[ryandrake]

> 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.

[lanza]

> 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.

Come on man, if you don't understand how a business can be showing signs of unhealthiness while still increasing revenue then don't post. That's such a trivial superficial analysis of reality.

I'm not going to pretend to know or understand enough about Twitch's business to agree or disagree with whether they need layoffs. But a shallow comment of "revenue go up" is lowbrow nonsense.

[ilyt]

Or, the investors want their returns. If you don't understand how perfectly healthy business can be gutted just because investors want better number on next year's sheets and don't care about long term then don't post.

[camhart]

I just want to say, investors getting returns should be a goal of every for profit company (whos taken investor $$). Thats why investors risk their capital. That capital is responsible for the growth of most major tech companies. Its responsible for most jobs at tech companies.

Not saying this is an excuse to treat employees poorly. They're just as vital as the capital (employee hours is often quite literally whats bought with the capital). But I get tired of hearing only poo poo being thrown on investors.

[yunohn]

Having money should not be worth more than doing the work. Same goes for landlords.

[ThunderSizzle]

Then don't take the money. You don't need seed money to make a business. You can just spend all your time instead.

You might get to the point where you'll value that money more. Or not.

[yunohn]

Are you positing that companies should never go public?

Or even if public, that there is no physical limit we can impose on growth expectations?

[eldritch_4ier]

They are the same thing! Money is just a store of work. All money was earned via work. Investors give that stored work to companies. They’re essentially energy credits

[yunohn]

> Money is just a store of work

So, when you print more of it, whose work is being encapsulated into it?

And how do you explain profit margins? You are aware that things aren’t priced at just the cost of work, right?

[Vaslo]

Except for this whole thing called “risk” that investors and landlords undertake as part of the process.

[yunohn]

And that’s exactly the problem - risk does not confer inherent value. The employees are also taking on significant risk - clearly, if things go even slightly south for investors, they fire the employees first!

[dantheman]

If you look around most companies especially with the way hiring has been the last few years, layoffs != gutting.

[WeylandYutani]

The investors that made the business want to cash out? How dare they!

[parasense]

But we are in fact in the early stages of a slow train-wreck of a global economic meltdown.

Investors wanting value out of stock is one thing, especially if the stock has a dividend. But this is not a dividend stock, so that tired trope doesn't apply. Also, this is Amazon, famous for channelling revenue back into the business, effectively making the stock neutral value in a fiat sense. It would be one thing if it were any other company, but it's Amazon. The only value in the stock is the perceived value of the stock holders, and Amazon doesn't play that value-game like other corporations.

Considering they previously cut 19K jobs, and this is just a piece of the additional 9K job cuts across all business units... it strongly indicates Amazon is preparing for an even worse economy to come. Consider the Biden Administration printed about ~$10 trillion USD since 2020, and if Inflation were comparable to Dune sand-worms, this would be the Shai Hulud of Inflation. It takes a while for the economy to realise everyone is being payed less, and prices need to rise in accordance with increasing costs, but oh wait... people are still paid the old income they always earned, and so they buy less stuff, and around and round the cycle goes.

Amazon isn't selling as much as they used to, so please with all due respect... get the fuck out of here with the ShArE hOlDeRs WaNt VaLuE nonesense. A bunch of corporations are cutting jobs, because payroll is typically the #1 cost of doing business, for any business.

[dangus]

The truth of the matter is that companies aren't monetarily incentivized to avoid layoffs.

Layoffs cost almost nothing. Companies aren't required to pay full salaries or provide any healthcare/benefits for any reasonable period of time after a layoff.

I think even the 3 month notice period from the WARN Act is a pretty crap amount of time to provide for employees who have been terminated.

For a software company especially, they can pull a Twitter and leave the business on autopilot with the code that has already been written and axe most employees. It's not really a big deal to get rid of employees then hire them back 6 months later, but it really should be.

Also, companies like Twitter prove that the WARN Act can just be outright violated while employees are left to fight court battles they can't afford nor have time to fight.

