Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
$40M / 400 = $100k per employee, which sounds absolutely standard for a skilled white-collar job. When I worked for a large (and still successful) company in the tech industry, that was the figure they used to estimate how much each employee cost them: my salary was about half that, and the rest was taxes, benefits, 401(k) match (heh, remember those?), building upkeep, chicken giblets for the cafeteria, etc. etc. etc.
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
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]
$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.
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.
And 50K/year is diddly squat in silicon valley.
Typical employee cost is salary plus 15%-35% over the top of that cost for employee benefits like insurance and 401k matching.
--- I do not moderate.
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 apparently still hiring (and hiring pretty young men to boot).
Yeah, but the ones they're firing are old and ugly.
If each of these 400 employees required an expensive SGI workstation on their desks, just think of the savings!
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.
SGI is the only hardware that excites me more than Apple.
Obviously, you haven't seen a great pair of tits. Although on further reflection, they might be considered software, so never mind.
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.
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...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
But for the typical Slashdotter, merely vaporware.
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.
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.
They getting rid from technical support and entry level egnineers. High-level programmers in Sillicon Valley still make 150K - 250K, and that would give 300K - 500K for the budget. But even they are not overpaid as they actuall those who really work. But if SGI wants to really cut the cost then they should let go execs - the guys who are actually responsible for keeping the company on the buttom. Of course that will never happen - execs will never lay themselves off.
Less is more !
You're talking about CrayLink [ibm.com], which is the memory sharing technology in SGI MIPS supers. Supposedly SGI bought Cray just to get the patent--a purchase that cost them a lot of money, very little of which they got back when they sold Cray off again. But IBM and Sun have similar technologies. Whether they're as good as CrayLink, I couldn't say. Still, SGI Origin series no longer dominates the supercomputer market [top500.org].
SGI's scalable numa architecture is an offshoot of Stanford University's DASH project. The "Cray" in CrayLink was done for marketing reasons. The original productized version of the Cray Link interconnects was in the Origin 2000 (SN0), at 1.6 GByte/sec per cable with up to six cables to each node. In Origin 3000 (SN1) it's 3.2 GByte/sec. In Altix(SN2) it's up to 6.4 GByte/sec. SGI has put a lot of work into keeping the latency of both the NumaLink architecture and its software very low... even on a 1024 processor machine.
The ranking on Top500 is mostly CPU-based. Cluster-type machines tend to score very well as I/O thruput isn't reflected very well in the benchmark. Most users need all the CPU they can get, but there are still many that need insane amounts of I/O... for those sorts of people, there's the Origin and Altix.
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.
Original Mac's could also update the mouse cursor during VBL. It was a complaint that some game designers had with the Apple II/II+ design, no reasonable way to sync to refresh for the smoothest animation with single-digit MHz CPU's. That's where we got some of our ideas when we were designing the Amiga architecture.
The UMA (unified memory architecture) also has a heritage from the Apple II, to the Mac, to the Amiga; and SGI used it in some of their later workstations and the N64 chipset. Of course the bandwidths needed these days requires a different solution.
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
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.
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.