Yahoo Lays Off 600; Free Beers and Jobs Flow 164
CWmike writes "Yahoo confirmed on Tuesday that it has laid off 600 people, following news reports often based on Twitter messages from employees who had been let go. The layoffs amount to about 4 percent of the company's global workforce, Yahoo said. The company said affected workers are receiving severance packages and outplacement services. Laid-off workers may find some comfort on Twitter, where they are receiving an outpouring of goodwill. One San Francisco brewery is offering a free beer to people from Yahoo who show their termination letters. People with companies including Aprendi Learning, Tucows.com, DirecTV, Combine Couture, OMGPOP.com, and Uptake.com all posted Twitter messages expressing interest in hiring former Yahoo employees. The site Quora is hosting a thread for companies in the San Francisco area interested in hiring laid-off Yahoo workers. So far, there are 14 posts about jobs with companies including Yammer, Mozilla, and Cloudera."
Exclamation point (Score:4, Funny)
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He went to work for H. H. Gregg.
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They replaced the "Y" with Hard Gay Razor Ramon a while ago, but I guess he got tired of the job.
What sorts of jobs were these? (Score:4, Interesting)
What sorts of jobs were lost?
Were these people programmers, graphics designers, server administrators, network administrators, network technicians and others who actually produce something of value?
Or were these people involved with "marketing", "project management" and other ill-defined positions that usually just suck resources away from those getting real work done?
Since the 1970s, there has been a disappointing trend in American corporate culture whereby those who actually do productive work get laid off, while those who fluff around in meetings coming up with "strategy" or putting together "action plans" end up remaining employed the longest. Eventually the company goes under, since it is not actually producing anything of value. I sure hope Yahoo! hasn't gotten sucked into this horrible situation.
Re:What sorts of jobs were these? (Score:5, Insightful)
What sorts of jobs were lost?
Were these people programmers, graphics designers, server administrators, network administrators, network technicians and others who actually produce something of value?
Or were these people involved with "marketing", "project management" and other ill-defined positions that usually just suck resources away from those getting real work done?
It's easy to dismiss those who don't have a direct impact in developing a project. You've obviously never worked with a good project manager. A good PM is vital to a development team when they do the right thing. And I wouldn't dismiss marketing people either. They might be loathed, but marketing works.
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You've obviously never worked with a good project manager.
GP's statement being so popular says a lot about what kind of person usually works in such a position. In the end, it's not about what a project manager should do, it's what he/she actually does.
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The funny thing is: Project leader/Manager is a fucking hard Job, if done right.
a) balance the team internally: Stressful because balancing means stepping on somebodies toes.
b) meet the deadline: stressful because driving the team is stepping on sombodies toes. missing the deadline despite of that mean that management steps on the own toes.
c) Organize the transition between projects: either involves working twice as much for some time or being seen as a failure.
Lets be realistic. Nobody wants to do that Job
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To many layers are always bad. be it when wrapping stuff in programming to distribute the responsibility between the different abstractions or when managing.
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Then let them work with half as many employees as they need, like every other division in every company in America these days.
Corporate profits are way up, yet there's no jobs. People are being forced to do the work of two or three, lest they be fired into an (artificially) terrible job market.
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Corporate profits are way up, yet there's no jobs. People are being forced to do the work of two or three
The second sentence explains the first.
I think the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Is that many people haven't dealt with proper project managers, as in a manager who's job it is to oversee a protect and make everything work. They've dealt with "Project Managers" people who's title is PM and who believe they can attach themselves to any project, no matter how little they know about it, and "manage" it effectively.
Any project has a manager just because of how it works. Even a one man project, in that case the one guy manages it. For large projects, it is so complex that you need people who do nothing but deal with the management, the logistics, that kind of thing. A project manager, or in some industries a producer. A person who's focus is big picture, making sure everything is working and working to correct problems when they happen. That is valuable. However those people are generally people who are managers of that particular kind of thing. Someone who manages a large programming project effectively is likely just a manager of programmers, and probably has some understanding of how programming works.
