A mass layoff. Volunteer. Told on social media with a mix of regret and relief. Hundreds of employees have decided to leave Twitter after Elon Musk’s ultimatum. Two days ago the new owner told everyone: either you agree to become “hard workers” of the new course, or you have to quit. Their number is not official, but in these hours in the company’s internal chats over 500 people would have sent farewell messages to their colleagues. A situation that has created an evident havoc in the Twitter headquarters, which remained closed for the whole weekend. But which competitors would be ready to take advantage of.
First of all: TikTok. According to The Information, the home social network Bytedance would be ready to double its staff in San Francisco. Take it to 2,000. A decision taken just in the hours in which a good portion of Twitter employees would have decided to leave their jobs. Among them some top-level software engineers. The technological heart of the company.
Work
Amazon, Meta, Twitter. Because the tech giants lay off en masse
by Archangel Rociola
Why TikTok Hires in Silicon Valley
Some of the assumptions decided by TikTok would actually be dictated by necessity. The company pledged to hire more US-based engineers after the application came under scrutiny by US government officials in recent years.
Several American politicians have argued in recent months that the Chinese government (present on the board of directors of the Chinese company Bytedance with its delegate) could access the personal data of American users of TikTok.
To dispel these allegations, or allay ensuing fears, TikTok said in July it was directing all US user traffic to Oracle-managed servers and bolstering its US-based engineering teams “to reduce the need for data transfers from one region to another”. TikTok’s current vacancies in Mountain View, where TikTok is headquartered, include engineers and scientists in the fields of content recommendation algorithms and data architecture, a discipline that deals with how data is collected, stored and used .
An opportunity also for startups and companies
The Mountain View office, the same location once occupied by the WhatsApp team, now Meta, has become the main design center for TikTok in the United States. Headcount has grown from a few hundred to more than 1,000 in the past two years. And now the application is looking to hire 1,000 more employees. TikTok also has offices in Los Angeles and New York, as well as London, Dublin and Singapore. ByteDance, whose other products include China’s largest short-video app Douyin, has nearly 150,000 employees worldwide, including those at TikTok, The Infromation reveals.
If TikTok is ready to take advantage of it, so are thousands of Silicon Valley startups. Many of these don’t have liquidity problems, given the investment rounds concluded in 2022. And they don’t have staffing problems. They have money to invest in the product, and developing it with experienced people is an opportunity.
Analyses
What will happen to the licensees of Meta and Twitter?
by Archangel Rociola
They could now access highly qualified personnel, until recently inaccessible. Same thing for the giants of American industry. Forced by a rapid digitization process, they could find a sudden treasure trove of talent in Twitter leavers. The redistribution of responsibilities is already underway.