This past year I have been recruited and recruited to jump ship for better pay. One prospect was stamps.com, which was hiring a LOT of people. Six months later it layed off half of them. No one is buying laser printed UPC stamps off the web and the vulture capitalists want to stem the outward flow of money.
It turns out that being too busy to respond to offers may have been good luck for me.
I don't know what to think about all the twenty-somethings who went to work for dotcom turkeys thinking that they were starting "careers." In my life I have learned the hard way that you don't rely on employers or buy their hype.
Peter Kosenko
---------- Original Message ---------------------------------- From: "Steve Perry" <sperry at usinternet.com> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 12:24:27 -0600
>
>How the ax falls
>Layoffs are never easy, but doing it the dot-com way is just plain dumb.
>
>- - - - - - - - - - - -
>By Salon Technology & Business staff
>
>Tone-deaf at Listen.com
>
>Hire, hire, hire -- whoops, time to start firing. At Listen.com layoffs came
>right on the heels of steady expansion. "They kept hiring people in
>editorial as late as November," says one former employee. "Plus, managers
>were really tough about allowing people to take vacation time over the
>Christmas holidays. Management said, 'Look, we can't have everyone going
>off -- we're really gonna need you.'"
>
>But by the Tuesday after New Year's, Listen.com execs were singing a
>different tune. Staffers received voice-mail messages instructing them to be
>at the office by 10 a.m. sharp, at which time they would receive an e-mail
>directing them to one of two rooms for a mandatory meeting.
>
>"At that point," said our informant, "the jig was up." The next morning, he
>received an e-mail telling him to report to an inauspicious locale: the
>small conference room on the office's lower floor.
>
>The news was delivered with a heavy dose of euphemistic jargon. "We were
>told: 'As you know, there's been a restructuring, and you have been affected
>by the restructuring.'" And just in case staffers hadn't quite gotten the
>gist, "they said, basically, 'You have 45 minutes to get out of the
>building.' They had boxes ready for us to pack our stuff up in."