Twitter is preparing to make some drastic changes within their large staff. Reportedly, the social media giant will be laying off employees from most departments, with the majority of those cuts expected to affect engineers.
This downsizing is taking place after co-founder Jack Dorsey was named permanent CEO. According to Re/code, sources have said that revamping the company’s engineering team would lead to more efficiency, so it is speculated that Dorsey is quickly working on making that potential improvement a reality. But the move isn’t completely understood by financial experts.
“It is important to run a tight ship, but simply cutting jobs is often the action of a company that does not know what else to do,” Edison Investment Research analyst Richard Windsor wrote in a message on Monday. “What I would have preferred to see is the removal of engineers from the mature part of the business and their re-employment on the big new strategy that will bring Twitter back to growth.”
Twitter has approximately 4,100 employees, about half of which are engineers. That number has doubled since 2013, while Twitter users have grown by less than 50 percent in that time. While it’s been said that the company is overpopulated with staff members, and even Dorsey has said that Twitter needs to be more focused, they are staying mum to their rumored plans to rectify the problem.
“We’re not commenting on rumor and speculation,” a Twitter spokesperson told Re/code.
On Monday morning, after news broke of the possible staff cuts, Twitter’s stock fell by almost 5 percent, according to Reuters.
