Returning to 2020 levels. Says something about the hiring frenzy that went on.
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.