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Tech Layoffs More Than Double In Bay Area (mercurynews.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article on Mercury News: In yet another sign of a slowdown in the booming Bay Area economy, tech layoffs more than doubled in the first four months of this year compared to the same period last year (could be paywalled, here's an alternate source). Yahoo's 279 workers let go this year contributed to the 3,135 tech jobs lost in the four-county region of Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda and San Francisco counties from January through April, as did the 50 workers axed at Toshiba America in Livermore and the 71 at Autodesk in San Francisco. In the first four months of last year, just 1,515 Bay Area tech workers were laid off, according to mandatory filings under California's WARN Act. For that period in 2014, the region's tech layoffs numbered 1,330. The jump comes amid a litany of other signs that the tech economy may be taking a breather: disappointing earning reports from stalwarts like Apple, an IPO market that has come to a near standstill, a volatile stock exchange and uncertainty in China.
Number H1B requests to go up as well.
I had a manager who thought of himself as the next Jack Welch, implemented a bottom 10% firing policy, and drove out the top 10% out of the company. I was the third out of a dozen senior lead testers who responded to the manager's "his way or the highway" speech by submitting my resignation. He drove the company all the way into bankruptcy. Not surprisingly, he blamed other people for that disaster.
This Internet bubble has lasted a little longer than the last one, and there isn't any one thing you can point to that's absolutely ridiculous this time (pets.com sock puppet, theglobe.com IPO, etc.) But, the VC money has been drying up again, and this forces startups to get rid of staff. There was an article a couple of days ago on Slashdot about Dropbox cutting some of the crazy perks they've been giving out to attract "the best and the brightest" like free meals and laundry.
This is the natural cycle of things, even in big companies. Some places I've worked for routinely over-hire or have staff doing jobs that don't really need to be done during the good times. When things turn bad, bloodbath city. Look at HP cutting 30,000 employees lately - i guarantee that was them finally digesting the last of EDS and dumping the random redundant assistant account liaison executives, etc. The place I currently work for is majority-owned by Europeans, so the opposite is true. You have to prove completely the demonstrated need for a new position, partially because it's harder to just dump people on the street in Europe than it is here. As a result, there are layoffs but they're much smaller and require a bigger downturn than most medium-ish companies would to start hauling out the axe. Length of service around here is pretty long as a result, because people are doing more work than the average IT person stuck in a very narrow silo of activity.
It will be interesting to see what happens, especially in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. I would never move there because of housing costs (and this is coming from a New Yorker...) I can definitely see bigger companies with deeper pockets scooping up the actual smart people, and a huge unemployment nightmare for the hangers-on. Remember how many paper MCSEs and HTML "programmers" there were out of work in 2001!
Jack Welch only did this for management staff. I think most people who have had to deal with idiot managers stuck at the level of their incompetence (the Peter Principle) and clogging up the system for everyone under them, won't find this such a terrible idea. However, it also only really worked for GE because it was an exceptional company, so the bottom 10% of managers there were still in the upper levels of management experience/ability in general. I have heard (from someone who used a recruiter who worked with Welch) that they didn't even need to fire the bottom managers. They just passed their details along to the headhunters circling the company and those people had a new job within a week.
It sounds like your manager was like those little Steve Jobs' that populate the tech industry and believe they can have world class design on third world budgets.
Why hypocrites? A shortage of talent AND layoffs can actually coexist within the same company. If you need Linux Developers and you've just dropped your unsuccessful Mac or Windows product and laid off the entire devision, how does that suddenly add to the pool of Linux Developers? The folks being laid off are picked over for talent worth retaining in light of current company needs. The ones whose jobs are eliminated but are not sufficiently skilled to be deployed elsewhere within the company are let go.
My questions are:
* Should companies continue to make products no one wants in order to avoid layoffs?
* Should they retain employees who used to support Windows but cannot support Linux (or vice versa) and call them Talented on the new platform?
Thanks,
- Wiz
The rate of crime has steadily decreased over the last twenty five years, while unemployment has had its ups and major downs. You couldn't be more wrong.
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