Slashdot Mirror
Job Cuts For Dell, Motorola, and Circuit City
maeveth writes "Talk about not a good time to be working in the tech sector. Layoffs all over the industry have been announced, in a variety of different areas. Last week Dell announced they were partnering with Wal-Mart; this week they are planning a ten-percent reduction in their global workforce. Motorola was already going to cut some 3500 jobs by the end of June; they're now adding another 4000 pink slips to that number (and hoping that next month's RAZR2 launch will boost profits). To top it all off Circuit City is acting in a decidedly schizophrenic manner. The are going to axe about 850 employees, on top of the 70 stores they closed last month ... while also planning to open 165 new stores."
Well, Dell and Motorola are (at least in theory) product development, while Circuit City is (again, in theory) consumer sales. Of course, one could argue that the real oddball here is that Dell is the only one beating expectations for (positive) earnings, and is still cutting jobs... Maybe a pre-emptive layoff, but you have to feel for those guys. Your company does well and STILL you get massive layoffs.
Circuit city and Dell are in the retail sector, and that article doesn't say who at Motorola is getting canned. It could be marketing for all we know.
At first, it was a great part time job for a guy working his way through college. Commission based computer sales, and the commission was more than fair. Then around late 2000 there was a huge shift.
First of all, our store's management staff was almost entirely changed no less than 9 times in 7 months. That's the store manager, assistant manager, and all the department managers. The only role that was relatively "safe" was the AV manager, who got demoted to a sales guy when they brought in someone else, then got promoted again after 3 guys went through that manager role.
Commissions were first cut, then to compound the problem they started flooding the sales floor. Where you used to only have maybe 2 guys in a department during the day and 3-4 at night (depending on the time of year and the department), it became literally 5 during the day and 8 at night. No one was making money on commission anymore, we were just drawing the minimum hourly pay.
Ironically, I think that last move is what really started the store's sales going downhill - no one wants to feel like there's 8 sharks circling for blood/a sale while they're looking at a printer or whatever. Even if the salespeople aren't trying to do so, with 8 of them in a small department, you can't really avoid that feeling.
From one of our assistant managers, I heard that there was some huge politics going on in the regional level in the company. Exactly what, he didn't have details on, but most of the Northeast was going through similar issues (although our store was the worst example he heard of).
Really, I think the problem is that Circuit City hasn't been aggressive enough in its adaptation to new marketplace conditions. It settled for "good enough" for too long, and lost it's momentum.
Disclaimer: I don't hold anything against them, like I said, it was a nice place to work for a while. And at least their problems stemmed from poor organizational practices rather than a crappy attitude toward the consumer. Customer service was at least given more than lip service while I worked there. Granted, it's been 5 years, so things may have changed there too, I'm not sure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia
Of note, specifically: Despite its etymology, "schizophrenia" is not synonymous with dissociative identity disorder, previously known as multiple personality disorder or "split personality"; in popular culture the two are often confused.
The persistence of the incorrect definition is really annoying.
And to a certain degree, this is what is driving the private-equity-backed buyouts of publicly traded companies: take them private in order to remove the pressure from the quarterly roller coaster that is Wall Street. In doing so, you give companies the time and space to make long term plans and execute on them. By not having to please Wall Street on an ongoing basis, situations like these may happen a bit less often.
-jason
how many employees do they plan to hire in India and China in the next six months, and how many of said new employees were using L-1 and H1-B visas in the US prior to said "downsizing", when it's really outsourcing?
Do an online Yahoo Stock search and check the news and PR items and find the truth.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Dell inaugurated Thursday a new research and development (R&D) facility in Bangalore, India, that can house up to 1,000 staff. The new facility is in line with Dell's plans to make India a hub for the development of enterprise products such as servers, storage, and software. Coincidence? Surely not.
Here is the way it works - companies alternate between the red and the green, and when they are in the green (actual, good performance), they want to keep the investor confidence in the high.
Now, based on how they perform, the market they may mark them as Buy, Sell or Hold. If a company's deep in the red zone, it gets marked Buy. But if a company goes from red to green, it tends to get marked as Sell. Usually, if enough investors dump the stocks (making a profit while they can etc), then the stock price tends to go down.
So, companies want to stay in the green zone for as long as possible to avoid this from happening. After all, how else could the management get rid of all their stock options? So when they do have profits, they institute cost-cutting measures (e.g. hiring freeze, no travel, no corporate lunches, no company-sponsored lunches or dinner unless you're entertaining a client etc). After a while, they run out of this too, so they use the good old fashioned means of laying people off to stay in the green.
At this point, the stocks jump way higher than ever before and this gives the management time to get rid of all those stock options and make some money.
And once they are in the red again, they "realize" that their short-term goals have cost them in the long run and they go back into hiring folks and so on. After a while, these efforts will pay off and the company will be back in the green.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Of course, not all companies do this, but most companies follow some of the same patterns. Which is why you see just as many lay-offs when the company is doing well as when the company is doing poorly.
Besides, getting rid of people when you are doing well is less likely to hurt your stock price than when you are doing poorly. When you are doing poorly, analysts would predict that your layoffs are because you are the Titanic and are sinking. But when you are doing well, it is because you are rearranging the chairs on the Hindenburg (with due apologies to Stephen Colbert).
Didn't you know?
Right... because its so much better when the company comes to the IT guy who does "karate or something," (I don't do karate, I do kung fu, but who cares) and make him do the escorting? Seriously, I have been this guy.
No offense, but doesn't that just make sense. I bet everyone hates at least one company. It's just common sense (not specifically that they hate a business, but just the fact that they would).
That may be true, but I'm willing to bet that the numbers of people who "hate" Target are a drop in the bucket compared to the other way around. Count me among the Wal-Mart haters. That in fact is why I just came to dislike Dell even more recently (despite the fact that they are now selling Linux boxes - albeit with next to no configuration options-).
1. I don't love or hate Microsoft. And I'm getting tired of my fellow Linux fanboys wasting their energy on "hating" them rather than using that energy to promote Linux. But that's a topic for another thread....
2. I've heard of plenty who hate Apple. Can you say iPod and DRM?
As long as I ignored the fact that their employees didn't know squat about what they were selling (which has been - for the most part- true of both companies), I just preferred the atmosphere and layout in Best Buy stores. I almost never shopped at Circuit City and now I'd not set foot in one of their stores if they were giving stuff (I wanted) away.
Scott
©20014 angrykeyboarder & Elmer Fudd. All Wights Wesewved
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso