
Which free speech? The one where Elon Bans you because you called him on something heinous?
I don't really need anymore branding ads for McDonald's, Disney, Apple or Budweiser.
Facebook is still way off the highs and other's like Snap are floating around $10 when it peaked at $80. Twitter tanked from the changing macro environment not anything he did.
At this point Twitter is likely way out of compliance with anything like GDPR. Users are finding that they are not actually able to fully delete their accounts. They remain there forever, but inactive. This by itself is a massive financial risk for the company. They are also being sued in at least one country for violating laws around speech.
Stability is maybe a little better than a few weeks ago, but we'll see. A car can go for a long time without doing any maintenance, but if you don't change the oil eventually even the best designed and engineered one is going to have a seized engine.