layoffs

The Guardian is reporting that George Oates, along with two others on the Flickr team have been let go as a part of this week's Yahoo layoffs. Oates was one of the first employees at Flickr before its acquisition by Yahoo in 2005, and more notably its former chief designer.

Flickr, along with its Yahoo sister site Delicious, are well known for having a minimal, and angular user interface. Oates was a big part of that. After her stint as Flickr's chief designer, Oates moved on to become a senior program manager where she headed up Flickr's Commons project.… Read more

Yahoo began laying off 1,520 employees around the world on Wednesday as the company tries to deal with its financial difficulties.

Here's what outgoing Chief Executive Jerry Yang had to say to employees about it in a memo that uses his trademark lowercase style.

yahoos,

today, most of our layoffs in the US are happening, and they've been underway in other regions around the world.

this is a tough time for all of us and i wanted to take a moment to reach out to you.

saying goodbye to colleagues and friends is never easy. they all … Read more

Sony announced Tuesday it's cutting 5 percent of its full-time workforce, in addition to a sizable chunk of contractors, and delaying investment in some factories. It's all part of the Japanese electronics giant's plan to save money amid the troubled global economic environment.

The total annual savings will eventually amount to $1.1 billion by early 2010, the company says. But will it be enough? Sony's current struggles are well known, and it's not clear that cutting just 16,000 positions and a few factories is going to get the unwieldy behemoth back on track. … Read more

Web video-rental store Netflix has laid off 50 technical specialists, the people who typically do most of the trouble-shooting for customers with tech issues, such as struggling to connect the service to their laptop or set-top boxes.

Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, said 15 of the company's 65 technical specialists will join the 300-person Customer Service group. According to Swasey, Netflix also plans to add 50 more people to its customer service unit sometime after the New Year.

Swasey said there just wasn't as much need to keep so many tech specialists. He credited Microsoft's Silverlight with … Read more

Editor's note: This is part of a series of stories about the recession's effect on the tech industry.

News gathering and job hunting during a down economy aren't unalike, says longtime technology industry reporter Robert Mullins. They both require spending inordinate amounts of time trying to get people on the phone, trolling the Web for leads and swallowing lots and lots of rejection.

For most of the past decade, Mullins covered Silicon Valley, writing about servers and open-source software at publications like Software Development Times and NetworkWorld. Like most seasoned reporters covering the tech sector, it meant … Read more

Editor's note: This is part of a series of stories about the recession's effect on the tech industry.

With the calendar winding down, the hours get hardest when Andy Erickson and his wife, Andrea, are forced to take out their checkbook and do the math.

"We see the finish line in December before we have to dive into personal savings," says the unemployed 39-year-old father of three. "It can turn into a tense talk between us for a couple of hours."

For the last 15 years, Erickson had steady work as an IT consultant, … Read more

Media and music company RealNetworks started to conduct companywide layoffs on Thursday, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the events. One source said that employees were being notified over the course of the day in a series of meetings. RealNetworks PR representatives declined to comment on the matter.

About 130 of the approximately 1800 RealNetworks employees have been laid off, which comes out to just over seven percent, a source close to the company said. The cuts were spread across the company's departments and regional offices, the source added.

Earlier on Thursday, gossip blog Gawker had reported that … Read more

A report on PaidContent suggests that InterActiveCorp, the media conglomerate owned by Barry Diller, may be looking to sell off some of its smaller ad-supported content properties--effectively, tossing assets overboard to lighten the load during rough financial seas.

According to PaidContent, IAC may be "dissolving" its "programming" group, a set of ad-supported content businesses that includes CollegeHumor, 236.com (a joint venture with The Huffington Post), Very Short List, and the brand-new The Daily Beast. The restructuring reportedly involves the departure of Nick Lehman, chief operating officer of the programming group.

A CollegeHumor executive told CNET … Read more

Update at 7:59 a.m. PST: A RealNetworks representative quashes a rumor about a RealNetworks-MTV joint venture.

The long-expected layoffs at Viacom, parent company of MTV Networks, have finally taken place.

According to an internal memo (first leaked to gossip blog Gawker), 850 positions have been cut. That amounts to 7 percent of the company's workforce.

"Our advantages and best efforts can't completely protect Viacom from the very serious and broad-based challenges of this economic recession," CEO Philippe Dauman wrote in the e-mail. "Viacom's long-term health will depend on our shared commitment to … Read more