BlackBerry Cuts 250 Workers, Calls It Efficiency 68
First time accepted submitter Dawn Kawamoto writes "Want to become more efficient? Try lopping off 250 workers. That's what BlackBerry did this week — saying it was a move to become more efficient. From the article: '“This is part of the next stage of our turnaround plan to increase efficiencies and scale our company correctly for new opportunities in mobile computing. We will be as transparent as possible as those plans evolve,” says Lisette Kwong, a company spokeswoman.'"
Clickbait Summary and Dice article. (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, laying off staff can improve efficiency if they're not doing anything useful or have become surplus to requirements. There's a reason it's called "being made redundant."
P.S. Fuck you Dice, /. was a news aggregator long before you ever came along and probably will be long after you've folded. If I wanted to read half-baked op-ed pieces I'd buy a fucking newspaper.
Re:Clickbait Summary and Dice article. (Score:5, Insightful)
This. At risk of feeding the Obamacare troll, Canada hasn't had much change in their healthcare system since going socialized quite a few years ago. For some reason the terrible costs and market distortion from it didn't stop RIM/Blackberry from becoming iconic in the 2000s. So we are to believe that healthcare is the cause of their decline now? That it has nothing to do with hubris, inertia and having their asses kicked by Apple and Android vendors?
Re:Clickbait Summary and Dice article. (Score:5, Insightful)
So when your manager says "I don't understand what you do, so it must be easy" he's some kind of genius, right?
Mostly board members are due diligence on the senior execs. If everything is going well, and the CEO's not trying to make any big changes this quarter, they don't need to do much. If the company didn't make it's numbers, they're the ones who can fire the CEO if he doesn't appease them (and I've seen the CEO of a company I've worked for fired twice now -it really does happen). If the CEO wants to re-org the company, make an acquisition, or add some new line of business, he has to sell that to the board.
"All" the board members do is use their judgment - but they have lots of money at stake, and CEOs are champions bullshitters as a rule, so the decisions are rarely easy or obvious.
Re:Efficiency (Score:5, Insightful)
Those programmers with 10 years experience moved on (or became too sick to work due to no healthcare). You get the guys they dragged in off of the street yesterday.
If you REALLY want to save some cash, outsource the CEO. He's the single most expensive human resource and there's plenty of qualified European CEOs used to working for 1/10th of what an American costs.