Then you look at unemployment benefits where in most states the whole process is overly bureaucratic and wasteful system that doesn't come close to anything resembling a replacement for salary. I think that whole system would work better and be able to send more money to the unemployed if it was just automatic payments without all the overhead of having people on staff processing applications and answering phones to deal with questions, appeals, etc.

Instead, just continue all terminated employees' salary and healthcare benefits for 3-6 months after termination automatically on the employer's dime. Implement something like that and watch as our boom and bust economy gets a lot less mountainous. Companies would actually have to try and make an educated choice about whether or not to hire someone.

Companies should only be able to dispute unemployment in cases of clear and obvious misconduct. I don't even think that low performing employees who showed up and made some level of half-assed effort should have unemployment benefits revoked. Isn't the hiring of a low-performing employee the fault of the employer for not sufficiently vetting the candidate?

Maybe what I'm proposing is too extreme, I don't know, but I think the status quo is way too lenient on businesses.

[bg24]

"The truth of the matter is that companies aren't monetarily incentivized to avoid layoffs."

Very nicely put. Fixing this will help lot of employees.

[chongli]

How do we fix that? Require companies to pay a large severance? Then companies will be heavily disincentivized to hire in the first place due to the risk.

[vineyardmike]

If we required companies to pay a massive severance, then it would disincentivize hiring to an extent. You'd still need to hire as your business grew, it's unavoidable.

If you made hiring more risky, companies may keep their employees for longer, and treat them better since hiring was a gamble. Why hire someone, who could be a liability, when you can retrain an existing employee and invest in their future with you.

[chongli]

I could just as easily see companies treating their employees worse if hiring is made more risky. You won’t get the big severance payout if you quit. At the same time, it’s harder to get a new job somewhere else if employers are more reluctant to hire. This situation seems like it could lead to employers mistreating you and you having fewer options to get out.

No, I think barriers to hiring lead to market failures. This includes everything from severance to health insurance and other benefits. This is part of why the U.S. has such a hard time trying to introduce a public health care system: it takes away from employers’ ability to keep people working at a job they don’t want.

If there was no friction at all for employment, if people could join a company one day and quit the next day — and if employers could do the same — without worrying about losing health care or the ability to pay rent, then the labour market would be far more of a free market than it is today. Working should be 100% voluntary and free from coercion. That would also lead to higher pay for workers because those who don’t want to work could not be forced to do so.

[inglor_cz]

You would move to a different jurisdiction. US has plenty of those.

Looking at places like France or Italy, where protection of existing employees is very strong, yes, it makes companies wary of expanding. It also motivates automation, which might not be a bad thing.

[bart_spoon]

They’d be heavily disincentived to hire unsustainably. Every business has to hire to some degree. The issue is when businesses hire masses of people the don’t need in hopes of it somehow translating to growth, only to pull the rug out from said employees when it doesn’t. Especially in the US, where healthcare is tied to employment, and at a time where upper management is adamantly insisting that in person work is necessary, meaning employees must physically uproot their lives to be in proximity to their job, there needs to be more assurances for employees, and not just leaving them to the whims of whoever happens to be in charge that quarter as they throw spaghetti at the wall and hopes something sticks that will please investors.

[selimthegrim]

I discovered the iPhone’s four hour call limit while on hold with the Louisiana unemployment system

[abledon]

on-demand scalability mindset creeped over from spinning up VMs into their quick hiring/firing strategy

[buck4roo]

Vote parent up.

Accurately describes the public costs of private for-profit businesses' whipsawing the labor force, and foisting all the consequential costs of periodic waves of unemployment onto the public.

[Panzer04]

You want to make it even harder to get a job? The better the benefits you mandate for firing/leaving employees, the more onerous companies become about bringing on more manpower (and eventually, lower wages as a whole since they have to fund an additional 10% or whatever whenever someone leaves).

You're arguing that companies should implement these measures at the cost of just hiring people? "Companies would actually have to try and make an educated choice about whether or not to hire someone." - Isn't it already a meme that people get 3-6 interviews just to get hired at some places nowadays? and you want to make that worse? Maybe I'm reading that wrong, but employees aren't the big losers in situations where companies are doing layoffs - companies are. If they had more disciplined hiring practices they wouldn't be hired (or, more likely, wages as a whole would be slightly lower because of reduced demand) These kinds of benefits aren't free, and I don't think it's unreasonable that employees bear some responsibility in terms of saving up or whatever if they have to be let go.

