Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
Bollocks. A few years ago programming was just tapping away on a clicky keyboard with a spiffy green-screen terminal. Or, in other words, it hasn't changed at all; maybe you only write dumbed-down trivial apps, but the rest of us are still writing the good stuff.
Any more cutbacks, and they'll fire the Garamond typeface.
"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
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
China isn't remotely a communist country by the real meaning of the word. The only reason their economy has been booming in recent years is because they have opened up their markets (unlike a true communist country such as North Korea). Basically, you can have an authoritarian regime without communism (like china), although I've yet to see an instance of a communist regime that isn't authoritarian. At this point in time, I wouldn't be surprised if China's markets are actually freer than most of Europe's markets.
Phil
The hemmoraging will stop when people start forgetting that they've been told (by someone else, usually the media) that the economy is "bad" and go back to buying and selling things at higher levels than they are right now.
Go do what you're going to do: The economy will take care of itself, if you're working toward useful endeavors.
+++OK ATH
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.
Every new language solves problems already solved by Lisp.
Doesn't mean the language is sufficiently documented that a book wouldn't be welcome.
It also doesn't mean there's nothing interesting to write about besides a new language. After all, if this was a mature industry, wouldn't we have decided on a few common languages by now?
Examples of interesting problems: Statistical analysis of relationships, shaders and procedural generation in games, virtual machines (both the emulate-a-system kind and the just-in-time-scripts kind),
Oh, and not every problem was solved by Lisp -- in particular, concurrency wasn't. See Erlang.
Every new technology is just a piggyback on the crumbling HTTP layer.
Just what is crumbling about HTTP?
If you were talking about HTML, or Javascript, you might have a point. Maybe. But HTTP?
These days you can write your "programs" with nothing more than a mouse and a spiffy GUI.
Doesn't sound like Java, or Ruby.
Yes, you can write "programs" in Excel. And when those fall apart, often they do so thoroughly enough that you'll have to hire an actual programmer to fix things.
But there is still real logic to be written, and that still requires programmers, and the mouse is still the wrong tool for the job.
And those spiffy frameworks -- take Rails. Sure, you can bang out Hello World in seconds, and CRUD in minutes. But as soon as you need to actually build something interesting, it's going to take actual code, not just generators, along with unit tests, designers, QA, sysadmin(s), the works.
Yes, I know, you want me off your lawn. It was better when men were men and programmers were Real Programmers and you would write a jump instruction based on knowledge of exactly how fast the drive spins.
And if you really want that back -- a world where you're harder to replace, for no good reason -- COBOL is alive and well. If what you want is a low-level challenge, find somewhere performance and reliability are needed -- maybe an embedded system, or a compiler/VM, or drivers...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If you want to be like that, you can't technically "own" land in Australia. You buy a 100 year lease, which can be renewed when passed on to family members.
Bet most Aussies don't know that one.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Sure, this is really bad for people who bought within the last decade. But a Million-dollar mortgage has always been the equivalent of selling yourself into lifetime indenture. Maybe the slaves should have revolted before.
Bruce Perens.
This economy has been going on for over a year and half.
I think the economy has been going on for longer than that.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
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.
"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
The hemmoraging will stop when people start forgetting that they've been told (by someone else, usually the media) that the economy is "bad" and go back to buying and selling things at higher levels than they are right now.
It's not just emotional: people really have less cash to burn. The housing bubble ended the happy days when homeowners could get huge loans, or when flipping houses was a major business activity (not that it produced any real value, of course.) Today you can borrow money only if you can prove that you do not need it.
Salaries also took a hit. Many are unemployed already; more will be; and often those who are still allowed to go to work every day are told that their salaries are reduced. What can they do? Business wise, sales of stuff (of all kinds) are dropping. People have less money to spend, so the industry has to reduce the manufacturing, so previously employed workers become unemployed. They don't need the media to tell them anything about the economy - if they have no job they already know themselves.
Add to that the news that many states are approaching bankruptcy and trying to increase taxes to cover the deficit. Or they can send state workers packing, that will save money but unions won't allow that. So everyone may need to pay higher [property] taxes using their reduced income. That leaves no money for toys and non-essentials.
