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University of Helsinki To Lay Off a Thousand People (yle.fi)
jones_supa writes: University of Helsinki, the place where Linus Torvalds got his degree as well, will reduce staff by 980 people, with 570 being laid off by the end of 2017. In addition, the university will reorganize and incorporate certain divisions including continuing education. Professors, teachers and researchers are criticizing the cuts, which coincide with the university's administrative and educational overhaul. The staff cuts reflect the government's drastic funding cuts to education, which plays one part in the effort of trying to help the difficult economic situation of today's Finland. The university estimates that of the 980 positions, terminations during this coming spring will account for 570 positions. Of the employees to be made redundant, 75 are teaching and research staff and 495 other staff. The rest of the cuts will be spread over the coming years.
with the layoffs.
I get it that Torvalds went to school there etc, but this isn't any different than any other school that hundreds of other developers have gone to that have had staff cuts. Those don't make /.
Why is this here at all?
Well they need money to pay for all those refugees. Population replacement is not cheap!
It sounds like most of the cuts don't affect the people who are fulfilling the core mission of the university, the ones who teach, do research and advise the students. US universities have hired so many administrators that they need more administrators just to keep track of all the administratoring they do. When there are budget cuts, it's administrators who draw up the cost-cutting plans, so it turns out as one would expect. At least in the US, universities can just keep raising tuition. In Finland that is impossible.
A few months ago we were told that Finland is doing so well that everybody is going to get a basic income...
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/15/10/31/2125226/finland-begins-to-shape-basic-income-proposal
Unlike most western countries, at least they understand that these non productive jobs are part of the problem. They need to cut these jobs and cut the taxes used top pay for them. This will allow for extra demand and new jobs in productive fields that service that demand. NZ dis the same thing long ago, with gigantic cuts. Make work jobs like park rangers were cut from 20,000 to literally single digit numbers. They have had a massive economic turn around.
In 2015 Finland accepted 15,000 more asylum seekers at a cost of EU 15,000 per head. That works out to EU 225 million *more* in 2015 due to some legitimate asylum seekers mixed in with a lot of opportunistic economic migrants:
http://sputniknews.com/europe/...
Imagine if a portion of that money had gone to existing citizens instead - and the asylum seekers kept closer to their point of origin while receiving the other portion for their care - it's cheaper to help them closer to their point of origin, like in a neighboring country.
Too bad the politicians and bureaucrats in the West always consider their own citizens and tax payers last when deciding where to spend money taken from those very same tax payers.
The staff cuts reflect the government's drastic funding cuts to education, which plays one part in the effort of trying to help the difficult economic situation of today's Finland.
I have it on good authority - years of reading Slashdot posts - that European countries are enlightened, problem-free utopias. Someone must've made a mistake and replaced "America" with "Finland" when writing this. Stupid editors missed it again!
#DeleteChrome
What is happening at the lower ends of society?
Why is the EU allowing itself to be flooded with people with few or no skills that will need long term generational support if it cant even look after its own best and brightest?
If a nation is so 'poor' why accept more poor people in who will need funds from a government who cant their own fund higher education?
Time for some national interest and ensuring educational funding is placed above EU policy.
Finland was able to keep the Soviet Union out, time to look after its own funding again and stop wasting limited funds on the EU's rapid population growth projects.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Organizational downsizing and layoffs are inevitable. The difference is that these people get to keep their national pensions, will receive at least 700EUR/mo in basic allowance even if they're not qualified for unemployment insurance, and if they are, as they are likely to be, up to 85% of their normal pay for up to a year while they try to find a replacement job. Then there is the normal array of services, should any of them run into real difficulty. It's much more manageable than what you'd get in a third world hellhole like Arkansas.
Troll smarter, not harder next time.
