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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)
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.
SGI did not write FSV (File System Visualizer), Daniel Richard did that and infact was inspired by FSN. FSN (Fusion) is the 3d file system navigator featured in Jurassic Park, but SGI hasn't updated it for awhile (it only works on IRIX versions 5.3 and below.
$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.
$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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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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
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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.
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
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.