Mon 20 Mar 2023
The news was broken to all Twitch employees that there was going to be a mass layoff that would nuke 1/5th of Twitch’s workforce, Just over 400 employees. We were not given a date that this would happen we were just told that it would be by the end of the week or early the next week.
Fri 24 Mar 2023
The day started with an announcement that Twitch would layoff 1/5th of its workforce. The anticipation of this moment through the whole week left hundreds of us with a sick feeling in our stomachs. They had split the layoffs up between APAC, EMEA, And AMER. APAC on the chopping block first. We saw people loose access and numbers from our #general slack channel dither. Each Region had a 5 hour window where people would get dropped in waves. You were lucky to get dropped straight away instead of be part of the last wave of people and have hopes that you might just be one of the people to survive.
Luckily I was one of the folk that was able to keep their jobs this time. But 1/5th of the workforce has surely affected every person that works at twitch. We all lost somebody we worked with or reported to and so morale has tanked this past week, and you can see it. The #general channel is almost a bone yard.
In my team the GSOC we lost our technicians, these amazing folk made our lives - the engineers - much easier as we no longer needed to worry about emails and phone calls. Now that the Techs have gone this workload has been thrown back at us and it has shaken up the way we got used to working. Our workflows have been disrupted and thus productivity has dropped massively. But not only when it comes to work will we miss these people, The two Technicians that I worked with made the shift lively and I already miss our interactions.
Conclusion
If you’re reading this and you are a recruiter then please talk into account ex-twitch employees effected by this tragic event.
Shout outs to: