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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?"
Moon to cut only 1200 jobs (and Marvin gets to keep his).
Who's your user, program?
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
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... :-(
And honestly, why should we care? What do you expect us to do about it? They're doing what they feel is right to put the company back on track.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"What about the future of 5,000 human workers?"
Sun has been going down the tubes for years, any idiot could have seen this coming - especially once it was announced that McNealy was stepping down as CEO. Sun employees have had plenty of time to find jobs at profitable, well-run firms, or to at least stash away money to live on. I see little reason to worry about their futures - anyone getting canned has had plenty of time to jump ship.
Why should we care? Of course it sucks to lose your job, but what do you expect everyone else to do? Do you want the gov. to step in and support Sun?
IMHO, Sun has been completely mismanged for a long time and these cuts might not even be enough to save them. It's a good thing that they are finally cutting people in order to try to stay open and continue providing jobs to those who are left. The people who get cut will presumable go out and find another job. Such is life...
Well, you know, it's possible to have a little compassion for the people who are going to lose their jobs without suggesting that Sun was wrong to let them go. Nowhere in the parent post was it implied that the RIF was wrong or even unnecessary. So why all the righteous indignation? It's one thing not to have empathy, but quite another to be actively offended by it in others.
Exactly. A whole lot more than 5,000 jobs will be lost if the whole company goes bankrupt. It is not always entirely the employees fault, but look around you, how many people in your office are expendable? As in, if they were not around, the work would not get done. I am guessing it is a very small number of people. As someone who is working in a group that used to be a part of a small/medium sized company that was swallowed by a giant one, I have seen the number of non-essential employees balloon. Managers get budgets, and they want to build empires. So they hire people when the money becomes available, not when the right person becomes available. This leads to a pile of pretty good people, not great ones who can lead the system and innovate.
And honestly I have been marginalized down to a non-essential employee these days. I spend about 40% of my time doing work related to audit, documentation, and corporate policy requirements, not doing new development or fixing bugs. If I got laid off tomorrow, a whole lot of knowledge would be lost, but life for the company would go on.
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
Nnot exactly, they're doing what they feel is right to maximise shareholder value which doesn't necessarily have to be the same thing.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Here's the thing. It's really hard to make Solaris crash. I can throw a system load of 80 at a two-processor box and still get a response (enough of one to fix the problem causing a load of 80). It can run on a 216-processor single-system-image NUMA box efficiently, including some "self-healing" properties. Bank of memory throwing correctable ECC errors? Map it out. Processor that has ECC errors in it's cache? Map it out. Hotswap the board containing the processor or memory without a reboot. Users don't notice. On lower-end hardware, like the new AMD-based boxes, it will just map out and stop using the offending hardware until you have a chance to fix it. Isn't it better to have a machine drop from 8G of memory to 4G of memory until you can schedule downtime rather than just crash?
There's another, even larger factor. The government (one of Sun's biggest customers) likes Solaris. A lot. And they especially like Trusted Solaris, for which there's basically no *certified* comparable Linux distro. There's a lot of stuff painted Army green or Navy gray that has Solaris machines inside.
Did Sun mismanage things? Hell, yes. Was the major problem that they didn't throw out 20 years of engineering work to switch to Linux? Hell, no.
-30-
Under employment is not the same thing. And with this admin, underemployment is probably at a peak.
But keep in mind that this is result of the awesome economy that we had under clinton. During his time (with his opening of the internet), we saw such great expansion. Basically, the tech jobs that were created were way too many. Many ppl who came in had no real knowledge (a training class in windows sys-ad or programming is NOT real knowledge) and really did not gain much experience. Most have been forced into other jobs as incompetent companies went under.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I work for a company (not Sun) that makes high-priced, highly reliable machines that competes with other companies that make low-priced, less reliable machines. They're beating us in every market. Customers simply value low acquistion cost over low cost of ownership. It's annoying and counterintuitive, but I've seen it happen over and over again. Sun is facing that situation and you can see what has resulted. Like my company, they've gone from a market maker to an also-ran. It's inevitable, or seems so. And it has nothing to do with quality or capability.
We're due for a major RIF, too. Too many employees for the level of business, I'm afraid.
Disclosure - I am a Sun employee. Hopefully unaffected by this move. I am speaking for myself here, not for the company.
Having said that, this is a targeted cut. Not a cheese-paring '10% everywhere' as has happened in the past. The execs have taked a hard look at our business and decided that we'll focus on what makes sense for Sun. Areas that don't make the cut will be, well, cut. What's remaining will be left intact.
In fact, my group has open reqs that we are actively filling. Unusually, these are entry-level positions. If you're fresh out of college and want to 'live in interesting times', as the Chinese proverb has it, then take a look.
Cheers,
Pat