Yet another big, successful company feels the crunch; 500 people were eliminated from AMD’s worldwide operations today, although AMD did not say what jobs were cut or where. We haven’t heard similar announcements from the other major players in AMD’s game, Intel and NVIDIA; the former may be banking on the its new Core i7s to buoy earnings, the latter probably made a packet on… → Read More
Really now. I would have expected the Death Star to lay off people before EA would. I guess the Empire had a pretty solid economy, though. It seems that although EA is doing well in the long term, it’s cautious of incurring too much in costs during the downturn. Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll be having Maddens for years to come, but a 6 percent reduction in headcount at… → Read More
Since our last update a week ago, we’ve added 18,885 job eliminations at tech and media companies to our Layoff Tracker. That brings the total to 38,538 layoffs across 108 companies over the past two months.
Some of the bigger reductions this week came from Motorola (3,000), Qwest (1,200), and Electronic Arts (600). Among startups, there were job cuts at Revision3 (10), Emusic (10), Sugar… → Read More
This has been a brutal month or so for tech layoffs. According to our Layoff Tracker, there have been 19,683 job eliminations at tech companies announced since mid-September, and we’re not even counting the 24,600 people at Hewlett-Packard who are being eliminated as a result of its merger with EDS.
But only five big companies make up more than 90 percent of the layoffs: Xerox (3,000), Dell… → Read More
In a post on his blog, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis has announced that his human powered search engine has laid off 10% of its staff. Along with the layoffs Calacanis writes that the company will be doing some “smart things” to help cut costs, including outsourcing much of its editorial department to freelancers instead of in-house staff. Calacanis pegs the number of full-time staff cut at… → Read More
Jaxtr, a startup that offers VoIP serivce as well as a social network, has laid off 13 of its employees and has been added to the layoff tracker. As of June 2008 the company had 35 employees (we’ve asked the company for the current count). Update: The company now has 30 full time employees.
CEO Konstantin Guericke says that the company is well positioned to weather the economic downturn, as… → Read More
After Silicon Valley woke up to the economic crisis last week and VCs rang the alarm bells, startups are starting to heed the call and tighten their belts for a long winter. As the slide above from Sequoia Capital illustrates, belt-tightening now may be the most prudent thing a startup can do. While nobody likes layoffs, least of all the employees losing their jobs, it increases a startup’s… → Read More
Zivity, the adult social network and media site that describes itself as a “community-powered showcase of female beauty”, has laid off 1/3 of its staff, cutting back from 22 employees to 14. (Again, 1/3 seems to be the magic number – Jive and Seesmic have both laid off about a third of their staff in the last week).
Zivity is in a unique position as one of the only venture capital backed sites… → Read More
It’s not a happy day at San Francisco-based Adbrite this morning. The company is laying off 40 employees, which is 40% of total staff. Among those that are leaving are VP Marketing Paul Levine and VP Finance Bob Feller.
This is the second Sequoia-backed startup to report significant layoffs after last week’s meeting where Sequoia warned the CEOs of their portfolio companies of the long lasting… → Read More
When it comes to layoffs, 1/3 of total staff seems to be a magic number. Portland based Jive Software, which is backed by Sequoia, laid off around 40 people today, a third of their total staff. This follows massive employee growth over the last year. Twelve months ago the company had around 60 employees.
Two Vice Presidents are among those that left – Marty Kagan, VP Engineering and Scott… → Read More
It’s time to start slamming the reality of the Silicon Valley situation home to everyone. Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur lets seven employees go, he says, which is more than a third of the company. This comes on top of three employees let go a couple of weeks ago.
“We cut everything that wasn’t outsourceable, core or absolutely necessary for the company.”
Le Meur says the company isn’t in dire… → Read More
[Please see the update at the end of this post.] According to VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall, the US division of Virgin Mobile is considering the layoffs in the face of poor stock performance. Those affected would come mostly from the Northern California offices in Walnut Creek along with some marketing and sales people in New Jersey. → Read More
Sprint announced today that it’ll be laying off 4,000 people and closing 125 of its stores in the hopes of saving $700 million to $800 million in labor costs for 2008. It’ll also close 4,000 of its stalls and kiosks normally found in retail stores (it currently has about 20,000). The stock fell almost 19% in light of the announcement. So is Sprint in trouble? Maybe, but new CEO Dan… → Read More
CNET reports that Intel will likely cut thousands of jobs as part of a bid to increase company efficiency. Paul Otellini, CEO of the Santa Clara based chipmaker, is expected to make the announcement within the next week. The mass layoffs stem from the results of an internal audit dating from April of this year. The cuts are expected to affect as much as 10 percent of Intel’s 100,000… → Read More
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