EMC, the storage giant has announced that the company is expected to layoff 2,400 employees for its current workforce. The expected number of employees to be laid off makes 7% of the total workforce of EMC. The announcement came in despite the expected record fourth quarter revenues. These layoffs are also part of the company restructuring. The company which recently acquired SourceLabs, is expected to cut $350 million in costs this year and by the next year $500 million.
According to EMC’s chief executive, Joe Tucci:
We managed our costs and investments very carefully throughout 2008. However, we believe this additional program will help us strike the right balance between achieving higher levels of efficiency and sustaining strong business agility and performance.
The layoff of big companies would create countless miserable families.
Look at them:
http://www.listen2helps.com/search.php?category=68
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Prior to this layoff, many employees accepted a 5% reduction in their salaries and took one for the team, which they presumed would ensure their jobs were safe when time became economically more stable. This being said, the employees were more at ease psychologically feeling EMC had looked out for them. This directly impacted the productivity of the organization; happy employees are more productive and interactive, and are more compliant to put in extra time and energy to meet their deliverable dates. After all, they looked out for us; we can at least be as generous. In hindsight, I feel this was a ruse which misled the employees into a false feeling of security. Because, once the salaries were adjust back, the layoffs began. Good engineers are for lack of a better term “pattern recognition machines”. If there are changes with regards to a known process, they will want to understand why. Why the change to deliverables, product deadlines, changes in management, which groups are we training to “help” with the workload, paralanguage in all hands meetings, side stepping direct questions, having a high ranking manager in an all hands meeting explicitely say we’re going to purchase a number of American companies and move the jobs to India, and then quit 2 weeks later, having co-workers tasks minimized to the point of trivial code-monkey work, having you’re laptop at work basically locked down with security software. All these items paint a much more precise picture and contradicts the purpose of the 5% reduction in salary.
I’ve seen documentation going all the way back to January 1, 2010 indicating the layoff process was already defined and would be implemented in the near future. So, the 5% pay cut was a not what it claimed to be. There was no caring ideology such as Southwest Airlines “no-layoff” policy being implemented. The only consideration was money… share holders, capital to purchase more companies, a really nice bonus for upper management perhaps. I would also like to know where I can explicitely see the buyout prices of some of these companies, since they were not explicitely published via the news media. I’ve inspected the EDGAR reports publish on the SEC website, and it is quite unclear what was done, or even if the data was published at all. I would like to see for example something equivalent to; HP bought OpsWare for 1.6 Billion as defined in Wiki… was at least 1.0+ billion if this figure is incorrect. I know for a fact that EMC has currently made a hostile bid to acquire Data Domain in an attempt to beat out NetApps. From my reading, companies such as Voyence gave nothing to their employees. The press I’ve read indicated that Voyence had a superior product to Opsware, and needed an enterprise solution to capture the market. So it appears that Voyence either managed their capital and resources poorly or, that there was a big payday that was obfuscated in the documents presented to the SEC…
My last thoughts are in regards to the statement that lays offs where used to accomplish a more efficient and streamlined process. First, laying off employees having years of domain knowledge of the product is an extremely foolish move. So, you may be able to get a collect grad who has no industry experience for 45-50K however, it will take at least 1 year to be as productive as experienced group members. And perhaps longer to developer a strong relationship of mutual respect and the ability to converse with co-workers. Software developers do not like to be frequently asked trivial questions. The Agile process does not permit this. Lastly, layoffs are most generally executed to please the stock holders by knocking the price of the shares up. It would quite nice to be trading options with all the knowlege of buyouts and layoffs. I would at the very least have some money to retire on after previously working for WorldCom…
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