All that being said, I'm not against a couple of months of wages/warning, just realize there are costs to this (really, I'm probably arguing most against 3-6 months - that sounds like a really long time to me; It feels like a couple of months should be sufficient in most cases).

[buck4roo]

Re: shorter benefits

Every corporate downsizing is an example of a "private decision" with clearly visible public costs, unemployment insurance payouts among them. Social and emotional distress have a cost, not just to the employee, but their social group and family.

But, did I catch your opinion correctly? You believe we(society) are(is) providing unemployment benefits for too many months?

In your mind, who benefits from decreasing that assistance benefit? Cui bono?

[Panzer04]

Obviously the employee being let go gets the biggest benefit - but those rights aren't free, is all i'm saying. It leads to more onerous interviews, a more stagnant and slow-moving economy, etc. eg. 6mo of guaranteed severance if the company lets you go just seems huge to me. Obviously degrees to the implementation, but still, I feel like it's a huge loss in flexibility to the company, and economy as a whole.

My presumption is that companies will generally be more reluctant to hire when severances are higher, and vice-versa. You're probably not really winning anything on average, with the inexperienced losing out the most in terms of just trying to get any job at all given the possible expense to most companies. Small companies even more so, given they'd be less able to absorb the cost of those benefits.

Anyway, can speculate all I want, I'm just saying there's no free lunch.

[dangus]

This idea you bring up that the jobs will evaporate when businesses are regulated sounds logical, but it’s a trap.

McDonald’s didn’t wait for the minimum wage to go up to be motivated to install automated drink dispensing machines and self-service kiosks. In fact, the minimum wage adjusted for inflation was decreasing during the entire time period in which those innovations were deployed.

On the other end of the labor spectrum, companies like Meta had no problem hiring thousands of excess employees during a period of high wage growth and scarce tech talent.

When labor generates revenue, companies will hire regardless of regulations. When labor is unnecessary for revenue, no regulation will prevent a company from downsizing.

Extra, guaranteed severance pay and a reduced unemployment insurance bureaucratic burden would be a godsend for terminated employees. I argue that for most businesses it would be a minor adjustment to their standard operating procedures.

An analogy to your point: “Cars will be too expensive if safety standards are required.”

While it’s true that cars are more expensive than they would be without those safety features, the market has adjusted just fine and the societal benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

[Panzer04]

Ultimately though nothing is free. The cost of those extra rights will come from somewhere else.

In Australia we have superannuation. The government is raising the mandatory super contribution soon from 9% to, idk, 12%. Some people act like that change is free, but that's obviously not the case if you think about it. All that'll happen is regular wages are reduced a little such that a person's total compensation is basically the same in the end.

I contend the same will be true of generous severance policies, especially those imposed on a global scale. Some of these things are worth fighting for, I'm not sure huge severance periods are one of those things, personally. At best something that scales with experience/time at a company (eg. half a month of severance per year of experience, or whatever value fits your conception of the idea), so those more attached to a particular position have more time to adjust if they are let go.

[blippage]

I'm not keen on the whole US model of "mandated psychopathy".

From what little I hear, the Germans seem to have found as good a balance as ever is likely to happen. There is good worker protection whilst industry is still being strong economically. Perhaps we should be looking at the way they do things.

Formerly in the UK, the chocolate-makers Cadbury was founded by a Quaker who had a strong sense of social responsibility motivated by Christian convictions. They were a profitable company who were taken over by Kraft.

[jszymborski]

> Come on man, if you don't understand how a business can be showing signs of unhealthiness while still increasing revenue then don't post.

I wasn't aware of this criteria, is that somewhere in the guidelines? All I'm seeing is stuff about civility and being decent.

[yunohn]

> revenue go up faster

CEO takes responsibility by cashing out massive bonuses.

> revenue go up slower

CEO “takes responsibility” by firing others.

