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Sun to Cut 5000 Jobs
codemachine writes "In one of Jonathan Schwartz's first acts as CEO, Sun Microsystems has announced that they are cutting up to 5,000 jobs over the next 6 months. The company plans to sell property it owns in Newark, Calif., and to exit leases at a site in Sunnyvale, Calif. Analysts will be pleased that Sun has finally taken steps to cut costs, but what will this mean for the future of the company?"
And to think, just yesterday I was pointed at thier jobs page by a friend...
Moon to cut only 1200 jobs (and Marvin gets to keep his).
Who's your user, program?
Good thing I didn't move to California for that Sun job..
"Faith: Not wanting to know the truth."-Friedrich Nietzsche
5000 disgruntled ex-Sun employees band together to form a new company, Black Hole, billing themselves as the "anti-Sun" development company and creating a programming language called "Borneo." I can see it coming; it's written in my tea leaves.
Let's hope Sun gets smart and gets rid of the excess layers of middle management and their entire marketing staff, along with a few maintenance guys. If they let go too many programmers, the competition may reap a windfall.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Yang Yuanqing was rumoured to be grinning, while wispering "..excellent"
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
its still always a dream to work for sun.
Time to buy stock in Sun finally?
Nobody cares about what happens to the workers who get fired. You're talking to (mostly) Americans here... Unless its thier job being cut, they just dont care... :-(
I think they have some deal to provide hardware or something...
Blar.
Yeah it sucks badly to lose your job, but it doesn't really mean Sun is going down the hole. It means they are cutting the fat. I don't know how profitable of a company they are, but this is typical of companies that are trying to be all things to all people. It generally means they are going to re-focus on their core market (what actually made them money in the first place).
I remember when Amazon refocused. They were selling so many ridiculuos (to ship) items, there were many products you could get at a local store that cost more to ship than the product itself!
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
I bet it will be office space like situation there now. "Michael Bolton"...you can call me "mike"
Sun's not-invented-here madness has kept them from overcoming the McNeely mindset.... one that pushed SGi recently into Chapter 11. I, for one, believe that both Solaris and uSparc technologies bring a lot to the table.
Their feistyness has been one of their biggest stumbling blocks for years. This gives them a chance to rebuild, cut some of their more insane projects and financial bleeding, and get back into action.
Sun has very goofy, fence-straddling legacy madnesses: Java programs, licensing issues, relationship issues, Microsoft litigation legacies, and all sorts of baggage. The faster they shed the baggage and go with producing assets, the better, IMHO.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Ordering stuff from Sun in Europe is a difficult process, unless perhaps when you have 1000 or more employees. The representatives they use over here (Finland in my case) are often arrogant and do not really know what they are talking about. They also deliver quotes that are just silly compared to the initial request. In short, if you run a SME, it makes more sense to order your stuff from HP or IBM.
Good timing. I start a new Sun class next week on MTP/MBM. I'm sure the guy is going to be lots of fun.
Hats off. Pioneer of microcomputers is passing away.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Sun could have jumped on the Linux bandwagon and been it's strongest proponent. Could have stood up their own distribution, and brought some of their vaunted engineering skills to bear in polishing it.
Coulda-woulda-shoulda
except it would have competed with their own cashcow Sparc business.
Now Sun is just the posterchild for companies with poor strategy.
I hope they get their act together. The new AMD hardware looks to be a promising start.
What about the future of 5,000 human workers?
Relocate to Redmond, where they are still sought after only to push the housing prices higher in NW OR Relocate to Infosys which is seeking all kinds of Geeks in India & China.
What Sun hasn't mentioned is that contract workers are still needed, in great supply. Even during, and after, the job cuts contract workers will be needed. I'm not just talking about 3mo gigs, 1+ year contract workers will be in high demand. If you're damned good, they may even hire you on. All their doing is cutting the fat, not the muscle.
Being an employee of Sun its not the best news in the world to hear this. Sun is a great place to work and while I hope I don't lose my job I don't think things look so good there since I started not too long ago, so I know my position ain't a good one. Best to polish off my CV's and covering letter then and prepare for the worst.
In this world of executives where they are rewarded for what The Street thinks, and the The Street only cares about this quarter's results, this is a BAU process.
Verizon is cutting staff again, I think this is iteration #2354 for them. Of course the work doesn't go down, it just shifts to the people left.
