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SGI Announces Restructuring, Cuts 400 Jobs
kerneljacabo writes "Yikes! SGI seems to be the lastest victim of the economic downturn. Today they announced an extensive 'restructuring,' which includes releasing about 10% (400) of their employess. Seems like no one is immune." SGI claims this'll save them $40M, as well as improve their performance next fiscal year.
Caught in an economic downturn? Force to cut jobs? I am shocked.
...SGI stands for jobs soon gone to India.
Sad. I spent many a fun hour in the SGI lab at university, hacking on GL and wondering if we would ever get consumer-level graphic cards that could do that.
Poor SGI.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
If they knocked their price down, and brought back FSV, I'd buy one...Problem is, they never used FSV...coulda been one of the best File Managers ever. The one for Linux is lame, and hasn't been updated in a while.
for those that don't know, fuckedcompany is the best 'news' source for stuff like this.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I wonder how many jobs are being outsourced over yonder.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
From the page at the bottom: "About SGI [...] SGI was named on FORTUNE magazine's 2003 list of "Top 100 Companies to Work For." FORTUNE regrets the error."
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Is lastest a new word? Perhaps it suggests that while an event is the latest in a series, it is also at the end of the series, and (in this case) the economic upturn is in sight?
4,000,000 / 400 = WTF?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Is this trimming the fat 10% across the board?
or
Does this mean some departments (read product lines) are to be put down?
they're canning all 400 janitors and cleaning ladies
at $100,000 a year each, it really adds up quick!
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
i see Rick Belluzzo is living large at Microsoft after driving SGI into the ground? At high corporate levels performance means nothing, knowing the right people means everything. Same with venture capital: its knowing the right corporate heavyweights - nothing to do with ideas :(
amor, paz, esperanza, muelle
Saludos
miguel
Before adopting WHATWG, read the moonlight.NET EULA [http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx]
It was developed for IRIX, and they did not promote the hell out of it or port it like they should have. It coulda' been a contenda
$40,000,000 saved by cutting 400 employees...they SURE do spend a lot per employee! What's that, lifetime Jolt cola, personal 24-hr masseuses, and weekend company Jet usage?
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
...than merely their wages. There's also the housing, the equipment, the unemployment taxes, the benefits. You have obviously never run your own business before, you think that all these things appear magically for free.
Thanks to Linux, Unix is now a commodity and corporations must find a new way to add value. You can't keep expecting people to buy the same product year in and year out. Linux is a success because like any other product, eventually it becomes a commodity like textiles and companies cannot charge a premium for commodities.
Software has the potential to be distributed almost cost free, and that demand for a commoditized Unix came in the form of Linux. Microsoft must commoditize Windows or else risk losing complete market share to Linux.
This is why SGI is in trouble. Unix can now run on commodity hardware on a free Unix clone, Linux. What SGI needs to do is invest in research for the next business cycle and NOT FIRE EMPLOYEES. Doing so will hamper its chances for survival in the future.
No, really. How could anyone seriously be surprised by this? SGI's products are inordinantly expensive for what you get. Their "maintainance" alone on their systems could buy a brand new Sun system of equal or better power EACH and EVERY YEAR. And lets not even compair them to standard PC hardware costs. You could buy a small cluster of high end PC's and run Linux on them cheaper then getting an SGI.
The only reason SGI still exists is because their name is ingrained into the heads of many people in managment as being "the thing to buy for graphics workstations" when in reality they are by FAR definitly NOT the thing to buy, especially if you are being told to cut back on cost.
It was only a matter of time before SGI started to cut staff. What they really need to do is cut the price of the maintaince on their systems, and maybe then will more companies ramp up purchasing of their (SGI's) products. But as is, they are completely overpriced given the current market.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
And how is that there are open positions displayed on their Careers page ?
So , Are they blatant fakes ?
or
Is the company merely using the time as an excuse to get rid of the chaff ?
Arent there laws which prevent companies from hiring immediately from a mass layoff ?
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
You may be replacing someone who had been there for 10 years. You'll cost them less. In 10 years, you'll be the one getting let go.
Are they just getting rid of execs, or overpaid prima donnas?
There are 10 kinds of people; those who know ternary, those who don't, and those now hunting for a dictionary.
That's it? Only 400? Damn they must be doing pretty good!
Lucent tends to lay off workers in lots of 10 and 20 thousand, I think its been what 60 thousand or so? Heh, who can keep track these days.
Uh, sorry. My mind was wondering when I wrote the subject.
Oh yeah, I was going to say. This company is still around? Let me guess. About 400 employes still left?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
It seems to me that SGI's major problem is that they were always a one-trick pony -- they made the decision to stick with graphics machines at a time when that particular niche was sliding towards being a commodity, or at least commodity-doable. When Jurrasic Park came out, it was like a birth cry. When Titanic came out, it was a death toll.
They tried to branch out, but their directionless, clueless management (I'm looking at you, Chainsaw Rick Belluzo) flailed around towards one ill-concieved scheme after another, and all the while powerful PC-based workstations were dropping in price.
IMO, they should have concentrated on appliances. I remember pilot programs floating around to do things like massive network storage (a la NetApp) and other similarly promising things, but they never went anyplace.
Oh, and I had a Herman Miller Areon and an office. As an intern. Might have been a symptom of part of the problem, on reflection...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
AT&T TO CUT WORKFORCE 120 PERCENT
Funny and brutally honest. Too bad they stopped putting out new stuff.
