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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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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.
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.
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.