Well, to extend the ship analogy: Twitter seems to believe that they're sinking because the ship is overloaded, so they're trying to improve things by tossing people overboard. I don't mean to make light of the situation; I truly feel for all of the people affected by this.

So, why would anyone want to join Twitter now? Well, the diminished share price could be one reason. If you believe the company can turn things around, and you believe that your contributions would help the company do so, then getting in now and hopefully acquiring some shares or options at the current market price could be a rational move. You'd probably want to make sure you've got a lifejacket (i.e. an emergency fund) handy just in case you find yourself thrown overboard in the future.

Also, working at a company which actually has a deployed product with a high public profile is probably not bad. There are plenty of startups which never pan out. And there are plenty of companies out there with a single profitable cash cow and futile strategic projects searching for the next hit. Or barely running but business critical legacy projects written in Cobol, C++ or Java. Twitter doesn't strike me as particularly bad in comparison.

Also, having had layoffs is not necessarily only a bad thing. Even the best company will end up with a certain amount of substandard, undermotivated employees after a long hiring frenzy. The best thing for everyone is to let them go and hopefully blossom elsewhere.

Being able to say "I worked for Twitter" is and will be impressive to most people regardless of Twitter's future. It's not like future employers will see that on a resume think you're the one who sunk the ship (unless you do something high profile to make your negative impact public knowledge).

Twitter isn't sinking. It just isn't ascending as fast as investors would like to ensure hyper growth.

While its always great for your career to be in a company that's constantly growing - sometimes being that person that can help the company do a lot more with less resources is even better for your career. When everyone's jumping ship - the people who choose to stay on-board can often be very rewarded as far as their career growth goes.

You sure it's not sinking?

First Disney wanted to buy them apperantly, then Google. Then they both pulled out for some reason, and they are laying people off like crazy.

I may be wrong but from the little research I just did it sure seems like things aren't great.

> Then they both pulled out for some reason

The reason is that it's too expensive. For the right price, those companies would still be interested.

The high stock price indicates investors think Twitter can still grow a lot. That isn't clear to me.

> You sure it's not sinking?

As the article implies, it isn't far from profitability, and is cutting back to ensure it will be profitable.

Silicon Valley demands hockey-stick growth, but there's no reason why Twitter can't keep ticking along comfortably.

> it isn't far from profitability

Twitter came to being back in 2006.

That's a long time to wait for the first profit.

The biggest criticism levied against Twitter are:

1. Not lean enough. That's why today's news bumped their share price.

2. Not great at leveraging value into revenue. That's what an acquirer would do, ostensibly.

Plus, the specifics of the Disney/Google rumors are of dubious veracity. Don't put too much, er, stock into them.

You could argue that they've hit peak audience and that might be fair. A change in leadership would probably push Twitter into becoming a more aggressive on the acquisition front itself, too. Basically, a lot of untapped value and too much overhead.

I'm not up on the Bay Area hiring scene these days, but I would guess that the people that would never work there, wouldn't have before the layoffs.

The big companies use stock as a major component of their compensation package, so the stock price being down already was impacting their ability to hire in comparison to their peer companies. By cutting staff and beating revenue estimates they might be able to raise their stock price which may keep some of their existing engineers from jumping ship.

But I'd agree, Twitter does not look like a great long term prospect for ones career.

Twitter certainly has problems but they have nothing to do with any sort of unhealthy pursuit of the mighty stock price. They have to do with poor management, lackluster growth & inflated expenses.

Well I haven't been following them but my comment was based on this article.

They had a good quarter they still laid people off, their stock price went Up.

That seems to me like some kind of persuit.

They didn't have a good quarter. They had a slightly less bad quarter than originally predicted.