SGI is the only hardware that excites me more than Apple. Its unfortunate that they have fallen from the mountain that they built. After starting on an Indy, and an Indigo and then moving to a dual Proc Octane 2, i can tell you first hand that they truly do make awesome hardware. I havent gotten my hands on a Fuel yet, but im sure thats great too. The only thing stopping me from buying their machines (second hand) is software. All the software for the system costs more than the hardware does! (ie... Alias, Maya, AutoCAD) well maybe ill get one to replace my PovRAY server. /me checks ebay.
I want 2D games back.
SGI is apparently still hiring (and hiring pretty young men to boot).
Yeah, but the ones they're firing are old and ugly.
You will next see this quoted on SCO's Quotations from Linux Leaders page with the caption:
"Conclusive proof that a leader of the Linux movement 'Anonymous Coward' (must be important seeing the number of his posts on Slashdot) is trying to DDOS SCO's servers. Shows that the open source community is scum and proves our point."
Give it a rest will you! There are better ways to fight this fight.
A *HIGH END* tech company, no less. I'm amazed they made it this long. They must have had good cash reserves.
Until MS lays people off, I'll just ignore the part about nobody being immune.
Moderators are on crack because this guy pointed out how it is short sighted of SGI to fire its workers. You need to develop new and cool products that run on top of linux, and that requrires good employees. Once the business cycle swings up, those who invested during the downturn will benefit.
The above poster was RIGHT ON.
"the software development realm of SGI is apparently still hiring (and hiring pretty young men to boot)."
a strange way to phrase that -- freudian slip? hmm?
I'm sorry but they emailed me an offer like three weeks ago. The deadline to accept the position (software architect) is July 1st.
I'm sorry to tell you this, but they can withdraw that offer without a second thought. It's pretty crappy, but the people who extended it to you most likely had no idea that the layoff was coming.
I sadly was involved in layoffs at my work, and one minute I was talking to one of my employees about his 6-month/1-year/2-year goals, and the next, I was laying him off. I knew business was slow, but I didn't realize we were anywhere close to letting people go. That was in late 2000. We've had 2 more blood-letting since.
The other fun bit was that I had lined up a co-op position for a friend of my girlfriend. Without even telling me, HR withdrew the offer. I managed to get that fixed up, but if I wasn't "tight" with the right people, that coop would have been toast.
Those old school guys are all the same. There are even people who still claim that the Amiga 500 can do things which "you can only dream of" doing with a modern Intel box. They never give any real examples, too.
Belluzo and his whole upper management chain always acted as if the exercise of running SGI was just a practice in theory, a game they could reboot or something.
...and basicly they fell victim to a disappearing market niche. PCs could do much of the same, at far lower cost. I think many of the "big iron" companies have had this problem, if your needs haven't scaled with the computing power, what before required a special solution can now be done on a standard Intel/AMD platform. Even in computing intensive applications like CAD/CAM/FEA (Finite Element Analysis) much of the time goes into creating the right model, not calculating it. At least that was my (limited) experience with it.
I think this is a problem for a lot of the "big irons". If their customers don't need them anymore, but can get away with commondity machines (PCs, laptops, thin clients instead of workstations and things like Athlon MP or Hammer servers, which are "light" servers in this context, they're screwed.
Of course some people need the big irons. But if I needed the power of a 3GHz desktop ten years ago, what would I have bought then? Five years ago? Now? The answer is very different, even though the needs stay the same.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Today they announced an extensive 'restructuring,' which includes releasing about 10% (400) of their employees
Part two:
SGI claims this'll save them $40M
Now for the big finale:
$40M / 400 = $100,000 (average, of course)
Those were some VERY expensive employees, don't you think? I suppose maybe there were a couple Big Fish in there, but still, that average seems really high, since layoffs are almost always biased towards the bottom of the food chain, where there are more employees, of course.
However, not as expensive as McCracken(former CEO, ranked #25 of the "top paid execs" list), who got $3.25M in cold cash for severance, and another $2M in stock options. Ah, to pine for the good old days, when SGI gave Belluzzo (CEO before McCracken, I believe) a $3.4 million insider loan so he could cash in on the stock options he got when he left HP, netting him $600,000(he did repay the loan, BTW, unlike a lot of other execs). Gotta love the revolving door of money- get paid to sign, get paid to sit there, get paid to leave, and when you stroll into your next job, they're so happy to see you, they help you cash out from your old job with multi-million-dollar loans.
Execs in tough times always give you the sad face, the kind, concerned, crackling voice while they say things like, "we're all tightening the belt". Every single one is lying straight through his or her teeth- executive salaries(and stock options), despite slumping profits and stock prices, are skyrocketing without fail. They don't give a crap about the company stock price, because their option price is so absurdedly low...and if they finally get booted from the company, they'll get a nice golden parachute, and some other company will happily snap them up. It is almost a complete reversal from how the regular Joes are treated.
Meanwhile, of course, Bush is buying off the rich for the next two elections, making it even cheaper for them to cash out their stocks and investments(yeah, that'll help the economy), and giving them huge tax cuts(make $1M+ this year? Take about $17k off your tax bill!)
Please help metamoderate.
