Twitch reportedly set to lay off around 500 employees later this week

A minute after posting this, I can think of way more necessary roles. Let's start by mentioning that all this infra needs to run 24/7 with 100% uptime so that some 30 year old can jerk off to a VOD of Amouranth at 3am without a single frame drop.

And all of this is just core product people.

Then you need HR, managers to hire, fire & promote all these people, lawyers, customer service reps, content moderators, executive assistants, and the facilities maintenance people who refill their snack closets.

Its hard to run a huge online service like Twitch.

following infrastructure

A lot of that stuff doesn't need regular work, so maintenance should be pretty limited. I could see a team or two (~10 people) maintain most of that. Most of it really doesn't need much, just updates to stay on top of security threats and whatnot. So like max 50 people there, at least on the development side, and that's being generous.

Most of the work is going to be DevOps and other IT roles for maintaining databases, load balancing, etc. But again, that doesn't need a ton of people, as in, I could see the whole company being under 500 employees easily, and that's with a fair amount of redundancy. It's not like they're doing much R&D for new products, just iterating on engagement metrics.

Twitch scale

Hence the IT people.

Sure, but if they're firing 500 employees, they probably have >2k total. That's a lot! How many salespeople and content moderators do they need?

Content Moderation at this kind of scale is:

1. Impossible to do without both humans and algorithms
2. Always going to produce absurd, hypocritical and controversial interpretations of and changes to the TOS
3. Cause a horrific workload for those programming the algorithm, who must devise ways of screening for not actually well defined and constantly changing TOS no nos
4. Literally traumatize and cause massive mental damage to the human moderators

Facebook has these problems on an even worse scale, and still operates basically computer equipped sweatshops of hundreds and thousands of people in less economically developed parts of the world, most of whom report massive mental trauma from having to constantly review absolutely horrific content, day in, day out, for years.

Fair, but surely a lot of that is automated, no? You'd want a human to review it, but it's not like you'd need people watching the streams constantly.

I'm just saying that eliminating 500 people means they have a lot more than 500 people working there, probably well over 2k. That's way bigger than I expected.