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