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BlackBerry Cuts 250 Workers, Calls It Efficiency
First time accepted submitter Dawn Kawamoto writes "Want to become more efficient? Try lopping off 250 workers. That's what BlackBerry did this week — saying it was a move to become more efficient. From the article: '“This is part of the next stage of our turnaround plan to increase efficiencies and scale our company correctly for new opportunities in mobile computing. We will be as transparent as possible as those plans evolve,” says Lisette Kwong, a company spokeswoman.'"
Yep! All those sweatshop programmers in China and India are more efficient than the three people left at RIM's office in Canuckistan.
Next week, they'll announce that they're moving their office to the local StarSchmucks'.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
if the 250 being canned wore suits and ties to work (i.e. management or executive types)
I'm now efficiently unemployed. my whole family loves feeling so efficient!
You know, laying off staff can improve efficiency if they're not doing anything useful or have become surplus to requirements. There's a reason it's called "being made redundant."
P.S. Fuck you Dice, /. was a news aggregator long before you ever came along and probably will be long after you've folded. If I wanted to read half-baked op-ed pieces I'd buy a fucking newspaper.
It's almost enough to make me wish Roland was still around.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
See: "auger in"
A friend just moved to New York to work doing blackberry software, before was doing embedded qnx, with him went two more programmers from the small shop in monterrey where was contracted
They should cut 100% of their workers. Who the heck uses blackberry anyway?
I didn't know there was even 250 blackberry users let alone staff.
Just a minute, I'll check for that on my iPhone.
A minute to check a fact...you need a quad core...and a larger screen...maybe on the next refresh.
They are not using iPhones http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23946013 IDC's latest figures show Apple market share at 20% with Android at 70%. Apples highlight of its quarterly reporting was its iPhone sales were down from last quarter...but still better than expected (its other products a disaster) showing its incredible resilience in America...and its strategy of providing the 4S at a lower price(everywhere else was a disaster...China particularly bad).
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23946013 by IDC's last figures 32.5Million shiments. Blackberry is suffering right now, but they are sill selling lots of phones. The trend is the real problem...its down.
250 got out with their lives and only lost their jobs
It is efficiency. They're cutting testing & qa staff. That's what customers are for!
And predict more cuts in the future.
As bad as this sounds, Blackberry as a company is not doing well. So, financially, they need to downsize. It sucks for the people who are laid off but at the end of the day the company needs to cut costs or it will go bankrupt very quickly. In which case these people will probably lose their jobs too.
So, best for them to get out of Blackberry and on with their lives.
"plan to increase efficiencies and scale our company"
A -5.0 scaling factor is STILL a scale!
Just not a scale up... it's down.. as in downscaling...
Ya know, it's one thing to have every 3rd story be something to do with jobs or hiring and/or posting things from people who only do 'sponsored' links (ie; Nerval's Lobster), but when you just flat out lie it's quite another. Not only is "Dawn Kawamoto" a Dice mouthpiece, this is the sixth article posted by her this year alone. Do you seriously think we don't notice or remember these things?
the CEO got a bonus for coming up with the idea.
It's hurts next to other places where employers do not need to pay for worker health insurance coverage. And they don't need to play games with hours to get around having to give people it as well.
Suddenly this makes this Lisette all hot, I am feeling an irresistible urge to fuck her.
Heck, BB can just get the carriers to do product testing.
Oh wait. That would require carriers who want the product badly enough. So, that's Rogers. Anybody else? Zimbabwe Mobile? Dunno.
Actually slashing R&D is what you do when you are out of ideas and plan to rebrand as something that doesn't need R&D. Like just becoming an App. Or a sub-brand, like Sony Experia Zeta 99 powered by Blackberry. Kinda like the Facebook phone. And that worked out just fine, right?
Sig for hire.
A dice.com opinion piece with clickbait headline? That's what we're getting here alongside our daily ration of infoworld articles?
I really need to take my own advice and not bother coming back - but somehow, I still end up doing it every week or two.
Blackberry makes good business devices. I prefer their tactile keypads over a touch screen any day. However, I found it weird when kids and casual users were getting BB phones. Suddenly BB was trying to be all phones to all people. BB gained traction because the business world saw their devices as a useful tool. They ought to focus on that market instead of trying to gain bigger market share. If you try to be all things to all people, you will get nowhere. Stick with the business crowd, make apps and tools useful to them. I don't care if Justin Bieber, Drake or Beyonce uses BB devices and neither should Blackberry. However, if Bernanke, Buffet, or Kim Shannon uses it--that means something--and that is who BB should care about and focus on. Let the kids and celebs use the other phones to play with.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
Is Blackberry still sending wheelbarrows full of money to their "Global Creative Director", Alicia Keys?
I weep for their OS. If they could just FOSS and license their system instead of doing it all in house...
Always a shame seeing good tech wasted on a backwards development model. Sure, the consumers wouldn't mind whatever it is that running their angry birds, but the majority of devs do and would prefer foss time and time again.
The only thing Apple and Microsoft have for themselves is the slow and stable release cycle and native development. This, at least, appeals to companies looking to make some money without too much maintenance overhead. Anyone who is actually interested in developing something more interesting then candy crush or microsoft office, will just not bother developing it over the closed system.
All I hear is that we need MORE technology workers, when there is a monthly story about a purge. I used to keep track of the total number of people purged from technology companies, but lost count over the past few years as IBM, Microsoft, HP, and so on keep purging workers at a pace I can't keep up with. The list is long, and out of all those purged workers, there should be enough to supply needs for many years.
The next bloodbath is going to be SQL Server admins. For a decade or so, companies have been dumping programmers and in-house software and buying vertical-market packages which are backed by a SQL Server instance, hence a big demand for SQL Server admins right now. But Microsoft is going to put SQL Server instances in Azure, and companies will be able to host both their vertical-market packages in "the cloud" as well as SQL Server instances. No admins needed. SQL Server admins are about the only thing left for companies to purge.
Some of the best, most experienced admins will get jobs at datacenters, but only a few. The rest will join the ranks of the surplus unemployed.