Are you good-faith questioning why the HN crowd is justifiably upset over the current state of things?

[shapefrog]

CEO gets paid massive bonus for “taking responsibility” and firing others.

[kibwen]

We should be holding the president of a multi-billion dollar corporation to a higher standard than a random HN commenter. If Dan Clancy wants to lie to our faces with this egregiously milquetoast corpo-speak, he does not deserve serious or good faith analysis of his words. He's bullshitting us, plain and simple, and I see no reason to smile, lick my lips, and ask politely for seconds.

[geodel]

Huh. If multi-billion dollar corporation executive is not going to do a corpo-speak, I don't really know who is supposed to be doing that.

[marcosdumay]

Hum... This one is easy to answer. Nobody is supposed to be doing that.

The entire thing is a non-statement (I dunno about the GP's accusation of lying; you can't lie if you don't say anything), so it should be one small paragraph. Or, two, if you want to say you are sorry for both employees and customers.

Nobody gains anything by the chatGPT-like decompresion of the message.

[vineyardmike]

Next thing you'll tell me that politicians no longer want to be politically correct!

[wombatpm]

I propose a weekly lottery. Each week we select 1 billionaire and one person making less than 50k. The peasant gets a gun, 1 bullet, and a free shot from 30ft. Lottery continues until the social contract is restored.

There was a time when corporations had principles ahead of maximizing stock holder value. Maybe we should re-examine that.

[hossbeast]

Which principles would you like the companies that you are invested in to maximize ahead of stockholder value?

[vineyardmike]

While I think the original comment on a CEO, a peasant, and a gun to be crass, I want to note that society wasn't always valuing "shareholder value" so much.

First, I want all companies, regardless of who invests in them, to hold some level of social responsibility to the society around them. Sometimes layoffs are necessary, and companies can't maintain excess costs forever, but there's some value to society to maintain employment.

Second, investments that return a profit to their investors is great, and as an investor, it's something I would want. That said, it's unreasonable to expect exponential growth forever, AND it compromises their ability to focus on other principles. How much return on investment is enough before a company can focus on being a force of good? 10%, 100% 1000%, 1M%?

Third, as an investor, I question if paying execs so much more than rank-and-file employees is good. So thats another example principle. I assume a well paid exec is incentivized to increase short term value, while as an investor I value long-term growth. Having a healthy employee base full of bright talented workers (incentivized by top-tier salary) seems a better solution.

[WeylandYutani]

This is fucking twitch.tv not something society should actually value. I'd be angry if doctors or teachers get fired.

[peyton]

The last guy fucked up and overhired. Now this guy is fixing it. What do you want him to say?

[sigstoat]

> What do you want him to say?

there's nothing that makes the HN comment section happy about these corporate communications. if some CEO literally fell on his sword in personal apology to these folks, they'd gripe about the blood stain.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

At least one scenario doesn’t seem to support your analysis.

When the Groupon CEO resigned, he basically did something like that and it was actually pretty well received by this community: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24453681

[amitrip]

is it though?

[chatmasta]

Here's a better version:

> Everyone else is firing people. So it seemed like a good time to fire some people.

> We found 400 people to fire, which sounded like a good number because it's not as big as 500. None of them seemed to be doing anything useful, so we fired them.

> The product will not be affected and as a user you will notice no difference whatsoever.

> Signed, some anonymous guy who took over after our CEO stepped down this week so you can't blame him for firing people.

[bottlepalm]

> there’s a looot of employees here we don’t like. Instead of going through the whole PIP/HR dance we’ve decided to give every manager a blank check to fire a few of you. The whole ‘economy’ situation is a perfect cover to do this now. Adios.

[raydev]

> we’ve decided to give every manager a blank check to fire a few of you

This hasn't been common in a lot of recent layoffs. Low level managers aren't getting input, the decision comes from the top and it's random.

[vineyardmike]

> the decision comes from the top and it's random

As someone laid off from a FAANG, it's not random. They don't lay-off the top performer. They don't lay off the woman who keeps winning peer bonuses, or the one who plays golf with the VP, or the one doing cross-team knowledge sharing sessions. They're not laying off the guy that got an out-of-band pay increase because they're so valuable to the company.

