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[Bloomberg] Amazon’s Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

Jose92

[Membe


Not surprising at all. Twitch pays one of the highest salaries. their principle software engineers compensation could reach a million.

Honestly this tech salary bubble will burst, and a lot of software engineers will be shocked with the reality.
akgmysa82abc1.png
 
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Wildebeest

Member
Ironically it is using amazon cloud services which kills most hopes for profitability. Amazon video itself saved a lot of money from moving away from amazon's "microservices" to its own dedicated servers. That stuff just doesn't scale up.
 

ReyBrujo

Member


Not surprising at all. Twitch pays one of the highest salaries. their principle software engineers compensation could reach a million.

Honestly this tech salary bubble will burst, and a lot of software engineers will be shocked with the reality.
akgmysa82abc1.png

Well, if you consider the Stack Overflow survey yeah, these salaries are pretty high in comparison but even if the bubble bursts they will likely find jobs somewhere else. The issue is always with juniors because why hire one when you get plenty of seniors who can be productive from day 1.
 

SJRB

Gold Member
1500 people sounds like an insane number honestly. I wonder how many of those are actually keeping the platform afloat and how many are in the "adult daycare" category.
 


Not surprising at all. Twitch pays one of the highest salaries. their principle software engineers compensation could reach a million.

Honestly this tech salary bubble will burst, and a lot of software engineers will be shocked with the reality.
akgmysa82abc1.png
US salaries in the tech sector are insane to be honest.
 

Jose92

[Membe
US salaries in the tech sector are insane to be honest.
they are not sustainable like game pass, it’s already causing major layoffs across many tech companies.

In the uk many design companies are making a lot of engineers redundant and outsourcing to the far east. Because it is cheaper and can do the same job. And in the uk salaries are not even a fifth of us tech sector.
 
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First question should be, why would you need 1500 people to run a game streaming platform, just like the thousands upon thousands of people working at Twitter before, for a messaging service.
 
I have a love-hate relation with Twitch. I don't like the platform per se, but I still like to watch and want to support some of the streamers on there. I've been watching Twitch streamers since 10+ years ago, so I've seen the changes since over the years. The main features they've added are more (sometimes very annoying and in your face) ways to monetize users and more advertisements. As a someone with multiple Twitch subs (sub or not, you're still confronted with more monetization crap) I've always felt the company has a very consumer unfriendly and greedy approach to it's userbase. I guess it makes sense to keep such a bloated organization afloat.
 
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1500 people is an interesting number of employees alright. On one hand, big tech companies like this can have that. You could have one team consisting of one designer, two developers, a product manager etc, and all they do is like emails for example. That is their domain. Another team could be responsible for profile and search. The service is so big and gets broken up within the org.

All that said its one thing to hear about a 5 or 10% layoff... but 35% of your staff? That's bloat. Or... or in some cases the money train is slowing and severe cuts need to be made to continue.
 

Arsic

Loves his juicy stink trail scent
This company doesn’t need more than 100-300 at most considering how poorly it’s run with 1500…
 

justiceiro

Marlboro: Other M
Holy hell, people thought 2023 was full of game industry layoffs, but 10 days in and 2024 already catched up.
 

ReyBrujo

Member
Those US software engineer salaries are insane, most developers in the EU earn way, way less.
The US average is much lower from what I understand. These are salaries in the top 50 or top 100 companies, the vast majority pay much less. Many companies (like Twitch) expanded during the pandemic and shrank back once the extra income stopped coming during 2022-2023. It would look like Twitch was able to keep that extra layer for a year longer but maybe Kick taking some of their main streamers like xQc and Hikaru (even if not exclusively) made them being preemptive and take steps they should have taken a year or two ago.
 
I guess we will see game streaming fragmentation in the future. Maybe some new competitor will arise. Discord supports streaming now, Twitter (lol) supports streaming and obviously Youtube.
 
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