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.'"

Comments

Tim O'RLY?

[Big_Monkey_Bird]

Any more cutbacks, and they'll fire the Garamond typeface.

A lot of 'glitches'.

[0100010001010011]

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.

Re:A lot of 'glitches'.

[NateTech]

Heh... I remember getting calls after I was hit in a post-dot-bomb layoff, asking "Have you seen what people are posting about the company at FC?"

Not knowing what FC was, I enjoyed reading the rants. But then again, I always thought they were stupid, in the end.

Stupid of the people (then looking for work) to post things like that in public, and stupid of the people still working there to even care what was being said.

Most of them were about the company's culture, which was based on the personalities of the owners, their professional backgrounds, and stuff like that...

Those guys sold the company a few years later for 3.5 million, and are on to working on their next company. The people who complained? Who knows -- but I bet they've haven't been as successful.

Why post to places like that? Get a life, get on to the next job, and move on. And I say that after being jobless for a year after that place. I was depressed, angry, all the classic stages of loss... and then I got on with life.

People will get on with life after this "global slowdown" too.

I say, the sooner the better. Kickstart it... move on, and don't wallow in it. Go do something useful today.

Look at bookstores and the small tech section

[xzvf]

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).

Re:Look at bookstores and the small tech section

[Bruce Perens]

Do you really use reference books any longer? I just use the web. I used to have my own line of 24 reference books, these days I'd feel bad about wasting all of that paper. Now, tutorial books can still sell.

Re:Look at bookstores and the small tech section

[KibibyteBrain]

The point of rapid obsolescence is exactly why O'Reilly needs to restructure and remarket its Safari Books Online service. If this service was more affordable and well known to the average technology interested person, they could have a wide profit margin goldmine on their hands. They also need to make it more accessible, think Safari Books iPhone apps and more of that like. O'Reilly needs to become the Netflix of tech books if they want to survive. They can't compete against lower quality but free, searchable, internet tutorials otherwise.

Re:Look at bookstores and the small tech section

[Frosty Piss]

Do you really use reference books any longer? I just use the web.

Bruce, I know *many* people who still prefer books. For me, I do much of my tech reading in bed and on the toilet. I still enjoy the *paper* in the morning (in bed and on the toilet). I buy a lot of books in e-book form, but I almost always end up printing the, out one-sided on 8.5 by 11, I keep 'em in big ring binders. Maybe I'm a dinosaur, psychologically, I *enjoy* books on paper, I feel they lend themselves to easier study, I can search and cross reference content MUCH faster than diddling around with some PDF or whatever on a laptop. Also, I like to have my references *open* beside me while I'm coding on my large but single monitor.

Bad news is good news

[XanC]

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.

Profit Margins in Publishing

[solder_fox]

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.

More mealy-mouthed BS

[NateTech]

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.

Re:More mealy-mouthed BS

[Merusdraconis]

Because these sorts of layoffs are cutting out dead wood, and the economy is a great excuse. The whole point is that CEOs have already learnt that being honest about why someone's being fired is a good way to have people hold an unnecessary grudge. Obviously, you can't say that, because it comes back to them and they get to find out that the company felt they were astonishingly mediocre.

People tend not to deal with evidence of their own incompetence well.

Re:More mealy-mouthed BS

[Dhalka226]

I don't know, it seems he said roughly that. He wasn't as blunt as you, but that last half of the sentence ("a response to today's very tough economic climate") seems to roughly equate with your comment about sales and profits being down and needing to fire some people. As far as saying anything close to "we needed to avoid losing the whole company," people don't say that because it's simply irresponsible. It will create a panic whether there is any reason to panic or not and drop the share prices if it's a publicly-traded company, all for absolutely no benefit.

The first half of the sentence is no doubt an attempt to soften the blow of the latter, but it may (may, I have no idea) also be a glimpse into who was fired. When you're canning people for economic reasons, you can go about it in a lot of different ways. For example:

1. The newest hires; this probably saves the least money (per job), but shows some loyalty to older employees.
2. The oldest hires; this probably saves the most jobs because older employees tend to be paid more, but shows no loyalty and may throw out too much institutional knowledge.
3. Management. This is similar to #2, but may include some higher-priced newer hires. It also risks losing institutional knowledge, and is harder to project the real benefits from it because there likely will be some sort of reorganization costs involved when people are suddenly reporting to a new person and perhaps have new requirements or responsibilities.
4. The highest-paid people. This will be similar to a combination of 2 & 3.
5. Some specific sub-set of people, usually a specific team or division. As a really contrived example, this would be something like a car manufacturer firing the SUV team because they don't plan to make SUVs in the near future. (Yes yes -- they can probably do other things equally well, work with me!)
6. Probably others that aren't coming to mind right now.