They may not use it as a PIP alternative, but it's not random. If you're an IC, you want your manager to be sharing documents with your name on it to the VP/Director. You want to be getting CC'ed in emergency product discussions. You want the senior leadership to know your name for a good thing. If your manager doesn't include you in meetings, and doesn't talk about your work, and doesn't make your presence known then your in trouble... when layoffs start and a director gets an excel spreadsheet with everyones name on, you want them to recognize your name. They're not axing the people they recognize first.

[raydev]

I know at least one manager upset that they let go preferred high performers, with suspected reasoning that their comp was too high.

[vecter]

It’s easy to comment like this from afar, but would you actually send this message if you were the CEO?

[chatmasta]

No, and the fact I'm not the CEO is why I can give a more accurate version of the statement.

However, if I were the CEO of Twitch I'd like to think I could produce a statement more direct and less impersonal than the one they did release.

[vecter]

Fair. What would you say?

[chatmasta]

Dunno, is the position open? :) (I'm taken)

Probably I'd say something about increasing efficiency and focusing on our core product. I'd still use some buzzwords but would avoid using the passive voice as a crutch to imply it's not our fault, even though we've increased revenue and it was our choice to fire people.

[vecter]

I still think that what you're describing would sound like the vague passive general corporate-talk that everyone complains about. I personally don't find any problem with it, since if I were in their shoes, I'd write the same thing. But I'm always skeptical when people say that they would do it differently as the CEO. Once you actually have that responsibility, your perspective changes. There is no point in doing anything different than what pretty much every CEO writes, and that's because they do write the most optimal thing from a business perspective, as "lame" as many may find it.

[calderknight]

I 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]

Yup, 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.

[dehrmann]

This is going to get a lot of hate, but the common refrain about WFH is "my productivity is up." That might be true, but it doesn't mean you're producing the right things, and I've found that harder to do remotely.

[Supermancho]

No hate at all. The vast majority don't control what they are told to do. WFH has nothing to do with it.

[bart_spoon]

What does this have to do with WFH? The point is that teams are tasked with meaningless projects, which they deliver on, but because the project was meaningless, they get axed for not producing value. They were doomed from the start, due to the strategic initiatives management mistakenly decided they should work on. This is occurs for both WFH and in person work.

[dehrmann]

My theory is it's harder to be critical of meaningless projects and align on what's meaningful when remote.

[onlypositive]

Not really, we keep moving from project to project because we're discovering no value in the initiative or it's outcomes after testing things out.

It's not necessarily failed management, it's just the nature of big tech. You have the OG money maker. Then you have all the other stuff to try and continue to grow or expand revenue streams.

It's fine in a good economy and hopefully you get a few big wins in amongst all the failures (think of it like vc / angel funding).

But in a downturn those excess experiments are weighing you down when you just need to stay afloat to the next upturn.

[BearOso]

The problem here is increasing growth. That's unsustainable. Having growth is already a linear positive. Companies seek to continuously increase growth to placate shareholders, but that's a magnitude greater, quadratic.

Eventually you simply can't keep increasing. In a panic to keep up the in short term, companies are cutting their lifelines. This is just leading to failure.

[sokoloff]

Or, so long as revenue growth is increasing (first and second derivative being positive), companies are inclined to pour on as much fuel on as they think they can productively use.

Once the second derivative turns negative, they are naturally much less interested in keeping the gas turned all the way up, so they trim back on spend.

[arrty88]

They were staffed for 10x and only seeing 2x. Probably shutting down a lot of growth projects that aren’t showing promise.

[misssocrates]

"Those who thought it was free money are now discovering that they have to pay for it retrospectively." -Nassim Taleb

[varunjain99]

Well, a company doesn't exist to just be profitable. But to maximize profits (mostly).

So it's certainly possible that cutting costs - even when profitable - can increase short-term and long-term profitability.

[ryandrake]

So why didn't they do it a year ago? Or two years ago, or three? It would have increased profitability at that time, too. How did dozens of already-profitable companies all suddenly decide together to cut costs within 6 months of each other? I wish they would be more specific than the "macroeconomic environment" excuse.

