Posted 11/19/09 at 11:45:38 AM by Paul Lilly

Today's WTF moment is brought to you by AOL. The struggling ISP recently told investors it would spend $200 million trimming down a large portion of its staff, but up until now, the suits in charge didn't say how they planned to do it. According to CEO Tim Armstrong, AOL is looking for "up to 2,500 volunteers," CNet reports.

Raising your hand for a pink slip doesn't quite have the same effect as barging into the boss man's office and telling him to to 'take this job and shove it,' so we're curious how AOL's volunteer program plays out.

The 'step forward and enjoy the holidays on unemployment' program begins on December 4, just a few days before AOL spins off from Time Warner. So in other words, AOL employees must choose whether to leave on their own free will and start the job hunt right away, or roll the dice and hope they won't end up with a pink slip anyway as AOL moves to cut its annual operating expenses by $300 million. Sounds about as much fun as Russian Roulette, but hey, at least the investors are happy.

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Posted 11/04/09 at 08:08:18 AM by Paul Lilly

It's not been a very good year for Novell employees, who never know what the next day will bring. For 100 to 130 workers out of Novell's roughly 3,900 global employees, this week brought more pink slips, CNet reports.

CNet's sources are saying that the Workgroup division saw the most layoffs, but according to Ian Bruce, Novell's public-relations director, the cuts sliced "across the company, both geographically and productwise."

Ironically enough, Linux jobs in general are doing a smashing job and are up 6 percent ince January, according to data from Dice.com. So if there's a silver lining to all this, Novell employees that were let go might not have such a rough spot finding employment elsewhere. In the meantime, they'll have several months of severance pay to tide them over, which is based on the number of years they were with the company, plus other factors.

And what about those who still have employment at Novell? The company also announced it would suspending 401(k) matching contributions.

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Posted 11/02/09 at 08:10:11 AM by Paul Lilly

Citing un-named industry sources, news and rumor site DigiTimes reports ECS is aggressively looking for notebook engineers to replace its depleted staff of mobile gurus. The company is reportedly looking to pluck talent for several second-tier notebook players, including First International Computer, Cleveo, Foxconn, and Compal.

The notebook market continues to sizzle and isn't showing any signs of slowing down. Unfortunately for ECS, some 80 technical specialists and executives from its notebook division have recently jumped ship, leaving in their wake an R&D gap. The exodus has also put some projects on hold.

Tapping into growing notebook sales would also help ECS rebound from what's so far been a disappointing fiscal year. In the first three quarters, ECS reported consolidated revenues of around $1.71 billion, which represents a drop of 18.32 percent on year.

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Posted 10/28/09 at 01:35:31 PM by Paul Lilly

At nearly 10 percent, the unemployment rate is the highest it's been in 26 years, or a little over a quarter of a century. Nevertheless, SMBs are looking to the coming year with optimism and planning to hire rather than lay off more workers, suggests a new study.

Intuit Payroll pinged over 1,000 SMB owners and found that 44 percent have plans to hire in the next year, and 60 percent are expecting their businesses to grow. But there's also a bit of a quandary SMBs find themselves in.

Nearly 90 percent of the survey participants indicated health insurance benefits as key to attracting and retaining good employees, but 58 percent don't offer healthcare benefits, with nearly half saying they simply can't afford it.

"There's a wideing gap of expectations," said Nora Denzel, senior vice president of Intuit's Employee Management Solutions Division. "On one hand, we as a society assume that health and retirement benefits are part of every employee's compensation package. And yet even as these small businesses gear up to hire, according to our results, small businesses are leery about what those benefits will cost."

Intuit also found that only 1 percent of respondents reported receiving federal stimulus money, even though 74 percent admit that they are probably not taking advantage of all the benefits made available to them under the federal economic stimulus plan.

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Posted 09/16/09 at 08:43:46 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Google made a bit of a surprising move recently by openly stating it wanted to hire away Yahoo search engineers. Google’s senior search blogger, Matt Cutts, said, “If you’re an excellent Yahoo engineer with solid experience in search, Google is hiring.”

The search giant may feel able to snatch skittish talent from Yahoo as the Microsoft deal closes. Microsoft has agreed to take on 400 Yahoo employees, but no assurances have been made beyond that. Given the uncertainty, many may be willing to jump ship for Google.

Ask.com has also been going after these employees. At a recent expo, Ask called out Yahoo employees with a banner reading, “My company just gave up on search. Where do I work now?”

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Posted 08/24/09 at 12:15:04 PM by Paul Lilly

Forget about all this talk of losses and job cuts, the economy is apparently doing just fine for Facebook, the social networking site which boasts the most users. It's doing so well that mark Zuckerberg told Bloomberg news agency in an interview that the company plans to increase its staff by as much as 50 percent before the end of the year.

As it currently stands, Facebook claims 900 employees, so by our math, the planned hiring would put the worker count up to 1,350 strong. And why not when your list of investors includes venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Accel Partners, Microsoft, and Russian Internet firm Digital Sky Technologies.

But not all social networking sites are looking to expand. MySpace in June announced plans to reduce its U.S.-based workforce by 30 percent and two-thirds of its international employees.

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Posted 08/11/09 at 11:30:40 AM by Paul Lilly

Commercialized PC repair services like Best Buy's Geek Squad and, when it was still around, Circuit City's Firedog are often mocked for being over priced and under qualified, the latter of which might be an unfair generalization. Or maybe not, now that we've seen Geek Squad's CompTIA A+ preparation exam.

The exam questions were sent in to Gizmodo from an "anonymous tipster," and while some of the multiple choice answers are a bit amusing, you'd be hard pressed to find a question/answer combo that you couldn't answer correctly without too much thought. For example:

Q: What is the most effective way to increase the performance of your PC?

• Upgrade your processor from Intel to AMD
• Tweak the registry for maximum efficiency
• Installing more RAM
• Use your PC for shorter periods during the day

It doesn't get any more challenging than that out of the six samples Gizmodo posted. And we suddenly understand why a dislodged hard drive cable was so hard to diagnose.

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Posted 03/26/09 at 10:30:32 AM by Paul Lilly

Citing an internal document, The Wall Street Journal reports IBM, who was recently ranked No. 3 on the "Corporate Citizens" list, plans to issue its largest number of layoffs in terms of revenue and employment, with 180,000 employees worldwide. Of them, IBM will cut a "large number" of US employees in its business service unit and look to India to fill the void, the Journal states.

According to "people familiar with the situation," the number of US jobs being cut isn't known, as IBM typically remains tight-lipped when it comes to layoffs. However, earlier this year IBM had sent notices of layoffs to roughly 4,600 US employees in its software, sales, semiconductor, and finance groups.

While this might be the largest shift in IBM's history, the company has also been linked to acquisition talks with Sun Microsystems. According to a New York Times article last week, IBM is considering spending nearly $7 billion to merge with Sun. Layoffs and job shifts would be one way to help fund the venture, which would have IBM and Sun accounting for about 65 percent of the market share for server computers running Unix and 42 percent of the total server market.

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