It's a shame that SGI is slowly going down the tubes. Back in the 80's, this company made some of the most incredible hardware and software there ever was. I remember seeing a few of those computers in action. One of the earlier models, a 32-bit RISC model (at a time when most personal and business computers were 286s) was able to graphically transform the design of automobile parts in ways that I never imagined possible. Heck, 2d side-scrolling video games with 16 colors were, like, high tech! I had the pleasure of using a few of these computers on several occasions, but never had the pleasure of owning one. (There is something very aesthetic about an SGI. I don't know what it is.) Back in the 80's, these computers did what today's PCs are just beginning to do. I deeply hope that Linux will acquire a lot of great graphics technologies, and that the "magic" of SGI will live on, if in another form.
Here's an interesting tidbit from SGI's site... some performance numbers of Intel's Madison (next generation Itanium) on SGI's Altix (Linux/Itanium-based machine running on Origin 3000 architecture)
a y/madison.html
http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2003/m
The machine is limited to 64 processors per single-system image (O3K can handle up to 512 out of the box, or 1024 with a special kernel) but the Itanium2 is about 2x as fast as the MIPS R14K... plus the Itanium system can run a very slightly modified linux distribution (currently Red Hat plus SGI's ProPack kernel patches and additional utilities).
Pretty neat stuff for the high-end Linux market. Of course, the number of people that need Origin/Altix level system I/O is pretty slim...
Any company that size would have some 'churn', if 1/1000 people quit a month, then SGI would perpetualy have 4 openings. The layoffs would probably reduce that for a while, but a good company would probably always have it's doors open for relly talented people.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Gotta roll the dice, else we might as well become socialists and settle for the lowest common denominator..
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that nowdays you can't spend more than about $2000 on a graphics card. There is very little that the consumer cards can't do (apart from very high anti-aliasing). I'm sure all the people who were happy to pay $250,000 five years ago for systems 20x faster than the industry norm would do so if the machines could be made. If you treated modern GPUs as components, couldn't you construct a massively parallel system for $200,000 that would have stunning performance? Just a thought...
That's interesting. I'd never have suspected that anything's wrong with the way my mouse moves.
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SGI could easily compete in the post dot bomb economy in new area's that complement it's high end graphics systems.. gaming is the child of SGI (and others) excellent work, an industry meant to be worth much much more than the cd sales market...
Not saying they should make consoles, but imagine! your P4 4.01ghz playing HalfLife 3, with an SGI video card...mmmmm!
Do you need a website upgrade?
When I worked for them in 99, they already had cash flow issues, and had had them for some time. But Wall Street has always loved them, so they always got more cash when they needed it. Many people who worked there thought this was actually a bad thing. I guess Wall Street has finally figured out that their business model is just not working.
I went from SGI to Borland, which has cash up the wazoo. They got a huge patent settlement (disguised as an investment) from Microsoft, and have mostly been in the black lately. But Wall Street doesn't trust Borland: too much weirdness. (Personal trauma prevents me from being specific.) So we were always under pressure to cut costs. I once had to go all the way to Dale Fuller for a $200 memory upgrade!
Publically held companies live and die at the sufferance of Wall Street, no matter how well, or how badly, they're doing. I imagine that's why Google is still privately held, even though an IPO would make a lot of the people there -- maybe not rich, but certainly comfortable.
I see several companies hiring/firing practices on a daily basis. SGI happens to be one of those companies. In the time I have seen those they have let go of significantly more people than they have hired, and it is never out with the old and in with the new. It is always cut staff to cut costs and then hire a few new people becuase we let too many people go and can't get the damn job done. Several other tech companies are doing the same stupid crap *COUGH*agilent*COUGH*HP*COUGH*
Damn ugly people shouldn't be able to breed or vote let alone wright software.
SGI has been cutting jobs steadily for the last 4 years. This is one of the smallest job cuts in that time...
-- SJS smooge at smoogespace dot com
I don't think they are the victim of the economic downturn. People were wondering why they were still around even during the peak of the dot-com boom! In fact, several years prior, when they build that ugly "toon-town" building near the old Adobe HQ, people thought they were through.
Best Buy can have you arrested
At my company they were hiring people shorlty before and after layoffs. What I think they are doing is not only cutting down the roster but also taking back on other people who they still need but will work for a lot less due to the 5-8% unemployment rate. People who have been at a company for a while and have accumulated many pay raises are prime targets for this kind of severance and replacement.
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SGI is hardly a victim of the recent economic downturn; in reality, they have been on a corporate death spiral for at least the last 5 years. The only thing that's suprising is that they still have 400 people left to layoff!
SGI's troubles are mainly of it's own making: outrageously expensive workstations that can't compete with PC's that cost a tenth of their price. Supercomputers that look great on paper, but which are saddled with a CPU that's at least 2 generations behind the latest x86 procs.
Also, in a move of real stupidity, at the hieght of the internet boom, they purchased the dinasour Cray Research for $500 million dollars (they later sold to Tera for $15 million in Tera stock!)
But the sadest part of it all is that the supposed 'top-of-the-line' 3D graphics company can't even keep up consumer level graphics cards.
SGI will soon be dead...they haven't made a profit in years and they only have so much money in the bank.
Happy Duck say:
o< -- You fail it!
It absolutely is. And why pay people salaries when you can get gullible college kids to work for you for free? I wish that I could get gullible, wealthy college kids to work for my business for free. I'd can my employees, too.
