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Tech Publisher O'Reilly Slashes Jobs
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.'"
"we've. fixed. the glitch"
Can anyone recommend a good therapist for me.. er.. my schizophrenic network card?
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.
I always wonder when this hemorrhage will stop. But at the same time, I have nobody to blame because most of us have been living a "lie," with [communist] China supporting our lifestyle.
Sometimes I think their model of communism is better than our capitalism. Why? Because they potentially can now control our government's priorities.
O'Reilly, O RLY?
read some interesting stuff at mightyinteresting.com
All these companies keep beating up on Steve. One company is cutting him, another is slashing him, no wonder he looks so thin.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Any more cutbacks, and they'll fire the Garamond typeface.
"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..."
We could always go back to the good old days when someone with money (lets call them kings) would pay someone else (lets call them scribes) a sum of money to create a one of a kind product that would go perfect in one's personal library. I predict a growth market (lets call them paperbacks).
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
"The Digital Media branch was restructured into one publishing division along with the companyâ(TM)s Missing Manual group, Oâ(TM)Reilly Technology Exchange and its Head First series, Winge said."
Without actually seeing the company's financials, this could well just be standard streamlining for better efficiency, perhaps a proactive move before they're seriously hit. The story noted that they've been through much worse before, after they had to seriously trim their 300+ employees after the dot com bust.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Google lay offs = fifth horse of the Apolocalypse
So has any website sprung up to replace fuckedcompany? TechCrunch has their Layoff Tracker as does Forbes. But nothing quite like the original.
It's getting depressing out there.
Know what would be *news*? A report that some company's leaders have decided to bite the bullet and weather the storm. Not, massive layoffs, declaring bankruptcy, or trying to pass the problems to the consumer. Let's hear about a company whose execs are man enough to at least *try* to ride out this slump.
I am already sick and tired of everybody using "the economy" as their excuse for everything. And I don't remember seeing an article about how O'Reilly for instance, tried things like cutting unnecessary expenses, reducing executive bonuses, or really anything imaginative at all. No, the first we hear about trouble, they are addressing the economy by doing their part to make it worse. 31 people worse, to be exact. Come on, seriously, what all did they try first? Or is this just the first instinct?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Most independent book stores are gone. B&N went though a bankruptcy and Borders is for sale. But books have good margins if you control inventory. I remember a decade ago, the large bookstores had huge sections devoted to tech books, but it has deteriorated (because of poor sales and rapid obsolescence) to a couple of book cases. In many ways it is just like the science and engineering section. Limited and focused demand of a small base for quality books and a shrinking base of noobs needing books. While O'Reilly is the gold standard, the market isn't there in depth anymore and the book market is being disrupted by online purchases (long tail, smaller runs, marketing issues), electronic delivery (cheaper but the cost savings are not passed on), and alternative sources of information (many technical solutions are a search away and seldom require the depth of a book).
Actually layoffs are pretty much all that do make the news, regardless of what else is being tried first. What you see are "Company X lays of Y workers". You never see "Company X keeps Y workers a little longer than they otherwise might have", nor do you later see headlines like "1 worker gets a job elsewhere" repeated Y times.
No doubt things are going to get worse, with loads more layoffs. As it is, companies have been quietly laying off. For example, verizon, comcast, and qwest have for months doing layoff. But the good news is that lots of new companies will come out of this just due to necessity. We will see lots of new innovations all over the world.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Profit Margins in publishing are usually razor-thin. (The mega-blockbusters are the exception.)
Barnes and Noble shows a 2% Margin, for example, with a 36% drop in stock price this year.
It's hard to make a profit in books, even good books.
--- Thousands are enslaved every day.
Tim says at TFA: "The layoffs, which were spread across the company, were part of an overall reorganization to create more focus on some new opportunities, as well as a response to today's very tough economic climate."
Cut the crap, Tim. Why can't CEO's just say it:
"We laid of 30 people to save money so we don't lose the whole company. Sales are down, profits are impacted. If we don't lay off, we will die."
Be real. It'd garner a lot more respect from the people you NEED supporting you.
+++OK ATH
This economy has been going on for over a year and half. These companies have already been weathering it for some time. Take advantage of it. Think of new ideas and work on a company for it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
There are a few big publishing houses that print a tremendous percentage of our books. Fewer than there were a few years ago, due to consolidation.
But at least one of the six major houses has stopped purchasing new books from authors, either completely stopped or near-completely stopped. Times are tough for everyone but bankruptcy lawyers. (And their times are tougher when ours are better.)
