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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.
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...
I still use an SGI, an Indigo2, to do visual database modelling for an aviation training facility. Great machine- even as old as it is it can still do things you could not think of doing with an Intel machine.
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.
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
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.
Well thatone is easy. On an amiga 500 the movement of the mouse cursor is actuelly timed to the screen update frequence, meaning that the mouse updates EXATLY once each vblank. The result is that when you move the mouse in a constant speed, the cursor also move in a constant speed. Something that no other hardware is able to do -(( (Yes, there are plenty things the new computers can do the old can't so I would not say the amiga 500 is better then the currently available computers)
Curse Intel and Apple for that #*&*$&*#$& usb mouse standart
...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.
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...
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. Easy to code on, widespread COTS support and rock solid stabilty as compared to the other HPC vendors. I'm really looking forward to getting it online and getting sometime on it. Ahhhhh... I love the smell of silicon and CFD in the morning.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
Uh. I guess I can understand your completely fucked up view of the company if you worked at Chippewa, but you should have gotten your ass to Eagan or to Amphitheater once or twice while you were there.
SGI basically wrote off their workstation business in about 1998 or 1999. It happened about the time Rocket Rick left; I forget now exactly when that was. They had O2, which was built exclusively for The Weather Channel and which sold very well because of it, and they had Octane, which was essentially built for Discreet Logic and Southwest Airlines. No SGI internal salespeople got commissions off of sales of those systems. They were being sold only through the channel, which essentially meant not at all.
The real juice was in SN-1 and SN-2. And that's still where SGI's sweet spot is. Unfortunately, their products are still overpriced, even though they've got the best scalability curve in the world.
And incidentally: SGI got those chairs for about $75 apiece back in the mid 1990's. They bought thousands of them, and buying in volume translates to some very good deals.
The contractors, the temps, and any full time employee working for one of our joint ventures weren't counted. It made our income-to-employee ratio look more attractive for investors. Personally, I found the joint venture fudging a little bit dishonest, because as far as those employees were concerned -- they were full time employees working for our company.
SGI itself was originally an offshoot of Stanford, I belive Jim Clark and several of his students left to start the company originally.
This is correct. SGI bought Cray, which was a big mistake. They got very little out of it. And CrayLink is just a marketing name for what became known as NUMAlink which is now known as NUMAflex. And so the lesson is that marketing sucks, and SGI has pretty much developed their own stuff instead of buying it up, like oh, say Microsoft.
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