Twitter will pay over $800 million to settle a class action suit:
Twitter has agreed to pay $809.5 million to settle a class action suit filed by shareholders in 2016. Investors alleged that Twitter masked the company's slowing growth while executives including former CEO Dick Costolo and co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey (the current CEO) sold stock “for hundreds of millions of dollars in insider profits.”
The plaintiffs said Twitter was tracking daily active users (DAU) as the key metric for engagement in early 2015, but it was still reporting monthly active user figures. The DAU measurement indicated engagement was dropping or staying flat, according to the lawsuit.
[...] The company plans to use cash on hand for the settlement. It's expected to pay the sum by the end of the year.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Wednesday September 22 2021, @07:37AM (4 children)
I'll take "companies that don't need to exist" for $100.
And they're still building out headcount, from 3900 in 2019 to 5500 in 2020, despite having lost well over $1 billion in 2020. WTF does a "microblogging" company need 5500 employees? Where are they getting that kind of cash to burn through?
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday September 22 2021, @12:59PM (3 children)
Considering how many users they have (if those users are actual people or just bot I have no idea) then perhaps 5500 employees are not that much. Still it's a valid question what all these people do. One would think they don't need that many developers. There will be a fair amount of administrative staff to keep it all running. But I guess a lot of those 5500 people are just "business" people that are not really part of the development and tech side of things but are HR, PR, Finance, etc the other "administrative" or "community" part of large companies. It could be interesting if there was some kind of available breakdown.
I strongly suspect it will be similar for the other similar companies. There might not actually be that many actual developers and tech people involved but just more and more people in the other segments to keep the business running. That may or may not actually be essential people.
For fun, lets just have a look at Twitters career page ( https://careers.twitter.com/ [twitter.com] ). Lots of corporate PR bullshit. Love the pictures of black women, like they are somehow an actual representation of the people that work at Twitter that will probably just be a lot, or mainly, of white males in reality. But lets sell the feelgood corporate image of equality and such "Life’s not about a job, it’s about purpose. We believe real change starts with conversation. Here, your voice matters. Come as you are and together we’ll do what’s right (not what’s easy) to serve the public conversation." Right they are not in the biz, it's not really a job, it's you finding a purpose in life. There are several people employed at the company that just sit around to come up with gems like that.
As I write this they have 666 openings (that is funny all by itself).
By "Teams"
Customer Support (34)
Data science (32)
Design (20)
Finance (16)
IT Enterprise (11)
Infrastructure (50)
Legal (22)
Machine learning (62)
Marketing (49)
MoPub (14) (I don't even know what that is, some kind of partnership program?)
People (44)
Product (64)
Product and design (24)
Sales (69)
Security (7)
Software engineering (282)
Trust and safety (39)
Workplace (7)
There is an overlap in teams tho as one position might be in many different teams. Some of them are more catch all teams such as Software Engineering which also then include all other kind of developer positions in all the other groups etc.
But lets assume here that the "Software engineering" group is the actual tech jobs and developers. Subtract from the total and more then half the positions they are looking for are not even in what we should call actual tech or developer jobs. It's all the other stuff that keeps the business running (possibly running it into the ground).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 22 2021, @02:02PM
Seems a lot of openings, could be:
- there are no real jobs in IT (per N=666 maybe that crazy AC had point:)
- a good selection of opens to bring new blood for all the {duds or burnouts or nepotism} big orgs always accumulate.
- their recent FTE growth really needs that many new hires (even with multi role hires)
- part of the strategy to bilk the shareholders was to pretend hi staff demand
- free market means the keep high turnover?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday September 22 2021, @07:16PM (1 child)
Could have just DDG'd that:
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday September 22 2021, @08:05PM
I could have, I just didn't care enough. But now I know. Thank you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 22 2021, @08:28AM
Now we know who are real customers of these companies.
So who are their users?
That's why I ignore all "social media" owned by companies. My small public_html folder and its local mirror is enough.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 23 2021, @02:51PM (1 child)
"Investors alleged that Twitter masked the company's slowing growth while executives including former CEO Dick Costolo and co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey (the current CEO) sold stock “for hundreds of millions of dollars in insider profits.”"
So is there any follow up on what happened to the insider traders? Did they get any fines or jail time or anything?
(Score: 2) by SunTzuWarmaster on Thursday September 23 2021, @05:32PM