Sun slashes up to 6,000 jobs Before the markets opened on Wall Street this morning, Sun Microsystems did what most of us expected it would soon do after years of flatline revenues and a lack of profits or losses in many quarters: slash the employee headcount again, and this time a little deeper to appease investors and to get back to profitability. Sun …
Does anyone know how much the top brass at Sun makes? It would be nice if, in articles like this, we could see how much money top management makes so we can see just how greedy they really are. If you're in such dire straights that you need to fire 15-18% of your staff to become profitable, you should also be making significant pay cuts across the board for the overpaid top management.
Maybe Jonathan should try being a real leader, like Lee Iacocca. When Iacocca turned Chrysler around the last time, he worked for $1/year in salary, taking only options. That way, he couldn't make any money if Chrysler didn't make any money. Jonathan could save quite a few employees jobs if he didn't take his salary for a year, and with his $4M bonus already collected this year, he won't be hurting. Only the everyday employees will be hurting, getting no raises (even though Computerworld surveys show most IT shops will be paying 3% raises on average this year), and no recognition. How does he reconcile that with creating a new executive position, with the accompanying stock options and high salary?
Canceling the Power of Sun survey indicates that employee feedback isn't valued during this transition.
Kinda weird. Every time someone's upset with Schwartz they take it out on his ponytail. What's up with that? Would it be better if it were a braid?
The venom sometimes seems to be from folks who are current or former sun employees and haven't worked for enough other companies to know just how bad it can get or how good they have it. The movie Office Space wasn't too far off from some of the companies out there.
Erm, didn't Chris Mellor's article on the 12th point out that Sun would actually have to hack off about 12,000 to break even? Unless that lower figure includes a large swathe of highly-paid mid-to-upper management (unlikely) I think even 9,000 would be on the low side.
Though Rock should be dead, I can't see Ponytail giving it up that easily. It does give him an excuse to announce a delay in launch for another year or more, maybe even long enough to sort out the remaining bugs, but by then it would likely be to late to be competitive.
"A lot of heads seem to be rolling in the marketing department as part of the restructuring. Sun said in its statement that it is moving marketing closer to the sales and product organizations...Overall corporate marketing will be done by Ingrid Van Den Hoogen, now a senior vice president and reporting directly to Schwartz."
This could be very good news. Marketing dead wood finally being cleared out after Sun's continual image problem over being able to effectively market a product portfolio that is the strongest ever? Anil Gadre being moved sideways? A new head of marketing reporting directly to JIS?
Interesting perspective provided here by Ben Rockwood:
http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/
Certainly more balanced and less hysterical than you'd get from El Reg's resident HP sales troll.
Oh, hi Matt! :)
Under McNealy Sun were loathe to cut jobs - how many companies have an attitude towards staff liek that? I dunno about Schwarz, but Sun still seems to fight the Wall Street thirst for job cuts. Funny that these cuts are partly a result of the economic problems that Wall Street monkeys caused. Sure, Sun management hasn't been great, but there are much less humane companies who will sack you without batting and eyelid, and their CEO will take home a lot more.
"....Funny that these cuts are partly a result of the economic problems that Wall Street monkeys caused...." Yeah, stoooopid Wall Street for making al those dumb product and business decisions, nothing at all to do with McNealy nor Schwartz.
Get a grip! Sun dug its own gi-normous hole, Wall Street is just kicking the dirt back into the hole which is rapidldly turning into Sun's grave.
Here here... I agree, McNeally had his issues, but being a bad leader was not one of them. If he hadn't grown head count so fast, there may not have been the need for the number of cuts now, though. McNeally always talked about not hiring a bunch of nuckleheads, but they started hiring so fast, that this is exactly what they did. I think McNeally semi-retired just so that he did not have to do the actual lay offs.
Schwartz seems to not be much of a leader. Schwartz talks a lot and doesn't seem to execute. Schwarts was supposed to be the cut man, but he's even failed at doing that very well. He, however, has great vision (which is important in a leader). He just needs to learn execution.
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