If the first half of the statement has a deeper meaning, it sounds like he's saying they chose #5. They fired some people because they had to fire some people, yes, but the people they chose were presumably ones who fit into a business model they're moving away from going forward.

These people are, in part, professional wordsmiths. They may try to couch what they're saying in more comforting terms, for good reasons or bad, but there's always a value to seeing what specific words they chose.

Re:What can stem this hemorrhage?

[NateTech]

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.

The big publishing houses

[solder_fox]

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.)

We haven't started losing blood yet...

[copponex]

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.

Re:News.

[Moridineas]

Cutting costs (ie, sometimes employees) is exactly how companies weather a downturn.

Do you have any idea how expensive it is to employ people? Obviously big companies have a lot more "extraneous" costs that can be cut, but many smaller and midsize companies don't run with a lot of fluff to begin with, and for many companies, employees are the single biggest expenditure.

I work in publishing, in a small company (~20 people) ... we don't have elaborate travel costs, don't throw parties, or buy crazy advertising, the boss isn't some fatcat CEO, etc. Our biggest costs--printing books, shipping books, labor. Not a thing we can do about printing and shipping costs--they are out of our hands. Labor is about it. Apparently the employee insurance plan (which not everybody is on--some have their spouses, so maybe 10-15 people insured?) is running close to 100k a year. (that's one thing I would like Obama to fix!)

Should also add that we've had no "redundancies" and doesnt seem like we will (heh, that's what everybody says, right?)

Re:What can stem this hemorrhage?

[Bruce Perens]

The problem was that we were being told absurd prices before, not that the prices are absurd now. My home supposedly tripled in value over the first 10 years since I bought it. Now, that would be a problem if you borrowed on that falsely-inflated value, or assumed that it represented a durable component of your net worth. I didn't. A lot of other people did, and they are paying for their mistake now.

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.

Re:Why?

[Fluffeh]

This economy has been going on for over a year and half.

I think the economy has been going on for longer than that.

Re:If CEOs spoke the truth

[chromatic]

How are your books doing?

I don't know that I can give specific details, but at 10% of wholesale, I don't make enough money in royalties to work as a full-time author of technical books. I believe there's still a market for the printed word, but I have my doubts that a big publisher creates as much value as it captures, at least from the author's point of view.

Even tutorial books age too quickly

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:News.

[2Bits]

Ok, since you are asking, I'll give you my side of the story.

We are a consulting, IT services and software development company. Not a big name, and we are very small. I'm the founder of the company. We have 30 something people. The economic problems affect us too. Projects in the pipeline dried up, as customers cancel or postpone indefinitely. Quite a bit of receivables suddenly become bad debts.

We could have slashed half of the workforce, but I'm putting in my life savings, and borrow money to pay for the monthly expenses and salary, trying to ride the storm. We don't even cut any benefits, we even gave everyone a small bonus at the end of year (yeah, in cash, not a Gphone like Google did), and also paid for the annual health checkup (as we have done every year), when every other company has cut all these.

Now, can I get the good publicity now? Can we be called a good corporate? Can we get more clients (eventually) because we are good to our employees? In fact, I'm not even sure that, once the economic slump is over, our employees would even be grateful and stay a bit longer with us.

When the economy is good, we see employees jump ship for a 100$ raise all the time, and being so cynical at the same time. During a bad economy, when a company is trying to be nice, no one notice. As a matter of fact, a lot of people called us stupid too, because employees are ungrateful by nature. Sometimes, I just think being nice does not pay. But I'm just trying to do what I think is the right thing, and hopefully, more people or more employees recognize that, and have the solidarity that would allow us to get past this time. But telling the truth, I don't have high expectation for this, as I think it would be same old, same old, as the last recesssion in the early decade. We did the same thing at that time too, but that didn't prevent employees to be so cynical. Go figure. Some day, I'll have to learn to be "evil" too.

Re:If CEOs spoke the truth

[Bruce Perens]

Uh-huh. It is especially true for folks like me who really just stuck their name on the front of the book for series recognition and didn't do the work. Authors don't need that any longer, if they even did then.

