
Also Out at Twitter: Engineering Head Roetter (and More to Come) - argonaut
http://recode.net/2016/01/24/also-out-at-twitter-engineering-head-roetter-and-more/
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Sir_Cmpwn
I think Twitter needs to learn to be okay with its current size, or perhaps
even smaller. The core idea is very compelling - a curated feed of short,
simple content. The nonsense Twitter has added lately substantially detracts
from its core values, and it feels like desperate pleas for unnecessary growth
to somehow support the massive payroll they convinced themselves to take on.
The Silicon Valley obsession with endless growth is harmful sometimes.

~~~
JonFish85
While I see this as true, man does it suck to be an employee who was hoping
for stock options to be worth anything. Especially for those who became
Twitter employees via an acquisition, since I imagine a big part of their
compensation from that event was stock.

~~~
ryandetzel
Work for a large well know established company making a great salary and
tangible RSUs or work for one of the other 99% of startups that pay under
market and whose options will never be worth $0.01. Yeah, sucks to be an
employee at Twitter. :-/

~~~
JonFish85
I guess? I have friends who worked for a company acquired by Twitter pre-IPO
and their stock options are apparently not doing well. Granted it's anecdotal,
but I'm not saying that nobody makes money off of Twitter.

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firasd
Twitter's problem is not really revenue; the ads and other sources are working
(they'll probably announce over $2 billion in 2015 revenue). Their problem is
that Facebook has trained Wall Street to look at Monthly Active Users as a
core metric and Twitter's user growth and retention doesn't match up well
compared to FB.

Twitter execs have been trying to underscore their "logged-out users", as in
views on embedded tweets and other pageviews, and are adding ads in those
places.

~~~
brandnewlow
If they retrain Wall Street to value logged out users, then they will have to
accept a much lower valuation as the new norm.

Twitter's IPO valuation was based on persuading the market that they were
another Facebook, i.e. a sticky platform that would extend out to solve
problems in varied industries.

I agree that their media business is really solid. They acquired TellApart,
Mopub, and a bunch of smart ad tech people.

The problem is that a solid media business is not what investors were hoping
for. If that's Twitter's new story then they're a well-equipped media/ad tech
company -- another AOL, Yahoo, or even Criteo. Those are real companies that
generate revenue but they're not the sorts of companies able to recruit top-
level talent, retain and empower their acquired talent or garner 10x
valuations.

~~~
username223
> Those are real companies that generate revenue but they're not the sorts of
> companies able to recruit top-level talent, retain and empower their
> acquired talent or garner 10x valuations.

That kind of sums up the current bubble, doesn't it?

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JoshTriplett
Trying to rework Twitter into a profitable company does not seem like an
enviable position. How do folks see Twitter becoming sustainably profitable,
without tactics that will alienate their userbase?

They've tried ads (promoted tweets), which doesn't seem to have worked well.
They've tried analytics targeted at high-end users/companies, which doesn't
seem to have much traction (though it does seem both useful and unobtrusive).

Paid accounts? What features would such an account have that free accounts
wouldn't?

Longer tweets? That'll certainly change the culture drastically, but not
necessarily for the better.

Richer content? Likewise.

Twitter seems like the contemporary company with the most valuable yet least
profitable product.

~~~
feverishaaron
I think they have a ton of opportunity with a distribution platform like that.
Tweets are already headlines for other products.

A few expansion areas come to mind off hand:

1\. Media distribution

2\. E-commerce (get the hottest, limited supply thing)

3\. Events & ticketing

4\. Financial market alerts

5\. AMA-style Q & As

6\. Chat/AI services and integrations

~~~
JoshTriplett
> 5\. AMA-style Q & As > 6\. Chat/AI services and integrations

This actually makes me wonder: if you increase or remove the length limits,
how well would Twitter work as a private chat platform?

Because compared to the terrible internal "social platform" sites that some
large companies run on their intranets, a company-wide private version of
Twitter actually seems like a significant improvement. Use lists (including
shared lists) as an equivalent to rooms or groups. That would give three
different types of streams: your main feed (people you follow from across the
company), the groups you watch or participate in (where most of the productive
value comes from), and the firehose (to sample what's going on across the
whole company).

As a bonus, if you add in a form of federated accounts, this could allow
businesses paying for such a service to have a family of verified accounts on
the public Twitter, all tied to their domain (similar to email addresses).

~~~
randomsearch
Slack?

~~~
JoshTriplett
In a way, yes. But far more people know Twitter, including employees and
purchase-decision-makers.

~~~
cpeterso
Imagine "Enterprise Twitter", something like Yammer and Slack. I use Yammer at
work and it is worse than Twitter in every way, except it has no post length
limits and you can create groups. Without the annoyance of spammers,
Enterprise Twitter could implement new features like following #hashtags.
Twitter needs to fix their threading UI, though.

Facebook has a "Facebook at Work" enterprise product and, from what I hear,
the company dogfoods its own platform for work as an alternative to email and
mailing lists.

