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Tech Publisher O'Reilly Slashes Jobs

Posted by kdawson on from the more-with-less dept.

An anonymous reader writes "According to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, geeky tech publisher O'Reilly Media has slashed 14% of its workforce, or 31 people. Founder and tech pundit Tim O'Reilly comments on the layoffs by exhorting people to 'get more with less.' According to the article, 'Just this week... both tech giant Google and book retailer Barnes & Noble announced their first layoffs ever. Other publishing houses, including HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Random House, and Simon & Schuster have frozen salaries or cut jobs, or both.'"

1 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. They're just giving their books away! by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    If you go online, you can pretty much download any of their books for free from their website. Maybe they can make it back through providing service...

    Seriously though, what are the must-have books being published today? As far as I can tell, technology pretty much stagnated in the last 5 years and we are simply seeing rehashes of rehashes of old technology. Every new language solves problems already solved by Lisp. Every new technology is just a piggyback on the crumbling HTTP layer. Every new programmer only thinks in terms of Java and/or Ruby.

    There's no real need to go buy books anymore since everything is so dumbed down and stupifyingly simple. These days you can write your "programs" with nothing more than a mouse and a spiffy GUI. That doesn't really lend itself to sitting down and studying or using books as a reference.