The 'other/temp/tiered/expendable' workers are outsourced. They are not on the corporate head count/roster, so that number doesn't change whenever the outsourced quantities rise or fall. It's a non-event in terms of 'official' staff counts, so there is nothing to have news about.
This is one of the reasons corporations do it this way...they can increase or decrease staffing, and everyone, from investor to competitor, hears nothing...not even the door hitting them in the ass on the way out.
Basically their mid-range Linux machines have better I/O than anything else in their price class, and they scale better than any other computer available with an almost linear relation of processors to performance.
That has been a Holy Grail for hardware designers ever since multiprocessor machines were first invented.
IMO SGI's Linux boxen are the fastest Linux machines available anywhere, at any price..
I just got hired for a high tech job.
hahahahhahaha
SGI's problem is not commodity software, it's commodity hardware. All the movie and CAD/CAM and scientific people who used to buy SGI workstations are buying ordinary PCs instead. And if they need to crunch numbers or crank out their graphics, they don't buy SGI supers, they buy Beowulf clusters.
Of course, Linux is important to this change, because people who want to sell commodity systems for high-end applications can use Linux, instead of developing a new OS, or waiting for Microsoft to get its server act together. Not that this is universally popular -- a lot of SGI customers would like them to port IRIX to the Itanium. But that'd be expensive.
Why is why SGI does sell Linux boxes. But people who buy them don't buy them because they run Linux. They buy them because they're Itanium-based supercomputers.
One of the more regrettable things about SGI is that they spun off the MIPS processor division. My computer architecture class used the MIPS R22000 processor (1985) as the example through which to explain computer architecture. Evidently the MIPS processor had a very elegant and efficient instruction set when compared to most processors (some argue that ARM and Alpha are better, but hey).
Mips stands for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages, and it means that each instruction was executed in one cycle. Therefore, multi cycle depedencies ("locks") did not have to be accounted for, simplifying the design.
Unfortunately their design was not able to keep up mostly because SGI could not afford to stay on the bleeding edge of manufacturing techniques. MIPS lives on in embedded applications, but the last great computer processor was actually able to reach 1 Ghz!
Anyway, people who deal with assembly code (electrical engineers, and esp. compiler writers) can appreciate the relatively small and simple instruction set of the MIPS architecture.
I don't think SGI will be going out of business soon. They have a few cool machines up their sleeve. And customers for whom price is not much of an issue (US Govt. *ehem*) will buy them.
A penguin had to take his car for engine repair. The mechanic told the penguin to leave his car with him for about two hours, to find out whats wrong.
The penguin proceeds to go across the street to a grocery store, climbs into a freezer and eats some vanilla ice cream.
When the two hours was up the penguin went back to the garage to find out what happened to his car.
When the penguin entered the garage, the mechanic looked at him and said, "Looks like you blew a seal."
The penguin replied, "NO way, thats vanilla ice-cream!"
I sadly was involved in layoffs at my work, and one minute I was talking to one of my employees about his 6-month/1-year/2-year goals, and the next, I was laying him off.
So you laid people off in 2000, and you're still with the same company 3 years later?
Do you feel no shame for ruining someone's life for the sake of profit? It's people like yourself that continue to perpetuate the fraud of "downsizing" by your willing participation in the process. What a sad commentary.
The government owns a few SGI supercomputers.
Yep, but they're BIG, insanely high bandwidth beats. 512 and 1024 processor, single-image machines (not clusters).
If SGI were to die, I'm sure the NSA would buy up the patents so they could continue with their work.
And for those that claim the MIPS R14K is too far behind, keep in mind that the Altix series of machines uses the exact same Origin 3000 architecture, but with the Itanium2 (and soon, Madison) processor and Linux OS. Altix is currently limited to 64 processors due to kernel scaling issues... but give SGI and Linus time and they'll have 512 processor Linux machines too.
Well yes it'll cost a lot more since you'd have to have AutoCad ported to Irix and there's no such thing as Alias anymore.
Back when Alias still existed, there was an IRIX version of AutoCAD... and SunOS version as well. Corel Draw was also available for many flavors of unix.
I work at a DoD facilty that is on the brink of buying a 2048 CPU Origin 3900. We get machines of this class every other year. Nothing excites the 'eggheads' like an SGI.
One of the coolest things of such a machine is booting the entire beast from a single hard drive. For those that don't already know this, SGI's Origin and Altix systems are single image machines, not clusters. 512 processors in a single machine (1024 and 2048 processors with a special kernel). The current Origin 3900 architecture doesn't physically scale past 2048, though.
No longer does large layoffs. They do them almost constantly to stay under the Department of Labor's radar, etc.
The same thing occurs at HP.
People just quietly disappear..
How exactly does Socialism imply lowest common denominator? Since when societies designed around the citizen, and not the corporations, man something bad. Oh wait, you are another American kid that enjoys the benefits of the "capitalistic" super-duper educational system... which means you do not even know what socialism means.
In 1997 I had a half dozen Origin 2000 systems to play with for a few months.
On an 8 way Origin 2000 with 8 195 Mhz R10000 CPUs, I compiled GNU emacs 19.34b in 9.5 seconds. It was repeatable (from a 'make clean') and the 9.5 seconds included loading the lisp and dumping the binary. This was on a 64 spindle RAID 1, though everything was in RAM (6 GB).
It was amazing..
I still have matrix multiply benchmark results from that machine that are significantly faster than my 2.2 Ghz Athlon (to the the 4 MB L2 cache).
Linux is doing well at SGI, your opportunity might well be there.
If you look at the 1999 chart carefully, you'll notice that all the SGI machines in the top 150 are Cray vector computers. SGI got out of the vector supercomputer business a few months after this chart was compiled, selling all its Cray IP to Tera Computer. So even if this line of computers had managed to maintain its dominance of the Supercomputer market, it wouldn't matter to SGI.
So much for your big conspiracy theory.
I assume you are being sarcastic. Many companies lay off and hire at the same time. When I was at IBM they did it all the time. Sometimes they made the hiring announcement before the fired people were even out of the building, so they heard the announcement!
Hey, TPC, have they shut down the cafeteria yet? Excuse me, "campus restaurant." That's the one thing I really miss about SGI -- being able to have a first-rate meal every day.
the way everyone disses sgi you'd think they were belly-up, insolvent already. i wonder how many times have i've read something along the lines of "if sun don't change their misguided ways, they just might go the way of sgi. . . " ?
For those who dont know A Proud American is an anti-american troll, he is featured on slashdot and k5. Anything he says is guaranted to be dead wrong.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Um, SGI is not the *latest* to suffer from the economic downturn - they were one of the first. They used to have *many* more employees than the 4k they have now. They started laying people off in droves almost 3 years ago.
Personally its not God I dislike, its his fan club I cant stand (bash.org)
Read it for yourself if you want. The server linked is down, but you can find the text at http://www.public.iastate.edu/~cokere/index2.htm
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Still these guys packed up a nice salary... given the "savings" they plan to make these guys used to make 100k per year. hardly sorry for them. welcome back to reality guys :) Guess the time of over hyped companies is coming to an end. Jurassic park was cool but most of people is running windows explorer...
In a socialist economy, there is no incentive to try to be more productive, since no extra personal benefit gets obtained.
a strange way to phrase that -- freudian slip? hmm?
Well, if you read his post carefully, you'll find the mention of "Linux" therein, and everyone knows about Linux's gay left wing agenda (groups.google.com "linux" + "gay" = 59,700 hits)
A savings of $100K per RIFed employee probably equals a true salary of $65-70K. The balance of the savings can be attributed to taxes; benefits such as insurance, vacation & personal days, maternity leave, sabbatical (if they still have it), 401(k) MatchPlus (if they still have it), stock offerings (if they still have it), and miscellaneous amenities; facilities and asset related issues (a cubicle furnished with an Aeron, workstation, etc.); miscellaneous administrative expenses including performance evaluations, wage reviews, training & development, etc.
Of course, the bulk of the cuts will probably go to the lower paid line employees: call center/customer service, admin, manufacturing. Some better paid RIFees would probably include disgruntled engineers unwilling to work in other divisions, the folks waving "Pick me! Pick me!", under-performing sales folks, product and corporate marketing (always one of SGI's weak points), and a few middle-/upper-level managers who really should have been given the boot around the same time TJ left for @Home. And maybe even a VP who should have been given the boot around the same time Jimbo left to start Mosaic Communications (later known as Netscape).
It's just a tactic to pump the stock price man. No biggie.
The corp can use the temp numbers as headcount scavange data if they so chose. One data set says 'lean' (low fulltime count) and another says 'leaner' (cut temp count). That's why I'm never impresssed when a corp claims cutting staff is necessary to cut costs.
Anyone find it amusing to see a comment about job layoffs moderated "Redundant"?
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
What would CHOMSKY think about this?
Are you suggesting that a company should instead keep all of their employees forever? Most companies lay off employees when they are losing money; otherwise they go bankrupt and then everyone loses their job.
how pretty are you?
I used to work for DG; hey, we had a bunch of ex SGI folks there. Ex DEC too. Ex Prime. Ex Geac. Ex Ex Ex.
:-)
All the Ex's have been X'd out...
DG's technological guru had one very precient saying "commodity economics always wins". Sadly they - and I predict SGI, and Sun too for that matter - failed to develop a strategy that would allow them to be on the right side of the curve.
DG thought they could do that simply by building Intel based servers. Clearly that's not the case, or the point.
Cheap intel clone pc's in clusters will no doubt rule the world and enslave us all.
Hey ekrout, FUCK YOU
Now, for the clueless fuckwit who modded this troll up, he's ekrout, a real asshole
Brett Glass
all the names we used to look up to are dieing, is it our fault?
;-)
years back I wanted to run SCO (couldn't afford it) played with Minix (didn't pay for it) and then Linux arrives and so do I. After linux I didn't need SCO.
I always wanted an SGI box if only to play with 3d graphics. They where too expensive I carried on buying PC's and ran free unices eventully getting the performance I wanted for a couple of hundred quid.
I always wanted a Sun machine they where just the ultimate (to me at least) so eventully I splashed out on an Ultra Sparc (I just had to get those extra 32 bits before the wintel brigade) so what if it was beige it has a 18inch flat panel display, and those mythical 64 bits I was after. I soon got bored with Solaris and went back to Debian, now those extra 32 bits are rarely used in userland.
We are killing off all the hacker companies we used to respect and the big boys that we had no respect for are getting all the corporate dosh thats left around. Perhaps SGI, Sun et al need to start putting out some cool bits and pieces in our price range because MS and IBM are getting our bosses money.
