https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/amazon-lays-off-500-twitch-employees-hundreds-more-at-mgm-and-prime-video/
Twitch reportedly still unprofitable, paid over $1 billion to streamers in 2023.
"As you all know, we have worked hard over the last year to run our business as sustainably as possible. Unfortunately, we still have work to do to rightsize our company and I regret having to share that we are taking the painful step to reduce our headcount by just over 500 people across Twitch," Clancy wrote.
Cripes I hate corporate newspeak. "Rightsize" isn't a word, and I hope I never encounter it again.
"As 'sustainably' as possible." I love that one, because it makes it sound like they're being kind to nature.
Nope, just profit.
Even in financial terms "sustainably" always pisses me off. None of these companies are trying to sustain, they demand constant growth to be happy. Never ending growth is never sustainable.
I know corporate America doesn't really deserve any meaningful amount of good faith, but for whatever truth is worth, "sustainable" in a business context has essentially always meant financials. A platform like Twitch is generally going to have really high operational costs between infrastructure, network traffic, engineers, and revenue sharing with streamers, and given that Amazon doesn't operate Twitch for charity any more than you do your job for free, they need to make sure that they actually have sufficient revenue to be able to make the finances sustainable. I won't pretend to know how profitable it is, if it even is yet, but cutting employees is obviously a pretty easy lever to pull to reduce costs if your operations can get away with it.
Is twitch or prime video even profitable? I’m pretty sure twitch isn’t but prime might be just due to locking people in to making their e-commerce purchases on amazon
prime might be
It all depends on Amazon's accounting, and whether or not they want it to be profitable.
They can pretend that people are subscribing to prime just for the videos, and then it becomes profitable. Or, they can pretend that people are subscribing to prime for the shipping, and prime video is just a loss-leader they use to encourage people to subscribe.
You're fortunate that this is the first time you're hearing it, but it's been a business term for quite some time now. I've only ever heard it used as a euphemism for downsizing but one HR lady insisted the term was general, that if you were understaffed you'd still need to right size.
I asked her if in meetings that might lead to some confusion, and she was confident that it never would. She was also an idiot.
When I started getting mentioned in meetings for doing a really good job on tasks that she was supposed to be doing she fired me. She was fired just a few weeks later. Sorry, she was right sized.
This legal responsibility to shareholder profits sure is shitting on everything else. We should change that.
That's just an excuse companies make when they never had the intention of doing the right thing.
The fiduciary responsibility standard is there to protect people’s retirement which is all in the market. It sucks that people are losing are being laid off but I don’t think changing the standard would give these people their jobs back.
You should not be entitled to protection when you engage in gambling knowingly and with your own volition. These protections certainly should not come at the cost of someone’s job, the thing people do to follow the rules and contribute to society.
These people would lose their jobs regardless because twitch is not profitable.
Edit: Investments are made in good faith, and having law backing that and recourse for those wronged is important. Like it or not the millions of people with their money in the market outweighs the temporary bummer that is a few hundred losing their jobs. It might be popular to think that the people being hurt are sleazy venture capitalists but it’s the workers who rely on their 401k to be able to live when they retire or the parents who are trying to save for their child’s education that get hurt.
A few hundred losing their jobs is kinda misrepresenting the situation isn't it. If you keep seeing each company by itself in terms of firings but then group the market as a whole in terms of people with money in the market.
It's either a few thousand with money in the company vs the people fired from that company... Or the market vs all people fired in the market during these waves.
Plus.. when you are one of the fired people the impact can be deeply impactful, in the US even as far as having no health insurance. While less profit does not have such an impact.
I was mostly just trying to get my point across in a hastily written comment. But you are absolutely right that I should have considered the layoffs market wide when talking about the impact they have have market wide.
And I hate to lessen the human impact that the layoffs have, especially when COBRA is a joke and people rely on their employers 401k match and such to have a decent living in retirement. I’m not endorsing our current system, I don’t like any more than the rest of us. I just think we need to solve the problems of people’s QOL in retirement being tied to the market and things like healthcare being dependent on one’s employment before we worry about companies being run to make as much money as possible
A reasonable response with worries we also share. Thanks for that.
I'm from Europe and don't understand why this should not just be resolved with taxes on the companies.
The record profits of the companies are in my vision because the company does not have to do anything for the healthcare and pensions. So if the company does not have to care for it, but society requires it, this is where the government needs to act. Tax the companies and arrange healthcare and retirement stipends. This solves one issue by solving the other, allowing the company to keep doing what it's doing without having to think about healthcare.. that has been resolved.
Individuals then have retirement benefits and can use private retirement insurance to supplement this.
Instead it just makes an entire generation who never gets to retire.
The easiest way to protect retired people is to make sure there are no retired people to protect (taps head)
They're the same thing, and Elon buying Twitter in cash should have taught you that.
They're not the same thing. Musk paid for twitter partially with borrowed money, partially with money raised by selling Tesla stock. The money he got when he sold that Tesla stock was income. The borrowed money wasn't.
Have you been living under a rock or in a comma during the past two decades? Like 5 dudes own 90% of the world.
It's been that way for awhile.
If you have Amazon prime, you can sub to one creator a month "for free."