Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, January 20

• Why an Ex-Google Coder Makes Twice as Much Freelancing: With a talent war raging, companies from Airbnb to Pfizer are paying top dollar for the services of independent programmers. James Knight recently made an unorthodox career move for a 27-year-old coder: quitting a well-paid gig writing software for Google to go freelance. No more catered lunches, gold-plated benefits or million-dollar views from the search giant’s Manhattan office. Knight is willing to sacrifice those perks because as an independent he’s pulling down about twice as much as he did at Google. Plus, he has more freedom. In March, Knight and his wife plan to travel to Spain and hopscotch across Europe—all the while writing code for a dating app and a self-portrait app, among others. "I’d rather control my own destiny and take on the risk and forgo the benefits of nap pods and food," Knight says. Amid an accelerating war for tech talent, big companies and startups alike are paying top dollar—as much as $1,000 a hour, according to a person who gets coders gigs—for freelancers with the right combination of skills. While companies still recruit many of the best minds, they're turning to independent software developers to get a stalled project moving or to gain a competitive edge. In some cases, the right person can be the difference between a failed and successful product. Last spring, Aaron Rubin hired a freelance coder through recruiter Toptal for about four weeks to help get ShipHero, his cloud-based logistics startup, off the ground.  "To find someone that talented in New York in three days was never going to happen," Rubin says. "Every talented engineer I know has a job.

• Netflix global push grabs more customers than expected; shares jump 7%. Netflix said revenue rose 22.8 percent to $1.82 billion in the December quarter.Netflix's aggressive push into international markets won more customers than the video streaming service and its investors expected last quarter, sending its shares surging 7 percent. The dominant online video company said on Tuesday it had 74.8 million subscribers at the end of December and forecast 6.1 million more through March, fueled by its expansion this month into virtually every country except China, where it is exploring ways to launch its service. Shares of Netflix rose 7 percent to $115.42 in after-hours trading.New customers overseas are countering slowing growth for Netflix in the United States, the company's biggest market. It added 1.56 million U.S. subscribers in the fourth quarter, below the 1.65 million it forecast, and less than 1.9 million a year earlier. 

• IBM forecasts weak earnings for 2016; shares slide:  Revenue fell 8.5% to $22.06 billion. International Business Machines Corp forecast weak earnings for this year after reporting an 8.5 percent fall in fourth-quarter revenue as a strong dollar and tepid IT spending weigh on Big Blue's results. Shares of the company, which receives more than half its revenue from markets outside the United States, fell 3 percent in extended trading on Tuesday. IBM has been shifting away from hardware by selling low-margin businesses such as low-end servers and semiconductors to focus on high-growth areas such as security software and data analytics, besides cloud-based services. Yet the new businesses have so far failed to make up for revenue lost to divestitures. IBM's fourth-quarter revenue fell to $22.06 billion in the quarter ended Dec. Revenue from "strategic imperatives", which include cloud and mobile computing, data analytics, social and security software, rose about 10 percent in the fourth quarter. Net income fell to $4.46 billion, or $4.59 per share, from $5.48 billion, or $5.51 per share, a year earlier. Up to Tuesday's close, IBM's shares had fallen 18.5 percent in the past 12 months.

• AMD revenue forecast misses market estimates:  Revenue fell 22.7 percent to $958 million. Advanced Micro Devices forecast first-quarter revenue below analysts' estimates, due to lower demand for its graphic chips used in consoles and an economic slowdown in China. Shares of the company, which is in the process of selling some of its assets to cut costs, fell 7.7 percent to $1.80 in extended trading. AMD has been shifting to gaming consoles and low-power servers, but progress has lagged Wall Street expectations due to intense competition from Intel Corp and Nvidia Corp. China accounted for 42.2 percent of AMD's revenue in 2014. Revenue fell 22.7 percent to $958 million but still came above analysts' expectation of $954.7 million. Up to Tuesday's close, AMD's shares had fallen 13 percent in the past 12 months. The company's net loss narrowed to $102 million, or 13 cents per share, in the fourth quarter ended Dec. 26, from $364 million, or 47 cents per share, a year earlier.

• Twitter Stock Hits New Low Amid Struggles to Keep Website Up: Twitter Inc. shares slumped to a new all-time low after the company’s website suffered disruptions, shutting out millions of users and underscoring concerns about the company’s efforts to boost its audience and sales. Services including search and the news stream were unavailable for more than five hours after the company’s software engineers made changes to the service that lets people post and share 140-character status updates. The stock fell 7 percent to $16.69 at the close on Tuesday, well below the price of $26 at its November 2013 initial public offering. Users of Twitter’s mobile applications and website experienced a string of outages since Friday, as the company tweaks its features and services to improve the user experience and address a slowdown in growth. The glitches come at an inconvenient time for the company, which has to prove its value to any new users and keep existing ones from leaving in frustration. “The issue was related to an internal code change,” Twitter said on its website. “We reverted the change, which fixed the issue.” Services including search and the news stream were disrupted, according to the company’s performance status website. The top trending hashtag for about the past two hours was #twitterdown. Prior to the latest round of issues, Twitter’s last outage was about two months ago. Twitter’s stock has tumbled more than 28 percent in January, following a 35 percent decline in 2015.