I took a Unix systems programming class from Sun about five years ago and it was very good. The only downside to the class were the attitudes of some of the Sun employees that were in there. They repeatedly told the rest of the class that they "didn't really need to know this stuff" and that they were "web guys" or "java gui guys" and that the nuts and bolts of Unix were tangential. When they were in the room they spent most of their time talking about the price of Sun's stock. It was hard to imagine how the company was going to go forward when so many employees seemed to think that their core products (Unix servers) were not really worthy of learning about.
I really like Sun's stuff and I hope that they are able to make a big comeback; but they are not going to do it counting on the folks that were in my class.
Sun is unlikely to ever recover. It's on a DEC Death Spiril. Good riddance too, for helping SCO fund its lawsuit to eliminate Linux.
I know people who work for Sun here in CZ. I also went through their interview process while I was looking for a job in January. Sun decided a long time ago that continued investment in the US was a waste of money. They directly told me they had no interest in having new employees in the US. Their operations have been growing in eastern Europe and India. The layoffs come as no surprise to me at all. They have been creating the redundancy to be able to let go of people for a while.
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
what exactly is Sun's business model? java is free, their hardware is expensive, linux is also free, and thin clients are great but not what the market wants. are they a hardware company like apple, or a software company like microsoft? or are they a services company?
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Its always nasty when you loose your job but this is long over due to be honest. Sun's workforce is still huge (a shade under 40,000). The StorageTek acquisition has swelled it beyond a sustainable point. Sun's results have been hovering just below the break-even mark in recent quarters. Today's cuts should push the company into the black during many, if not all, 3 month periods. Posting a small, tidy profit will keep many of the critics quiet as Sun continues to rework its business becoming more of a software company and less of a hardware company and this can only be a good thing I think.
We tend to forget that companies (from mom-and-pops to corporations) are nothing but a group of humans (investors, owners, board members, employees, etc) all working for a common goal. They need to worry about the future of the other 32,500 human workers and the thousands of human pensioners whose will be affected if Sun goes belly-up. So, yes, "what will this mean for the future of the company?" is a very important human related question.
Remaining Sun employees to be paid in Grid computing hours.
How many of these jobs were for lawyers who write up new "open source" licenses?
http://outcampaign.org/
What? Everyone take note, I think we have isolated Tony Snow's slashdot ID ...
Anybody who still or might some day work for said company cares. People still working want to know what happens since companies are creatures of habit when it comes to lay-off policy. If it's 3 hours notice and zero severence, people will step up the job hunt and take just about any offer to get the hell out. If it's a nice pacakge, they'll take stock in thier own finances and weigh the bail-out-now option against it. Anyone who might want to work for the company will shy away for 18 months or so (long enough to forget and/or tell themselves "yeah, there were layoffs, but that was almost two years ago and...").
Cutting staff is never a good sign and reflects a colossal amount of stupidity on the part of management. In this case, it means "we couldn't figure out how to make money with these 5,000 people". Unless it's 5K worth of mouth-breathing middle-management, it's a sad statement on the company vision & direction from the top and the lack of grasroots channels to communicate from below. Nothing worthwhile coming from the top, nothing able to break through from the bottom....
The real question is, how much of a pay cut are the top execs taking? What's that you say, zero? In fact you say they're getting fat bonuses? Yeah... that's what I thought....
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
Jonathan Schwartz's blog says a lot more behind the decision to cut the 5,000 employees. You may or may not agree with the decision, but it's far more informative about the direction Sun is heading in than the /. submission link.
h ase_2
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan?entry=p
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have to admit, I was a bit stunned myself... but hey, them's the breaks with moderation!
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
For the last 5 years, being cut meant that it was going to be difficult to get a job. Right now, there is a shortage of techies in the Denver (where I am guessing that some 1-3K will come from). So as to the ppl, most if not all will be ok.
Of course, according to the gov. numbers, they would be wise to pick up jobs real quick, rather than taking too long.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Meanwhile, competitor Microsoft is making room for 12,000 new employees.
Hmm...
"Why should I have to change my name? He's the one who sucks!"
I Guess this explains the new Sun Microsystems building I see getting built in my city....
