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Twitter lays off around 20, shuts down engineering office in Bangalore, India
- raverbashing 10y agoThe real question is why does Twitter need 3 offices in India It seems the whole company is freewheeling
- shortsightedsid 10y agoIt's likely to be sales office or a government relations office.
- sporkenfang 10y agoSales.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- elliotec 10y agoThe headline says "shuts down engineering office" so it sounds like it is engineering rather than sales.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- codeonfire 10y agoLots of Indians in tech work their way into management and then try to bring home the bacon back to India. They continue identifying as Indian nationals even after going through grad school, green card, etc. You may not have noticed but there was/is a large wave of placing Indians in executive positions at tech companies, so I don't see why this is so mysterious. Did people think they were going to open offices in Omaha?
- geodel 10y agoUntil they get US citizenship they do remain Indian nationals. And for Indian origin people it can easily take 10-15 years after graduation to get US citizenship. Also identifying with India and actually going back and living in India are two vastly different things. Most of them will talk and plan but never leave for India as facilities, money and comfort of the first world will be just too much leave. Of course some of them may go for CEO/very senior position to establish office in India and then come back after some time.
- codeonfire 10y agoGreen card holders and those seeking permanent resident status have presumably announced their intent to become Americans. If they are trying to use their position in America to send jobs and offices back to India then that's their power that corporations have given them. But, they should lose their green card and/or visa as a result because their loyalties are obviously not to the US. They just want a green card to exploit American businesses, not to become a citizen.
- raverbashing 10y agoWhat is mysterious is the fact that's 3 offices
- 0xmohit 10y agoWe thank the impacted individuals, less than 20 persons, for their valuable contributions and are doing as much as we can to provide them a respectful exit from our company. Epic.
- chris_wot 10y agoYeah, no loyalty to employees. Get used to it.
- e7c6ht6iad 10y agoIf Twitter had no loyalty to employees I figure they would have fired 3000 of them and become profitable by now.
- yequalsx 10y agoIt's the "less than 20 people" that rubs me the wrong way. I think something along the lines of feeling bad at having to do this would go over much better and sound sincere. Writing "less than 20 people" makes them seem insincere. The last part of the sentence is nice. I wish they had reworded the first part.
- ipince 10y ago"less than 20 people" also implicitly assigns a value to 20 people. Should read "fewer than 20 people." (ok im sorry for nitpicking)
- coldtea 10y agoAs with a lot of such corrections, the fewer/less dichotomy is wrong: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog/archives/003775.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog/archives/003775.ht...
- vidarh 10y agoI agree. Even just writing "We thank the X affected people." would have been better. The "less than 20 people" interjection makes it sound like they're trying to minimise the importance of it and making a point of it being such a trifling little firing-round that they couldn't even be bothered checking the exact count.
- trjordan 10y agoI feel like "lays off" is the wrong term here. If you're closing an office of 20 people at a company of 3,800, that feels more like firing a team for not producing, not making bottom-of-the-stack-rank cuts because you need to free up budget.
- pearjuice 10y agoWhat do you think generates more clicks and thus more ad revenue, a dramatization of occurring events or the actual truth?
- omouse 10y agoEach of those 20 people have lives and families. Not producing by whose measurement? Who defines that ,they were obviously hired for a particular job and have been doing it for a while and pretty well if they weren't fired before. I wonder how much help Twitter is giving them in looking for their next jobs.
- nine_k 10y agoMaybe they were given ample prior notice, then Twitter reported only the actual closure, not the plan.
- kaliku2 10y agoNot producing by twitter's measurement. If it was their fault, or their manager's or maybe it was simply a bad decision to open that office there, is completely irrelevant. What if they didn't have families, would their discomfort mean less to you?
- coldtea 10y ago>Each of those 20 people have lives and families. Not producing by whose measurement? Who defines that ,they were obviously hired for a particular job and have been doing it for a while and pretty well if they weren't fired before. Don't necessarily disagree on the human impact, but this is a strange reasoning. >Not producing by whose measurement? Obviously by the one who hired them? >Who defines that, they were obviously hired for a particular job and have been doing it for a while and pretty well if they weren't fired before. Nobody is fired until they are fired. So by the same logic, everybody who wasn't fired immediately did their job "pretty well". Alternatives not considered: (a) they did their a bad or mediocre job for a longish time, but company only ever cared to fire when money got tight, cuts needed to be made, performance review was completed and they came up empty. (b) they did their job bad for a short time, and they're fired as soon as it was discovered. Of course firing is can be also because they were hired for a specific project that they completed and now they no longer needed, or because the project went south or went out of favour with Twitter management and Twitter wants to kill it, etc. Or they do their job perfectly well, but it doesn't bring Twitter the money it expected, so they are canned. >I wonder how much help Twitter is giving them in looking for their next jobs None? Like most employees? Besides maybe a good recommendation letter?
