Tech Publisher O'Reilly Slashes Jobs 207
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.'"
News. (Score:2, Insightful)
Know what would be *news*? A report that some company's leaders have decided to bite the bullet and weather the storm. Not, massive layoffs, declaring bankruptcy, or trying to pass the problems to the consumer. Let's hear about a company whose execs are man enough to at least *try* to ride out this slump.
I am already sick and tired of everybody using "the economy" as their excuse for everything. And 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. No, the first we hear about trouble, they are addressing the economy by doing their part to make it worse. 31 people worse, to be exact. Come on, seriously, what all did they try first? Or is this just the first instinct?
Look at bookstores and the small tech section (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad news is good news (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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:What can stem this hemorrhage? (Score:3, Insightful)
Phil
Re:What can stem this hemorrhage? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Fine economy (Score:3, Insightful)
what else did you expect from capitalism?
Re:A lot of 'glitches'. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
We haven't started losing blood yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
http://mediacow.tv/node/166 [mediacow.tv]
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:Look at bookstores and the small tech section (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More mealy-mouthed BS (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Look at bookstores and the small tech section (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They're just giving their books away! (Score:3, Insightful)
Every new language solves problems already solved by Lisp.
Doesn't mean the language is sufficiently documented that a book wouldn't be welcome.
It also doesn't mean there's nothing interesting to write about besides a new language. After all, if this was a mature industry, wouldn't we have decided on a few common languages by now?
Examples of interesting problems: Statistical analysis of relationships, shaders and procedural generation in games, virtual machines (both the emulate-a-system kind and the just-in-time-scripts kind),
Oh, and not every problem was solved by Lisp -- in particular, concurrency wasn't. See Erlang.
Every new technology is just a piggyback on the crumbling HTTP layer.
Just what is crumbling about HTTP?
If you were talking about HTML, or Javascript, you might have a point. Maybe. But HTTP?
These days you can write your "programs" with nothing more than a mouse and a spiffy GUI.
Doesn't sound like Java, or Ruby.
Yes, you can write "programs" in Excel. And when those fall apart, often they do so thoroughly enough that you'll have to hire an actual programmer to fix things.
But there is still real logic to be written, and that still requires programmers, and the mouse is still the wrong tool for the job.
And those spiffy frameworks -- take Rails. Sure, you can bang out Hello World in seconds, and CRUD in minutes. But as soon as you need to actually build something interesting, it's going to take actual code, not just generators, along with unit tests, designers, QA, sysadmin(s), the works.
Yes, I know, you want me off your lawn. It was better when men were men and programmers were Real Programmers and you would write a jump instruction based on knowledge of exactly how fast the drive spins.
And if you really want that back -- a world where you're harder to replace, for no good reason -- COBOL is alive and well. If what you want is a low-level challenge, find somewhere performance and reliability are needed -- maybe an embedded system, or a compiler/VM, or drivers...
Re:What can stem this hemorrhage? (Score:2, Insightful)
Bet most Aussies don't know that one.
Re:More mealy-mouthed BS (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
If CEOs spoke the truth (Score:3, Insightful)
Tim O'Reilly on truth drugs:
Folks, dead-tree publishing is hardly the wave of the future. People don't even buy our reference works any longer, they just google. We can sell them more tutorial works, and we can make money from advertising coupled with online references only if ours are consistently better than everyone else's, because there is no shortage of online references for computer software and languages. Half of you do things we don't have much use for any longer. We've got to radically redirect our entire business, and that doesn't mean just getting rid of some jobs, it means that some of you older folks who don't have the flexibility will be replaced with young, shiny, eager folks who know the new paradigm.
If there's one thing we've learned about the modern world, it's that the guild system doesn't work to deliver value to employers over the long term. Our only choice is to let you go, or go out of business ourselves. And you know what? We might still fail anyway.
Re:If CEOs spoke the truth (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
More like... (Score:3, Insightful)
"The federal government is about to near double the deficit in a single day, we're not one of the companies that won that lottery, and we have no idea what will happen to the economy (or our tax rate) as a result. Heading for the bunkers and seeing how long we can hold out".
Remember that actual spending and wages are not down that much yet - companies are cutting back big time in anticipation of something much worse ahead. Though your end motive is right, they are just trying to do what they can to keep the company going long term.
Even tutorial books age too quickly (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:What can stem this hemorrhage? (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Guess there just weren't enough H-1b visas issued, huh?
Re:What can stem this hemorrhage? (Score:2, Insightful)
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
"people" dont have money, sure they can get cheap credits, but credits are to blame for the crisis in the first place. America is not producing goods any longer, you all live off forein credits (mostly China). This living on debt cant go forever you know, you will go under, hiperinflation and all.
Re:News. (Score:2, Insightful)
I think I'm seeing flaws in the whole corporate model, not just its current effects.
I'm am not convinced that corporations should enjoy the protections they do, if they don't "promote a social good" as a primary motivation. Probably just saying this makes me a Marxist or something. People aren't really given much option except to live inside of the system that is controlled by the profit-driven 'corporate' mentality, and it winds up having more influence than any system of government ever has.
As for 'putting up capital' I have no source of capital, and I see that as part of the problem.
Re:Look at bookstores and the small tech section (Score:3, Insightful)
Good tech books do not become outdated/obsolete fast. Books tied to software, specifically certain versions of said software, become obsolete very fast. Of course bookstores usually stock books of the latter, and not the former.
Business is business (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want to combine business with philanthropy, you're welcome to do so. However, you shouldn't assume that is somehow the duty of business owners. The businesses exist to make a profit within the bounds of law. That is not evil, hearless or cynical. That's the way things are supposed to be.
Moral obligations apply to human beings, nonprofit organizations and the government. In fact, the only truly effective moral actor is the government. If the government (aka "we the people") decides that a corporate owners should carry a special burden, they will enact a tax law and collect the tax evenly from the commendable and heartless business owners alike.
Re:What can stem this hemorrhage? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not enough for me to have been financially conservative. If my customers haven't been, they're going away, and they'll take a lot of their income with them.
As an employee, I consider myself to be a one man operation, with one huge customer. Luckily, my employer/customer seems to be conservatively managed. But I don't know the quality of their customers.
Re:News. (Score:2, Insightful)
"When the economy is good, we see employees jump ship for a 100$ raise all the time..."
Well, the idea of a company being loyal to its employees died somewhere back about the time Reagan took office. Employees have learned to respond in kind.
Sorry if you're an exception, but what goes around comes around, even to those who didn't opt into the system.
On the plus side, unless you're underpaying people to the point where $100 is make-or-break, you're better off without them.
Re:News. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.