Palm firing it’s developers?
CNet is reporting that Palm is firing an unspecified number of employees, a “small percentage of our workforce”. According to CNet the bulk of the jobs are in the US and are in the “development ranks”. This is mind boggling, at a time where companies can’t hire enough developers (because Google is like an insatiable developer hiring beast, with it’s gourmet chefs and corporate mass transit networks), Palm is laying them off. They claim to be eliminating hierarchy but on their own jobs posting page of the 39 positions a whopping 26 of them are managers or directors.
Seriously? Developers aren’t the problem at Palm. I think they need to start at the very top and work their way down if some firing is going to be happening. Hopefully more details will emerge and we’ll get a clearer picture of who got the axe there, if it really was the line developers, the picture of an imploding company will be complete. Hopefully their development system was actually some stratified bureaucratic mess (which would explain some things) and they’ve actually cut out the top layers of that. Guess we’ll see.
June 15th, 2007 at 10:07 am
I guess they ran out of buttons for their developers to code for.
Even if their current development is a bureaucratic mess, unless those current job listings are out-of-date, it doesn’t bode well. The answer to the question “How can we right this sinking ship of a tech company?” is never “Hire more managers.”
June 15th, 2007 at 10:34 am
Yeah… I’m not inclined to give any more benefit of my doubt to the company. Time will tell, if it hasn’t told already.