However the people who identify themselves as "Project Managers" who find their role in life is just to manage random projects? Worthless normally. I've dealt with a few indirectly, and have friends who spoken, at great length, about them. They are people who attach themselves to projects in a company. They aren't someone in the normal structure of command, they just kind of slip in. Because of this, they've no real knowledge on any of the things they are doing. They don't understand the project. As such they tend to do useless shit like demand meetings with the developers to "See what you have," even when development is in the stage there is nothing running, or they ask useless questions like "How much time could you save if we skip the testing phase?" or "Let's not worry about what's possible right now." (really, I was in the room for that one). They just regurgitate stuff they learned from a book or a course, presuming it works for anything.
That seems to be the problem to me. A case of project management is useful but Project Managers are worthless. In my observation, "professional" Project Managers are a role the useless types work themselves in to. They don't have the skills to get themselves an actual management sort of job, they don't have the skills to really do anything, so they get themselves in the nebulous "I can manage any project even if I understand fuck-all about the technology, process, employees, and so on," position. That's where the dislike comes from I think.
I don't worry when I hear a project has a manager, that just tells me that people have bothered to think about who is in charge, who makes the decisions, who needs to make things run smooth. I worry when a project gets itself a "Project Manager" to "help things out." Someone who had no real involvement and doesn't have a clear position in teh chain of command.
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When is the last decade anyone said "Old Spice" as anything but a punchline for a joke before marketing people came up with those new commercials? I'm not saying market always works (not by a longshot) or is even always neccessary. But the idea that market *never* works, or even helps, is just fucking stupid. It's the kind of self-aggrandizing shit that programmers mumble about amongst themselves when they're just CONVINCED that they're product is so good that it doesn't *need* promotion.
Go have a look some
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I don't think anyone is saying marketing doesn't matter at all. I think people are saying that those who work in Marketing need a dose of reality, as well as a 50% reduction in headcount. That way the people who do Real Work (tm) can have more resources, while the (still important) work of Marketing still gets done; they'll just have to "work smarter", like everyone else. Why should they get treated differently?
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The bartender handed him a mirror.
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I'm sorry that you have not worked with, and apparently were not yourself, a truly good project manager. They are worth their weight in gold.
An awful lot of them are nearly useless, though, I'll give you that. I'll also give you that people making the promotion or hiring decisions rarely can tell the difference. Often whether a project is managed well or poorly is not clear until some time later.
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Products do not just sell themselves. From the perspective of actually producing a working product, sure Marketing types aren't going to help with that. From the perspective of selling a product (highlighting its strengths, downplaying its weaknesses, and convincing a potential customer that they need the product ) marketing types are essential.
Real developers might be the ones actually stringing code together to make the computers do fancy things, but there won't be any way to get paid without someone ou
Re:What sorts of jobs were these? (Score:5, Insightful)
Were these people programmers, graphics designers, server administrators, network administrators, network technicians and others who actually produce something of value?
Or were these people involved with "marketing", "project management" and other ill-defined positions that usually just suck resources away from those getting real work done?
Spoken like a true naively arrogant 16 year old.
Next time you have to do an upgrade on a live service that is used by millions of people, tell us how it goes without a project manager to define the work breakdown structure, a business analyst to capture functional requirements and produce a traceability matrix, someone to hand hold your valuable clients (you know, the ones who pay the wages?) during the transition...all those other positions that "suck resources away", in your elegant words.
There are good project managers and poor PMs. There are good BAs and poor BAs. It's one thing to chuck up a small web site with a couple of developers; it's quite another to do this in the real world, where if things go wrong you lose millions of dollars, good will, reputation, and customers.
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Curse those 16 YO's my friend, they will own you and be paying you within 10 years. I guarantee it.
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well its been my experience as time wares on that PMs, and BAs are getting farther and farther removed from the technical side. I have been in the industry about 10 years and when I started most of the BAs and PMs had at one time been programmers or admins themselves. They may have been doing the business side functions for awhile and might not have been educated in the latest technologies. They might have been COBOL programmers when we were using C++ and Java for instance, or former VAX guys while we we
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Maybe such a thing as a "Good" project manager exists, but I have yet to meet them. The best managers of a project have been the technical leads who's asses and reputations are on the line, not someone who's title is project manager.
It's been my experience that those with the title of project manager are there to act as an interface between management ( who doesn't like dealing with the techs directly ) and the techs themselves. This barrier in communication does more to complicate projects than it does t
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PMs are like PR, except on a micro level.
A good one will stay behind the scenes, make YOU look good while their bosses are watching in on whatever trickery you're doing.
Duh? (Score:2)
Management isn't about to fire themselves...
Think of parasites slowing killing its host.
