Psssttt, Hey you, at Yahoo – You wanna make 25 grand?
Here’s one good thing about being a Yahoo employee: if you quit and join Yammer, a social networking service for businesses, in the next 60 days you’ll pocket a $25,000 signing bonus.
That’s the offer that was tweeted on Thursday by Yammer CEO David Sacks.
“They’ve got a lot of great engineers there,” Sacks said in an interview with Reuters. “The talent has been misused by senior management which has made a lot of bad decisions.”
Of course, when Sacks (whose credits include producing and financing the 2005 film Thank You For Smoking) isn’t whispering sweet come-ons to Yahoo employees, he’s holding a gun to their heads. Infuriated by Yahoo’s controversial decision to sue Facebook for patent infringement, he vowed a day earlier that he would never hire another Yahoo employee that doesn’t leave the company in the next 60 days.
Sacks later revised his ultimatum, so that the blacklist applies only to Yahoo senior managers and not rank-and-file employees. But he noted on Thursday that people who continue to work at Yahoo do so at their own peril.
“There will be a growing stigma attached to working at Yahoo as long as it continues to pursue this type of patent troll strategy,” Sacks said.
Regardless of how Yahoo workers feel about their employer’s litigation strategy, it’s not hard to imagine that many in Sunnyvale are brushing up their resumes. The struggling Internet company is said to be preparing for a massive reorganization that could slash thousands of jobs.
Fired AOL India employee talks
AOL cut more than 900 jobs around the world today — 20 percent of its staff — and India took a pretty tough cut from the axe: 400 jobs, according to several sources, and 300 contractors, according to another source. The nice thing for Reuters is that we have a big bureau in Bangalore, not too far from AOL, and plenty of our people know other people there and were able to get important details about the job cuts.
I coordinated some of the coverage from here since I’m hanging out in the bureau, and was happy when I heard that my colleague Nivedita Bhattacharjee got time to talk with one of the employees who was laid off today. Here is some of what he told her. We agreed to his request for anonymity because he wants to get work again and does not want to disqualify himself from jobs because he spoke to the press.
The entire team had a meeting, and they briefed us about how issues will be handled… we work in AOL. It’s something that we are always prepared (for). We were expecting an announcement soon.
They had some U.S.-centric plans, so they didn’t need us.
I’m leaving on good terms. It’s quite a good severance package… In many ways people are satisfied — we are getting four months’ salary as compensation and, depending on each case, there will be other benefits added to it.
Every fired employee (gets) four months of severance, which is pretty good, but with this action, nobody really has much faith in management, and (we) have been scarred by the experience of easily being let go … after being told for months prior that we were a valuable asset. …
Most technology product teams are being moved to HP. Services like finance, advertising,… paid services are now going to move to MindTree. Of course, not every team in full is being moved. They laid off some, and the remaining will become HP and MindTree employees.
Layoffs hit The Washington Post after BusinessWeek, AP
Several media reporters wrote on Twitter on Thursday that this was one of the worst weeks in journalism, and it’s hard to argue with them. BusinessWeek is canning a third of its staff as Bloomberg gets ready to buy the magazine. The Associated Press is laying off 90 people as part of its effort to cut payroll costs by 10 percent this year.
And now The Washington Post is laying off staff, sources told me on Friday, and a spokeswoman confirmed.
The Post has cut an unknown number of washingtonpost.com workers, the website folks who until now have worked separately at the dot-com headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, across the river from the Post’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. One source told me up to 10 are going. That’s not as big a number as other places you’ve read about lately, but it’s still a painful cut. (Disclosure: I worked for The Washington Post Co. from 1998 to 2005)
Sources shared several names with me, but until those people confirm that they were laid off, I don’t want to publish them. What I can say is that there were several journalists and marketing people among the casualties. They are getting severance packages, but they are accompanied by non-disclosure agreements which prevent them from discussing their firings. Apparently, some of my sources said, they will be out of work by Dec. 31.
