Slashdot Mirror
More Massive Layoffs at AOL
dawnzer writes "It looks like AOL read the comments from Slashdotters saying that 950 employees do not constitute a 'massive' layoff. Several news sites are reporting that AOL is getting ready to cut 5,000 jobs, or roughly 26 percent of their global workforce. Now that's more like it."
AOL is a dinossaur now. Their market doesn't exist anymore and they stuck upon their past until it was too late.
Your ad could be here!
I'll bet you'd be a lot less glib about it (and way more pissed off) if it was your job on the line. Especially if you saw people making comments like that!
Those people will now be employed doing something useful, instead of perpetuating the existance of AOL. Everybody wins!
Its never cool when any company does layoffs. If Microsoft did a layoff, I know people would be happy because "the tide is finally turning." That is very sad. You should never be happy when someone gets laid off... you don't know who they have to support with that income. It may be their family suffering now that someone got laid off, so be a little more of an adult and don't praise layoffs, from any company.
Nope. This is just the HR side to AOL's decision to only charge for ISP connections... much fewer paying customers, much fewer people needed to handle the support, sales, and retention operations. AOL figures they'll get more cash from ads being shown to many more eyeballs than they're currently getting for subscription revenues.
It's just a shift to smaller companies or self-employment; we just don't hear about it. A company laying off 10,000 people is news. 1,000 different companies hiring those people the next day isn't.
It's one of the risks inherent in participating in a capitalist economy. The potential exists to do very well, but there is also the potential that things might slip in the opposite direction. Is it cool? Not really, because it does tend to disrupt peoples' lives. Do I feel sad for them? Not really, because it's all part of the game called "US of A". And let's not forget that there are other parts of the world where just getting a single meal is the biggest worry.
If AOL has, what?, around 20 million subscribers, and each was paying on average $20/month, isn't that $400 million dollars a month that will be pumped back in to other areas of the economy? Given that 'only' 5000 are being laid off right now, I suspect that the increase in other spending on 'net related (or entertainment, or whatever) will, on the whole, be able to create jobs for those 5000 somewhere... I realize I'm talking somewhat in the abstract, but *damn*, that's a lot of hard cash that will be freed up on the consumer side.
creation science book
I've survived layoffs and I've been laid off. I love business and I understand its part of our economy. I don't have a problem with layoffs. I have a problem with people being happy about layoffs just because they don't like the company.
People forced to leave a job that they use to support their families is never a "good" thing. It may be a necessary thing, or it may be an inevitable thing, but it is nothing worth being happy about. I am disheartened, but unsurprised about the almost gleeful reaction of some posters in this thread and the other. It's the same sort of drivel you get when you take anyone who is more concerned about their idea for "improving humanity" than actually caring about humans.
Of course, if this happened to a relative of yours or a friend, I doubt that you'd be so cheery. Happily, in this case, you've got an axe to grind and you have no personal stake in the lives of the people affected. Congradulations, you have scaled the moral high ground and can now lob down spitballs on the people beneath you without worrying about friendly fire incidents. I bet from all the way up there, they just look like ants anyway.
Stay tuned for the posting of the layoff dates so that you can be ready to show up at your nearest AOL office and jeer the people being escorted out by security. I'm sure they deserve everything they get because they worked for AOL. Make sure and wear your "Don't be Evil" T-shirts for maximum effect.
If by "they" you mean the corporation and its shareholders, then I've got some bad news for you. They would not be doing this if it hurt their bottom line. Their management will be getting fat bonuses for "streamlining" the enterprise; and their shareholders won't be left holding the hat either. The price is being paid by the 5,000 folks who are getting canned. Besides, chances are that this announcement will be shortly followed by another - AOL hiring 5,000 workers in India.
At the risk of sounding like a libertarian (which I'm not), that's how capitalism works. A crappy company goes under, and in the process some people lose their jobs. Then some other company rises and those people get another job.
Note that there's no need to get doom and gloom about it. I know that for the average citizen unemployment and inflation are signs of the apocalypse, and politicians use them as such in campaigns... then proceed to forget that they promised solving both. That's because they're not. Read something about keynesian economics, which is how the economy works nowadays, and especially about the Phillips curve.