OK maybe I am just having a bad day.
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Don't you mean..."Or were these people involved with "marketing", "project management" and other jobs I can't do so it doesn't affect me?"
Fixed that for you...
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If a company could cut 100% of its administrative staff, it would fucking do it tomorrow. In reality, even a small company needs someone to do bookkeeping, answer phone queries, deal with tax and other authorities, ensure compliance with health and safety laws, order coffee and take minutes at meetings, etc. etc. etc..
The same goes for what you call "marketing" and "project management" - do you really think companies just de
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Marketers without anything to market are useless. Programmers without marketing still produce important work, they'll just have to get the word out by reputation instead of glossy print. Is it harder to succeed without good marketing? Sure. It's just that it's *impossible* to succeed if you don't have something to sell.
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Programmers without marketing still produce important work,
Programmers without marketing produce work which languishes in obscurity until the company goes bankrupt. For people to become aware that your software exists, someone needs to let them know. That someone is doing marketing, even if it's the programmers themselves pimping their work on blogs or slashdot. Someone is doing marketing.
they'll just have to get the word out by reputation instead of glossy print.
What reputation? Awesomesoft and their new Awesomizer application have no reputation until people discover that Awesomizer really is awesome and buy it in droves. Then their new F
Hiring? (Score:3)
Great idea! I'm sure Yahoo laid-off all their best people first.
Re:Hiring? (Score:4, Interesting)
Great idea! I'm sure Yahoo laid-off all their best people first.
And I'm sure Yahoo doesn't hire just anybody off the street. It takes someone skilled to get hired at a big tech company like Yahoo. Obviously these offers are indicative of others' confidence.
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First, all companies make a few bad hiring decisions. Just because you managed to slip your way past a Yahoo interview doesn't mean you're any good. Secondly, if you need to cut 4% of your workforce, you start with the least productive 4%.
There is an exception to this which is when a company decides they are no longer going to work on X and they lay-off everybody who was working on that. In that case very talented people who are very good at X may get laid-off because the company's not doing X anymore. Of c
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Some companies do lay off their best people. A company gets too big, and the person cutting heads is completely disconnected from the people they're cutting, so they have no idea what the person contributes, just what their salary is.
At my former company, only the most junior people with very low salaries are still there. They no longer innovate, and can barely maintain existing systems. Apparently it looks good to shareholders in the short-term when they cut expenses.
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I was going to ask this too, I don't want to sound overly harsh, but why prioritise recruitment of what are quite possibly the bottom 4% of people from a company that's plummeted to about half it's previous worth in just a few years?
Wouldn't you be just as likely to find good talent by recruiting in general and hence possibly tempting over the ones who didn't get laid off and are hence possibly more capable rather than specifically targetting these folk who did?
Is this a recruitment drive based on sentiment
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I think it's pretty obvious. The unemployed are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to things like negotiating salary. If you're hiring someone that's employed, IN GENERAL (not always) you have to meet or beat their current salary. If you're hiring someone without a current job, anything looks better than unemployment benefits, so you can pay them less than you would have to otherwise. Makes business sense, even if it is soulless and cruel. (I find that a lot of things that make 'business sense' a
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Also having specialized i
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Also having specialized in-company knowledge is a good way to stay employed - particularly knowing how to maintain badly-coded dinosaur applications.
Pro Tip: Be the one to create the badly-coded dinosaur in the first place and you can cruise all the way to retirement telling junior coders that they just aren't smart enough to appreciate your genius design!
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yahoo = radioshack (Score:3)
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Yahoo still has a services contract with AT&T (formerly SBC, formerly Pacific Telesis, formerly Pacific Bell *sigh*), presumably, which is probably responsible for 90% of its income these days.
Besides the big name appeal what's the attraction? (Score:3)
Been seeing these ads myself on Craigslist and really don't understand it. The place is a cube farm, and while I know there's some knowledgeable people there, I highly doubt the braintrust in this layoff has any real appeal. Also, I know for a fact that they OVER HIRED from 2004 - 2007 because I was getting up to 5 calls a day from on-site and 3rd party recruiters for Yahoo, to the point that I wrote them a letter asking them to place me on whatever list they had for non-interested parties. That request actually did seem to work since the calls ceased. But it was common knowledge that they were hiring pretty much any warm body they could get their hands on.