--- Thousands are enslaved every day.
http://mediacow.tv/node/166
From October 2007
In short, the deregulation of credit derivatives and lowered lending standards created a real estate bubble. The depression will ease once homes return to their pre-bubble prices, which is still a ways off.
The only way to soften the impact of the trillions of dollars of equity disappearing in a few short months is to create jobs through government spending. If you give the money to anyone else, they will just hoard it in today's economic climate, so you have to keep the low and middle class working and spending, and at least direct money towards infrastructure improvements. We could easily afford it by halting foreign wars and slashing military spending, but that seems unlikely at this point.
As far as China is concerned, they will emerge from this crisis as a new economic superpower within five or ten years. They have huge growth potential internally, and they are essentially the manufacturing engine for the world. America will continue to slip behind unless we reinvest in education and the manufacture of high tech products, and drop our costly engagements in South America and the Middle East.
I have a large bookshelf of IT tech books, mostly O'Reilly, but they are all gathering dust.
Whenever I need some technical information,I just google it, and it appears instantaneously. For items that are new to me I look for an online tutorial. Why ruffle through the contents and index of a book, often more than once, to find information.
I can't remember when I last bought a new tech book.
Bookwormhole.net -- over 7000 published book reviews.
Tim O'Reilly on truth drugs:
Folks, dead-tree publishing is hardly the wave of the future. People don't even buy our reference works any longer, they just google. We can sell them more tutorial works, and we can make money from advertising coupled with online references only if ours are consistently better than everyone else's, because there is no shortage of online references for computer software and languages. Half of you do things we don't have much use for any longer. We've got to radically redirect our entire business, and that doesn't mean just getting rid of some jobs, it means that some of you older folks who don't have the flexibility will be replaced with young, shiny, eager folks who know the new paradigm.
If there's one thing we've learned about the modern world, it's that the guild system doesn't work to deliver value to employers over the long term. Our only choice is to let you go, or go out of business ourselves. And you know what? We might still fail anyway.
Bruce Perens.
WTF. At first glance, I thought O'Reilly slashed Steve Jobs.
... when it's convenient to do so (i.e., bad economy) just to trim the fat, whether they need to or not. Some companies just trim every couple years just to streamline. I'd like a company to have the balls to say "hey, we could weather the storm, but we owe it to our shareholders, NOT our employees, to make them money."
Not that I don't think it's shitty, but some honesty would be nice.
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
"The federal government is about to near double the deficit in a single day, we're not one of the companies that won that lottery, and we have no idea what will happen to the economy (or our tax rate) as a result. Heading for the bunkers and seeing how long we can hold out".
Remember that actual spending and wages are not down that much yet - companies are cutting back big time in anticipation of something much worse ahead. Though your end motive is right, they are just trying to do what they can to keep the company going long term.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Now, tutorial books can still sell.
That's an area most easily covered by the web and also an area that tends to go out of date quickly. I don't know they sell that much more highly than a good reference.
Do you really use reference books any longer?
All the time, but then I'm an O'Reilly Safari subscriber. Otherwise I probably would use the web resources instead. Either way, paper technical books are pretty much dead to me - but the content of the books if properly refreshed, I usually find more valuable than most web resources.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Now Jobs will have to stab O'Reilly with a broken bottle.
Guess there just weren't enough H-1b visas issued, huh?
Seastead this.
In other news, the local Amoco that carries a large selection of tech rags just laid off 40% of their workforce, or 2 employees.
"What kind of music do pirates listen to?" -Paul Maud'dib
"Yeeeaaarrrrr n' Bee!!" -Stilgar, Leader of Sietch Tabr
Didn't Google just a month or so ago report record profits in spite of the downturn and are yet cutting staff?
Are companies really slashing staff because things are looking bad or do many that are doing just as well as ever see this as an excuse to try and slash some dead weight without too many questions being asked? Or is it just because they think despite profits being up now things are going to get worse and they want to prepare?
Is he ok?
I swear to Gawd, the first time I've read the headline, it said "Tech Publisher O'Reilly Slashes Dots"!
Me is sorry for poor engrish. You ar enco... ecnu... please tell me, when i is wrong.
I know O'Reilly hasn't exactly had a great Mac section but really , this is going too far!
Are you from the ACT perhaps? Certain locations are subject to a 99 year lease (see Australian Capital Territory (Planning and Land Management) Act 1988), but your broader assertion is wrong.
If you want to combine business with philanthropy, you're welcome to do so. However, you shouldn't assume that is somehow the duty of business owners. The businesses exist to make a profit within the bounds of law. That is not evil, hearless or cynical. That's the way things are supposed to be.