Sun hardware rocks. Seriously, would you rather run a 32 bit consumer dell box built to the cheapest possible denominator or a 64 bit Sun Solaris box built to withstand industrial abuse? If your just playing around, I am sure a dell is fine if you want to spend most of your time tracking down hardware failures in riser cards. You get what you pay for and cheaper hardware is just that, cheaper.
I was a Dell technician who used to fly out to remote installations to fix the dumbest hardware failures that just don't happen with a Sun box. I don't work for Sun. I work in an IBM shop where we run linux and the stuff is nice. At home, I run Solaris on a 64 bit sparc. I like linux but the difference between Solaris and Linux is night and day. Yes there are some Linux features I wish were in Solaris, but overall Solaris X is faster and more stable and has some awesome features.
Hopefully people will see the value of Sun. You can find the "overpriced" hardware dirt cheap used. Pick some up. You will be amazed. The difference between Sun and Dell mechanically is like the difference between a high end road bike that fits you well and a cheap bike from Walmart: both will get you down the road, but the one that rides better is immediately noticeable.
You can also run Solaris on X86 architecture. Download it for free and fire it up, the performance will amaze you.
Java is probably the best example of great technology held back by completely incompetent marketing.
I had heard about numerous problems with Java in the past (JVM performance, licensing issues, etc.) but had not known its marketing was widely perceived to be one of them. I'm curious ... what was it that the Sun marketing staff did that was so "incompetent?" Did they do something that turned off users or developers in the way it was marketed? Did they run big ads saying 'Java causes intestinal cramps' or hand out Java-logo clubs for killing baby seals?
"95% of all Slashdot
Perhaps it's because my rates are high; I can command the highest rates in the Valley, and Sun has a low limit last I heard. Or perhaps it's because they are very big into outsourcing.
But whatever, I'd consider talking to them at least. The trouble is, one has to go through an approved Vendor; and none of the agents that I've dealt with either are an approved Vendor, or they don't have contracts there.
So show me. Show me where these supposed contracts are. Or show me an agent who has contract openings there. Or just show me an agent to deals a lot with Sun (none of the fly-by-night ones, thank-you-very-much).
Otherwise, I'd have to call B.S..
The job market here has greatly picked up; I have recruiters calling me every day to examine positions that they are offering.
How does a company increas profit? Not through cutting edge products that the public eats up. Not through going on an agressive selling campaign. No, the way to increase profits is just to get rid of all those pesky employees who eat up your money with their stupid salaries and their sissy healthcare coverage.
In fact, lets just outsource everything to a country where they force people to work 20 hour days for $10 a month. Profits will go up, executives will all get pay raises, then jump ship with their golden parachutes right before the first batch of crappy overseas products hit the market and ruin the company. Billiant!!!
Take the multi-core uSparc family. There are three viable choices for server CPUs today-- Intel/AMD-something, PPC family, or uSparc. Intel and AMD are fighting each other for margins. The fabless uSparc design is tight and well designed. IBM can't let go of the PPC family for many reasons, but it lags behind the Intel/AMD world vastly.
Java? Nice technology with a crummy marketing plan. The Java Desktop is pretty cool stuff.... and needs lots of sandpaper and varnish to make it work well. Do they have an intelligent developer program? No. Certification/education program? No. They should look to Oracle or even Cisco to learn how to do this right. Sun Press. Think about it.
There are other programs which need to be whacked with a sharp knife. R&D is a very good thing, when you have focus and vision-- and not a chip on your shoulder about how Bill and Steve done-ya-wrong. It's all about understanding your clientele, and avoiding the temptation to involve research in incestuous projects that foster the not-invented-here mentality. Sun needs friends. Sun has enemies. Easy play.
And not one that a hockey player might make.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
There's been a steady stream of layoff announcements over the past 6 years. And yet, Bush and many economist pundits claim the US economy is strong.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
...is too busy posting on Slashdot to help it.
There's also a rumor that Intel is going to layoff people as well, to the tune of 16,000 workers.
This is just yet more of the same from Sun. The business strategy since the bubble bursts seems to be:
Fire 9-11% of the staff to "cut costs"
Take an accounting hit to reduce tax
Acquire many smaller companies adding thousands more staffers
Continue everything else the same
Increase revenue hopefully
Not quite make a profit
Repeat.
pSo, what other secret laws of tax, accounting and business does this exploit, and why is it a good strategy?
Stick Men
Hmm. Sun announces that Java will be open-sourced and now lays off 5000 people. Coincidence?
