I mean this is all textbook IPO nonsense:<p>Pump the revenue however possible (crazy API fees, push for native only) assuming that people have no choice cause it’s been so long<p>Slash anything that isn’t directly revenue producing<p>All to make the P/L look really groovy but more importantly as a loyalty test to your underwriters.
I've heard anecdotally from people I trust that social media is dying.
Content is struggling for views and shares.<p>Reddit isn't completely social media, but if people aren't responding to SM like they were it will hurt Reddit. If you're an insider it's probably the best opportunity you're going to get to juke the stats and max your IPO. Only going to go down from here.
I sometimes wonder is layoff just for show for the investors. A company the size of reddit couldn't possibly care about saving salary of 90 people to take bad PR. Instead they could have simply moved people around and fire 90 over period of a year or so easily as part of performance review. Similarly I know a company whose yearly attrition rate is 30%, and they fired 10% of the people with 4 months reverence.
Honest question from someone who has never worked at a Bay Area startup:<p>What do all these developers at these tech companies do all day? As a freelance developer who has to meet ridiculous timelines all the time, I don't really get how a company can have hundreds of developers and yet the product seems to languish and/or get worse or slower or both.<p>I suppose there's a lot more overhead with internal QA, code review, meetings, etc, but with the amount of developers these companies have as full-time staff, what are they doing all day? Is it mostly internal systems, tooling, etc?<p>I just find it hard to believe that there can be hundreds of developers at a company like Twitch and yet the product is largely the same as it was 5 years ago. I would think features could be cranked out so much faster than they appear to be.