Moral obligations apply to human beings, nonprofit organizations and the government. In fact, the only truly effective moral actor is the government. If the government (aka "we the people") decides that a corporate owners should carry a special burden, they will enact a tax law and collect the tax evenly from the commendable and heartless business owners alike.
Sometimes I think their model of communism is better than our capitalism. Why? Because they potentially can now control our government's priorities. We go down, we take them with us. That is really the only reason that China didn't call the mortgage years ago.
The first time reading that I thought it said employees were being exhorted to "get more with ass." Which I thought was either brutally honest job advice or a complete change of direction in the business plan. Or perhaps some bizarre hybrid. PHP Booty Call.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The poor man, he has cancer and now some idiot attacks him with a knife!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Aesthetics aside, the title really should read, "Tech publisher O'Reilly slashes jobs."
Useless capitalization makes it difficult to read properly, I thought this was something having to do with Steve Jobs (given how much Apple and himself are discussed here and elsewhere.)
So what are all those cute little pandas, and snakes, and groundhogs, and camels, and loons going to do for work now? Life always was hard for the animal models getting in at the ground floor, but now it's even bleaker. Perhaps they can have an adopt an O'Reilly animal campaign.
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...the Definitive Guide
Am I the only one who read the headline the wrong way? I was expecting the first line to say "Steve Jobs filed charges for aggravated assault after an altercation with Tim O'Reilly..."
Useless did you know #887: My
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Sorry Bruce, but as somebody who runs a publishing company, and was an e-book author back in 2000 with what was at the time a high-profile e-book, I have to disagree with this statement: "Folks, dead-tree publishing is hardly the wave of the future." Dead-tree books are going to be the standard for the foreseeable future.
I've been tracking this for some time. While there is a downturn in book sales - which is hardly surprising, considering the economy - e-books are not making any serious headway in the market. The AAP (Association of American Publishers) recently published the statistics for domestic book sales in the United States for October 2008 (they track it on a monthly basis, and there is around a two-three month lag on results), and had the following numbers (all numbers are net sales):
Total book sales for the month: $644 million
E-book sales for the month: $5.2 million
Audiobook sales for the month: $18.4 million
(Source: http://www.publishers.org/main/PressCenter/Archicves/2008_December/StatsOct08.htm )
E-book sales are about as high as I've ever seen them, but after eight years, they have only achieved 0.8% of the book market. Compare that to audiobooks, which are sitting at 2.9% of the book market.
Now, I'm not saying that the market hasn't shifted when it comes to computer reference books - indeed, I think your observations about how people are dealing with troubleshooting issues and computer reference materials are spot-on. It is far easier to google a specific problem than to buy a compendium for reference purposes. But, a shift there does not translate into a shift across the board, and at the rate e-book sales are climbing we are probably looking at around twenty to thirty years before they occupy any respectable share of the book market.
For that matter, considering the technical issues involved with e-books compared to the ease with which one can deal with a printed book, even if the e-book does manage to get 30% of the book market in about 30 years, I can't really see a way for it to supplant the printed book.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
capitalists are always the same and will never change. Some people have understood that and many attempted to overthrow it, and still do, with very positive results.
I think O'Reilly was a fairly large employer in Sebastopol though and I am sure that this layoff is hitting the city hard. I used to live down the way from them in Rohnert Park and Petaluma. To the best of my knowledge the employees were rather attached to their jobs there and the job market in general in Sonoma County has sucked since foreign telecom manufacturers (Singapore mainly) ruined the telecom alley.
I am not sure where these people will get technical jobs next as highly trained technical people have been flipping burgers in Sonoma County for a few years now. I had to leave the area after twenty years over lack of jobs. Good luck to them.
As I said, I don't know Tim personally, but I would like to think he felt paternal about his Sebastopol employees and probably hated having to lay off anyone.
As I said though, he was arrogant to me, so I am not sure about what I just said. I think Sonoma people are nice in general and I hoped he was, but who knows?
I check on the old company now and then, and it seems they have faded away. I guess blowing off the founder who had the prime technical base wasn't that good of an idea. The odd thing though is that everyone involved knew what a crook my partner became, but continued to do business with her anyway because she seemed to be able to sell product. For a while anyway. I am talking about you Dawn and your husband Ray.
I guess I am glad that I am not in the position of having to lay off employees that have been devoted to my company. Although I would have taken good care of them along the way, times are bad and I might not have been able to keep going.
Although people talk a lot about how bad it is to be laid off, I am sure it is hard to watch your staff lose their positions and suffer, especially if you suspect your company will go down soon also. Those owners and managers that are good people aren't having that much fun these days. Things are tough at both ends of the stick.
Barnes & Noble was laying off people in 1997-98. I know. I laid them off.
Ah poor Steve