
Twitter lays off around 20, shuts down engineering office in Bangalore, India - doppp
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/20/twitter-lays-off-around-20-shuts-down-engineering-office-in-bangalore-india/
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trjordan
I feel like "lays off" is the wrong term here. If you're closing an office of
20 people at a company of 3,800, that feels more like firing a team for not
producing, not making bottom-of-the-stack-rank cuts because you need to free
up budget.

~~~
omouse
Each of those 20 people have lives and families. Not producing by whose
measurement? Who defines that ,they were obviously hired for a particular job
and have been doing it for a while and pretty well if they weren't fired
before.

I wonder how much help Twitter is giving them in looking for their next jobs.

~~~
coldtea
> _Each of those 20 people have lives and families. Not producing by whose
> measurement? Who defines that ,they were obviously hired for a particular
> job and have been doing it for a while and pretty well if they weren 't
> fired before._

Don't necessarily disagree on the human impact, but this is a strange
reasoning.

> _Not producing by whose measurement?_

Obviously by the one who hired them?

> _Who defines that, they were obviously hired for a particular job and have
> been doing it for a while and pretty well if they weren 't fired before._

Nobody is fired until they are fired. So by the same logic, everybody who
wasn't fired immediately did their job "pretty well". Alternatives not
considered:

(a) they did their a bad or mediocre job for a longish time, but company only
ever cared to fire when money got tight, cuts needed to be made, performance
review was completed and they came up empty.

(b) they did their job bad for a short time, and they're fired as soon as it
was discovered.

Of course firing is can be also because they were hired for a specific project
that they completed and now they no longer needed, or because the project went
south or went out of favour with Twitter management and Twitter wants to kill
it, etc.

Or they do their job perfectly well, but it doesn't bring Twitter the money it
expected, so they are canned.

> _I wonder how much help Twitter is giving them in looking for their next
> jobs_

None? Like most employees? Besides maybe a good recommendation letter?

~~~
omouse
And you're okay with an employer not offering any help beyond a recommendation
letter and you're okay with not knowing whether or not Twitter is a supportive
employer? I'm not, that's why I brought up. Perhaps the beginning of my
comment isn't so great but it is damned important that we know what kind of
support employees and former employees will get when they're fired and
something that needs to change in industry.

~~~
riboflava
What sort of help would you want or expect? A severance package or help by
having the employer pay a recruiter to pimp the former employee? Or something
else? In any case I'm totally fine with the idea of no help being offered
provided such an exit clause is not part of the contract of employment the
employee signed. If you want some specific sort of help from your old company
in the event they fire you for cause, require that to be in the contract
before you accept employment.

------
r_smart
It seems weird that they would choose to do this. From what I understand,
they're a company in need of something big happening for them. Laying off 20
people, who are probably some of the lowest paid on their staff, doesn't
really seem to do anything for them as I can understand it. It's basically $0
in Twitter dollars. Why not just turn it into an R&D department and see if
they churn out anything interesting? Otherwise, just don't replace them as
they leave.

Having worked in the semiconductor industry (oh boy, annual layoff time!),
once you start firing people, rumors start and morale tanks. Sometimes you
have to do it, but I just don't see how 20 people in India helps at all, but
will get rumors churning internally.

I guess it just seems to me like saying: "I've realized I'm going to have a
hard time ahead of me financially. To that end, I"m going to start buying
generic dish soap. I'm now saving about $0.3 / month!" You haven't fixed your
financial problem, and now your dish soap doesn't bubble up like it's supposed
to.

Please enjoy that labored analogy :)

~~~
joneholland
Firing a offshore team usually improves morale for the onshore teams.

~~~
iampims
This is the saddest thing I've read in a while.

~~~
r_smart
It might be sad, but I have a hard time thinking it's true. It certainly runs
counter to my own experience.

------
TheLarch
2015 R&D: $806,648,000 2015 Sales, General and Admin $1,132,164,000

I can't imagine a justification for these numbers. Twitter seems like a small
company idea.