Finally, people who had their money invested into the stock market lost big - as much as 40%. If they were investing into specific stocks, they can be wiped out completely. Look at how much value of banks' stock was destroyed - and banks were thought to be safe, long term investments. People holding bonds are not immune - now and then a bond issuer defaults, and then you have nothing. So one way or another, people have less money today, even though yesterday a lot of their money was of imaginary, speculative nature.
Guess there just weren't enough H-1b visas issued, huh?
Seastead this.
The hemmoraging will stop when people start forgetting that they've been told (by someone else, usually the media) that the economy is "bad" and go back to buying
"people" dont have money, sure they can get cheap credits, but credits are to blame for the crisis in the first place. America is not producing goods any longer, you all live off forein credits (mostly China). This living on debt cant go forever you know, you will go under, hiperinflation and all.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
The cash they were burning was never theirs, for one thing. (Burning other people's cash is a great way to end up a wage-slave for the rest of your life. If you like the work they give you to do at the end, fine... but if it's not exactly your life's ambition of a job -- you're headed for revolution at some point. Not everyone can be an Astronaut when they grow up.)
Salaries took a hit? Most IT workers haven't had a raise that was more than inflation in a decade. Now mix that knowledge with, "Honey, let's take out a big loan against the place we need to LIVE IN!" Pretty stupid, eh? Not here!
States and Unions and all of that... yeah, lovely stuff our voted politicians did with their surpluses, eh? How few people were voting for fiscally conservative politicians during the good years in the normal 7-10 year business cycle? Do those who voted for non-conservatives take any blame for their local government being out of cash? Are they willing to pay up NOW to cover who they voted for?
Unions: They'll eventually be busted, one way or another. It's not like sending billions to Detroit is going to suddenly teach GM how to make a car that lasts as long as a Honda. Guess what people are going to buy when times are tight? You buying a GM product, or a Honda/Toyota/Acura? I know which one I want if my car budget is tight.
Stock Market: If those people were truly INVESTING (by definition investing is using money you DO NOT NEED TO LIVE ON FOR SOME TIME YET), they aren't in trouble. They knew if they needed to live on it in the next five years, they were already out of stocks and into less risky assets. The real issue with the stock market right now is there are people dorking around in it pretending they know what they're doing, and who are being ripped off by mutual fund managers and the whole market is being gamed by hedge funds, etc. The reality is, the market's rigged to make big money, big money. The little guy has to be very intensely engaged to follow big money's moves and continually make money. The fallacy of the mutual fund is that it removes the RISK. It doesn't. It means we all go up and down together. The market is packed to the gills with Baby Boomer 401(K) money that should have already started to have been diversified out of the stock market. Oh well, it's out now... poof. Bye-bye. 40% losses on a true INVESTMENT sucks, but it's not supposed to change your LIFESTYLE, if you did it right.
So yeah... people were imagining they were creating wealth, and it bit them in the ass. Now the key to recovery is to GET TO WORK and really create some wealth. Do we have any companies that can make things of a quality level seen back in the 1950-1969 era? Can we do it?
I think we can.
Oh, and in most cases... sorry Slashdotters... SOFTWARE is not the answer. INTEGRATION and really thinking HARD about the big picture of what a company is accomplishing long-term with their products... is the answer.
+++OK ATH
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.
You are mistaken. Land in Australia can be held in 'freehold title' which is the highest form of estate in the land and represents full private ownership. See Here for the stats. Much of the land in Australia is Crown leasehold, but it is certainly possible (and common - see Victoria) to own private freehold title.
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.
It's not enough for me to have been financially conservative. If my customers haven't been, they're going away, and they'll take a lot of their income with them.
As an employee, I consider myself to be a one man operation, with one huge customer. Luckily, my employer/customer seems to be conservatively managed. But I don't know the quality of their customers.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
The hemmoraging will stop when people start forgetting that they've been told (by someone else, usually the media) that the economy is "bad" and go back to buying and selling things at higher levels than they are right now.
Only if they forget that they don't have any damned money. Wages have been stagnant for decades, and the economy is propped up on credit. The problem isn't a mindset, it's that the middle class is broke.