Sun to Cut 5000 Jobs

codemachine writes "In one of Jonathan Schwartz's first acts as CEO, Sun Microsystems has announced that they are cutting up to 5,000 jobs over the next 6 months. The company plans to sell property it owns in Newark, Calif., and to exit leases at a site in Sunnyvale, Calif. Analysts will be pleased that Sun has finally taken steps to cut costs, but what will this mean for the future of the company?"

Yeah, it sucks

[porkThreeWays]

Yeah it sucks badly to lose your job, but it doesn't really mean Sun is going down the hole. It means they are cutting the fat. I don't know how profitable of a company they are, but this is typical of companies that are trying to be all things to all people. It generally means they are going to re-focus on their core market (what actually made them money in the first place).

I remember when Amazon refocused. They were selling so many ridiculuos (to ship) items, there were many products you could get at a local store that cost more to ship than the product itself!

Contract Workers are Still Needed

[C-Shalom]

What Sun hasn't mentioned is that contract workers are still needed, in great supply. Even during, and after, the job cuts contract workers will be needed. I'm not just talking about 3mo gigs, 1+ year contract workers will be in high demand. If you're damned good, they may even hire you on. All their doing is cutting the fat, not the muscle.

Forget , what about stock options?

[SangoDaze]

I took a Unix systems programming class from Sun about five years ago and it was very good. The only downside to the class were the attitudes of some of the Sun employees that were in there. They repeatedly told the rest of the class that they "didn't really need to know this stuff" and that they were "web guys" or "java gui guys" and that the nuts and bolts of Unix were tangential. When they were in the room they spent most of their time talking about the price of Sun's stock. It was hard to imagine how the company was going to go forward when so many employees seemed to think that their core products (Unix servers) were not really worthy of learning about.

I really like Sun's stuff and I hope that they are able to make a big comeback; but they are not going to do it counting on the folks that were in my class.

i doubt these jobs are disappearing

[castlec]

I know people who work for Sun here in CZ. I also went through their interview process while I was looking for a job in January. Sun decided a long time ago that continued investment in the US was a waste of money. They directly told me they had no interest in having new employees in the US. Their operations have been growing in eastern Europe and India. The layoffs come as no surprise to me at all. They have been creating the redundancy to be able to let go of people for a while.

Re:business model?

[molarmass192]

From personal experience, we *used* to buy Sun because they had top notch hardware (E450 being the glaring exception ... POS) and top notch service. Solaris never factored into our equation. Like I've said repeatedly, kill that sick Solaris horse, it's time has come and gone, hanging on to it will only serve to sink the ship. The market wants Linux, in fact it's been a few YEARS since we looked at Solaris in our stack, at least in house. Sun needs to dump Solaris, and make a firm stand behind Linux. Sadly, I think that by open sourcing Solaris, they somehow think this will make it more competitive with Linux, hopefully the new CEO understands that the market doesn't want OpenSolaris, that stategy is about 7 years too late. I'd like to be able to source mid range x86 hardware from Sun. Their Fire X line is good, but it's tough to sell Sun and Linux on a project, unlike HP or IBM with Linux.

Re:Stock

[bladesjester]

Funny you should mention that. I was watching the news the other day and the stock ticker was going on merrily across the bottom of the screen.

Most things were down. Sun started out at +.10 when I first noticed. By the time I changed the channel, it was at +.16

Explains the new Sun building in Hyderabad, India.

[goodgautam]

I Guess this explains the new Sun Microsystems building I see getting built in my city....

Re:The company?!?!?

[EastCoastSurfer]

Of course this is anecdotal, but we've been trying to hire someone now for 6 months. Out of all the people we've interview only one was even remotely qualified and he took a different job. Have you thought that maybe those former programmers/sysadmins aren't qualified to do anything else? It's interesting because even through the economy down turn we had from the internet bubble hangover, qualified people I knew had no problems finding good, well paying jobs. Hell, I have 2 job offers open on the table right now. I'm just negotiating on salary...

Re:What was the marketing failure?

[pete6677]

Initially, the big problem was they claimed Java could do absolutely anything. Remember the jokes about the Java-enabled toaster? Once Java failed to live up to its initial promises, they failed to market it to a more appropriate environment, like business applications. Businesses and software companies made this popular on their own. Then there was the laughable Java Desktop. Then the licensing issues: are they going to open source it or not? Is Java proprietary or not? Once Sun makes up their mind exactly how they are going to allow Java to be used, companies are going to be a lot more comfortable about it and I see it surpassing .net.

Re:Doh

[superpat]

Disclosure - I am a Sun employee. Hopefully unaffected by this move. I am speaking for myself here, not for the company.

Having said that, this is a targeted cut. Not a cheese-paring '10% everywhere' as has happened in the past. The execs have taked a hard look at our business and decided that we'll focus on what makes sense for Sun. Areas that don't make the cut will be, well, cut. What's remaining will be left intact.

In fact, my group has open [sun.com] reqs [sun.com] that we are actively filling. Unusually, these are entry-level positions. If you're fresh out of college and want to 'live in interesting times', as the Chinese proverb has it, then take a look.

Cheers,

Pat

Re:business model?

[rdavis542]

The hardware is still top notch, especially the AMD64 boxes that they have produced the last year or two. Screamingly fast in web servers (my companies websitse run completely on sun/solaris/apache/php) and pretty damn stable (close to a year of uptime since being implemented). Solaris 10 Sparc and X86 are also probably the best releases Sun has had for years, ZFS right around the corner, the zones implementation (allowing prod/QA/test all to reside on one box but somewhat seperate from each other), the new services implementation which allow for role-based access control eases the burden from having to start services for app admins/developers. While all this stuff probably isn't new in the Linux front, it's fantastic for large scale companies with numerous layers of IT depts.

a feasible SUN strategy (Re:business model?)

[Anonymous Coward]

As others have noted, SUN maintains the luster of quality hardware (well deserved), and I'm sure it shows in good part due to Solaris' support for them.

One strategy for SUN is to follow the steps of IBM - expand support/build consulting business while maintaining its hardware/research quality. SUN's much smaller than IBM, but both are quite similar in that their greatest assets are quality hardware and engineering reputation. An importnat but subtle advantage is SUN controls Java.