Why is this happening? Here’s what spokeswoman Kris Coratti said:
As part of the work we’re doing to turn around the business that supports our journalism, there were a small number of individual positions eliminated as a result of efficiencies we have found through our new structure and through new technology, and those have taken place in both print and online.
The background: The Post’s web staff, as I mentioned, is joining the main newsroom as they eliminate the gap that the paper set up many years ago by making its website a separate operation. The company, all my sources tell me, want to cut staff before the end of the year because next year the remainder would become unionized. Web staff are not unionized now. That, my sources say, would make it much more difficult for the money-losing Washington Post to cut costs by laying off people because they would be protected to some extent by their contract.
This place is an absolute joke. The paper is dying, not slowly but fast and it’s all of the Senior managements fault. The worst generation of the Graham family.
from Commentaries:
Times tough for info security guards
With all the cyberscare stories about North Korea making headlines these days, the last place you might expect to see job losses is among information security workers.
However, a survey by UK recruiters Barclay Simpson says the number of IT security professionals looking for work has risen 17 percent so far this year, even as the number of new positions has fallen by 57 percent.
"The market has been swollen by candidates whose contracts have come to an end and permanent staff who have been made redundant and are making themselves available for both permanent and contract work," the report finds.
Hardest hit are more senior and managerial roles, the survey finds, while junior roles are less affected.
Mark Ampleford, head of Barclay Simpson’s IT security unit says: “Information security, despite its current high profile, has not been protected from corporate cost cutting. Q1 and Q2 redundancy levels were high and whilst many departments have vacancies few have permission to recruit.”
Corporate cost-cutting is taking its toll, and not just through layoffs. Swelling ranks of unemployed security technicians is further dampening salaries and wages, the recruiter says.
Lower level security analysts at banks in the UK start around £30,000. Penetration testers -- pretend hackers who test client networks for vulnerabilities -- can expect between £51,00 and £62,000, the survey's salary data shows.
The industry in general has experienced an influx of fresh faces, newly certified with their CISSPs, that lack the insight and experience to do the jobs they have their sights set on. This is a normal trend for an niche industry like Information Security that experiences periodic swells in popularity, and when the new faces leave to pursue greener pastures the job market will right itself.
In the meantime, between the time that candidates show up looking for work and IT shops realize that certifications don’t equal ability, the perception of more workers than jobs can be expected to lower wages somewhat as competition for available positions heats up.
Tribune Co papers hit where it hurts, Baltimore Sun slashed
Tribune Co keeps the layoffs coming at its newspapers as the media company moves through the bankruptcy court process.
The Sun: Over in Baltimore, we heard from a source that 21 editors — including most of the metro editing staff and two top editorial editors — were herded into offices and told they had to exit the building immediately. Editor & Publisher confirms this report and says more cuts might be coming as soon as today. Perhaps there’s a strategy in there, but it’s hard to tell what it is when most big-city dailies have abandoned their ambitious overseas reporting goals, saying their real value to the community is their local reporting franchise. UPDATE: Looks like at least 40 more people are getting laid off as we speak, according to two sources I just spoke to at 3pm eastern.
And another UPDATE: A Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild memo says a whopping 27 percent of the Sun’s staff is getting laid off.
Excerpt from the memo:
“Tribune, through careless management practices, has saddled itself under $13 billion in debt and now Baltimore is paying a price,” said Cet Parks, Executive Director of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. “Tribune is siphoning good jobs from Baltimore and sending work that talented editors, reporters, photographers, copy editors and designers have done here to its home base in Chicago. That is not right.”
Tribune plans to lay off the 40 newsroom employees by May 27. Targeted employees, who include four columnists, photographers, critics and copy editors, received hand delivered letters Wednesday afternoon signed by Monty Cook, senior vice president and editor. Also, in the last two weeks The Sun has laid off seven employees in other departments including advertising and customer service.
Chicago Tribune: The paper said last week that it would cut 11 percent of its newsroom staff. Today’s edition of the Gorkana business journalist career moves e-mail shows that, among others, the Tribune is losing Joshua Boak, financial exchanges and energy reporter. We don’t know if it’s because of the layoffs or if he’s just leaving, but either way, it’s a heck of a time to lose the exchanges beat reporter at one of the hometown papers of the world’s largest futures exchanges.
