this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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"As you all know, we have worked hard over the last year to run our business as sustainably as possible. Unfortunately, we still have work to do to rightsize our company and I regret having to share that we are taking the painful step to reduce our headcount by just over 500 people across Twitch," Clancy wrote.
Cripes I hate corporate newspeak. "Rightsize" isn't a word, and I hope I never encounter it again.
"As 'sustainably' as possible." I love that one, because it makes it sound like they're being kind to nature.
Nope, just profit.
Even in financial terms "sustainably" always pisses me off. None of these companies are trying to sustain, they demand constant growth to be happy. Never ending growth is never sustainable.
Never-ending growth may not be sustainable, but it is growable.
Clearly they mean that they want the growth to be "sustainable", not the company..
I know corporate America doesn't really deserve any meaningful amount of good faith, but for whatever truth is worth, "sustainable" in a business context has essentially always meant financials. A platform like Twitch is generally going to have really high operational costs between infrastructure, network traffic, engineers, and revenue sharing with streamers, and given that Amazon doesn't operate Twitch for charity any more than you do your job for free, they need to make sure that they actually have sufficient revenue to be able to make the finances sustainable. I won't pretend to know how profitable it is, if it even is yet, but cutting employees is obviously a pretty easy lever to pull to reduce costs if your operations can get away with it.
Is twitch or prime video even profitable? I’m pretty sure twitch isn’t but prime might be just due to locking people in to making their e-commerce purchases on amazon
It all depends on Amazon's accounting, and whether or not they want it to be profitable.
They can pretend that people are subscribing to prime just for the videos, and then it becomes profitable. Or, they can pretend that people are subscribing to prime for the shipping, and prime video is just a loss-leader they use to encourage people to subscribe.
..so we can make a profit off your work.
You're fortunate that this is the first time you're hearing it, but it's been a business term for quite some time now. I've only ever heard it used as a euphemism for downsizing but one HR lady insisted the term was general, that if you were understaffed you'd still need to right size.
I asked her if in meetings that might lead to some confusion, and she was confident that it never would. She was also an idiot.
When I started getting mentioned in meetings for doing a really good job on tasks that she was supposed to be doing she fired me. She was fired just a few weeks later. Sorry, she was right sized.
Sorry.