This sort of smells of the old political trick of announcing a fire station will close. It gets a lot of people together against the bad government closing the fire station which leads to a tax increase. Perhaps they're betting on people getting riled up and getting more public or private funding. If they were hurting that much financially the layoffs would happen sooner unless there are some legal reasons not to.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
TFS says:
75 are teaching and research staff and 495 other staff.
So a few are teachers and researchers, but MOST are useless administration and "overhead".
Could be a lot worse. Could be a little better, but it's almost the opposite of your claim that most of those being cut are the people actually serving the direct function of the university.
Let's lay off 1,000 Finnish Professors and Academic staff but let in millions of Muslim Syrian migrants that are going to immediately be placed in publicly funded houses and food provided by the Finnish Citizens. What's more important, the working class and Finnish educators or Muslim opportunists posing as Syrian refugees?
Finland sells a lot of oil?
You're probably confusing Finland and Norway...
University of Helsinki, my heart cries.
In the US we have witnessed the rise of the "Administrative University".
The Administrative University exists without classes, without research, without service to anyone or anything.
The Administrative University has a state appointed Board of Regents, a President (The Champion of the Board of Regents), Vice Presidents, Vice Vice Presidents, Superior Lawyers, Middle Layers, Submissive Layers, Patent Office Administrative Staff, Provosts, Vice Provosts, Deans.
The Administrative University exists to feed itself.
Teachers? NO.
Classes? NO.
Research? NO.
The Administrative University exists for itself and nothing else because it syphons money from the State and Federal Governments.
The Administrative University exists to uphold the lifestyles of the Board of Regents and Their Champion, The University President.
The Administrative Staff are the human shields to endure the slings and arrows of sexual lawsuits and felony complaints against The
Champion of the Board of Regents, The University President.
Example: The University of Alaska
Ha ha
A basic income would fix that problem.
So true! When there isn't enough economic activity to generate the jobs that would make things like expensive university programs easy to afford, the best plan is definitely to spend more money you don't have (massive debt!) in order to just hand it out without any connection to productivity (inflation!). Excellent idea.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
With Linux replacing the infrastructure servers, they're finding they need only one admin per 100 systems, not one admin per 10.
I've actually seen this sort of thing happen....
It's working out great for Venezuela and Zimbabwe!
As in Greece, Spain, Italy, etc etc., the inability of the economy to recover is the consequence of adopting a currency that is run to benefit Germany instead of your own country.
Do you have any idea of how expensive beer is in Finland?
Well, not the ones in the green suits. But I've heard the one in the pink suit has done well for herself.
This would never happen to an institution owned by the benevolent government of a nice, progressive country with constitutional protections for earning a living wage. Oh, wait...
The problem is that our government is far from benevolent. This is the most hard-line capitalistic government during the entire history of the Republic of Finland. This government has made it its mission to completely dismantle every remnant of the welfare state and turn Finland into a tax haven for the rich. The "difficult economic situation" is merely a pretext.
I'm veering off on an off-topic tangent, but the fact is that almost all economists, when asked by the press, have stated that the measures taken by the current government only worsen ad prolong the situation.
Lemon curry???
I like the use of "park rangers" as an example. If you want real examples of non-productive tax-payer funded jobs... you're looking at the millions of useless admin jobs/managerial posts in the civil services. Most of them women. Most of them flexible working/job sharing/endless maternity leave. All of this, in turn, propping up an HR industry that again multiplies up the costs and useless jobs.
The Scandinavian countries are quite pragmatic when it comes to solving problems. Sweden did a turn towards the right in 2006 which served them very well. Finland will do something similar.
See, Finland is not that pragmatic. That's the main problem actually. The country has failed to perform the necessary agile moves, the ones that neighboring countries like Sweden and Estonia have done. We Finns just stand with mouth open and mittens in our hands, stare into the horizon and say "Gee, I guess we could do something about the problems. But not right now. And there are many regulations preventing change anyway, and we cannot quickly change those regulations either." There is a lot of the classic 1970s conservative old world stiffness still present. However, right now a lot of confidence has been placed on PM Sipilä and his government, so we'll see.
