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0 pointskranke1553y ago0 comments

Software engineers at Twitter got used to working on an money losing company for 10 years and being told they’re great at their job. Then they were fired en masse because someone’s called them out on it.

If your company is losing money all this time you are likely to be fired eventually in the real world. Job security in sw world had become so high that no one seemed to expect it. Everyone assumed “sure we’re losing money and the company has no direction” but all is fine.

They all stayed there in their tables working for 10 years in a rudderless company as if it was a government job.

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entropy_3y ago

This is factually untrue though. Twitter was making money in 2018 and 2019 (to the tune of ~1.2B/year in net profit out of ~3B revenue, which is a fairly high profit margin) they lost quite a bit of money in 2020 and less in the years thereafter. However, even in the years where they had negative net income EBITDA remained positive suggesting the losses were upfront investments that would be expected to be amortized over the coming years.

The only reason Twitter is in deep financial shit right now is because Elon acquired it in a leveraged buyout and the cost of servicing the debt is estimated around 1B/year.

matwood3y ago

Yeah, most of the complaints of Twitter was that it should be doing more in the space it commanded, not that it was losing tons of money every year. Though, 1-1.5B in yearly interest payments is going to make that tough going forward.

kranke155OP3y ago

I stand corrected. My impression was they always lost money.

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