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Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees
- ipsum2 3y agoThe CEO and founder of Twitch announced a week ago that he was leaving the company. It's admirable to see a captain going down with his ship. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35184011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35184011
- gretch 3y agoThere is something romantic about it, but make sure you don't accidentally admire it more than the captain who keeps their ship safe and thus neither of them go down at all. All those captains out there who are faceless/nameless because their ship didn't get blown to pieces.
- varunjain99 3y agoOr more like transferring ships while the ship goes down :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- calderknight 3y agoThat's the opposite of going down with the ship.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoYou meant to write "to see a captain jump ship"
- iepathos 3y agoIs it admirable if that same captain steered the ship into a rock leading it to go down in the first place? I don't think so.
- wolfgang000 3y agoWhat do you mean? he just appointed a new capitan while he deployed his lifeboat
- PurpleRamen 3y agoIt was known for a while that he will leave, so it's not like he left because the company has problems. I mean, they are also "only" firing 3-4% of their workforce, which in my understanding is a pretty low number for a mass layoff. And it's mostly a reaction to their massive growth and hirings in the pandemia, which is now over as the company is shrinking back to a normal size.
- kup0 3y agoYes how convenient of him to step down days before having to make a difficult announcement and instead pawning it off on the new interim CEO instead. So admirable. How this could be characterized as "going down with his ship" is absolutely wild to me
- joshe 3y agoLike rain, interest rates raises fall on the just and the unjust alike.
- ccity88 3y agoFor context, this is part of a wider layoff at Amazon, with over 9000 job losses: https://twitter.com/zachbussey/status/1637826120216195075 https://twitter.com/zachbussey/status/1637826120216195075
- gtirloni 3y ago> Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment I must be living under a rock because, outside big tech self-inflicted wounds, I don't know what they are talking about. Is it Ukraine? SVB? Chinese housing market?
- mdavidn 3y agoThe "macroeconomic environment" is the evaporation of available VC funding because higher interest rates provide more lucrative investments elsewhere.
- runnerup 3y agoWhy would Amazon (owner of twitch) care about that? They have tons of cash and revenues are still quite strong. AMZN isn’t looking for VC funding, they are the whale. Net income is hard to judge — yes it’s down but not only is Amazon famous for reinvesting all profits and claiming $0 of net earnings, but they’ve also been writing off a lot of one time charges for severances related to these layoffs.
- gretch 3y agoBecause their income comes from advertising. Because the economy sucks in general, companies in all industries are being more careful with where they spend their marketing budget. You can see this reflected in the revenue of other advertising companies as well such as google and meta.
- saos 3y agoWhat type of roles are they cutting?
- tecc501 3y agoNot Poggers
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dathinab 3y agobest comment on HN today (through due to satire will probably down voted into oblivion).
- ubercore 3y agoA bit unfortunate that their blog format has "In other news" in giant letters right under their announcement about laying off 400 people. Maybe a blog isn't the right place to make news like this public.
- greenyoda 3y agoEarlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35235579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35235579
- 1B05H1N 3y ago"Only 8,600 more to go" - Amazon HR rep probably
- moneywoes 3y agoDoes twitch follow the same pip policies as Amazon?
- squarefoot 3y agoI'd be curious to see how the sudden surge of available workforce is affecting the average salaries in the IT, compared to other fields that weren't touched so badly by the layoff wave.
- dathinab 3y agoThere had been a huge deficit of qualified worker due to SV/FANG/.. sponging them up. So we likely won't go to a oversupply situation. But as under-supply decreases and in turn saleries should fall. But then salaries had been in some contexts so high that most startups couldn't afford paying it, so just by accepting this salaries without them falling the average would fall. So I don't expect the salaries for mid to high qualified IT workers to fall too much outside of SV, and especially outside of the US. Like it still will be a pretty well paying job, just not necessary through the moon high salaries. Through it might get a bit harder for low qualified IT workers, much harder if they are unlucky wrt. current AI development.
- brwck 3y agoThere's a theory in economics called "sticky wages". Salaries don't decline due to layoffs or temporary economic downturns.
- maerF0x0 3y agoTwitch is an amazon property. This is likely simply an extension of the amazon layoffs.
- dathinab 3y agounlikely as AFIK Amazone hasn't fully folded Twitch into it's structures additionally: Firstly Twitch due to historic reason is less likely to have any personal bloat. Secondly running a streaming platform isn't cheap (media live cross decoding, high data transfer, more requirements for the data transfer due to less buffering, still moderation and copyright detection, some licenses with big copyright holders etc.) and from why I have heard twitch isn't doing that well (through not terrible). Thirdly there was a influx of live streaming usage during COVID which now likely is receding. Fourthly it relies a lot on people not just subscribing but "gifting" money (bits, subs) to streamers for little return besides bragging rights, a thanks maybe some emotes and feeling good because of the gift. In a economy which feels more unstable people are less likely to want to spend money this way, or can't even if they want to. I would guess Twitch has more reasons for cost cutting then Amazone, but at the same time I would guess in different to Amazone Twitch is more likely to be negatively affected by the layoffs.
