LJ Lay offs PANIC PANICS OH NOES!!! oh wait...

[f4f3]

A lot of angst yesterday over a rumour site posting that LJ had laid of 20 of their 28 staff, and that they were obviously circling the drain.

A little digging around came up with figures of 17 from their LA office out of 30, and no cuts back in Russia. It looks a lot more like moving expensive support roles offshore (or, to be accurate, back onshore to Russia). I don't know if the mainframe support was outsourced when they had their servers moved to Montanna, but the financial logic of having a full scale operation on the West Coast of America must have been looking, well, less than compelling.

Of course, our New Russian Masters (whom I for one welcome) couldn't communicate anything about this until the staff involved were informed, but I'm surprised that there hasn't been any clarification today.

Comments

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

The official release from yesterday talks about "restructuring" and "pooling resources", which seems about right. The rouble-dollar exchange rate looks bad; advertising is coming down or has come down already. Taking out the slack is just smart business. (Though they could've been a little less... Russian... about the way they did it.)

There's going to be some drama from the scarred veterans of the Brad Fitzgerald Promised Us No Ads crowd, who still haven't quite managed to wrap LJ being a business activity around their brains.

[unblinkered.livejournal.com]

There's a "proper" article (as opposed to a shit stirring one) here (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10132684-36.html), ad yeah....it looks like they're rejigging resources rather than shutting down.

That said, I'm still backing up my lj, if only because I've not done it since I started blogging in 2003!

[helianthas.livejournal.com]

Did you figure out how it's done? I opened a bunch of links and then got scared and said, "Uh, I'll do it later..."