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Twitch reportedly set to lay off around 500 employees later this week
(www.eurogamer.net)
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this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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Twitch builds and maintains the following infrastructure:
All of this has to run at Twitch scale (140 million MAUs)
And these are just the technical teams. Then add on UX designers, marketing, product and business development, not to mention Business Intelligence data scientists.
A minute after posting this, I can think of way more necessary roles. Let's start by mentioning that all this infra needs to run 24/7 with 100% uptime so that some 30 year old can jerk off to a VOD of Amouranth at 3am without a single frame drop.
And all of this is just core product people.
Then you need HR, managers to hire, fire & promote all these people, lawyers, customer service reps, content moderators, executive assistants, and the facilities maintenance people who refill their snack closets.
Its hard to run a huge online service like Twitch.
Interesting you said exec assistants and not execs, almost like the empty suits are the least valuable addition to a company. hmmmmm....
A lot of that stuff doesn't need regular work, so maintenance should be pretty limited. I could see a team or two (~10 people) maintain most of that. Most of it really doesn't need much, just updates to stay on top of security threats and whatnot. So like max 50 people there, at least on the development side, and that's being generous.
Most of the work is going to be DevOps and other IT roles for maintaining databases, load balancing, etc. But again, that doesn't need a ton of people, as in, I could see the whole company being under 500 employees easily, and that's with a fair amount of redundancy. It's not like they're doing much R&D for new products, just iterating on engagement metrics.
Hence the IT people.
You're really showing that you have absolutely no idea what any of this takes. These teams take large chunks of people - their live service ops alone is probably 300 people, not to mention client application teams, teams working on new features, moderation teams, support teams, billing teams, QA teams, and then literally all the execs, management, PR, HR, finance, design, office staff, and the whole slew of other things every large company needs. The funny thing is the person already listed all of these out for you... It's pretty clear you don't know what this all involves and haven't worked at a company like this at all.
I'm sure it's over 1,000 people.
I really don't think that's necessary.
My company is a few thousand people, most of those are blue collar factory workers producing or delivering our core product (we design custom trucks for delivery because our product is very dangerous). Our actual corporate staff is like 200-300, and that includes a lot of people handling customer stuff (we're B2B, so marketing, payment processing, etc is mostly manual and catered to specific clients). Our dev team is 40-50 people with four release channels (web, Android, iOS, and Windows desktop app), and is broken down into 7 distinct 5-6 dev teams that are all cross functional and can deliver all products. We do a lot of complex simulations and new feature work, so it's not some boring product ordering service. If we were maintenance-only, we could probably cut that to less than half.
I understand that Twitch has very different problems and thus needs way more staff than us, I'm merely giving an indication that I know how projects generally scale.
Let's look at a somewhat similar company, Valve. Valve has ~360 employees and often has ~11M concurrent users (i.e. people playing a game using their service). They probably don't push as much data as Twitch, but they're in the ballpark, and they build a lot more compelling products, like Steam Deck, Steam Link app, and video games. They're a combination hardware company, game studio, and CDN. Twitch is pretty much just a CDN. I highly doubt the increased load Twitch handles to really need >5x the employees (assuming 500 employees let go is <25% of the total company).
You sure talk a lot about something you know nothing of consequence about.
Then enlighten me. What makes Twitch need way more employees than Valve?
Scale and bandwidth. Valve is not in the same industry, and you cannot use it as a comparison.
Don't they have similar scale and bandwidth needs? Sure, not directly comparable because Twitch is almost entirely live streaming while Steam is largely fixed file serving, so there's different needs on the CDN (e.g. Steam can serve copies throughout the world, Twitch needs to present a single logical stream), but surely they're at a similar enough scale that Twitch should be within 2x the employee needs of Valve, especially since Twitch apparently doesn't maintain their own hardware, they piggy-back off AWS' infra.
No. Video is much more bandwidth intensive. Transcoding streams is also one of the most hardware intensive things you can do. They're not the same, and just because they don't own the hardware does not mean that they don't have to manage their hardware. AWS only provides access to their platform to Twitch in the same way they do for normal customers, therefore Twitch must handle everything the same as a normal customer would. They just get discounts, that's the only difference; they still own their infra. I think you might not know what "infra" is.
You are continuing to assume that you're correct and smarter than a huge company with thousands of employees. If you know how Twitch can reduce headcount further, I'm sure the greedy execs would love to hear your ideas. They'd love to fire more engineers with your brilliant solution.
Once you go from "lots of bandwidth" (i.e. more than a single server can handle) to "a whole ton of bandwidth," you're in the same general order of magnitude. Steam needs to respond to spikes in demand (new game launch, seasonal sale, etc), so they likely already have auto-scaling automated.
Video is a bit different than static content because you can't just point a user to another copy, you need to actually route the data in real time to be accessible from multiple locations simultaneously, but it's the same general idea. If we want to look at something more similar, we can look at Peacock, which has 1000-2000 employees, but they also produce original content. If Peacock fired 500 employees, that would be 25-50% of the company, which would be absolutely massive and disrupt their normal operations. Twitch already let go ~400 employees last year.
That said, it looks like this is ~35% of their workforce, so they probably had 1400-1500 employees, and now they're around 1k. That still seems a bit high to me, but I don't know how many of those are streamer support people (i.e. salespeople) vs technical roles. I'm guessing it's related to shutting down in Korea, so I'm guessing that these reductions and last year's reductions were because of expected growth in other regions, not servicing their current market.
I said no such thing. I merely expressed surprise at such a huge number being dismissed and wondered what types of roles they could be.
The amount of continuous bandwidth required by twitch is way, way bigger than steam needs. Steams concurrent users are not using the download bandwidth, they are playing their already downloaded games whereas twitch's users are continuously taking from it. Furthermore, twitch is free to access whereas steam users when they download something they usually already paid for it, so the efficiency model to be considered is again, different.
I'm sorry to say that you really don't know about the technicalities enough to determine if they are similar scale companies. And if you do, you are being intentionally wrong which I don't think is the case.
Valve isn't operating streaming apps that require both the bandwidth control and continuous storage. That alone complicates it several fold. Valve is a store and game distribution site. The scales are wildly different.
Live Streaming and hosting videos over multiple platforms is a wee bit more complicated than just providing downloadable files.
The largest work is probably content moderation and support, but with that it is very likely, that steam support is not employed at valve, but contracted out.
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.