this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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Do you have experience in big tech? Because its completely normal for each of these app teams to have 3-5 developers at minimum, plus a manager, a product person and likely a QA as well. Even when not working on brand new features, these teams are all running A/B tests, working on marketing campaigns, keeping the SDKs and service frameworks up to date, responding to help requests etc. Every time there's "new bits", for example, its because a team of people made that.
You don't have to believe me but I've personally worked in systems like this and there's more copmlexity than you're imagining.
Twitch actually has minimal IT - they host on AWS because they're owned by Amazon. They pay a discounted rate but otherwise don't maintain their own server farms or hardware.
Yes, I work in a medium-sized company with ~40 devs across 7 teams. Our company has thousands of employees total, but only about 40-50 software devs because we're a manufacturing company (we do lots of cool stimulations though, so not a "boring" B2B that just handles forms). Each team has 5-6 devs, one QA, and there's a design and DevOps team that everyone has access to (total team is something like 60 people). We maintain four release channels (web, Android, iOS, Windows desktop), plus an externally facing API. We don't have a ton of customers (B2B with customers in the thousands), so we don't need to scale much, but we do have a much faster pace of new features than many larger companies. Since we're B2B, at have far fewer support than normal for an app of our complexity (we have two), so add another 50 or so less technical people to handle that.
We do cross-functional teams with each team being able to work on all channels. For an app like Twitch without a ton of changes, it's not unreasonable to expect a single team to maintain multiple products. I think my org is capable of handling everything except infra for something like Twitch, so that's why I estimate the need for developers in the dozens, not hundreds.
If infra actually is handled by AWS, there's even less need for headcount if they can offload their CDN. Things like scaling can be automated and only need a team or two to investigate if there are problems.
I think this is the part that you're taking for granted. "Customers in the thousands" is no where near the scale of Twitch, and I can guarantee that Twitch uses more bandwidth a day than your company uses in a year (but probably multiple years).
Sure, but bandwidth doesn't require manpower, especially if someone else is handling infra. Once you're operating "at scale," an increase to infra load requires only modest manpower to maintain.
My only relevant experience here is on the dev side, and from the outside, it looks like Twitch could operate fine in terms of app maintenance with my org's dev team (like 40 people), or at least in the same neighborhood. So the rest are other IT support staff (DevOPs, DBAs, etc), which really shouldn't be more than 100, especially with AWS managing the HW. If they're laying off 500, that means they probably have >2k. I really don't see how they'd need much more than 500 total, especially if we assume that Valve is comparable in terms of complexity and seems to have <500 employees.
I'd like to see a breakdown of Twitch by role, because I'm not sure what kind of roles these 500 employees would be.
Bandwidth doesn't require extra manpower? Since when? If you have a solution to reduce manpower for massive amounts of daily bandwidth, you could change big tech forever. So please enlighten us.
Where are you getting the idea that having that much traffic, bandwidth, and daily active users only requires a skeleton crew? It's clear to me that you've never worked at scale, and never have you had to deal with anything related to big tech (and I have, which is why I know that you're incorrect). If you ever go to a bigger company, you are in for a shock. You really think a huge company like Twitch just has dead weight that they pay salary to for no reason, when their goal is ultimately to make more money?
It's okay to be wrong. What's not okay is continually refusing to admit that you are in the wrong when multiple people are telling you exactly what the flaw in your logic is. You clearly are not worth arguing with, because you always have to be right and can never be wrong.
I just want to know who is likely getting axed here. It doesn't sound like these would be developer jobs, since it seems unlikely they'd even have 500 devs to begin with and it's probably not content moderation (though maybe? They did massively loosen their TOS). So who exactly are they letting go? And why?
My guess is that they thought they'd needed a lot more employees than they actually did due to some kind of strategy shift (probably COVID-related, like the rest of big tech), but that never materialized so they're letting people go. I'm guessing they probably don't need significantly more people than Valve (also works at scale), and they seem to have less than 500 employees, so I really can't see Twitch needing a ton more than that.
That's not true. Nobody has yet told me what roles they likely have. That's what I want to know. I provided everything I'm aware of, gave examples with other companies (both in the industry and my own), and I'm still not sure what the scale of their org looks like.
That's why I keep engaging, because I'm not sure if this is some weird Twitch-protectionism or if people just don't want to clue me in to how these types of things work for some weird reason. I want an idea of what this means for Twitch, who they're likely letting go, and why.
I work for a consulting company, the client I am working with is a bank. They have more than 100 external workers from my company, and there's that many too from at least 4 other companies. They don't have, at all, twitch's bandwidth or requirements and they still need these numbers, and you know they do need them since if they didn't, they would simply ask for less workers, us being contractors and so on.
The consulting company I worked before also was for another bank, same story.
Storage, management, distribution and transformation of the huge amount of data that twitch handles would require a higher number of devs, for sure.
They haven't released that information yet. We won't know until the layoffs are complete.
Your "guess" is incorrect because you have no idea how any of this works, and no idea who is being let go. You also clearly don't use Twitch very much, so how could you possibly know the features that need to be maintained, deployed, fixed, and managed?
You have not provided examples except for your own company and Valve, which is in a different industry. None of those work as a comparison.
I hate greedy corporations like Twitch, and am not defending them. I'm simply trying to tell you why you're wrong, and you just keep parroting the same incorrect assumptions back. Why do you want Twitch to lay off even more people? It seems like you might be the one defending them, since this is a thread about layoffs after all. Layoffs that they shouldn't be doing because ultimately the execs were the ones that fucked up if they overhired, and they're also the ones that want more money for themselves. Layoffs = bigger exec bonuses.
Yes, hence the discussion. I was hoping someone involved in the industry would provide some relevant information. I provided my perspective using numbers available to me.
It's honestly hard to find information for something directly relevant. In another comment to you, I also posted links to Peacock, which I think is pretty close since they do live and static streaming, but they also do a fair amount of original content (that's why I hesitated to link Netflix, Disney, etc). A lot of comparable companies have a lot of irrelevant roles for the discussion at hand.
My intent in providing Valve was to link something where the primary business was content delivery, with a similar number of users, and that people here are also generally familiar with. Yes, it's not directly comparable, but it's the best I came up with in the couple minutes I thought about it. I probably should've linked Peacock instead, but again, it's a different business (mostly static videos with some live content). Kick.com is even closer, but I couldn't find readily available information (and they're new, so not an established brand like Twitch).
All I've heard is, "you don't understand the business," not actual details explaining what that business looks like and why my expectations are so out of whack.
Again, I never said that. I merely said, "I think Twitch can be run with X, given data A, B, and C." That doesn't mean I think Twitch should be size X, it merely means that's what the data I have available shows. I'm absolutely open to getting new information to get a better idea of what that looks like.