I still enjoy reading the newspaper with a cup of srong coffee in the morning—apparently generation X does not.
Chili, Baltimore
Google layoffs don’t stop hiring efforts
Google may be giving pink slips to some 200 hapless souls, but that’s not stopping the company from hiring in certain places.
The search giant has about 360 job openings listed on its Web site, and a spokesman has confirmed that they are indeed open positions. Only about 30 of the US job openings are for work that appears related to sales and marketing – the kinds of jobs that were impacted by Thursday’s layoffs.
The job openings provide a fascinating window into the inner workings of the vast Google empire, which has a need for everything from a software engineer in Krakow to an account manager in Cairo.
A job listing for a “Peering Coordinator” at Google’s EU headquarters begins with a hint of international intrigue:
“When we’re not planning and designing our next secret data centre, we focus on selecting, negotiating for and acquiring the space, power and networks to expand Google’s global reach,” the ad reads.
Other roles are more pedestrian. A sought-after Transportation Program Manager in Mountain View, California will be tasked with, among other things, overseeing the day-to-day operations of the bike program.
And of course, given that the Google army famously marches on its belly, it’s no surprise that the company wants a Foodservices Supply Chain Manager to report for duty at the Googleplex.
With all googles money they get rid of a bunch of hard working people and then hire more why not shift these people who they are getting rid of and train them in on different jobs?
Reshuffle at Yahoo, Microsoft shuffles on layoffs
Rumors of a Yahoo management reshuffling, two newspaper publisher bankruptcies and a bit of PR unsavvy on Microsoft’s part do not make for a quiet weekend. Although not exactly high-octane breaking news, the stuff kept happening in dribs and drabs throughout the weekend, leading me to update my Facebook status thus: “Anupreeta would have liked at least 30 percent more weekend.” But so it goes.
On Friday night, All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher reported that a major Yahoo management reorganization was underway, and could come as early as this week. The Wall Street Journal, which shares an owner — News Corp’s Dow Jones — with All Things D, followed with its own story a day later.
Then, Microsoft — a big employer of foreign workers which took some heat last month from politicians for announcing plans to lay off 5,000 people — dug its heels deeper into the mess. It seems the software giant overpaid some laid-off workers because of an accounting error, and now wants the money back. Yikes. Does Microsoft need to do more damage control than this?
Meanwhile, newspaper publishers continue to collapse like dominoes. On Saturday, Journal Register said it had sought bankruptcy protection, becoming the latest U.S. newspaper company to buckle under a load of debt and falling ad sales. Close on its heels, the Philadelphia Inquirer owner announced it too was filing for Chapter 11 — sending out the press release bang in the middle of Oscars.
Keep an eye on:
- Will Rupert Murdoch’s love of newspapers drag his entire empire down? Maybe, but that isn’t stopping the mogul from looking for alliances to save on costs. (The New York Times)
- Falling DVD sales could hurt the fortunes of media conglomerates. (Financial Times)
- Social networks are a telco’s best friend. (Reuters)
(Photo: Reuters)
Baltimore Sun feels Tribune cost cuts
Suburban bureau reporters at The Sun in Baltimore, Maryland, are about to learn the true meaning of the word “mobile.” The Tribune Co-owned paper is shutting down the last of its three suburban bureaus and bringing their reporters back to the main newsroom in Baltimore proper, sources told MediaFile on Tuesday.
The paper will outfit them with laptops and Blackberries and will send them back into the field to do their job by car or however else they can get to the story. It is part of wider changes going on at Tribune Co, which is in bankruptcy proceedings because of some $13 billion in debt that it has been unable to deal with because of the increasingly grim advertising sales plaguing newspapers.
