MySpace announced 30% layoffs today and showed more than 400 employees the door. Near the end of the day the company stopped doing terminations individually, say employees, and called 10 or more of them to a conference room at a time for a quick firing. One good thing – every employee got at least 60 days pay. It wasn’t generosity, though. The WARN Act in California requires 60 days notice for mass layoffs, and this is how parent company News Corp. got around giving notice.
But MySpace isn’t done yet. The press release clearly stated that the layoffs only applied to U.S. employees: “This restructuring plan crosses all U.S. divisions of the company and lowers the total number of domestic staff at MySpace to 1,000 employees.” Next up are international employees, and we hear that 100+ more will be cut across the nearly 30 offices MySpace has around the world.
The delay is due to legal requirements for notice in some countries, we’ve heard. But cuts are coming. And based on how poorly MySpace has done internationally against Facebook, those cuts may be far deeper than the 30% U.S. rate. Our best guess is that MySpace currently has 300 or so employees not based in the U.S. I’m guessing those employees will be busy updating resumes and downloading every file they have access to onto portable hard drives.
i wonder what the average employee gets paid.
I was wondering that too. But then again, its not about how much they get paid as it is how much the company spends on other related costs per employee including pay.
lets just hope that they don’t lay off so many people that they end up loosing allot of internal intellegence capitial.
Yes there is a serious issue with pay checks when it comes to myspace. Sr Developer makes 120K Technical architech gets 130k Tech Manager gets 140K and Director gets around 160K. There are layers of these in every department. Guess what all they do is BSing every day. Also average age of these layers is 29-32 years. So now every one gets why this company is heading to toilet hole…
I’m glad I’m out of this mess…
I wish that was true….I worked there for many years and just recently left the company before the layoffs. I held a more senior technical position and I wasn’t making those numbers.
How’d it get like this? Keep the great people low on the scale, promote incompetence, then layoff some people who were obviously some of the better ones? Why!
Its sad but its true. I happen to know the guys who do make this kind of figure. At myspace it was more about u r connection with the director that would help u go up the ladder rather than working and busting balls off. I worked hard 11 hours a day made bug fixes, created new pages but all feel on deaf ears..why coz I was not licking my director’s ass..Coz I know in my department some ppl survived and good ppl laid off..Any ways its a history…
Remember when they went on a crazy hiring spree back in 2008..They did offer this kind of pay packages to the new bees. I don want to put the names of the ppl nor the department but believe me it did happen. I still remember talking to a tech manager who says 120K is not much….
It is clear that the new Senior Management has made very poor decisions. Many decisions came from reading short descriptions of jobs and performance reviews. To address a previous comment just made “lets just hope that they don’t lay off so many people that they end up loosing allot of internal intellegence capitial” Too late, many key people are gone and the rest standing don’t have a clue on how to recover from such a disaster.
Nice going “Owen” and “Mr. Miller”….such “adult” choices that you’re making….IDIOTS!!
Its pretty sad actually knowing so many people are losing their jobs and all ..
even though facebook is a multi billion dollar business i guess it still has to show the door to some employees ..
But still was a greatly explained post …
I will recomend it to everyone.-
Hey Chris Vinney its me michael , haha stting next to yiou in class …
i like your comment , even though it is really upseting about the employees…
seya… !!
Insane….well look at their traffic rank against facebook….they don’t stand a chance in social networking at this point in the game.
Again…social networking is a matter of “cool”
MySpace isn’t cool anymore. Facebook is.
I would bet all my life savings that Facebook won’t be as cool in two years either, when an even cooler competitor comes along
MySpace is still pretty cool (at least from my perspective from what I hear and read). Its still the place to go for the highschool set as well as college. And its still the place to go if you have dreams of becoming an artist (or do anything in the artistic world), promote stuff, and more.
But Facebook is cleaner, more savvy and when you just want to be around a more mature set (not saying that MySpace doesn’t have this but it is clear that it’s target market is 25 and under) you go there.
Sometimes a product or service can just run its course. the question is what will MySpace do to innovate to keep people to stay?
That’s the whole thing.
MySpace is still cool for high school kids.
But high school kids themselves are usually seen as lame immature idiots by much of society – and MySpace becomes guilty by association.
College, on the other hand, has a much “cooler” disposition in the society, and Facebook, because of its earlier college only stance, becomes cool by association.
And yes, for musicians, I’ll agree that MySpace is still the place to go..
watch this space for a layoff announcement on facebook next year.