If anything, I'd probably steer clear of these laid-off workers since I'm pretty sure it's a separation of the wheat from the chaff. With the sort of hiring practices they engage in, picking up a bunch of sub-par workers is all but assured and it's only wise to jettison them when you no longer have a need for extra warm bodies or need to make room for new candidates to take their place
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It's 4% of their worldwide staff, and as I stated, they were definitely over-hiring. That is, hiring just for the sake of it, to deny those employees to their competitors and to add to their braintrust. Statistically, you just can't retain them all.
I'm not saying they are terrible workers, just that having consulted scores of dotComs in the SV area, I know for a fact that yahoo was on a warm body hunt and that these are likely to be the lower echelon of those warm bodies.
Anyway, my post wasn't to disparage
Sorry, whats Yahoo? I havent used them in 10 years (Score:2)
Seriously, these guys should have dies 5 years ago.
In related news (Score:2)
Pabst Blue Ribbon is offering free beer to anyone still working at AltaVista.
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Just ONE? (Score:2)
Just ONE free beer? What happens when that initial buzz wears off and his wallet is still empty? Poor bastard.
Merry Christmas!! (Score:2)
christmas layoffs again? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Because, with the tax year ending in a couple of weeks, it keeps the books neat. And frankly, if this is your highest financial burden time of the year, that's your own choice.
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It's burdensome not just because of going on vacation or buying shit for your family, but also because nobody is hiring in the holiday season, because everybody else is going on their vacations.
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Could be worse, my last company let me go on my birthday... Try to get happy about that... Total waste of party...
Disappointed user... (Score:2)
Free, as in beer.... (Score:2)
One San Francisco brewery is offering a free beer to people from Yahoo who show their termination letters.
I see a huge business opportunity there - www.yahooterminationletters.com
Free beer? (Score:2)
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What do they even do?
Since they reject $45 billion takover bids, they must have a plan.
Re:Yahoo currently (Score:4, Informative)
They own Flickr. That's about the only product they own which is leader in its field though.
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Their email is either #1 or #2. If it's no longer #1, it was up until recently. They've branched out a lot and acquired a lot. Like Google, they were smart enough to realize they aren't in the "search engine" business, they are in the "get people to come to sites we run" business.
Re:Yahoo currently (Score:5, Informative)
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Let's wait and see if a significant number of employees are actually picked up. This smells more of publicity stunt that's gone viral - so everyone is getting on the bandwagon.
Or, less charitably, hoping to pick up a distressed former Yahoo employee or two at fire sale prices. If they actually were competitive
Re:Yahoo currently (Score:5, Informative)
No, yahoo mail has 55% market share in the US. That's over 3x gmail (15%). Yahoo sports is the biggest sports site on the net (bigger then fox sports), yahoo owns flickr, yahoo answers is a solid product. In terms of user minutes, they are also #3 on the internet (37.5 million user minutes), after facebook (41 million) and google (40 million). So yeah, they are still very relevent ;)
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Is that actual mail volume or number of accounts? Yahoo is the default email provider for AT&T DSL accounts, so that might skew things. How many people use their ISP-provided email accounts?
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If this is all true, people on slashdot are greatly underestimating Yahoo.
Yahoo is now perceived by geeks/slashdot posters as uncool, like Microsoft and Sony. This has no correlation with how they are doing in the real business world.
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Re:Yahoo currently (Score:5, Informative)
There is also yahoo answers which seems to be one of the bigger sites of it's type.
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But it only truly answers the question "How is babby formed?"
Re:Yahoo currently (Score:5, Interesting)
pipes.yahoo.com
Re:Yahoo currently (Score:4, Interesting)
One of those things they bought up and sort of forgot about.
Pipes wasn't an acquired product, it was built in-house at the now-defunct Yahoo! Brickhouse.
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Is Yahoo even relevant with anything anymore? They shut down their own search, they shut down geocities, no one really uses portal sites anymore and they don't make any hardware or provide services. The only thing I can think of is email, which is also is far away from popularity of gmail and hotmail. What do they even do?
Oh, they have a dying instant messenger (unless its already gone away?), a web based group system (can't be too hard to run) and at least used to have a decent photo sharing site.
I figure they have enough work to keep about 100 actual front line productive employees busy, and maybe 150 back office fluff, figure they should have about 250 full time seats. Depends how effective they are at outsourcing and contracting... Is the guy whom scrubs the toilets a yahoo employee or a contracted cleaning agency emplo
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So about 90% have to go.