SCO are gonna's by their own making I just hope SGI and Sun manage to pull a few tricks out of the hat or they will also self destruct. I never owned an Alpha becuase DEC tossed itself to the mercy of it's competitors I hope that I get an SGI one day if only for the cool case
sparkes
blog and junk
This layoff news is giving you incredible leverage in this negotiation. Don't be afraid to use it. So once you've done your research, you should talk (not email) to your hiring manager, share your concerns, and ask him what kind of (written) guarantees he can offer you to reduce the risk of impending layoffs. Any promise made over a phone line won't do if the person is being laid off, or if there is a general hiring freeze. And make it clear that you won't accept an offer until you have a signed copy of it in your hands with all the concessions they've made to you.
Here are a couple of links that may be of use:
"In many cases, the same companies that are firing people out one door are hiring people... Don't waste time fretting over the news..."
http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/basics4.htm
How to avoid a "bait and switch" job offer.
http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/crocodile.htm
Don't get fired on day #1.e d.htm
http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/crocs24dontgetfir
Beware The Cause Clause.e .htm
http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/crocs57causeclaus
Due Diligence: Don't take a job without it
http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/hadiligence.htm
Signing non-compete agreements for fun and profit.
http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/crocs66nca.htm
companies have to grow and shrink.
what you can complain about is a lack of a public safety structure able to guarentee health care and other necessities inbetween employment, at least, in the US.
-pyrrho
SGI is apparently still hiring (and hiring pretty young men to boot).
Well, I'm glad you think you're pretty.
I won't ask what 'booting' is in this context.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
That saying mirrors how I've been thinking for a while now. With hindsight, the success of the x86 PeeCee was inevitable, based on how open it was compared with contemporary hardware designs.
Now, the question is, which is more of a commodity; Free software (inc. Linux) or Windows?
On one hand, Free software is a commodity because it's cheap, good enough, and open (like the PC, in fact). On the other, Windows is a commodity because the people who admin it are a commodity, and there's plenty of software and hardware designed for it.
Hmmmm...
--
I started with Cray in 1991. Cray began their annual layoffs beginning in 1992. The annual layoffs continued after SGI bought Cray. They continued after SGI sold the parts of Cray they didn't want anymore. SGI had two layoffs in 2001, the year they laid me off.
Don't forget: the people who lost their jobs were in computers just for the money, not because they truly liked their work. I learned it from Slashdot!
They are actually doing a pretty SANE thing, namely firing people mostly from marketing and administration, instead of like almost every other company, firing the developers/technicians first.
Firing the people that do the actual work first, is like pissing in your pants to keep warm.
-H
Armstrong & Two Temps!
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
Belluzzo isn't at Microsoft anymore, he left after a failed power-grab.
Pity...Rick's been working for Microsoft since his HP days (he was the bonehead responsible for the quickly-retracted "We're dumping HPUX for Windows NT" announcement back in '97 or so). He did all that work for Bill and all he got was a golden parachute in the end...
I find it absolutely amazing that we are still in a downturn economy. It almost seems as though we're scared to recover. Life goes on...
Please watch your language. There are children reading and administering Slashdot. You could get in trouble for using such foul language on the open Internet. Have some manners.
Yes, they fire the older experienced workers and hire fresh graduates at half the cost. Then they farm some work off to India. For god's sake didn't you see Office Space?
That is my whole point. Management still thinks they SHOULD BUY SGI FOR GRAPHICS!!!! This is the whole problem!
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Apparently the folks in GIS (seismic oil/gas exploration). Their office on Westheimer (Houston) is now dark and has little "do not enter" tape up.
The Linux/Windows clusters got 'em. Look around at the GIS tech companies; they're either already using clusters, in the process of migrating to clusters, or getting ready to lay people off.
Every portion of the market has been hit, from TVs to mainframes. People will buy lower cost machines in far greater numbers now, and 'elite' machine companies are going out of business. Sun has realized this late, and are now releasing cheaper workstations, but their ultrasparc offerings are still a bit too high in cost. IBM got it down just right and started competing with DELL early. Compaq simply lost it.
Apples been bit, and brought out the eMac, and are now making it cheaper. SGI needs to cheapen up too, so it doesnt go the way of the dodo. Especially with such competition from nVidia and ATI on the x86 platform, and the Apple's offerings. We need SGI workstations that do not kill the wallet, beat the ATI radeon 9800 hands down, come with good modelling, file format, rendering software and is Linux-compatible; possibly using Linux. They should do these things before they have to file for Chapter 11.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Europe has an attitude similar to yours. Its the reason why their economies aren't as flexible as ours is and why their rates of unemployment are higher.
So you are actually causing harm instead of helping people. I hope you can feel good about yourself!
PS. To all those who say that the US does not count all of the people out of work, I agree. However with Europe's very restrictive labor laws much more Europeans are "underemployed" than Americans are. An example would be France's 35 hour work week. Whereas in the US you could have one person working 70 hours a week you'd cut those hours in half and hire 2 people in France. So in effect even though both those people in France have jobs it is the equivalent to one of them being out of work.
My completely uneducated and unresearched estimates are that France's rate of unemployment is 10% to 15% higher than the official stated level of 10%.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
The "kid" pretty much hit the nail on the head. It doesn't matter how a precious Socialist society is designed. Without sufficient motivation to succeed and innovate less development and invention will occur.
Why work at something when the government will support you for your entire life?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Borland, on the other hand, disappear long ago as far as most people are concerned.