~~~
cpr
Well, $200K/employee, 4K employees (roughly), and you're at $800M pretty fast.

Still an astounding number.

------
Naritai
A lot of people seem to be commenting that a 20-person office would hardly
move the needle at Twitter. They're right, in general - the total numbers are
too small to be layoffs and it covered an entire office so is unlikely to be
performance related (in an individual sense). The logical inference then is
that this team was hired for a specific project, and that project isn't
working out.

If they were sales, then they were likely hired to try to break into a
specific market (probably something geographically close to their office), and
when they failed to make the numbers the project was axed. If they were
engineering, it was a side project that has now lost its budget.

Something like that.

------
raverbashing
The real question is why does Twitter need 3 offices in India

It seems the whole company is freewheeling

~~~
codeonfire
Lots of Indians in tech work their way into management and then try to bring
home the bacon back to India. They continue identifying as Indian nationals
even after going through grad school, green card, etc. You may not have
noticed but there was/is a large wave of placing Indians in executive
positions at tech companies, so I don't see why this is so mysterious. Did
people think they were going to open offices in Omaha?

~~~
geodel
Until they get US citizenship they do remain Indian nationals. And for Indian
origin people it can easily take 10-15 years after graduation to get US
citizenship.

Also identifying with India and actually going back and living in India are
two vastly different things. Most of them will talk and plan but never leave
for India as facilities, money and comfort of the first world will be just too
much leave. Of course some of them may go for CEO/very senior position to
establish office in India and then come back after some time.

~~~
codeonfire
Green card holders and those seeking permanent resident status have presumably
announced their intent to become Americans. If they are trying to use their
position in America to send jobs and offices back to India then that's their
power that corporations have given them. But, they should lose their green
card and/or visa as a result because their loyalties are obviously not to the
US. They just want a green card to exploit American businesses, not to become
a citizen.

------
0xmohit

      We thank the impacted individuals, less than 20 persons, for
      their valuable contributions and are doing as much as we can to
      provide them a respectful exit from our company.
    

Epic.

~~~
yequalsx
It's the "less than 20 people" that rubs me the wrong way. I think something
along the lines of feeling bad at having to do this would go over much better
and sound sincere. Writing "less than 20 people" makes them seem insincere.
The last part of the sentence is nice. I wish they had reworded the first
part.

~~~
ipince
"less than 20 people" also implicitly assigns a value to 20 people. Should
read "fewer than 20 people."

(ok im sorry for nitpicking)

~~~
coldtea
As with a lot of such corrections, the fewer/less dichotomy is wrong:

[http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog/archives/003775.ht...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog/archives/003775.html)

------
gerby
If Twitter has other offshore employees that were underperforming, now that
they've shown a willingness to let people go even though they probably cost
less - it'll make the rest of the offshore employees work harder to keep there
jobs.

------
coldtea
And Twitter needed an "engineering office in Bangalore, India" because?

~~~
intoverflow2
Same reason it needs 3,800 employees to run what is essentially an internet
forum/messaging client.

We will never find out what that reason is though....

~~~
anondon
> Same reason it needs 3,800 employees to run what is essentially an internet
> forum/messaging client.

That's a very cynical way of looking at it.

The part of Twitter that you use "is essentially an internet forum/messaging
client". True, but what about the analytics, targeting ads, moderation, logs
etc.

Twitter most likely builds custom software,libraries for internal use. What
about their development and maintenance?

TL;DR : There is a whole lot more than the seemingly simplistic product that
you use.

~~~
coldtea
> _That 's a very cynical way of looking at it._

Considering WhatsApp, with 50 employees, was sold for perhaps more than
Twitter will, it's also a valid way to look at it.

> _Twitter most likely builds custom software,libraries for internal use. What
> about their development and maintenance?_

Development of what? Compared to something like the first UNIX, which was
built by 3-5 people at AT&T, Twitter is an order of magnitude less
challenging, including the whole server infrastructure and the mobile app.
Unless they built all those from scratch.