Sun is a great company. I respect them a lot. They were UNIX when UNIX wasn't cool. Java, Solaris, SPARC: the list of Sun's acheivements are long and storied.
Just a few years ago, a Sun workstation of your very own was quite the status symbol in geek-dom.
Sun has a lot going for them. I sincerely hope they can turn it around.
For those who get laid off, I hope they land on their feet.
I may be Obnoxious but I'm not Obnoxious enough to revel in the pain of others.
Is that a SCSI connector or are you just glad to see me?
The OP was just pointing out that people seemed to care more about the company than the workers, as if the damn company could feel pain. No one's asking you to do anything more than excercise your obviously underutilized empathy a little and throw an "aw, that sucks dude" towards the workers while you're crying over the poor little corporation.
Such is life? Such is life now, not in my grandfather's day when CEOs actually felt a little loyalty to the workers who had made them rich. Some of us don't like the attitude that CEOs can walk away from failing companies with multi million dollar bonuses while the average Joe get's shafted out of a job and a pension.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
best of luck to those affected.
MORTAR COMBAT!
The problem is that they aren't laying off the clueless management. Sun has been laying off people constantly for the past 4 years and it hasn't caused them to post a profit yet.
Today's cuts should push the company into the black during many, if not all, 3 month periods.
That's what they said about the layoffs in 2005.
And in 2004.
And in 2003.
And in 2002.
Let me explain why I don't care.
These people are highly educated professionals. They already live in Silicon Valley. Most will have new jobs within weeks, perhaps with a minor pay cut. A few may have to relocate. Nobody will be living on the street.
I know this sounds like a disaster for people in many parts of the world, but pretty much everyone in Silicon Valley has been laid off a few times. It's just how things are here, and for most people it doesn't mean much more than a bit of a vacation.
And there are many many Americans with jobs who are in a much tougher situation than these people.
Yesterday I attended a talk by Suns new VP for iWork (their highly interesting flexible work program) at Stanford University.
One of the more interesting statements she made was the following, when talking about open source:
"We don't want people isolated from each other with, like, firewalls, or such."
When a VP obviously does not have the slightest clue what open-source or firewalls are, but is in charge of managing the workers (engineers) of the company, I don't have a very positive feeling for the future of Sun...
Sun has been laying off workers since early 2000. They even have entire abandoned buildings:s ystems.htm
http://www.abandonedbutnotforgotten.com/sun_micro
Sun expanded by leaps and bounds during the DotCom boom, and has been contracting ever since the DomCom bust. This shouldn't surprise anyone. Sun will be around for a long time to come, just not as large as during their "glory days" of the 1998 Foosball/Aeron/Nerf DotCom era that we all miss.
Low-end salaries were always a drawback at Sun. And is probably why they had trouble retaining their top talent.
Their current solution seems to be to offshore as much as possible. That approach doesn't seem to be working, and it doesn't look like Sun is going to change. I know one place where their inability to keep up with technology cost them a small fortune when the company started moving away from Sun. A pity that the lack of talent is costing them such business.
I predict they'll be out of business in 5 years, 10 years tops.
Do they have 5000 people?
Many years ago, when McNealy was asked why he was against having NT on SPARC, he replied that he did not want his company to become a low-margin supplier of boxes.
What you are offering is to become yet another (failed) Dell's competitor in a niche market (Linux market is much less that Windows one). You're offering them to become a manufacturing and marketing (+ some services) company instead of a technological one.
I don't think it is a right way.
Sun has a lot of issiues because of being a niche company in a market turning into the commodity one. First it happened to the workstations, now it happened to servers.
However, your proposal is still not a viable strategy for a 12bln company.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Java is assinine... perhaps the IT world is beginning to realise it.
Flamebait no. Truth, yes.
Java is not platform independent, has no backward compatibility and is horridly abusive of system resources.
Java is assinine, despite your mod points on Slashdot.
Installing and uninstalling various JRE versions repeatedly in order to run java applications makes perfect sense, of course! It is perfectly reasonable to expect your users to waste their time on this crap, what was I thinking?
(Once again, I changed my IP address to work around the ridiculous flood interval here on Slashdot... 10 minutes... fucking absurd)
> But Sun has been actively trying to undermine Linux when it should be targeting MS. McNealy's attitude towards linux has been akin to Bush action about alternative energy. Quite honestly, McNealy has been Sun's worse enemy.