I swear these CEOs are like soccer players running around the pitch, just waiting for Mister Macroeconomic Environment to run near them so they can dive, clutching their calves, crying "impacted! impacted!"

[listenallyall]

> Or two years ago, or three?

Because 3 years ago (2020), their average concurrent viewer count increased from 1.26 to 2.12 million and average monthly streamers grew from 3.6 to 6.9 million. Both nearly 100% growth. Then the next year they both grew by about 30%. The company, for good reason, probably thought they needed more people -- more support staff, more payments to process, more server admins, more HR people to support those other people, etc. But in 2022 growth declined, both viewers and streamers. It is still Q1 of the next year, a perfectly reasonable time to lay people off as future projections have been lowered.

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitch-statistics/

I know it's more fun to rant on HN and try to make corporate executives seem evil and nasty and selfish, but if you did a bit of research you'd see it is all pretty justifiable.

[savingsPossible]

You can be reasonable from your point of view, and still be evil and nasty and selfish.

I'll bite the bullet: damn maximizing profits. It's a bad, inhuman goal. You got people creating things other people enjoy and are making money. That is more than enough, more than most people get. When you maximize profit at the expense of your workers, instead of just keeping it sustainable, you are acting like an evil, nasty, selfish bastard.

How the hell do we get coders, mostly workers, defending the POV of the employer like that?

Coders of the world, *ing unite :P

---

But if they don't maximize profit, another company will, and eventually it'll eat them for dinner.

Well, lets get some laws then? Say, lets *ing cap profits. Company sizes.

Again, workers of the world and all that

Communism was a resounding failure, and one sad consequence of that failure is that now we seem ok with growing concentration of power and wealth, and everyone seems to think like a capitalist, when so few actually are.

An important goal for a decent democracy is to counterbalance the inherent tendency of concentration that comes with capitalism, so that common people keep having cash and capitalists keep working for said common people.

---

But then other countries will... (see above. Laws and all that. Free movement of capital, low tariffs without regard to other democratic and social goals, they stop democracy on its tracks while concentration grows)

---

While we are at it? The whole 'build a moat' startup thing? Well, it can (maybe?) protect you from google and facebook, but is also a call to reduce competition in a way that specifically harms users and workers

(coders of the world, unite with the workers and stop pretending you are not workers yourselves?)

---

Also: https://nitter.net/trungtphan/status/1342521433470210049#m

profit per employee. Again, your salary might not look so hot now, specially if you are helping getting other people unemployed

also, what a nasty metric to try to optimize

(sorry for the nitter link, if twitter is somewhat more confortable: https://twitter.com/trungtphan/status/1342521433470210049)

(coders of the world, kindly notice that your employers are actively trying to reduce your share of the pie, and, well... At least think about it? Call me maybe?)

[Panzer04]

Maximising profits might come at the expense of the worker, but it benefits the economy as a whole. The reason maximising profits is such an excellent goal is because it indirectly leads to maximising profit per worker (especially in lean times, when there's less cash to go around and you focus more on efficiency as opposed to revenue). The highest net benefit to society comes from having the highest possible productivity per person. Layoffs suck, but they also improve business efficiency since in general the less productive workers are laid off. It's a bit harsh to say, but those freed-up workers eventually end up somewhere else, where hopefully they fit in better, be more productive etc.

A big reason other systems fail is because they don't focus on that metric. There's no feedback loop from per-person productivity, resulting in either stagnancy or even degradation in living standards.

[savingsPossible]

If the metric is important (and it might well be! -- I bet it is) it needs not translate into more profit for amazon.

Say you want to maximize efficiency, and you think revenue per worker is a good proxy. Then you can use the extra resources for: * charitable donations * keeping the employees and putting them in an open-source charitable division

I agree that market forces are powerful and can be used to do good things. I disagree that this fact should be used to justify evil behavior and greed

(also, laying A off and hiring B is ok -- they are not, they are reducing the workforce)

(also, the argument is symmetrical. If they had not hired, and were profiting too much, I'd think that almost as greedy and evil -- the difference is the disruption of the life of the person fired)

(also, firing A and giving the money away to some charitable cause is ok)

(also, profit maximization pure and simple is ok, as long as the government has the balls to take a lot of it and redistribute, to keep capitalists from concentrating too much money -- concentration leads to distortions, in the sense that the needs of the ultra rich are prioritized. The point of having a healthy economy is to have people in general live more and better lives.)