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vikas5678
A potential acquisition of Slack and cutting number of employees to < 1000 are
2 things that come to mind. Owning slack opens up other potential streams of
revenue in the enterprise space. Or allow twitter users to form groups/rooms
on twitter ala Slack.

~~~
harryh
Twitter can't afford Slack. Twitter's market cap is ~12B. There is no way in
hell that Slack would sell for less than 10B. They probably wouldn't even sell
for that much.

~~~
jay_kyburz
10B for slack! OMG I'm in the wrong business.

~~~
imrehg
If you just look at the numbers, pretty much everyone always is.

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perseusprime11
1\. Lack of clear product vision 2\. Bad execution. Look at Facebook's
execution in the last 3 years. Messenger, Sports Stadium, etc. 3\. Potentially
another re-architecture?

~~~
chucky_z
Actually, the insane amount of advertising and media groups on Facebook have
pushed me to Twitter, and it's very refreshing. I'll be moving away from
everything but FB Messenger (imo their best product).

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yeukhon
I see some comments talking about Twitter employee population is too big, is
there any statistics about what the percentage is for each department?

Despite the fact I agree the population is quite large, but I can guess at
least 30% are marketing folks, 20% are HR and process people, and then the
rest are developers. Twitter has done a number of acquisitions. I don't know
how many people are running Vine in production today, but my understanding is
their NY core team is still quite small. However, given Twitter has launched
so many products (including all of the background projects they did to support
their production), I won't be surprise if they have at least 10% of their
entire engineering force doing infrastructure and operation, and then 40%
divided into core product like Twitter, internal application developers,
security, solution engineers, etc.

When a new CEO is in charge, some layoff and some re-org usually happen. Some
projects have to be closed, some have to be sunset, and some have to be
merged. Let see how much they can trim down. It usually take a year to
complete the evaluations and projecting new positions.

~~~
josephmx
Their website puts 44% into "technical" staff,
[https://about.twitter.com/company](https://about.twitter.com/company)

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rockcoder
Twitter is actually the only "social network" that I use daily and find real
value in so I really hope they can get their act together somehow.

Just a few more random thoughts... Twitter's biggest asset is its core product
and they should not meddle too much with it. And I think they should be able
to make a company profitable with just that. Even though the product itself is
really simple, there are many use cases of it that are not all easily
transformed into revenue and probably not so easy to communicate to investors.
Its basically a platform that enables a new form of communication. Different
people use it for different purposes. Companies use it for different purposes.
Traditional media gets lots of their content from Twitter nowadays. Mimicking
Facebook in any way would be a mistake because I think it's a fundamentally
different product.

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frik
It seems it's Jan 2000 all over now. Reading old comments from that time, it
seemed obvious in late 1999 yet not everyone got it. For example check out the
one and two star review comments (1999-2001) on this page:
[http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Bubble-The-Anthony-
Perkins/pr...](http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Bubble-The-Anthony-
Perkins/product-reviews/0066640008/)

~~~
hueving
The bad reviews on that book seem legitimate (e.g. Doomsdaying without
specifics so it's difficult to pin down their point). Anyone can constantly
publish that the market is in a bubble and then just wait until it goes down
and claim they were right. It's completely worthless in that regard because
early doomsdaying are worse for investors than getting into the market.

~~~
frik
In hindsight it's always easy. You know what, the book authors wrote the book
in 1999 for the general public, the average joe who bought tech stock without
much knowledge. Many insiders from the valley knew about the bubble, yet your
grandma in Texas never heard about it in 1999 or Jan/Feb2000. That's why that
book helped lot's of people to get out of it, right before the crash - it
doesn't matter when the crash happen, a few months before is better than a
months too late, isn't it? Well the one amd two star reviewers thought they
were clever or were heavily invested insiders (like you/other downvoter now?).
Petty for them that those probably lost their money. It's always good to learn
from history.

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newman314
Twitter might have looked like a place to go to but it sure seems to have been
a continuous revolving door of exec mgmt for many years now.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
> Twitter might have looked like a place to go

Which, while slightly off topic, reminds me: does Twitter do automated resume
checking? I applied some time back at 3am for a job I was more than qualified
for and got a rejection almost instantly. I thought maybe it was an automated
system so I tweaked my resume and resubmitted and it was rejected again almost
instantly.

Really put me off from ever trying again considering that I met the
requirements listed and it declined me saying I did not. I had an indirect way
to send a resume through some friends but decided not to bother after that.

~~~
newman314
Given the revolving door of people coming and going frequently, personally
that's offputting.

So unless there's a burning reason that compels you to work there, maybe it's
not a bad thing to look elsewhere.

Disclaimer: I have never applied to Twitter.

PS. Twitter apparently uses Jobvite [1]

[1] [https://www.quora.com/Why-do-companies-pass-on-using-
Jobvite](https://www.quora.com/Why-do-companies-pass-on-using-Jobvite)

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lancewiggs
Just make us pay

Free: current access $25/Year: Access using any 3rd party product $200/Year:
Name verified $20,000/year: Corporate account etc

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curiousDog
Feel bad for a colleague of mine who joined the company when the stock was $60
and got his stock bonus at that price

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ryandetzel
Since this is a leak and not official (yet) we're not sure whose choice this
is. If it's Twitters (Jack) then it's probably a good move to get fresh
product/engineering talent in to change things up.