Microsoft would never let Borland go under.
Where else would they get their ideas for development tool innovation? MS Research?
BAAHAAHAAHAAHAAHAAHAAHAAHAAHAA!!!!!!!!!!!
In 10 years, you'll be the one getting let go.
In 10 years, SGI will be long out of business.
Employees can leave a company (and leave them without the skill-set/inside-knowledge a company needs).
An employee/employeer relationship isn't an eternal bonding.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That seems high to me. Now, of course I don't live in Cali, but whoa!
m
So you are actually causing harm instead of helping people. I hope you can feel good about yourself!
Bullshit. If companies were better managed, if executive boards weren't so greedy, and if our government didn't allow companies to go bankrupt and then reward them with the opportunity to create new companies (WorldCom->MCI, for example), there would be no need for layoffs. Attrition due to employee turnover and retirement would take care of the problem of "too many employees."
Employment at will actually favors the employer rather than the employee, because employers are usually better-equipped to handle the loss of an employee rther than employees are to handle the loss of an employer.
You might wanna call and make sure that offer is still valid. In past layoffs at SGI, I knew of some people who were extended offers that were then revoked due to the position (or even the entire product) being axed...
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
Mountain View, CA ; SGI will reduce its workforce by an unprecedented 120 percent by the end of 2003, believed to be the first time a major corporation has laid off more employees than it actually has.
SGI stock soared more than 2 points on the news to $1.16 in recent New York Stock Exchange trading.
The reduction decision, announced Wednesday, came after a year-long internal review of cost-cutting procedures, said SGI Chairman Robert Bishop. The initial report concluded the company would save $10 million by eliminating 10 percent of its 4000 employees.
From there, said Bishop, "it didn't take a genius to figure out that if we cut 20 percent of our workforce, we'd save $20 million, and if we cut 100 percent of our workforce, we'd save $1 billion. But then we thought, why stop there? Let's cut another 20 percent and save $1.2 billion.
"We believe in increasing shareholder value, and we believe that by decreasing expenditures, we enhance our competitive cost position and our bottom line," he added.
SGI plans to achieve the 100 percent internal reduction through layoffs, attrition and early retirement packages. To achieve the 20 percent in external reductions, the company plans to involuntarily downsize 800 non-SGI employees who presently work for other companies.
"We pretty much picked them out of a hat," said Bishop.
Among firms SGI has picked as "External Reduction Targets," or ERTs, are Quaker Oats, Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, Callaway Golf, and Charles Schwab & Co. SGI's plan presents a "win-win" for the company and ERTs, said Bishop, as any savings by ERTs would be passed on to SGI, while the ERTs themselves would benefit by the increase in stock price that usually accompanies personnel cutback announcements.
"We're also hoping that since, over the years, we've been really helpful to a lot of companies, they'll do this for us kind of as a favor," said Bishop.
Legally, pink slips sent out by SGI would have no standing at ERTs unless those companies agreed. While executives at ERTs declined to comment, employees at those companies said they were not inclined to cooperate.
"This is ridiculous. I don't work for SGI. They can't fire me," said Kaili Blackburn, an engineer with Sikorsky.
Reactions like that, replied Bishop, "are not very sporting."
Analysts credited Bishop's short-term vision, noting that the announcement had the desired effect of immediately increasing SGI share value. However, the long-term ramifications could be detrimental, said Merrill Lynch analyst Beldon McInty."It's a little early to tell, but by eliminating all its employees, SGI may jeopardize its market position and could, at least theoretically, cease to exist," said McInty.
Bishop, however, urged patience: "To my knowledge, this hasn't been done before, so let's just wait and see what happens."
Because when CEOs keep their jobs, and shareholders make more money, we ALL(*) do better!
* (excluding those who are not CEOs or shareholders)
Why stick up for big business?
People keep telling me that SGI boxes are unique because they allow hundreds of processors to share memory. Apparently that's no longer that big an advantage.
OK, you are directed and required to continue that train of thought. Exactly how is IRIX better than Solaris? More to the point, how is it better than Linux?
Anyone do the math here? 4million divided by 400 is 10,000. So they only payed there employees below McDonalds payment level? Or was it to give their CEOs a nice bonus for the "cost-cutting" idea?
Most tech people make (or made) 100K/year here if you contract or they made that with benefits if they were FTE.
I know this sounds like a lot, however the cost of living is still going up here. A typical house in mountain view was around a million for a 2 bed 1.5 bath. rent was between 1500/1700 a month.
its all relative...
btw: those days are over though. I work in a former SGI building.
SGI ships the fastest Linux machines on earth. Sure, it's not an option as a purchase for your or I, but for organizations needing serious power, and there are plenty of them, they are a viable consideration. Steven Hawkings' group just purchased 1024 CPUs worth of SGI Linux, for instance.
The problem with SGI is they didn't cut enough. They are in a cycle of having continual losses followed by the obligatory cuts. It's going to be a never ending cycle unless they cut HARD and dig in for the long run. The IRIX stuff is holding it's own with DoD and the rest of its installed base and the new Altix (Linux) machines are coming on strong, VERY strong. With that in mind, I think SGI could hang on and turn itself around if it was willing to cut deep enough.
SGI is dead. THis is like reading obituary like:
Today, Herbert Herbemeyer, previously of 222 main street, had his penis fall off. Fortunately, Herbert has been dead for 3 years. Sources close to the family said, "It's not really surprising, Herbert has been dead for nigh on 3 years now and decomposing kinda does that to you.".