Come on, Sun was targeting MS as nobody else in the industry.
BTW, theit attitude towards Linux was kind of similar (on the bigger scale) to their attitude towards Windows because both Linux nad Windows symbolized the same thing: commoditisation (sp?) of their market with squeezing out independent players with their unique and, thus, more expensive technology.
It is kind of like in the media when most newspapers can no longer affeord to have their own reporters over the world and rely on the 3 or 4 news gathering conglomerates who now define to large extent what is written in the papers.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Greedy lawyers ( http://users.wfu.edu/palmitar/Courses/SecReg-Palmi ter/Handout/Articles/Elkind-Lerach-King-Dead.htm ) and Wall Street vultures (sorry, "respected industry analysts") changed the companies' mentality to the short term one.
It is interesting that McNeely actually was objecting to the latest layoffs.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
It means they are cutting the fat.
Let's see. Last year they RIF'd some people. Then they bought StorageTek which added 7000. Now they're RIF'ing 5000.
Trimming the fat?
Since the dot com bubble burst, Sun has been laying off many thousands of staff per year, but at the same time acquiring other companies. Remember Cobalt? Within a year of the acquisition, the product line had withered on the vine, most of the staff had been RIF'd and the Cobalt founder left to start another company.
Have a look at Sun's history since 2001. Look at RIF's, acquisitions, revenue, profit/loss and "costs" under those funny accounting laws.
I'm not sure Sun wants to make a profit. I suspect they want to keep ticking over, buying and RIF'ing, taking "hits" against costs, whatever.
Why? What are they up to?
Later this year, Sun will probably buy another company, take on a few thousand more staffers, and this time next year, lay off another few thousand.
Stick Men
There are three viable choices for server CPUs today-- Intel/AMD-something, PPC family, or uSparc
IBM can't let go of the PPC family for many reasons, but it lags behind the Intel/AMD world vastly.
IBM's Power architecture is currently the king of the hill for servers (vs Sparc, x86, Itanium, etc.), has been for some time, and it looks like the Power6 will continue this trend.
If by PPC you were referring to the processor previously used in the Mac, then you should not have included it in the list of "server" processor choices. The Power4, Power5, Power5+, Power6 etc. are the server processors from the Power line.
Our benchmarks say something completely different.....
Multi-core Itaniums lead, followed closely by multi-core AMDs, followed by uSparc Ts, then the Power family.
This, using Linux 2.6 kernels in minimal/sparse installs, and LMBench3.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Bank of memory throwing correctable ECC errors? Map it out. Processor that has ECC errors in it's cache? Map it out
Coincidentally, our Sun box died this morning once AGAIN due to the LACK of ECC in cache and memory. While I'm sure the box you speak of is newer, they sure shot themselves in the foot by shipping so many systems without industry standard ECC for the last few years.
*sarcasm* You sir are management material. Developers are just replaceable parts. Any developer is the same as any other developer who gets the same pay ( better if they do the job for less ). *end sarcasm*
Layoffs are not done based soley on skill level and experience. Some good programmers will be cut with the chaff. Good people are going to get hurt. For some it may be an opportunity, for others it will be a tragedy.
New Rule: Don't judge people by their employer. There may even be some good developers at Microsoft and even *gasp* SCO. Although in the latter case, they may have been locked in a machine room for the last decade or so *wink*. Maybe the door was blocked by stacks of legal briefs and subpoenaed documents.
All joking aside. Being layed off can be one of the best and worst things to ever happen to you. Depends on your personality, personal situation, and just plain luck. I was one of the lucky ones... although I helped improve my odds with months of social networking and daily job hunting.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
...an antiquated programming language and operating system.
Hell would freeze over, but there would instantly be peace on Earth.
And, so ... Are the fortunate ones to be considered tendon, grissel, cartilage, nerve endings, bone? I guess a company can never have "too much nerve". I wonder what is the version of
--a "corporate root canal"
-- corporate bone marrow extraction
-- corporate cartilage snipping
-- corporate tendonits
Strike the corporate tendon and cartilage and they will swagger like the zombies in Return of the Living Dead that shouted "LIVE BRAINS", "MORE BRAINS"...
(I never liked cartilage in my food, either, nor the veins in shrimp and chicken, for that matter..)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Mabe the ACs out there don't know that Bugs Bunny wasn't the first to step foot on the moon. Someone else was....