A sad day but not a surprise for those who know the business. I left a few months ago so know. The management team is one of the poorest I’ve seen. No direction, no strategic, no leadership, no communication skills and no where near enough experience. The guy who run’s International, Travis Katz, was way in over his head. Really upsetting for the employees.
Another one. Remember Amber – Allen Hurf’s girl friend. She was a developer working for Monetization team. She got promoted to a Sr Manager position. No guesses why. The manager under whom she was working will now have to report to her. Manager quit the same day!!!!
This is the kind of stuff that happens at MySpace..On u r surprise now she is the Project Manager for 3 groups and she’s still at MySpace
Your mastery of English grammar lead me to believe that you would have been far more qualified for whatever managerial position this woman has assumed.
Seriously, dude, using “u” and “r” while attacking someone’s qualifications speaks volumes about your own competency. I can only assume this Amber person was promoted over you for cause, and that you are consoling yourself via slander.
Whoever you are, grow up. People were laid off, it’s upsetting and scary, and it’s doubtful you could have led MySpace, or any other company, in a better direction.
“No direction, no strategic, no leadership”
Very very precise!!! I never know how tasks get passed around. As the manager rarely speaks to me; and even I tried very hard to please and do things for her promptly (some unimportant, unnecessary tasks so that she can feel good by torsing others, and no consideration of the company money she wasted).
In the end, she still won’t be happy abusing her employee and company and go ahead put together a silly false performance reivew.
And tasks goes to whoever she personal preferrs and those who had past relationship with her, rather than a strategic balance of everything and brings the best out of the team.
!!! And seems heard she is one of the 420…
I agree that the coolness factor does play a role but I think something else is going on here. It reminds me of when the IBM PC was first introduced. At that time, the Apple II was cool but only used by rebels. If a corporate exec had one, he kept it hidden in his office. And after the PC was introduced the Apple was still cooler than the PC, but because it said IBM on the box, it suddenly became okay to use a PC in a business setting and it quickly became the “thing to have”, to the point that you looked dumb if you didn’t have one.
MySpace was adopted by very young people and kids and rock bands. It’s filled with wildly colored pages and lots of trash talk and foul language. It’s not a place that a business person would be caught dead. Facebook is more austere and mature, less childish appearing, and it was adopted by business people. It’s fine for a corporate executive to have a Facebook page but it’s not okay to have a MySpace page. That’s the difference between the two. They are perceived very differently by the public. MySpace is a toy. Facebook is serious. And once that dichotomy in perceptions appeared, MySpace was doomed. Facebook is viewed by millions as “the place to be”, even necessary for success in business, and I doubt that’s going to change any time soon. Facebook has a lock on that market and the only way they’ll lose it is if they screw up somehow.
So, you’re saying that toys don’t have a place in society or the new web at all? Not everything is about business. Fun has it’s place as well.
Part of the problem with all of this is exactly as you said – perception. MySpace has a very specific culture and user demographic, which is in fact quite massive, and they need to focus on locking that down rather than being everything to everyone. MySpace and Facebook are simply different sites, for different kinds of people and should operate as such.
Mike Jones is brilliant. Let’s give him and the rest of the new team some time to clean things up a bit.
not a surprise… Yahoo! looks like recovering after layoffs and hopefully MySpace will do the same…
Not really. I have been working in this company I quite frankly this company is in shit load of trouble.
Bad Product, Bad Direction..Secondly there is News Copr sitting on top of it which wants it to be profitable every year. Even if it still breaks even its no good and there will be still layoff..Coz News Corp does not like it. Unlike Yahoo and Facebook they dont have any money greedy layer of lard sitting on top of it.
As we see this is the end of it.
wow..it’s really a very bad news .
1K EMPLOYESS ..WOW! why do they even need such LARGE workforce IN 1st place ?
agreed.
Yeah 1,000 people is a lot, but keep in mind, that number is spread out among a thick layer of upper management, marketing, PR, legal, etc. The ratio of engineering to decision makers is still a bit skewed in the wrong direction. In time, under this new leadership, I think (hope) that may change.
My question is, why so many people are needed to run myspace?
Heard that the following are out Ed McKenna the CFO and Kevin Younce the controller. FIM has a transition plan whereby these individuals and other are still on board until 8/15. After that they are out.
Dump those US workers. Tax incease coming. Nice job all, nice job!
(Cross Posted)
Just to echo what has been said in previous posts, 720 people (300 back in August/Sept. of 2008 and 420 yesterday) lost their jobs because of 6 Executives that made extremely poor decisions – SIX…I could name them all (4 of which are known and have been mentioned here on Techcrunch.)
