YouTube Cuts 100 Employees as Tech Layoffs Continue
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I will continue the above until YouTube removes scam/junk ads, lowers their price, and gives me a way to opt out of strong tracking without killing functionality.
There is also a joke branch of the extension called SponsorLock, that isolates sponsors instead of skipping them: https://giveup.ajay.app
I’m not going to buy AG1 myself but until there’s a better way for you tubers to make their sausage then I’m okay with one sponsor interlude.
Cool, that's how opinions work.
Not only ads, do this for long videos to skip boring parts, this gives snapshots of content without missing much, can always go back, 5 sec at a time.
Far too many well-known YouTubers that have massive audience / subscribers decided to give up and claim burnout; fair enough I said, I understand.
Then one "goodbye" video after another, they started jumping the ship and immediately I went skeptical and said to myself: either they have some inside info that something big is about to happen (thus the need to get out ASAP) or they are about to push them to their limits with new demands and have said "enough is enough; we are not going to die for them; it's time to say goodbye, it was good while it lasted".
There's no other logical explanation, to me; this is my personal opinion which makes me very skeptical, that's all.
Then there are features. Almost every product seems to suffer from the eagerness of mediocre managers to leave their mark. And sure they do, products are loaded with silly features no wants.
All in all google is now a mediocre company making mediocre products.
I think you might be right about the experimentation though, because now google maps often gives me a "why didn't you do as I told you, was the path you ended up taking better?" style questionnaires afterwards.
I use gps all the time and go the same way all the time but it often wants me to take some side road when there is no accident or construction
Yeah google is likely training an ai at our expense. Not sure why they’d choose that over a deterministic approach that has been working reliably for more than a decade.
As for why they're leaving, word on the street is that Tiktok will be introducing 10-30 minute video lengths, which is prime YT territory.
I know of ~5 well-known people who have decided to stop making content, out of 100+ if not 1000+ of the "well-known" people on YouTube. Tom Scott was the first one, and his plan to stop was years in the making. I suspect the others were already burnt out, and seeing him leave gave them the initiative to do the same. A couple other YouTubers have made videos signaling they will pivot to different types of content, further reinforcing that they're burnt out with what they're doing but nothing is convincing them to stop making videos in general.
The same thing is happening in podcasting - podcast advertising has almost completely dried up.
All that to say: I don't think they had inside knowledge. YouTubers quit constantly for very good reasons, most of them are just all the benign ways that YouTube makes itself worse just, all the fucking time. And the site stays around because any serious competitors to YouTube are immediately flooded with low quality, low effort, offensive, or just stolen content that YouTube used to host before that creator was banned. That's what you get when you make an alternative to YouTube: Naturally, the first people in line to sign up are the ones who were too toxic for YouTube, which is a pretty high bar.
ngl, this sounds like the life I had in startups as a sysadmin/devops/platform dev
Either TikTok and Instagram pull all the viewers over to their platform or there is a problem with YouTube’s subscribtions feed. In any case, many YouTubers are frustrated by the few views.
IMO, YouTube has done a much better job recommending content from small channels the past couple years, and has introduced me to some great creators I would otherwise never have known about. Perhaps part of the recommendations have come at the expense of "channels you used to watch and maybe still would if they actually put out something fresh for a change," and there certainly is a conversation to be had there about the lack of transparency from YouTube whenever they change the algorithm, but as to which is better (subscriptions vs. small channels tangentially related to your viewing habits) is a matter of personal preference.
Ultimately I found a transfer role, but it was a bit past the deadline. With a couple days ago I went to HR with evidence that the transfer was in-progress and on track, and they extended that time for a couple weeks.
The funniest part was when I asked HR if I should come into the office while I was looking, and HR was like "I don't see why you'd bother".
The infuriating part was that my position was eliminated because the team lead didn't like me. Three weeks after my transfer deadline the position was re-opened. HR didn't really do anything about that, and my new manager asked me not to push on it.
A lot of this going on right now. Business is strong and companies don't necessarily want to let top talent go, but they simply can't afford the R&D expenditures anymore; it's all going to interest payments.
“simply choose not to afford” is more correct here. YouTube is in no danger of shuttering due to lack of revenue and financial support from the corporate entity that operates it. Instead, that entity is choosing to weaken YouTube by layoffs, rather than accept a decrease in net revenue after expenses. This may or may not stem from US taxation changes, but it is regardless critical to distinguish between cannot (e.g. “the business will collapse from debt if we don’t layoff workers”), versus, will not (e.g. “profitable business chooses to layoff x% workers rather than reduce profits x% due to tax law change”), when considering these tech layoffs. YouTube is not under threat of collapse due to lack of funding, so the latter applies.
My point is that we should not implicitly frame layoffs as “cannot afford” without having evidence or claims to support that. If YouTube cannot afford 100 engineers, YouTube’s profitability at all hinges on $50mil/year of expenses, which is a rounding error to the overall business operating it.
It is highly unlikely that the future of YouTube hinges on the absence of these 100 engineers, given the financial and megacorp contexts available to us. Thus, usage of the “cannot afford” framing in this case comes across as an unsupported argument that YouTube is in severe financial distress.
If that distress is real, let’s hear more about it! If the layoffs were due to dire circumstances around funding and runway, that’s material and interesting news — and would explain why the corporation had no choice (“can’t afford”) in the matter.
The article mentions "operations and creator management teams". I didn't interpret that as engineers. But either way, if they aren't required, why pay the money? You can put it to something else instead.
The way a lot of layoffs work isn't that those fired weren't required but rather that their work load gets spread out to the rest of the org slowing everything down.
For example, HP fired the in house IT staff and instead contracted it out to an offshore IT firm (which was not great). This lead to just about every department creating their own shadow IT group and a lot of things that should be easy to do (like granting permissions) becoming an absolute nightmare.
And where is that "something else"? Stock buybacks. [1]
Now, it might well be true that moving a key department offshore is worth less to the company than a buyback. But I don't think it's been demonstrated that that's the case for these 100 employees at YouTube.
Whether that benefit is profit or control or some other causes, given the evidence presented their decision to layoff workers was voluntary – not compulsory.
If there is some evidence that HP was facing collapse or legal issues or some other impending doom, which outsourcing IT prevented, then that’s interesting and worth discussing, focusing on the core question I’m raising in this thread:
Is this layoff voluntary or compulsory?
If it’s perceived as compulsory, then that needs to be considered and discussed – which defends against the tendency of misleading framing by corporate PR that presents voluntary layoffs as though they were compulsory.