Slashdot Mirror
Massive Layoffs At AOL
JLavezzo writes "Several news sites are reporting that the United States' largest ISP has laid off 750 employees. My sources at AOL put the actual number at approximately 950 regular employees and 300 contractors from various departments including new technology and marketing. The contractors aren't mentioned by the news outlets. Severance packages are known to include up to four months pay and keeping laid off employees on the AOL payroll through February (to retain health insurance). With most of the layoffs coming from the Northern Virginia offices, what are their hopes for finding new jobs?"
waiting tables, burger flipping, etc....
Meh.
Iraqi government is hiring US contractors to help them count ballots.
http://comments.fuckedcompany.com/phpcomments/inde x.php?newsid=109601&sid=1&page=1&parentid=0&crapfi lter=1
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." - Josef Stalin
US (nation) for Oct 04: 5.1%
VA (state) for Oct 04: 3.2%
If these poor souls have skills, they will find jobs here. I doubt most of them have security clearances, but those that do will be immediately re-employed.
Helevius
You think he's joking too. Layoffs by SMS have happened.
Take it from someone who lived there up until 5 years ago, and whose parents still live there -- the average price of a new home in Northern Virginia has stayed rock steady at about $600,000 (totally unscientific hand-waving based on neighborhood drive-bys). My parents' houses have both almost doubled in value in the last 5 years *and* stayed there.
No.Va. has benefitted tremendously from the steady upswing in government spending post-9/11. Last time I went back and drove around a bit the number of new and under-construction office buildings was stunning. Getting fired sucks, but if you want a liquid job market -- NoVa's a great place to look.
Point being -- don't sob too hard.
Someone from AOL (I presume higher-ups) that uses craigslist posted the news last night about the layoffs at 10:05PM EST. You can see the original post here.
Walt Disney was a capitalist? Right?
"No matter what the provocation, I never fire a man who is honestly trying to deliver a job. Few workers who become established at the Disney Studio ever leave voluntarily or otherwise, and many have been on the payroll all their working lives."
--Walt Disney
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
It's called an EPSQ. It can take as long a a year for your final clearance to come through. I think you might need a sponsor with a reason to access classifid data to actually get a clearance. Classified information is on a need to know basis.
He means W-4 vs 1099 employment.
;)
1099 is (not from the form name, but what it is used for) "Temporary/Contract worker", and the employee is responsible for all taxes, benefits, etc. However, a 1099 employer rarely pays enough to pay for benefits, and it's legally NOT THEIR PROBLEM. As a 1099 employee, you are legally self-employed as a contractor/subcontractor.
W-4 employment is where you are legally on their payroll, they handle all the payroll taxes, benefits, etc, and you are a permanent worker (well as permanent as you can get).
Hopefully this will help with any confusion. And I can be assured to not get a karma boost, as the moderators are much furthe down the page by now
" No, you'll get a job because you're fresh ... thus easier to pay. A Famous Programmer will want twice what a college grad will get..."
Not when you're starving, you don't.
The idea is to let you go before an extended period of time off (weekend, holidays) so that you can't come back to the office in a huff and had time to reflect.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
To my understanding, he doesn't technically work for Nullsoft anymore. He's part of Aol Multimedia or something to that effect. He's working on the Ultravox Multimedia Router. I know most of the Nullsoft team, including Justin Frankel (Nullsoft founder) and Tag, and it's my understanding that Tag wasn't really that actively involved in Winamp development outside of the DSP plug-ins for shoutcast. So I can't imagine he'd be doing much code maintenance anyway.
Shoutcast was originally developed by Justin and Tom Pepper while Tag was still at Phoenix BIOS. Tag sorta acted as a offhours consultant along with several other developers and testers on #nullsoft. After the AOL merger, Nullsoft brought Tag on-board fulltime to further the shoutcast development.
But AOL pushed shoutcast to be forked away from Winamp so that they could roll shoutcast technology into an enterprise product. They soon realized that Winamp would not make them any money, but saw potential in shoutcast. So that's where Tag went.
P.S. It's probably not a good idea to go posting about how someone is looking for another job on a forum like slashdot. Especially when their wife just had a baby. Especially when (as you said) they haven't been able to find a new job yet.
A quick google says 'Siemens', to save anyone else the effort.
Clearances don't simply help, they're everything. I'm another one layed off in the post 2000 bust, and if I had a clearance there wouldn't have been a problem. I got lucky in that a friend knew someone who was looking (it's not what you know, it's who you know), because otherwise my pizza delivery skillz would have been tested.
You need a clearance, and you can't get one.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.