That what helped Apple to stand out the crowd was much stronger marketing muscle (started to grow in the 8 bit computers era) and making no trade offs for crappy hardware like caring about running on systems with 4 MB of RAM. In long term it helped making them look like a quality and luxury brand. (Same applies to Apple vs Windows).
No, what made Apple stand out is that the platform itself was very, very, very compelling.
People wanted to program for it badly enough that they were willing to jailbreak the devices using systemic exploits to do it, and then work on developing an SDK for it, to the point of reverse engineering the APIs for all the frameworks on the thing, and then making modifications to the scratch register usage in the compiler, because Apple did not use the standard (at the time) ARM ABI or calling conventions.
Jailbreaks initially came about so as to rewrite the baseband seczone and then put a new (valid) TEA signature on the thing, so as to remove the carrier lock, since Apple sold the things into a limited market, but people *EVERYWHERE* wanted an iPhone. It got so bad at one point that Apple limited the number of iPhones you were allowed to purchase, and entire shipments were hijacked at gunpoint.
That never happened with Nokia phones. Ever.
When Steve released the thing, the Application story was that "You'll use web apps. Period.". Steve was deathly allergic to the idea of building another Apple Newton, and wanted it to be a closed system.
Only the damn thing wouldn't stay closed, and when it surfaced that the boot ROM had the same buffer overflow flaw in the signature validation code that was in Samsung and Sony devices which used Samsung OEM'ed processors, it was "game over" for at least two years on spinning new silicon.
Seriously: No one ever bothered with the Nokia phones.
Even if there had been a capability baseline (all the Apple phones has the same sensor capabilities, the same screen aspect ratio, and, initially, the same screen resolution) so that you could write one piece of code for a Nokia phone, and it wouldn't be missing features and/or run like crap and/or have to scale everything into ugliness due to using whatever the cheapest bulk available LCD resolution and aspect ration the thing had when Nokia was pricing parts right before going to manufacture -- the damn things were not compelling enough that people *wanted* to develop for them.
The only people who developed for Nokia were the ones the phone company paid to put simple games on then through the phone company stores, or the ones that Nokia solicited themselves, or the *very few* vertical market applications which would fit on the things and remain useful.
Nokia phones were crap feature phones with a JVM "in case", and while you *could* write binary applications for them, it was a massive PITA, and they weren't portable between models, and Nokia didn't pre-release models to developers -- which is kind of what you have to do, if you are going to be shipping a bunch of hardware incompatible devices, and the apps would only run on the older devices no longer being built.
Sorry.
Build a compelling product that developers want to develop for, and they will *break into* the thing to do it, even if it means sending the device to someone in Korea who's willing to remove surface mount chips to get at the JTAG port, and then reattach the chips to the device in a reflow oven, because he happens to have one, because he's an engineer at Samsung who works on Samsung phones, and the things are more compelling than what his company has him working on most of the time.
*That's* why Nokia took the dirt nap.
But they can't print their way out of debt like the US - they are in the Euro.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
See, Finland is not that pragmatic. That's the main problem actually. The country has failed to perform the necessary agile moves, the ones that neighboring countries like Sweden and Estonia have done. We Finns just stand with mouth open and mittens in our hands, stare into the horizon and say "Gee, I guess we could do something about the problems. But not right now. And there are many regulations preventing change anyway, and we cannot quickly change those regulations either." There is a lot of the classic 1970s conservative old world stiffness still present. However, right now a lot of confidence has been placed on PM Sipilä and his government, so we'll see.
I see from your comment that you apparently approve of the government's actions. Fair enough, I just disagree. However, your statement about the confidence placed on the PM could be just a tiny bit more accurate... PM Sipila's approval ratings have plummeted from 60% (June 2015) to 36% (Dec 2015). You simply cannot call that "a lot of confidence".
Lemon curry???