In a nutshell, there's a corelation between the two, and if you push one down, the other one goes up. And what governments can do is pick a point on the curve and try to keep the economy around that point.
What does this have to do with this? Well, it's darn simple: for the last 60-70 years (depending on the country) everyone had the unemployment basically where they wanted it. In spite of the constant "waah, another company lays off 5000 workers, our country is doomed" scares, that's never actually been a long term problem. So some other company or several smaller companies will figure out "hey, look at all the workers we could hire in city X" and proceed to do so.
Incidentally that kind of a correlation isn't even just an effect of the last century, but you can see effects as far back as, say, the 1300s and 1400s. The plagues and resulting utter lack of unemployment for, say, peasants, caused a massive inflation and were in the end the cause of the Renaissance.
And you can see the same economics at work on a smaller scale in the limited domain of IT in the dot-com bubble, where lack of enough workforce caused the salaries to spiral up out of hand, and the cost of any resulting program reflected it. There the impact was absorbed by the rest of the society, but imagine the same economy-wide. If for every job there wasn't a pool of unemployed workforce, and companies had to pay a premium even to get receptionist, you'd see the prices rising accordingly.
It may seem calous and lacking empathy to say that someone has to be unemployed for the economy to work, and it partially is, but that's how it works. Rebelling against it is like rebelling against gravity: not very productive. We have to work with what works, not with what would be an idealist utopia. All we can do to make it more palatable is to offer some unemployment benefits and some government demand for work and move on.
And at the risk of going off topic, that's another reality that we have to live with: that governments actually have to do that kind of thing. In spite of bullshit pseudo-economic theories idealizing lean governments and some idealized image of unrestricted 19'th century capitalism, it stopped working that way in the Great Depression. That's when the economy of scarcity ended. The countries that got out of the crisis fast were the ones whose government overspent: be it FDR's New Deal, or Germany's and Italy's spending on armament. The countries which didn't, got to enjoy a jolly good depression until WW2: e.g., Canada.
Funny what things you get to learn when you take your economic theories from real economists, instead of from novelists. (*cough* Ayn Rand *cough*) But that's another discussion for another time.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This is just business as usual. I've been working in IT for a large Fortune 100 bank for 8 years now, and I'm familiar with the long-term cycles of announcing some news (dropping sales, shifting markets, missed forecast, mergers announcements, whatever), then doing some layoffs. After seeing for a long time how the politics and the employee review process work, I strongly suspect layoffs often aren't as much about a company being economically unhealthy, as about periodic shedding of employee dead weight. In AOL's particular case it sounds rather more economic, but that's atypical.
Large corporations tend to be constantly hiring and growing, unless a hiring freeze is actively on--and even then they make strategic exceptions. All mid and upper-mid managers are ever hungry for a larger team because that boosts their power and profile over time within the company. The whole hiring process in a large corporation is usually a lot less self-aware then in a small business--they don't know who or what they really need for the long term good. So, it can only be so efficient--a lot of screw off and/or incompetent and/or unpleasant-personality people end up getting in to large corporations by putting on a reasonably good face during the interview process. After getting in, they're entrenched. They float around at a few projects underperforming and being disliked, going under a variety of different managers until nobody want to deal with them any more. I've seen some employees do this for years and years. It tends to be damned hard to get rid of them because no lower-level manager wants to have to personally deal with their firing. For HR legal reasons, unless they blatantly break a major company rule or kill someone, you have to painstakingly document exactly why they cannot do their job to fire them for cause. Not to say that everyone who gets laid off is bad, but a lot of times their section has more bad people then not so they get swept up departmentally.
After several years, the barnacle-class of people accumulates until they comprise about 10% to 20% of the mass population. Upper management then periodically recognizes that the company needs to shed some unneeded employees, but know it's perceived as unfair and politically unpalatable to demand personalized firings, so they come up with a neutral reason... a company-wide "slowdown". It serves as a good unchallengeable excuse to get rid of extras and undesirables. To try and do it without using trumped-up news and mass waves invites a constant bunker mentality and an excessive amount of infighting, paranoia, and company politics.