I'd do some sort of sanity check on that figure if I were you. Do you really think any company can carry that much dead weight? That out of every $100 payroll cost $90 is just waste?
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I haven't used Yahoo! in this century. The only thing Yahoo! seems to do is clutter my google searches with "Yahoo! Answers" results, where the stupidest people humanity has to offer ask questions like (and these are actual questions from the site):
ok im kinda worryed here since my g/f got pregnant and all she isnt been havein her period do u think the baby is drinkin the blood??? she 6 month pregnant
and
I have been with my boyfriend for 6 months now,he's my absolute everything.But last week he got told he has bad 'Skin Cancer',When he told me i was heartbroken.Should i tell him that we should end it ? or should we stay together?:( x
They have news, using the same AP news wire that every newspaper and website on the planet has. They have webmail, which every other site offers. They have stupid flash games, like every other site on the planet. They have IM (which must have a whole ten or tw
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I was expecting Yahoo to basically be a small team of server nerds and not much else. How is 800 people 4% of the company?
What does a search engine do with close to 20,000 people?
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Are they all in San Francisco? When I did the math, I decided that I would need about a $300K pre-tax salary to approximate my standard of living there. I have never understood how people make it on less.
A lot are in the Bay Area if not specifically SF itself, yeah. They used to have a pretty big campus further down the peninsula near San Jose; I don't know if that's still the case or not.
Mostly, they survive by renting and not buying, and sometimes by having roommates. Other than housing it really is not that expensive to live there. You also need less money (and living space) if you're youngish and single as many tech workers in the area are.
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Yeah, they're far away from the popularity of Gmail's 15% of the market with Yahoo Mail's 55%. Yahoo also owns one of the biggest and busiest photo storage and sharing service on the 'net - Flickr. Their fant
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in a company the size of yahoo, i can't imagine that laying off 400 will really bring them to profitability.
If you assume an all in cost (not just salary) of $100k/employee; that's an annual saving of $40mil. It may not balance the books but it is a start. Anybody know YAHOO's cash flow last year?
Re:does 4% really balance the books (Score:4, Interesting)
in a company the size of yahoo, i can't imagine that laying off 400 will really bring them to profitability.
If you assume an all in cost (not just salary) of $100k/employee; that's an annual saving of $40mil. It may not balance the books but it is a start. Anybody know YAHOO's cash flow last year?
Hit finance.yahoo.com for YHOO and they list over thirteen thousand employees (can't possibly be correct? what could they all be doing?) and lists an annual revenue of $6B although I can't imagine where that came from... all from banner advertising? And miraculously they are currently profitable?
Compared to GOOG they have about half the employees yet only a quarter the revenue.
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Hit finance.yahoo.com for YHOO and they list over thirteen thousand employees (can't possibly be correct? what could they all be doing?)
The figure was something like 14,300 employees before the layoff, so that sounds about right. The reason for the high head count is that there is no effective project management, a sprawling codebase and (amongst the US programmers) no awareness or understanding of coding for multiple locales.
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Your right, thank god they laid off 600 instead...
After all, since they are laying off 600 people, and it's 4%, that would mean the workforce was 15,000. That being said,a s of Sept, 2010 they reported 13,900 employees.
Since the average individual is making 40-50K yearly (we'll leave benefits and other HR stuff out for simplicity), that's a savings of $24,000,000-$30,000,000 yearly. While it may not look like much on paper, since the company's net income available is $1,000,000,000 ($1B), that's about 3%.
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It depends.
Smart Companies only lay off workers who are doing job that they really don't need anymore. So dropping a non-core or poor growth business unit, or where technology has replaced their usefulness.
Stupid Companies do blind layoffs being that it takes 150% more money to hire each employee. So if they are laying off people only to rehire those positions they are actually spending more then keeping the employee.
So for these people they may be part of a business unit or department that isn't needed as
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Maybe he's one of those people that thinks people should be laid off individually for being dead weight, instead of cutting 4% across the board and hoping to get the dead weight. With such a sloppy cut, you're bound to lose quite a few really good people, too.
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"Other terrorist groups"? Seriously?
People still need to be told that not every Muslim is a terrorist? Really? Even W got that one right.
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But...he got to stick it to the man! That's got to be worth something...right?