- odux 3y agoIt is part of the larger Amazon layoffs announced today though: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/update-from-ceo-andy-jassy-on-amazons-operating-plan-and-additional-role-eliminations https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/update-from-ce...
- amrb 3y agoBut how will I get my quote of hot-tub streamers??
- ryandrake 3y ago> Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations. In order to run our business sustainably, we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce. Let's just take a moment to admire this paragraph. > "our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment" There's that passive, vague non-word again: "impacted". Such a milquetoast way to say "something happened" but without that pesky specificity. > "user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations" So, they are growing, but not growing faster than some [arbitrary] goal? > "In order to run our business sustainably" Wait, I thought revenue was growing! How is that not sustainable? If you just leave costs where they are and let revenue grow, you are by definition sustaining/growing the bottom line. > "we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce" This is what I don't get about all of these layoff letters. It's always the same thing: We're growing, our revenue is growing, and [usually unsaid] our costs are growing. So why not just arrest the cost growth? Stop the bleeding, don't start amputating limbs. I can understand layoffs when your business is running at a loss, not when it's growing.
- _alex_ 3y agoZero growth or negative growth (real or nominal) are both cases that not keep pace with expectations. What about that paragraph makes you think things are gangbusters but they have to lay people off?
- calderknight 3y agoI think the companies have employees to try to make more money. When things are going really well in the economy it's easy for employees to create/capture lots of value, so the companies hire lots of employees to do that. But when the economy slows down a bit, suddenly it's a lot more difficult for employees to create value, so it doesn't make sense not to reduce the number of employees.
- onlypositive 3y agoYup, this is basically it. My team at work hasn't created any meaningful value in a year. We've shipped nonstop but the things were tasked to work on just don't work out or even if they are well received simply don't add up to our salaries.
- 2-718-281-828 3y agothey streamed 400 of their employees getting laid? o.0 ... that's outrageous!
- iepathos 3y agoFor some perspective, twitch generated $2.6 billion in revenue in 2021 and $2.8 billion in 2022. They've seen nothing but increased revenue over time.
- throwawayinvi 3y agoIncreased revenue tells nothing. What are the profits?
- pcthrowaway 3y agoSo they took in an extra 200 million $ in revenue in 2022, great. Though that doesn't necessarily mean they'll continue to take in more revenue given that 2022 was the year lockdowns pretty much disappeared everywhere and I'm guessing Twitch's model benefits from people being stuck at home. But let's ignore that, and say they'll keep making that 2.8 billion. Did they hire 1000 new employees between 2021 and 2022? Because if so, that probably means they're making less profit even with an additional 200 million $ in revenue. Assuming the fully loaded cost per employee is ~200K/year, which according to Levels is on the low end (their L4s make 209K, L5s and up make much more) Couple that with investors now clamouring for returns, and from the business side you can see why reducing their cash out-flows is at least appealing.
- PurpleRamen 3y agoAnd 2023, most likely this will go down hard. Revenue for streamers has already been down the last months, more than usually around this time of the year. 2021 and 2022, Twitch had a massive growth because of the pandemia, so many working from home and not being able to spend the money on other things like events or travel. This is now over, and their revenue is shrinking.
- pcorsaro 3y agoEvery one of these companies doing layoffs says something like what's in this update: "user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations." I find it really hard to believe that all of these companies assumed that growth during Covid was sustainable and would just continue into eternity. I have a small restaurant supply business. Our revenue was up almost 50% above our best year ever. We knew there was no way it was going to last forever. All of these companies just sound so disingenuous when they say their growth didn't keep up with their expectations. They knew this day would eventually have to come, they just don't want to come out and say that.
- Rastonbury 3y agoI'm curious if you own any stocks, did you own then sell any tech companies or after covid up to mid 2022?
- pcorsaro 3y agoJust index funds for the most part. I don't attempt to time the market really. I assume you're implying that if I had known things were going to slow down I should have made a fortune trading stocks. I'm not saying anyone had a crystal ball for when the market was going to slow down. I think that's kind of a fools errand for most retail investors. All I'm saying is these companies keep making statements saying that growth didn't meet expectations. It just feels really disingenuous to me is all I'm saying.
- xyst 3y agoProbably getting forced to trim the fat by their parent company, Amazon.
- thret 3y ago'Lays of 400 Employees' has a different meaning to 'Lays off 400 Employees'.
- jboydyhacker 3y agoAre they keeping their headquarters in downtown SF? It has not been used for a while and fairly nice
- rvz 3y ago"Engineers hopefully not affected" - HN
- benjamoon 3y agoIf I was more suspicious I’d be wondering if the sudden huge rise in ai was at all linked to the sudden huge waves of layoffs. Maybe all these big tech companies have seen something before the rest of us?
- hammon 3y ago[dead]
- seanhunter 3y agoThere's a typo in the headline. Should be "lays off".
- steakscience 3y agoI don't see how "macroeconomic conditions" impacts Twitch viewership. It's not selling anything to any consumer or business. If anything, people are watching more Twitch.