~~~
grardb
Sincere question: have you ever worked at a larger company?

When I was at Etsy, people always asked why we had "so many employees" for
what seemed to them like a simple e-commerce website. These people were always
from smaller companies.

I don't know a ton about the technology behind WhatsApp, but if I had to
guess:

1\. WhatsApp does not have an advertising platform.

2\. WhatsApp does not provide you with analytics for anything.

3\. WhatsApp doesn't need a team (or at least as big of one) dedicated to
anything related to big data or machine learning. Think of Twitter's "Trends"
and "Who to Follow" features.

4\. Searching Twitter is a much more difficult problem to solve than searching
through just your own personal chats.

5\. I may be wrong about this, but doesn't WhatsApp _not_ store anything/much
on its servers, and instead relies on your phone? I'd imagine that reduces a
lot of overhead.

6\. I'd be willing to bet that Twitter has (and needs) way more admin features
for dealing with things like harassment, illegal content being posted, etc.

I could probably go on, but this should give you an idea. All of these things
require people to make happen. Designers, developers (front-end, back-end,
mobile, dev ops, and more), PMs, you name it. Also, given that Twitter is just
a bigger site/app in general, it takes more work to handle things like
internationalization, for example. It's no sweat getting "Send," "Chats," and
"Settings" translated, but think about translating your entire advertising and
analytics platforms.

It's a lot of work.

~~~
coldtea
> _Sincere question: have you ever worked at a larger company?_

The largest tech company I've worked for was around 100 people, but I've also
worked for a (no tech) organisation of about 20000, and have done projects for
businesses with IT departments in the 1000 people range.

That said, not sure what unique insight it would give me. As a programmer I
can kinda evaluate the work behind Twitter. And I've seen companies that have
done equally or much more impressive stuff, technology wise, with 1/10 or 1/50
the resources. Nothing about Twitter, including the scaling, is rocket
science.

That's why I brought up WhatsApp -- itself is an example of this very thing.

I've read this (1), (2), (3). Fail to see why you'd need > 500 people total
for all of those, plus sales and support.

~~~
sangnoir
> As a programmer I can kinda evaluate the work behind Twitter.

That's just the Twitter you _see._ There is plenty you don't see: back-office
systems, their strategic decisions and product roadmap. All of which have a
material impact on staffing.

> That's why I brought up WhatsApp -- itself is an example of this very thing.

While the core functionality of WhatsApp and Twitter might seem
technologically similar, businesswise they aren't (weren't?). Twitter, for
better it for worse requires analytics and ads, which WhatsApp did not have.
Additionally, even the technological similarities are superficial as WhatsApp
is mostly 1:1 messaging whereas Twitter is M:N

~~~
coldtea
> _That 's just the Twitter you see. There is plenty you don't see: back-
> office systems, their strategic decisions and product roadmap. All of which
> have a material impact on staffing._

Well, knowing HN rules on profanity, I better not evaluate their "strategic
decisions and product roadmap" thus far.

> _Additionally, even the technological similarities are superficial as
> WhatsApp is mostly 1:1 messaging whereas Twitter is M:N_

True. But I'm pretty sure being M:N is not some unique challenge compared to
being 1:1 for hundreds of millions -- especially since WhatsApp had 1/60 the
people and, from what I know, 1/100 the funding to make that 1:1.

It's not that it's the same challenge, but is it that much of a challenge?

------
camelNotation
Well, there goes Twitter. It was a nice experiment. Pack it up.

Seriously, why is this news...

------
dlandis
They need to figure out a way to start monetizing Bootstrap.

------
debacle
20 down, 2000 to go?

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threesixandnine
Sorry. Wrong thread.

