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!"
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.
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
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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.
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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)
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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?)
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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?)
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.
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.
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?
Not necessarily. The profit(headcount) function generally varies over time.
When money was free they overhired. Now that's it's expensive they have to unwind.
