[HN Gopher] YouTube Cuts 100 Employees as Tech Layoffs Continue
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YouTube Cuts 100 Employees as Tech Layoffs Continue
Author : nickthegreek
Score : 34 points
Date : 2024-01-17 20:30 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| iwontberude wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240117202912/https://www.nytim...
| johnkpaul wrote:
| This is the first one where I've noticed that they have X amount
| of days to find another job in the company. I wonder how that
| works and what percentage of the 100 will actually not end up
| laid off.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| > This is the first one where I've noticed that they have X
| amount of days to find another job in the company. I wonder how
| that works and what percentage of the 100 will actually not end
| up laid off.
|
| 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.
| altairprime wrote:
| > _simply can't afford_
|
| "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.
| jeffwask wrote:
| To be fair, a 1.4% reduction in force isn't going to weaken
| YouTube. That's just some light spring cleaning. It's only
| newsworthy in the current zeitgeist.
| altairprime wrote:
| Pick your adjectives as you wish. To trivialize the
| layoff of a hundred workers is to reinforce that "can't
| afford" isn't applicable.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It is better for YouTube to be self-sufficient, though. It
| shouldn't rely on handouts from a different business, as
| that makes it more vulnerable.
| altairprime wrote:
| If the alternative to the layoff was the collapse of
| YouTube, then "cannot afford to" applies. Otherwise,
| "will not afford to" 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > If YouTube cannot afford 100 engineers
|
| 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.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I understand that businesses take short term loans to cover
| payroll as part of normal operating procedure, but Google in
| general makes shitloads of money - plenty to cover their
| payroll. They aren't sitting on a mountain of employees who
| need to be paid out of ever more expensive loans. They are
| sitting on a mountain of _cash_.
| jondwillis wrote:
| Hell yes, my cancellation of my premium, refusal to give into the
| nag to turn on watch history, and bespoke ad blocker usage is
| finally having an effect.
|
| 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.
| more_corn wrote:
| So, forever?
| Grimblewald wrote:
| google has fallen fully and completely to the corporate rot, so
| you may be holding out a long time.
| deaddodo wrote:
| The most annoying part about premium is that pretty much every
| youtuber now just does in-video sponsorship, which is about 10x
| as annoying to me. It's not easily skippable and I'm not going
| to Nebula or becoming a patron at 5-10usd/mo each to skip them.
| Konnstann wrote:
| Sponsorblock is good enough on pretty much every channel I
| watch, including skipping intro/outros, might want to check
| that out.
| stefanos82 wrote:
| Some things don't add up to my eyes...far too many coincidences
| lately that make no sense at all.
|
| 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.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Not a youtuber but i am aggressively degoogling. I imagine
| other people are doing it too. The regression in quality of
| google's products is noticeable and frustrating. Even search
| results are unreliable as of lately. Search for one term and
| you get results for another. Email works in the sense the you
| get and send email but search broken. Google drive search too.
| I suspect they are experimenting with ai behind the scenes,
| otherwise i cant explain the sudden spike in unreliability.
|
| 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.
| Grimblewald wrote:
| google maps is another example, it used to give me great
| paths but these days I feel that it is trying to kill me
| somewhat. I've switched to OSMAND which is a FOSS map app
| built over open street maps, and it is amazing how much
| better it is in terms of navigation. Search has a little left
| to be desired, but it thrashes google in actual navigation.
| It feels a lot more like what google maps was as opposed to
| what it has become. Voice recognition has become way less
| reliable as well.
|
| 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.
| pers0n wrote:
| I think google maps send you down weird routes to do
| traffic/police/accident reporting
|
| 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
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Being a YouTuber has always been an absolute shit career,
| citation: literally every YouTuber I've ever heard speak on the
| subject thinks that. It's shit for work/life balance, it's shit
| for stress, your "boss" is nothing but a confluence of
| automated things that break fucking constantly and make your
| job harder for no benefit on your part, and if you do have good
| ideas, it's highly likely some jackoff with a business degree
| is going to copy your idea, do it with a better thumbnail and
| post it to a larger audience and crush you in the algorithm.
|
| 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._
| rchaud wrote:
| It's the same problem as Twitch: the ads are just too much.
| Youtubers have their own sponsor messages in their videos, so
| they of all people know that more ads = bad.
|
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| TikTik barely pays though, apparently. YouTube people can
| make a very very decent living, if they're good.
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