Do you think you might try to do it on your own? Selling online, demand printing, etc? I'd do it that way today if I felt the need to write.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:What can stem this hemorrhage?

[tftp]

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.

Tim's H-1b Theory

[Baldrson]

So, Tim, how is that H-1b theory of yours working out? You know, the one you promoted around March of 2000 where you said something to the effect that there are 5 jobs created for every H-1b visa.

Guess there just weren't enough H-1b visas issued, huh?

Re:If CEOs spoke the truth

[NateTech]

It's an interesting point Bruce. The Internet continues to be the big thing shaking up business, worldwide.

Leo Laporte's keynote at MacWorld was along a similar vein for broadcasters, just a short few days ago. Broadcasting will be similarly dead eventually. People want a customized continuous stream of only the information they want. They don't want "mass media" anymore.

I look at my little sister's generation -- she hardly ever watches "the news". She's still well informed about general news from the overwhelming flood of information about the same topics over and over spewing from the broadcasters -- it works it's way to her somehow, but she's better informed and dare I say, "more competitive than her older peers" on the topics that interest HER.

This is happening to books, broadcast, anything that can't change rapidly.

Sure, there are things that are good on paper -- things that don't change. Stuff like "How to learn to fly a plane", and "Physics 101".

But trying to put down anything on paper like software languages or computing techniques, is a short-lived proposition -- unless you're talking core technologies like IP basics (and not how to program the latest router du-jour to do what you want with IP), etc.

I think the point I'm getting to here in this rambling fashion (hey, I'm tired.. hah...), is that static information -- is good in print. Stuff that changes, even slowly, has to be priced higher in print than anyone's willing to pay... to make it worthwhile to publish it in the first place.

Broadcast companies on the other hand have a small leg up, if they morph and morph quickly... having a 50,000W AM station at 850 KHz shouldn't be about putting out AM modulation of voice and news anymore -- it's a wide-area low-speed data transmitter... that can then be sliced up into packets.

I don't think the FCC nor the broadcasters quite "get it" yet, though.

He who dies with the most erlangs wins! -- Is our local joke in our little techie group. (We're telco-heads, and telco gets it... everything's rapidly sliding over to VoIP, and the struggles against QoS and actual voice quality have already begun long ago.

Not only that, we're just going straight to video and so-called "HD" video, and that 1960's world's fair dream of the videophone is here... easy to do on any laptop... *With enough bandwidth* to the laptop.

And print "media" like newspapers? The businesspeople already KNOW that model is dead. It's just being propped up. (I will miss my daily paper copy of the Wall Street Journal someday, but I can print it if I want to waste the toner... eventually.)

It's interesting times, but the Internet and packet-switched networks are still shaking things up... it's not done yet.

The movement to these new things is why I'm still upbeat about this so-called "bad" economy. There are still jobs (perhaps boring ones, but IT was always the "plumbing" of the business anyway -- the booming 90's just made us all feel more important than we are -- we're overhead, unless we make or save the company real MONEY), converting these old technologies to new ones.

The business world isn't dead... it's just leaning back on its heels and thinking. The first companies to lean forward and grab on to the fast-moving rope of time, and maybe getting some burns in the process, are going to do just fine.

Re:What can stem this hemorrhage?

[NateTech]

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.

Complete rubbish

[Mag7]

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.

Re:News.

[jalefkowit]

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.

How Capitalism Works:

When the company is doing well, it's because the CEO is a genius.

When the company is doing poorly, it's because the workers are too expensive, too lazy or too numerous.

Re:News.

[Just Some Guy]

When the economy is good, we see employees jump ship for a 100$ raise all the time, and being so cynical at the same time. During a bad economy, when a company is trying to be nice, no one notice. As a matter of fact, a lot of people called us stupid too, because employees are ungrateful by nature.

I could make a little more money elsewhere, but you couldn't pry me loose from this job. My boss hands me general outlines of projects and then gives me full authority and responsibility to finish them on my own. I can work from home when our babysitter takes a few days off without having to ask permission first. I have my own office with lots of personal stuff in it. The only time he has something to say about hardware purchase requests is when I should have bought stuff earlier instead of trying to make do. My boss didn't buy my loyalty with a paycheck; it'd take a lot more money for me to gladly do weekend projects for a company I didn't like.

You sound like a good boss with your head in the right place. Yes, some employees will take advantage of this and then move on, but isn't that always true in life?