- r_smart 10y agoIt seems weird that they would choose to do this. From what I understand, they're a company in need of something big happening for them. Laying off 20 people, who are probably some of the lowest paid on their staff, doesn't really seem to do anything for them as I can understand it. It's basically $0 in Twitter dollars. Why not just turn it into an R&D department and see if they churn out anything interesting? Otherwise, just don't replace them as they leave. Having worked in the semiconductor industry (oh boy, annual layoff time!), once you start firing people, rumors start and morale tanks. Sometimes you have to do it, but I just don't see how 20 people in India helps at all, but will get rumors churning internally. I guess it just seems to me like saying: "I've realized I'm going to have a hard time ahead of me financially. To that end, I"m going to start buying generic dish soap. I'm now saving about $0.3 / month!" You haven't fixed your financial problem, and now your dish soap doesn't bubble up like it's supposed to. Please enjoy that labored analogy :)
- bluedino 10y ago>> It's basically $0 in Twitter dollars. It's not when it happens to 10, 50, and then 100 teams
- r_smart 10y agoRight, but that's not what they're doing right now. They fired what are probably the 20 lowest paid engineers in their company. They've closed the office as well, but it was probably the cheapest real estate in their company. Most people who have been in the position of laying people off that I've met have said that it's better to do it all in one big cut. Laying off team after team over a period of time is disastrous for morale, and you can expect the performance of your company to tank. If that's their plan, it's probably a bad one. If they decided to clean up their books (in preparation for sale or whatever), and this was all they came up with, then I think they've failed to send the right signalling to potential buyers.
- Retric 10y agoCheap does not mean good value for the money. Let's say it costs them 1M to run that office and they get 0.5M in value from that office. Well, shut it down. Hell, it could have just been an experiment. Let's see if doing this is a good idea. If No shut it down, if Yes scale it up. PS: Another concern is how much effort it takes to manage. It can be really expensive to have a small team in another country. Often your better off with either nobody or large teams.
- coldtea 10y agoAnd Twitter needed an "engineering office in Bangalore, India" because?
- intoverflow2 10y agoSame reason it needs 3,800 employees to run what is essentially an internet forum/messaging client. We will never find out what that reason is though....
- anondon 10y ago> Same reason it needs 3,800 employees to run what is essentially an internet forum/messaging client. That's a very cynical way of looking at it. The part of Twitter that you use "is essentially an internet forum/messaging client". True, but what about the analytics, targeting ads, moderation, logs etc. Twitter most likely builds custom software,libraries for internal use. What about their development and maintenance? TL;DR : There is a whole lot more than the seemingly simplistic product that you use.
- coldtea 10y ago>That's a very cynical way of looking at it. Considering WhatsApp, with 50 employees, was sold for perhaps more than Twitter will, it's also a valid way to look at it. >Twitter most likely builds custom software,libraries for internal use. What about their development and maintenance? Development of what? Compared to something like the first UNIX, which was built by 3-5 people at AT&T, Twitter is an order of magnitude less challenging, including the whole server infrastructure and the mobile app. Unless they built all those from scratch.
- camelNotation 10y agoWell, there goes Twitter. It was a nice experiment. Pack it up. Seriously, why is this news...
- debacle 10y ago20 down, 2000 to go?
- threesixandnine 10y agoSorry. Wrong thread.
- TheLarch 10y ago2015 R&D: $806,648,000 2015 Sales, General and Admin $1,132,164,000 I can't imagine a justification for these numbers. Twitter seems like a small company idea.
- Naritai 10y agoA lot of people seem to be commenting that a 20-person office would hardly move the needle at Twitter. They're right, in general - the total numbers are too small to be layoffs and it covered an entire office so is unlikely to be performance related (in an individual sense). The logical inference then is that this team was hired for a specific project, and that project isn't working out. If they were sales, then they were likely hired to try to break into a specific market (probably something geographically close to their office), and when they failed to make the numbers the project was axed. If they were engineering, it was a side project that has now lost its budget. Something like that.
- dlandis 10y agoThey need to figure out a way to start monetizing Bootstrap.
- gerby 10y agoIf Twitter has other offshore employees that were underperforming, now that they've shown a willingness to let people go even though they probably cost less - it'll make the rest of the offshore employees work harder to keep there jobs.