back to article Latest tech layoffs: Twitch, Duolingo, Citrix parent ditch hundreds of workers

Last year's tech layoff spree isn't over, with live-streaming site Twitch announcing today that it's laying off 500 employees, around a third of its staff. The biz isn't alone in letting people go. Twitch CEO Dan Clancy confirmed the cuts on Wednesday after Bloomberg broke the news the day before, which Clancy described as a …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Companies that can't make money?

    Well... Citrix doesn't need anyone other than whoever produces the license files, as they haven't done anything for years. I'm surprised that Twitch is having a hard time given that they don't pay for content creation. They're more like a credit card processing company with IRC features. I'd recommend that they bump up their prices in Korea... but they already take half...

    I think the real problem is that there is only so much advertising $$$ in the world. Even if tech companies run 24/7 adverts, they're not going to pull in any more money.

    1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

      Re: Companies that can't make money?

      there is only so much advertising $$$ in the world

      Indeed. What "we are now sizing our organization based upon the current scale of our business and conservative predictions of how we expect to grow in the future." really means is "we're still making a loss, and can't pull the wool over the eyes of the VCs and advertisers any longer".

  2. bregister

    watch this space

    more to come ...

    Because corporate leaders are lemmings,

    Sorry lemmings.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "For some time now the organization has been sized based upon where we optimistically expect our business to be in three or more years, not where we're at today,"

    So what he's saying is basically he is unable to predict where the business will be in the short-mid term, unable to ensure he has the correct workforce in place at the right time in order to deal with the companies resource requirements, and is stuck trying to balance a workforce against company requirements almost in relative real-time?

    Which is kind of interesting seeing as most companies have 3-5 year planning cycles (none of which I've ever seen to be anywhere near accurate as, most of the time, it's based on a *desire* to meet

    unrealistic growth targets and investment returns as opposed to reality).

    One of the reasons why, during interviews where I've been asked "where do you see yourself in 5 years time" I reply "I don't know - where is the company going to be in 5 years time"....

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      It's basically executive incompetence. There's a reason the Japanese C-suite rather pays staff to do nothing than to admit their business is shrinking or they overhired, it reflects badly on management.

      Mass lay-offs are usually followed by reduced productivity and reduced profitability*, the only thing that briefly goes up is share price. In tech companies you can sometimes see a drop in service reliability too because they have fired the people who knew how to keep things working. Obviously Twitter is an extreme example where at one point, after Musk's seagull management interventions, they had more downtime per month than they used to have in a year. But Microsoft and Google watchers see these patterns too.

      * I once had to fire an employee after the entire team had begged me to get rid of him for his incompetence, lying and poor morale that was getting everyone down. I, foolishly, assumed that getting rid of him would improve the atmosphere. Unfortunately it didn't as now everyone was worried they would be the next one being kicked out. It's been more than ten years and I still think I may have done the wrong thing by just get rid of him.

  4. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "for all the anxiety that it caused"

    Oh ho, that was a good one.

    Apologize for the anxiety caused by the leak, and don't mention the anxiety cause by being fucking laid off.

    Well done. Corporate bullshit at its finest.

  5. Dan 55 Silver badge

    Enshittification continues

    So at the end of last year Amazon said that adding adverts to Prime Video and making people pay to remove them would allow them to "continue to invest in compelling exclusive content" and now they're firing people at Prime Video and MGM Studios who would make that content.

    Just come out and say "we're happy with the mediocre selection of series and films we've got on Prime, making it better looks like too much hard work and after all it's just one of the things so we've thrown into the Prime bundle so we're just going to charge you more and fire people to reduce costs", we'll respect you more for it.

    1. Julian 8

      Re: Enshittification continues

      I have prime for fast delivery, occasionaly prime prices and maybe the prime day or two.

      Only thing I have watched via prime video is the football, and got to say, on the laptop is is great as I can have 4/5 games streaming and quickly flick between them. However, they are going to have less football from next season.

      The streaming services need to rethink their strategy as there are so many that paying for them all for the odd series/film here and there is too expensive, even more with increases in prices or you'll get adverts otherwise..

      I know a few of my sons friends who are now either streaming from dogey sites / IPTV, on usenet (which is fun to watch) or trying to find decent torrent sites.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Enshittification continues

        For what it’s worth…. If you don’t have prime, it doesn’t actually take longer to arrive.

        - stuff not from Amazon Fulfillment is not affected

        - the dates show. Are only an indication. Usually it arrives next day anyway.

        The only time I had to pay extra was two weeks before Xmas

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Enshittification continues

          - the dates show. Are only an indication. Usually it arrives next day anyway.

          This. I have discovered that it's not worth paying for faster delivery because it usually arrives on the same day a 'fast' delivery would anyway. It may help that I live less than a KM away from two major regional distribution centres but paying five quid extra for the small chance it arrives one day earlier is rarely worth it for me.

          1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

            Re: Enshittification continues

            Agreed. I've never had Prime, and never wanted it. If I need something quickly, I go out and buy it in person. I do that with anything I can get locally anyway, and if I have to make the 90-mile round trip to some of the bigger stores, or the 150-mile round trip to the rest, then that's the way it goes.

    2. Joe W Silver badge

      Re: Enshittification continues

      Oooh... "si, amigo". As a user of Duolingo I can totally confirm that effect. Shoddy sentences, along with their inability to recognise proper English (sorry, we did learn proper English, with the proper words - "pants" are underwear, you usually mean "trousers", in school - and I can assure you my spelling in my native tounge is as shoddy as in English, not sorry, schools not to blame on this) has bothered me for a while - but the last year had an increase in shoddy sentences and inconsitently applied rules (you can use that word here but not there, even if the sentences are essentially the same, you can omit ther personal pronoun here but not in the exactly same sentence structure there (like you can in Portuguese or in Japanese)). They leave it to the users to flag problems, they also removed the "discussion" pages - but those had been littered by people trying to be funny rather than discussing problems with the exercise.

      They do agressively try to put you on the paid tier, but I sort of understand that - they probably do not make that much from ads, and somehow they have to pay people. I do not use it often enough to 1) properly learn any language and 2) justify spending money on it. Some friends use it, and apparently it can serve as a nice additional source of materials when taking a language class.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Enshittification continues

        Agreed. The translations have gotten worse - definitely in English, so can only assume also in the other languages - and accepted answers have some obvious ones missing.

      2. Daniel Pfeiffer

        Re: Enshittification continues

        The Duolingo content partly looks like AI generated already. Hallucinating sentences like “The bear touches the whale”, or “The wolf and the tiger look at the duck.” Not to mention very specific animals like raccoon dog or red crested crane, where the latter I can at least imagine what it might be. So annoying to have to learn stuff like that, instead of real life vocabulary!

  6. Tron Silver badge

    Layoffs, layoffs everywhere.

    Don't worry about a shortage of tech staff to lay off. The government are ripping chunks out of the university system and turning them into STEM colleges, to ensure that we have a steady supply of tech folk to lay off in the future, rather than postmen, nurses or farm workers. Praise be to glorious leaders.

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