Any idea if this was just over-hiring? Twitch grew during the pandemic didn't it? Now viewership is going down.
Is it isolated case of a business normal ups/downs, and not some general "oh my god the tech sector is crashing".
This feels more like Twitch just really struggling financially, as mentioned in the article.
Twitch got really big during the pandemic: lots of people had nothing else to do besides sit on their computers all day playing or watching games. Viewership exploded, creatorship exploded, hiring was easy in remote, so hiring exploded.
Post pandemic Viewership has likely tanked as people got back to work and school. Creatorship has also subsided as people can't play games 24/7 anymore, so any revenue growth they would have experienced over the pandemic has been likely off-set by now.
They countered that with layoffs last year, as most tech companies did, but their case was not just about laying off the extra hires, they also lost business they could not recoup, so they're downsizing even more.
I was recently laid off just a year after being hired. The layoff was described as not cost cutting but restructuring. The reality is that no restructuring has happened, morale has tanked, and attrition in key positions has occurred. Me being laid off means that management couldn't even plan out a year. Further, this company had a restructuring (i.e., layoff) in 2020 as well. If you need to "restructure" every three years, you don't know how to manage.
At will employment is a poor setup because companies hold all the cards. They should have much more pressure on abiding by contracts.
Money was too cheap, tech companies are now slapped with larger debt servicing costs and a less captive audience. Growth focused and delusion forecasting done by companies weren’t grounded in reality or pragmatism. This led to things like over-hiring.
I agree, but that's basically exactly what I said. Haha. Perhaps you meant to reply to another comment?
I don't see how it and similar LLM's don't lead to massive replacement of tech workers and creatives.
The fully replacing people thing would be if we had an AGI in which case I’ll be using one to augment myself and stay on top of the game.
Your assumption is that generating more work = more profit.
The idea that just adding more engineers leads to more money is an obvious fallacy. Cutting engineers though and continuing to receive the same income is an obvious way to increase net profit.
Yes it is, I’ve never seen “the end of work”, have you ?
Google has an unlimited amount of issues to solve. I read about them here everyday. ChatGPT is even an existential threat to their search, if not directly, then through the internet becoming a huge piece of AI spam.
LLMs are not why Google is laying people off.
"Google has an unlimited amount of issues to solve" sure but that does not lead to profits otherwise they would just hire as many people as they could and make more money. Again that's not how it works.
"LLMs are not why Google is laying people off." Guess we will find out soon: https://dataconomy.com/2024/01/03/report-google-ai-layoffs-2...
Ironically AI seems like a huge problem for Google's main business. Even if what you're saying is true, and all the layoffs are because of AI productivity gains. Well guess what? Other people can use AI to build cheap advertising businesses too? AI is cheap and it's getting cheaper, thanks to open source AI, it's accessible to everyone.
What I've come to realize is that, it's not Youtube that's valuable, or Google, or even Open AI, it's the information these things are providing access too. The information people are creating for them. The communities.
Now it seems like accessing that information is becoming democratized in a way that Google never really planned for. Soon I might be able to have something that can generate a youtube video for any topic I need, without youtube, just locally on my laptop or phone. That's going to be a problem for them. They know this.
I guess all of the leaders at those businesses though are" naive or little to no experience in software development."
I have actually been present in a meeting and watched in real time where someone demoed an LLM that absolutely replaced the need to keep several engineers.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/16/ai-job-losses-are-rising-but....
No companies who are doing layoffs are saying "we're laying off developers because AI", everyone who is drawing those conclusions are making assumptions. AI can automate other menial, clerical stuff, but making that stretch to software development isn't founded.
ChatGPT and friends coincidentally started gaining traction as the economy started cooling off. Rather than drawing casual inferences to AI, it's much more likely that companies are laying off because of the latter rather than AI.
This has to do with them leveraging AI for their product, not replacing software developers writing code. They also didn't fire any full-timers, so I fail to see how this fits your assertions.
Not sure me saying "I have a feeling this is going to continue as AI / LLM's become more capable" is a grandiose statement; I think you may be overreacting but whatevs.
I'm sorry you are so angry friend, all the best. Wishing you happiness.
...ok
In this case, previously software engineers' salaries were considered an operating expense like any other salary, and the full amount of that was used to decrease how much profit you have to pay taxes on. Now you can only write off a portion of the salary, having to split it over multiple years' taxes instead.
This is really common with R&D expenses, physical equipment, etc. The big change was that software engineers are now considered an R&D expense rather than someone working to assemble a final product, for example.
Are there any non-tax reasons that companies, accountants, lenders, etc. would use the concept of amortization?
I.e., is there some kind non-tax-related of financial planning that finds the concept of amortization useful for decision-making?
They can amortize the cost of new players over the length of that player's contract while accounting player sales as instant profits.