My question is this: Who’s left from the Executive Pool? Jeff Berman is still there…as is Tom Anderson, Tom Andrus (VP Product), Allen Hurff (VP Engineering), Kevin Freund (VP of Media) and John Faith (VP of Mobile). How long before they are gone? How can one be a VP of a division that has no people in it?
My prediction is that the current incarnation of MySpace (the Social Network) will be dead by end of year. It’ll morph into something that resembles the bastard child of TMZ, Hulu and Egotastic.com
Surely Berman must have gone? good riddance. The others you list aren’t so bad. DeWolfe led the ship of fools. Berman was a PR guy done good who talked (not delivered) his way to the top, Travis Katz from International is the other culpable Exec here.
berman was let go
this is what happens… you get a small group of people that create and “innovate” with no tethers, no naysayers, no posers dipping their hand into your work. you get shit done. the way you want it done.
companies grow. you lose sight. you lose number 1. you trim down. and then you tell people we got too big and we want to get back to our roots. but we have to change our culture. how do you tell people they need to change their culture when you don’t know what changed it?
think! think about it for a second what the hell happened? plug your nose and pinch your ear lobe. figure that one out.
what happened was you got a bunch of product managers and project managers that tell you no you can’t do that. you can’t add that feature because we already have that and it gets it’s own ad placement. no you can’t do that because it’s not in the user story card. you know what. after awhile you stop asking. you stop caring. someone will say no. now you’ve become a code monkey. many don’t even know what it is about the company that they don’t like anymore except that to say that it’s gotten too big. idiots that pretend to have some technological background, that they were once big time, that they carry a bag of certs, and they want to live vicariously through you. and telling you no gives them power. these idiots (granted there’s a few good ones and they’re rare) will suck your spirit away.
you want the culture back? you empower the people that make things happen. let them move around teams. stop saying no to them. back them up. don’t fire them. give up some of your pride and recognize that you’re job is just to be a facilitator. stand up and applause at the site of someone creating something you admittedly never could
“what happened was you got a bunch of product managers and project managers that tell you no you can’t do that. you can’t add that feature because we already have that and it gets it’s own ad placement. no you can’t do that because it’s not in the user story card.”
couldn’t have said it better.
It is clear that the new Senior Management has made very poor decisions. Many decisions came from reading short descriptions of jobs and performance reviews. To address a previous comment just made “lets just hope that they don’t lay off so many people that they end up loosing allot of internal intellegence capitial” Too late, many key people are gone and the rest standing don’t have a clue on how to recover from such a disaster.
Nice going “Owen” and “Mr. Miller”….such “adult” choices that you’re making….IDIOTS!!
Yes and the performance reviews are false. Here is how a dumb manager put in a perf review for its employee.
In every section of the review, this silly put:
1. xxxx rarely does…
2. xxxx rarely does…
…
OMG, idiot! Even the worst employee of a company could have done some minimal things more than RARELY!!!
So you know instantly the review is a lie from the manager. But the exec would even believe it.
And this manager has been mentioned multiple times in the tech crunch postings.
We make 15 dollars an hour. Customer support.
better than flipping burgers. And you get to review porn.
over the last few days i’ve been hearing about the layoffs of many people who should have kept their jobs.
i arrived late to the pink taco meetup tues night, so many had already left, but i wonder, what could be accomplished through a collaborative effort of even a percentage of that talent pool…
How about Dani Dudeck? is she still at myspace?
i am one of the recently laid off. i was hired in a mass hiring spree in novemeber through a staffing agency. about 2 months ago, myspace spent money renting rooms to re-interview people already interviewed, trained, and working for them, and a lot of those people are the people who got the ax and are now members of the myspace 30% club. some employees from the staffing agency are still employed despite poor attendance. i had perfect attendance, and got the ax. there are also recently hired employees still there. the entire department in charge of searching out the child porn on myspace has been let go. ALL OF THEM. they were also in charge of searching out hate groups, predators, etc.
I really have to wonder- just what exactly does a MySpace employee really do? The customer service is either piss poor or non existent. When my 14 year old daughter masqueraded as a 17 year old, I asled them to remove. The reply I got back was “log in yourself and delete it.”
What the hell does a thousand employees at MySpace do? Answer: nothing. You would think that maybe one person- just one- in this whole organization would have a clue how to promote this organization into a successful business model?
Considering MySpace’s track record- an amateurish look, sleazy ads, unresolved security holes, the aforementioned piss poor support- and could we not forget their server going down for 12 hours?- that I would hope that future employees see these peoples “MySpace career” as exactly just that- a joke.