You should have accepted already! If you were lucky, you might have gotten a hiring bonus and a layoff settlement on the same day, for zero work.
That happened to someone in my group at Netscape, years ago.
Yes, but $40 million, the sum cited in the post, divided by 400 is 100,000.
Now go stand in the corner for one hour or write "I will read the post before remarking." 100 times on the blackboard.
- I am made of meat.
You are forgetting about competition. When companies compete they fight for the same customer base. Only one company can get them. The one that loses, doesn't get the money they need to stay at their current staffing levels. If they're already as efficient as they can possibly be then they have to downsize.
What happens when there's a disruptive technology that comes along and forces the company, as well as most of the industry out of business? Who do you blame then? Its simply not possible or even desireable for a company to remain the same or in existence forever.
The railroad industry was virtually decimated by the combination of cars and planes. Does this mean the railroad execs didn't manage the industry well?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Anyway, all my sarcasm was directed at you.
My God, he's from the NSA! They're everywhere!
You see, taking certain facts into account and ignoring the "side-effects" is never going to get you a clear picture. Sure, US companies can "fire" at will, but that does in no way benefit society as a whole. When you consider the whole point of economies, companies, and governments, the end goal is to benefit THE PEOPLE as a whole and to preserve their well being. In the US this really fails miserably because nobody can see passed the dollar, everything can be justified if someone is making money at the end of the day. This is at the root of all US political thinking as far as I can tell.
And just to clear something up here, in Europe lay-offs happen too, and for the same reasons, it is just that since there are laws protecting employees, it is not easy to use layoffs to screw employees (like immediately hiring a bunch of cheaper folk to do the same job.)
Only if you count people who are in work and getting paid for it as you have done. Simply because they work less hours, does not mean they are out of work. Clearly you believe that working 70 hours a week is sutainable. It is not. It is exploitation. It is results in lots of inefficient tired workers, and is a primary reason that trade unions started. You might also take into account they get PAID LESS
Oh, and BTW, don't forget the vacation package that makes the US 2 week package look like exploitation. To understand why 4,6 and even 8 weeks vacation per year doesn't lose you money you really have to start thinking about why vacation exists at all.
In essence, the US has what it proudly calls a "work ethic." But what I actually see is an employer perpetuated moral standpoint that to work hard and long to the detriment of other areas of your life is to be saintly. There is enormous pressure within the US to "work hard," and in practice that translates mainly into "working dumb."
So after your 10 years of 70 hour weeks working for the man, you can proudly proclaim "I got laid off, not because I didn't work hard, not because I took too much vacation, not because the company couldn't make it any other way, but because someone, somewhere, wanted more money to spend on the executive conference-cum-ski-fest."
The reason why Europe has lower rates of people living in poverty is because Europe spends more on social services. Everyone knows this. More for homeless people, more for jobless people, you name it Europe will spend money on it.
And yes it is very very nice for the governments to do this.
Its also economic folly. Its EXPENSIVE to do that. It hurts your economies and takes capital away from creators and gives it away to people who do not contribute in meaningful ways to society.
I agree that one should not think that all they have to do with their life is "work hard". Vacation and sabbaticals are important. But you have to EARN them. Simply existing doesn't give you the right to them. Furthermore US workers aren't worked to the breaking point. Most work in the range of 40 to 50 hours per week, not 70 hours per week. The point I was trying to make was that by setting its maximum work hours so low France had hobbled itself unnecessarily in a world full of competititors who would do no such foolish thing.
And who are you to tell someone that is working 70 hours a week that its too much for them? Only the individual could know that. What if someone WANTS to work 70,80 heck 90 hours a week? Ambition is strong in the US. I don't know about Europe. Its not like everyone who works 70+ hours a week is forced to do so for their entire life. It could be for a very short period of time, say 5 years or less. But in order to do something similar in Europe you'd basically have to start your own business or find some line of work that is for whatever reason exempt from the rediculous labor rules/laws there.
And yes being able to fire at will DOES benefit society. It improves the economy thus bringing down the cost of goods for everyone. That means everyone has to work less and earn less to buy the same things. I don't see how that could be a bad thing. And social service spending is not the answer. At some point the government will run out of money because there won't be enough people working to tax or they'll already be taxed too much as it is.
With declining birth rates how will Europe be able to continue to pay pensions and social security and fund healthcare for its citizens when there's less people paying tax money in then there are taking it out?
Perhaps if they weren't raised in a culture of "the state will care for you" they would have made earlier arraingements to care more successfully for themselves.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I had promised myself to quit SGI when the Cokes were no longer 25 cents. They're 50 cents as of a year ago. I broke my promise ... a family to
feed and the job market kinda sucks.
My handle comes from Python, the little sister to Perl, and Cows, which were nice and warm in the barn on a cold winters night in my youth.
Can't say as we were using the layoff this time to get rid of deadwood. Everyone I know who got the ax was quite lively and valued. We do have to run a business, and that can be challenging at times.
Bishop's the best CEO I've seen in my 25 years; he picked up a real challenge here, and is making as well as could be hoped of it, with focus, integrity, and good leadership.
And yes, we definitely layed off more than we are hiring - I don't know the inside numbers, but what I've seen reported looked like about 400 out of 4000 reduction in total employees.