Who's your user, program?
Publish benchmarks like TPC-C and SAP transactions, etc. consistently show Power winning significantly.
...aside from the mindshare of Linux, aside from the simple problem of customers jumping on the Linux bandwagon just because, is that they will never be able to match or even come close to the power of Linux development.
Think about it. They have two major operating system vendors (Red Hat and Novell) that are in direct competition with them. And since Red Hat and Novell both work on Linux, well - guess what! That's two companies behind Linux, versus one behind Sun.
And we haven't even begun to talk about hardware, where IBM, Intel, HP and Dell are gunning at them as well. More companies that work on Linux.
So it's Sun working on Solaris, trying to convince people that it's "open" (well, sort of) and somehow materialize a super open-source developer force many, MANY years too late versus Linux, which runs on twenty plus architectures (including all of Sun's), sports better performance, better mindshare and coders with religious fanaticism plus the backing of MANY heavyweight corporations.
And I haven't even begun to talk about real technical issues (hint: Linux does NUMA, CPU hotplug, massive scalability, etc quite nicely).
This post is probably going to sound like a big troll to some. Its biggest litmus test will be time, and barring any major changes in direction from Solaris or Linux, history and smart predictions say Solaris is on its way out. How soon Sun decides to phase it out is going to be the biggest factor in how badly it hurts them.
As others have noted, SUN maintains the luster of quality hardware (well deserved), and I'm sure it shows in good part due to Solaris' support for them.
One strategy for SUN is to follow the steps of IBM - expand support/build consulting business while maintaining its hardware/research quality. SUN's much smaller than IBM, but both are quite similar in that their greatest assets are quality hardware and engineering reputation. An importnat but subtle advantage is SUN controls Java.
How frustrating.
At the highest level, Sun never figured out that their revenue channel was becoming a commodity. They are still trying to produce the "best" thing, when their customers want "good enough".
Hints for Jonathan:
1. Stop fighting Linux. Figure out how to make money on it. Buy Novell/Suse.
2. Figure out how to make some money from Java. Open source it and license use of the "Java" name.
3. You have great X86 servers. Your enterprise customers don't want them because they run Linux and Windows. You want them to run Solaris X86. Yes, it's arguably better, but your customers don't care. Take a cue from Sony's failures. They dumped money into Betamex till the bitter end, because it was better. They also squandered the Walkman brand with their "better" audio format.
4. Fire the entire marketing department. Have a talk with Steve Jobs and see if he'll sell you a clue. Hire a real Marketing VP.
5. You might have something on the multi-terabyte storage device. But make it an appliance. Don't make your customers have to load solaris patches on it. It's a high-margin business, and your only real competition is Netapp. Study what they are doing, and do it better/faster cheaper.
...the H1-B visa cap has already been reached for fiscal year 2007. As we all know, there's a tremendous shortage of technical folks, and we need to double the H1-B visa cap, and then raise it by 20% every year thereafter.
Oddly enough, both Sun and Intel are lobbying hard for increases to the H1-B visa cap, yet both are laying off technical people in North America.
t _pe/high_tech_visas;_ylt=As9F4vyAeAmlEjHycZvRxSEDW 7oF;_ylu=X3oDMTBhZDhxNDFzBHNlYwNtZW5ld3M-
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060601/ap_on_go_ca_s
By "need people who are really good" I think you mean "want people who have a precise match with their organization in terms of both technical and Line-Of-Business experience".
If you've been in the job market at all in the past five years, you would realize that it isn't about generalized ability or skills anymore. It's about being lucky/resourceful enough to match the keyword lists being generated by HR, or lucky/resourceful enough to be able to cut through the HR maze and deal directly with the technical manager.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
How specific are the requirements (skills and experience) that you're looking for?
Are you inadvertently/unconsciously subtracting folks from consideration early in the resume evaluation process that might be able to do the job effectively?
Is this a long-term position (where some training is viable), or a short-term one where a drop-in employee is vital?
Many employers cause their own "talent shortages" due to overprecision or simple overoptimism when drafting job requirements.
If your stated requirements are unrealistically high, you'll cut down the number of responders overall and probably increase the number of responders who are willing to pad their resumes just to get in the door. Fewer hits, and even fewer genuine candidates.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.