[bigtunacan]

It is possible to both understand why businesses operate the way they do and to sympathize with people who have lost their jobs as a result of how businesses operate.

If you really hate how businesses operate you have a couple of options. You can go work for a non-profit, a public university, or somewhere similar. They generally are lower stress, higher retention, but significantly less pay. That's the tradeoff.

You can unionize to get some worker protections, but of course this is Hacker News where no one wants to unionize because they think it's beneath them; nevermind that even film actors who make orders of magnitude more money have even unionized.

[listenallyall]

The vast, vast majority of actors in SAG make far less money than software developers. Only a small percentage earn enough to not require some other job.

Yes, famous actors get paid millions, they aren't really the people SAG is trying to protect.

[savingsPossible]

Unionize and vote (if there is someone to vote, I don't think that is usually the case in the US)

[listenallyall]

what evidence do you have that Twitch is making money?

why do you seem to think employees should have a job for life, anything else is "evil"? can you concede that some percentage of employees, for a variety of reasons, are not providing value to the company?

[sberens]

> It would have increased profitability at that time, too.

Not necessarily. The profit(headcount) function generally varies over time.

[wombatpm]

And you can’t fire all of the engineers and replace them HR drones and expect to maintain the revenues and profits. Under you theory, companies should start laying off at the top and work down until the proper $/person metric is obtained

[kneebonian]

That is preposterous the big tech companies would never do anything like cullouding with one another to depress salaries and reduce expenses, that is absolutely insane and conspiracy minded, I mean they super swore pinky promised they wouldn't do it after that one time Google and Apple did.

[narcraft]

Are these depressed salaries the $200k+ ones they were giving for entry level devs?

[misssocrates]

Because interest rates went up.

When money was free they overhired. Now that's it's expensive they have to unwind.

[TylerE]

I believe it short term. I’m not sure I’ve seen a large convincing example of it NOT causing a PR/customer/staff retention issue long term.

[Madmallard]

They don't exist to maximize profits. Publicly traded companies try to maximize profits in the short term. If it was over long-term they would be doing things people would generally like more.

[PurpleRamen]

> There's that passive, vague non-word again: "impacted". Such a milquetoast way to say "something happened" but without that pesky specificity.

Well, everyone ion the business knows what's going on with twitch and the streaming-market at the moment. So no reason really to explain further I guess?

> So, they are growing, but not growing faster than some [arbitrary] goal?

Actually, in the last months they were shrinking. Partly because viewership around this time of the year is always shrinking for reasons, but this time even more, because pandemia inflated the market, and now as it's ending, the inflation also disappears. Overall, there is still growth compared to the time before the pandemia, but nobody really knows how it will hold until the end of the year. Additionally, the gaming-markted is being a wild mix at the moment, and most attempts of twitch to diversify their content have failed. So they are a bit clueless at the moment I guess how the ship will move and grow.

[justapassenger]

> I can understand layoffs when your business is running at a loss, not when it's growing.

Do you revisit your personal budget only once you run out of money, or once your income changes?

[bart_spoon]

Mass layoffs aren’t the same as revisiting a personal budget. They are fairly drastic measures.

To use your analogy, a layoff while revenue is growing is like continuing to get raises at work, but when this years raise isn’t as high as you expected, you start pawning off possessions for the cash. If times were dire, perhaps it makes sense. If you are still making money, it seems more prudent to tamp down on new purchases than to try and take back old ones.

[justapassenger]

Employees are huge ongoing cost.

You leased expensive new car, expecting to get a big raise. Big raise didn't happen. Do you keep the car?

[machinawhite]

Do you also employ people and managers and use your personal budget solely to make profit instead of buying food? Stop the weird analogies

[edanm]

It's not a weird analogy, it's a great analogy.

