[HN Gopher] Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees
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Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees
Author : ccity88
Score : 42 points
Date : 2023-03-20 22:18 UTC (41 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.twitch.tv)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.twitch.tv)
| saos wrote:
| What type of roles are they cutting?
| tecc501 wrote:
| Not Poggers
| ubercore wrote:
| A 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 wrote:
| * * *
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> 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 wrote:
| The "macroeconomic environment" is the evaporation of available
| VC funding because higher interest rates provide more lucrative
| investments elsewhere.
| runnerup wrote:
| Why 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 wrote:
| Because 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.
| jacooper wrote:
| But Twitch is owned by Amazon? They don't need VCs?
| jacooper wrote:
| Its the investors.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I assumed rising interest rates primarily.
| gretch wrote:
| Federal reserve interest rates.
|
| When interest rates are low, money flows more freely. When
| interests rates are up, it's harder to lend/borrow, money flows
| less freely, and the economy cinches up as a whole. This is a
| major simplification to a very complex system, but it happens
| because e.g. as someone with money, you'd rather just put it
| into a government bond that will for sure pay you 4%, rather
| than chasing speculative investments. When that same bond is
| only paying out 1%, you might be more inclined to put your
| money in a start up and see what happens.
| vkou wrote:
| The macroeconomic trend is 'the stock price went down because
| the fed stopped printing money'.
| runnerup wrote:
| I don't understand how this is affecting AMZN's cash flow
| though. Seems like both their costs and revenues would scale
| similarly with inflationary effects, leaving a similar profit
| margin %.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I think it's more about expectation for growth being lower,
| not present cash flow.
| kneebonian wrote:
| Once you realize that sometime in the past 10-20 years the
| economy started having nothing to do with actual goods and
| services and instead turned into some sort of weird game
| played by the powerful and the rich it makes more sense.
|
| Personally I peg it happening sometime around 2008 when it
| became clear the rules didn't matter, consequences were for
| the poor and party hearty. Explain how else a company like
| Uber that was losing money on every ride was able to raise
| billions in VC funding.
|
| Think of it like that and it makes more sense.
| ccity88 wrote:
| For context, this is part of a wider layoff at Amazon, with over
| 9000 job losses:
|
| https://twitter.com/zachbussey/status/1637826120216195075
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(page generated 2023-03-20 23:00 UTC)