[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.)

[Panzer04]

How is any of that different to just paying out the money to shareholders, who can individually choose to champion said causes themselves? I don't see why the company should do so.

I suspect the biggest difference in how I see this compared to the feeling I get from you is that most things are positive-sum games in capitalism. One man's profits is another company's capital is another employee's wages. The profits of the company don't disappear, locked up in a bank never to be seen again. They get invested by the shareholder somewhere else, or spent on something, and so on. There's nothing inherently "greedy or evil" in this process.

This process can be very indirect (how does an investment in Apple today help? By providing the incentive for many of these companies to be built and made public in the first place, sharing their profits across many people), but it is there. Some explicit redistribution may be necessary, as in many countries with public healthcare or strong welfare systems, but having a stable core of a private market helps generate the overall resources to run everything.

Maybe there's a better system that can distribute the wealth more evenly - but the best examples we've seen thus far come from welfare-state western democracies, which all grew up on the same basis (and are all poorer on an average basis than America, who has a much weaker welfare base). These aren't necessarily related of course, America is stupendously rich in a lot of other ways, but it's food for thought.

[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.

[bigtunacan]

Most famous actors didn't start out that way so I would still argue it is.

It also doesn't change the fact that software engineers largely tend to be anti-union while simultaneously protesting things unions are designed 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.