Companies don't use their budget only for profit and not to "buy food", that's a ridiculous assertion. Companies get income, the use it to pay for all the operations that went into making that income, usually mostly salaries. Only what's left over is profit.

And if a company sees that next year, when it expected income of 100m, it instead will only get 80m, that difference has got to affect it somehow.

[ryandrake]

I think we are confusing derivatives here. No, when my income is growing from year to year, but just growing a little slower, I don't revisit my personal budget. I think these company leaders are seeing the second (or third) derivative starting to go down, and are panicking without actually losing money (base measurement) or revenue (first derivative).

[machinawhite]

Nope. Try again.

[shapefrog]

You gotta spend money to make money.

[throw8383833jj]

Jack welsh school of management: you've got to reward the top 20% and layoff the bottom 10%, about once a year. this is very much possible when there's an oversupply of labor.

[gotoeleven]

You would also be angry if they wrote "we fired our 400 worst employees because we decided they're not worth their salaries" which also happens to be exactly true.

Up there with anti-whiteboard-interview screeds, the critique-the-tone-of-a-layoff-post comment is a mainstay of the hacker news comment thread: as tiresome as it is uninteresting.

[TylerE]

So what does that make a meta post twice over?

[gotoeleven]

"Be the change you want to see in the world" -- Barack J. Obama

[thenerdhead]

Everyone is going through two things. Correcting irresponsible hiring over the last couple years, and a strategic inflection point. While the former has mostly happened, the latter is going to continue to happen until new business models are found.

It is very common to see new CEOs at this time to “make things more contemporary” and with that is the redundancy of roles and even people who may not adapt to the new culture.

Much of the business speak here is trying to say “we’re reducing our workforce to make room for new roles and new people who will match our new strategic direction”. Every company is confused internally and need strong leadership to get through it.

Literally all ordinary rules of business go out the window and people are firing from the hip right now. Pun intended.

[listenallyall]

Leave costs where they are? Inflation likely causing many of their inputs to increase. Employees tend to want raises, bonuses and stock options. Health insurance basically always goes up. Customers demanding more features/quality (i.e. faster streams, 4k) while bandwidth/server costs rising. Marketing visibility often set via competitive bidding or auctions. They already reduced what they pay to their content creators late 2022.

> I can understand layoffs when your business is running at a loss

How do you know Twitch isn't?

> This is what I don't get

No, there's more.

[lakomen]

> How do you know Twitch isn't?

They wrote that they're profiting, in the initial post, just not as much as they'd like to. Profit isn't loss.

[listenallyall]

> They wrote that they're profiting, in the initial post

no, they didn't

[_alex_]

Zero 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?

[Tsiklon]

>> "user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations"

> So, they are growing, but not growing faster than some [arbitrary] goal?

Actually the absence of a direction in this sentence is specifically vague language that allows the implication of, but not statement of “negative growth”.

[TeeMassive]

They're culling the less performant employees and use the current economic crisis as a PR excuse.

[Vaslo]

Setting targets for your business is not arbitrary. No business with investors just dials in an easy forecast. All investors demand growth with profit, otherwise they would put their money elsewhere. Goals are not set to make employee lives easy.

[dusted]

I'm impressed that they even needed 400 people to run it in the first place ?

[jefozabuss]

There is a lot going on the back-end of these big streaming sites and also they have "support over 25 languages, in order to provide 24/7/365" so I'd guess it's in the thousand+ range.

[misssocrates]

Why don't they just say what happened?

"We got drunk on cheap money"

[sokoloff]

Or "while the Fed had the punch bowl out, we drank heartily like everyone else; when they took it away, we grabbed out coat and headed home to sleep it off a while..."

[klysm]

Because we’ve set up the incentive structures to make growth the most important thing. Shares increase when you grow - the revenue barely matters to the people in control

[noduerme]

AMZN is down almost 40% over the past year, so if that's the purpose, I'm not sure the strategy is working.

[dehrmann]

At growth companies, share price tends to track future revenue.

[EricDeb]

This is mostly because capital gains is taxed less than income.