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Linuxgruven Layoffs
Several readers submitted this story about layoffs at Linuxgruven. Some of them made allegations that Linuxgruven had bounced their last set of paychecks - we have no confirmation of this. We have previously run a story and a followup about a conflict between Linuxgruven and Sair - looks like that won't be a problem anymore.
Exactly. IBM gave an S/390 to Telia for free without any consultancy at all. Guess you can't make money with Linux. Since Intel and Cisco are laying off 5000 employees each you can't make money in CPUs and routers either.
This is funny? Really. My company supplies equipment and leases space to Linuxgruven for their classes. Aaron up there has a wife and a child to support. Another person I know from Linuxgruven just moved here from Chicago, staying in a hotel with his family paid for by Linuxgruven. He was looking for a house. What's he gonna do now, move his family into a car? What's so funny about that?
On monday morning 15 people are going to show up at the door to my company expecting to be trained. Will there be anyone from Linuxgruven there to explain what's going on to them? Or are we going to have a riot on our hands? Then there are the afternoon and evening classes....
45 people who paid $2500 (or whatever) for training they're not going to get, expecting to work for a company that just let 100 employees go.... This is funny to you?
On top of all that, as I've stated before Linuxgruven has always paid their bills.... until now. They just ordered 100 machines from us for new offices they were planning to open. Thankfully they haven't been picked up yet, however we have to restock those parts to our vendors. If we're lucky we'll get a low 10% restocking fee. That's a large chunk of un-recoverable change for us to swallow.
This is not funny.
--J(K) DOS is like Unix in exactly the same way that a pinto is like an aircraft carrier.
Aparently you did not bother to look at the web site before commenting that it is out of date. It was recently updated to include the synopsis for the presentation I will be giving, and everything on the front page is current.
Matthew Porter was the CEO of Linuxgruven until he resigned on Thursday. His volunteer work running the user group began before he was hired at Linuxgruven, and I would expect him to be there continuing in that effort. I don't think the meeting is the proper forum to discuss company matters in depth, but I am expecting my presentation to be on the short side as far as time available to me.
Craig Buchek
Disclaimer: I am a Linuxgruven employee, but I obviously do not speak for them.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I am a Linuxgruven employee. I have a job. There were not 100 layoffs. If there had been I would not have a job. No one in my office has been laid off. So, for those that like rumors and news stories with absolutely no facts, no reporting, and no teeth, this is apparently your kind of story. I have been unable to find any supporting facts on several stories released by Slashdot. Posting stories based solely on general word of anybody seems to be a common practice of Slashdot. I highly recommend before putting any trust into these stories, you research your own facts. I'll stick with facts, and a company that has a great business plan. And we'll continue to be here, and be entertained by your comedy.
I thought you meant info about Thrusday's meeting, not the group itself. And that's what I had just updated. You are right, the web page is terribly out-of-date. I'm working on getting an account to try to fix that. And we somehow lost our link to the "parent" organization: SLUUG (www.sluug.org). There's plenty off info there, but the Linux group is just a SIG of SLUUG, and our Linux SIG information is not so great.
We should take this discussion off-line. You can reach my via my URL above, or via my User Info page.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
From the article:
Clayton-based Linuxgruven.com laid off 100 employees today, sources tell the St. Louis Business Journal. The company, a Linux training and service company, reportedly had 106 employees as of January.
Is this a typo, or are they really left with 6 employees?
I'm all for small working groups, but this might be a bit of an overkill.
----------
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
According to the company's own website, times couldn't be better:
And the company is making a profit. "We are in the black -- an amazing concept, isn't it, among these startup tech companies?" (Linuxgruven website)
Must have been a rough February...
*scoove*
Why don't we make a distinction, on Slashdot. We will refer to EVERY commercial linux company / distro as "Linux-dot-com" and every non-commercial distro or organization will simply be "Linux" or "Linux oriented."
This makes a lot more sense. With the rate at which all of these "revolutionary" Linux capitalists are going under, no one is going to want to invest in linux, and in turn, linux will not do well on the market place.
Linux [corporations] resembles dot-coms in every way, shape, and form. They have no plan, they pick up a copy of linux from kernel.org, get a post on slashdot about an IPO (which needs to stop, btw) and two weeks later, are on Yahoo about a Chapter 11. Ohh, this really looks great for Linux / Unix as a whole.
Let's vote JonKatz off Slashdot island.
Let's vote JonKatz off Slashdot island.
Are there? I can think of about 10 and some of them are for different platforms than x86.
OK. I apologize. I only updated the front page and the InstallFest pages. And that was a pain in the ass, since I don't have an account on that machine and had to email them in.
But the meeting information that you first mentioned is up-to-date on the front page.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Count 'em up. I think I got about 196 listed at LWN's distro page a month or two back. But, as you point out, there's a handful of major ones (Debian, Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, Mandrake, Turbo), a few HW-specific ones (Yellow Dog, ARM), and a whole slew of special-purpose ones, as well as smaller dists.
I tend to think of these as tailored applications of Linux rather than fragmentation of the core distro.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Okay. I'm getting the impression that there is VC out there looking to snatch up some LCA's. It would seem that more then one party is interested in starting a real company. I am going to assume that I'm getting this attention because my post got a rating of 5. The question that has come up 3 times is how many LCA can I muster up. Well I don't know that to be honest. But If you would sign up on the guest book on my personal webpage at www.mercybeat.com then they can see for them selves how many LCA's can be had on monday morning. Please LCA's only.