Tribune’s chief executive, real estate magnate Sam Zell, was unhappy with the amount of empty space that The Sun has in downtown Baltimore, especially when considering all the space that the paper was renting in the suburbs, one of our sources says. The three bureaus that The Sun will shut down are in Anne Arundel, Baltimore and Howard counties. The Sun’s bureaus in Carroll and Harford counties already closed in the past year. It’s not clear if the two are related, but the three bureaus shutting down now are traditional turf war zones with The Washington Post, which recently said it will begin cooperating with The Sun on some coverage in the counties.
Shutting down bureaus must feel a little like a retreat. On the other hand, it must be nice to not be chained to a desk all day long, as we suspect more mobile journalists — or “MoJos” — are discovering..
The news was delivered in an off-record employee meeting, which also included the news that more buyouts and layoffs are on the way, likely sooner rather than later.
Speaking of personnel issues, Tribune Co Chief Administration Officer Gerald (Gerry) Spector had some bad news for employees: Salary freeze for non-union employees are coming this year. And if you’re in the union? Management will work it out in collective bargaining agreements. This is similar to what News Corp did at Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. It also comes on top of mandatory furloughs at Gannett and other publishers, not to mention a variety of other ways to stay afloat in increasingly stormy seas.
Here’s Spector’s memo, released Monday and obtained through a source:
Writing for your life at The New York Times
Who can blame a print reporter for wanting to get up to speed in the new media world, particularly at The New York Times? With ad revenue down and the future in doubt, it might seem worthwhile for reporters to keep themselves marketable. The union that represents the NYT’s reporters approves, but it suspects that some are making too many concessions. Here are excerpts from the memo:
The financial troubles at The New York Times have many Guild members looking over their shoulders wondering when the next round of layoffs may occur…As a result, many of our members are understandably operating in survival mode and scurrying to find a niche.
In this economic climate, the Guild more than ever encourages members to make themselves as valuable as possible. Embrace the web, which undoubtedly holds the key to our future. …
The Guild has learned that some employees are blogging on their own time, working through the wee hours of the night, with no additional compensation. Some are receiving compensation, but only a small portion of what they are owed. Others are simply getting to leave a couple hours early in exchange for their work on the web. As a result of this “Let’s-Make-a-Deal” environment, some employees are taken care of and others are taken advantage of, which is not what being part of a union is all about. …
Management told the Guild during recent negotiations that they needed more flexibility in the workplace if the company is to survive. The Guild understands that it is in our best interest for the paper to thrive and not be so set in our ways. But at this point, it appears as if our members are the only ones who are being flexible and are giving their services away in the process. If overtime budgets are tight, bloggers should be given time during their normal shift to complete an assignment rather than be expected to do it pro bono or play, “Let’s-Make-a-Deal” with their livelihood. The time has come for management to stop preying on our members’ fear and vulnerability, pay our members what they are worth and schedule them appropriately.
When will those layoffs happen? We’re depending on you, New York Times reporters, to tell us. Tips always welcome.
from MacroScope:
So many ways to say goodbye
It takes a delicate touch to make job cuts sound more palatable. As U.S. companies reduce payrolls by the thousands, the press releases seem to be getting more and more creative.
Check out today's announcement from The Reader's Digest Association, which is eliminating 8 percent of its global workforce and suspending matching contributions to employees' 401(k) retirement accounts. Somehow it stings a bit less when you tell employees that it's all part of a "Recession Plan" right?
"We have announced a comprehensive 'Recession Plan', which is our internal roadmap for dealing with the extraordinary effects of this recession on consumer spending," Mary Berner, president and CEO, said in a statement.
Then there was Caterpillar, which said earlier this week that it would "remove" 20,000 workers as it executes "strategic 'trough' plans".
Reader's Digest spokesman William Adler said the language wasn't intended to try to soften the blow of something as traumatic as losing a job.
"We're calling it the recession plan internally to encourage not only understanding of it by the employees, but for their interactive participation," he said, adding that the company was encouraging employees to think of ways to cut costs and save money, which was all part of the "recession plan."
"It's not like 'rightsizing,'" Adler said, referring to an infamous U.S. euphemism that many companies in recent years have adopted to describe firing and laying off their employees.