This is not a joke. But I make no promises. I'm still looking for a job and I'm not wanting to be a opertunist. I have not heard from anyone like IBM. So far these are just e-mails with persons that say VC is easy for a consulting company.
They way I see it their are customers for linux solutions and at least a hundred Linux Admin's that can start on monday for someone that can come up with the VC. Before we are forced to work Microsoft to eat.
Too bad there is no way to put this on ebay.
Last one in jail is a fascist.
I called the 888 number for their Customer Service Center, 13:15EST, and there was no answer.
I'm guessing if you're using 'em, your SOL.
It's a shame that, if a company is going to fail, they don't do it gracefully.... you'd think that was the LEAST they could do, esp. if they were mis-managed... but, I guess if they were mis-managed, the wouldn't terminate gracefully...
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
Noth'in like kicking someone in the groin while they're on the ground, is it? >:|
They have 8 locations according to their Office Locations page, that's 3/4 of an employee per location.
Minesweeper Consultant & Solitaire Expert.
I just press the reset button...
I was hired by the owner to create those new training docs long before Matthew Porter was made CEO. I had found a page where James Hibbits had announced that they were going to be open-sourced, but I can't find it at the moment. I believe that was before Matthew Porter or I even worked for the company.
I will attempt to run the numbers for our viewers. 200 students (a high estimate) times $2500 (the new price) = $500,000 revenue a month (maximum). 106 employees times $4500 a month (a low estimate of $54K a year -- higher than the advertised $45K, but some people obviously make more than that, and you have to figure in insurance and employers' portion of taxes) = $477,000 labor (minimum). That leaves $23,000 (maximum) a month for rent on (by my count) 20 offices. I can gurantee you that rent averages more than $1000 a month. Did you want electricity with that? How about computers?
Now re-do the math with 80 employees. That saves you $117,000 a month, giving you a much better chance of being back in the black.
So at a minimum, you need to have 2 students in class for every person you hire (2*$2500 > $4500). From the numbers I have seen, there were about 106 employees and between 150 and 200 students. That doesn't cut it. And correct me if I'm wrong, but if you keep each employee for 12 months, you'd only be able to hire 1 out of 24 students or else the numbers start going exponential. (Or am I just tired?)
Disclaimer: All numbers are available in the public record. I do/did work for Linuxgruven, but this math was not sanctioned by them.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
The "St. Louis Business Journal" Article that Slashdot points to has a link at the botton labelled "Click for permission to reprint", and the page that it takes you to claims to be able to charge $5 for the right to link, as if copyright could restrict that. As I see it, this makes the "St. Louis Business Journal" a scam intended to take advantage of people who don't understand copyright and fair use, and, therefore, not a trustable source of news.
It's only social pressure, but I would like to recommend that slashdot label unconfirmed "St. Louis Business Journal" stories as rumour, since their misleading statements about copyright show that publication by the "St. Louis Business Journal" does not make it particularly likely that a statement is true. Also, keeping the "St. Louis Business Journal" in quotation marks helps make it clear that that site is not acknowledged as the journal of record for business in St. Louis.
I was Senior Systems Developer at Linuxgruven. I was working on internal projects when I got the axe. And here is what I know.
Yes it's a scam. The fact is that they count on people not passing the LCA. They do this by promising people that have no chance of becoming a Linux admin. Most of the time these are people that can't even use windows computers.
The owners ( James and Mike ) write checks out of the company's bank account. The reason everyone is fired is because the owners took a vacation and spent their paycheck.
Right before this happened everyone at linuxgruven was forced to sign a non-discloser agreement so that people would be afraid to speak out about what was about to happen. ( LG can fook off because I did not sign S#1t.
Everyone that was above me knew how the bussiness worked and chose to ignore it because they were getting great titles and pay.
I found out a month ago and started looking into the training materials. The instructors were top notch but the materials were so bad that I would not suggest them to be used as heating fuel. I see no possible way for people to study anything from the training materials.
In the beginning it looked like a real company. I was seperated from the rest of the company and told that support contracts for services were piling up. It was not till I went to the call center and saw everyone fooking around that I supected that it was the training classes that were the only form of income. Other then me. I was billed out for 170+ hour and got screwed out of my bonus for those jobs. Which by the way my bonuses were supposed to be in this coming fridays check.
I strongly suggest that people stay away from linuxgruven. I have been told personally by the owners that they will continue the training classes and look to other citys to make up for St.Louis.
Don't feel sorry for me. feel sorry for all the guys that thought they were getting a break. A chance to work with linux and get a real good pay concidering how much they knew. Instead these guys got screwed out of pay and the bills are coming fast for them.
The fact is that there was only one real admin job that linuxgruven had, and only one person did that job. The rest were sitting around waiting for people that wanted interviews.
This is a company to stay away from... If anyone wants to contact me they can do so though my home page www.mercybeat.com ( i'm mercybeat ).
There was some good work going on at Linuxgruven... there was a team that was working on creating real training materials that were to be released opensource.
My last advice to linuxgruven employees. Go to the courts and file a personal small claim against the company. If your in st.louis contact me and i'll tell you all about it. Or you can meet me in clayton monday morning and file with me.
I would still like to work for a linux professional services company if anyone has a job for a java programmer with 5 years or real linux experiance.
Damon C. Richardson
mercybeat@earthlink.net
P.S. Once again I have signed nothing at linuxgruven and I can say what ever i want to who ever I want.
Last one in jail is a fascist.