Electronic Sheep lays off 25%

It makes perfect sense. Most company's today don't look any further than maybe the end of the quarter. The question you need to ask yourself is how much money did I bring in for the company TODAY? Unfortunately, it doesn't matter if your research project would bring in $5mil in profits by the end of 2008, all that matters is how much money you made the company in November 2007.

ouch, it sucks to hear you got laid off Chosen.

Re: the article in the first post, that article linked to this story which I find encouraging:
http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2007/12/18/second-life-performance-improves-but-residents-dont-feel-it/

I wasn't aware of LL acknowledging, apologizing for, and pledging to focus on fixing the performance problems in SL. Above all else I would consider the crazy lag to be SL's main problem right now (they got plenty of features in place) so if they can improve the situation there then there's a real shot for SL to resume growth, only at a healthy and sustainable pace.

Wow, "right-sizing." That's their euphemism for "downsizing," which is already a euphemism for "layoffs."

A double euphemism. Is there anything corporate spindoctors can't do?

It is certainly true that SL has not scaled the way I thot it would over the past year, and it sounds like ESC had the same experience. Less scalability = fewer big corporate clients. LL needs to stabilize and scale the platform quick if they want to maintain any kind of corporate presence.

More evidence of LL being serious about this: Is the following a new posting on LL's employment website? This is NOT a replacement for Cory as CTO, it is an engineering/ops guy.

VP TECHNICAL OPERATIONS -----------------------------------------------

Overview:
The CEO and the executive team are focused on identifying a proven operations and infrastructure executive for this strategic and critical new position at Linden Lab. The VP of Technical Operations will report to the CEO, Philip Rosedale. The company's compelling technology and tremendous value prop has positioned Linden Lab to become the market leader in the online virtual society space. As a result, the new VP of Technical Operations will help lead Linden Lab towards aggressive and expansive growth. This executive should be a forward thinking, passionate, and strategic individual who has effectively scaled high growth companies.

Key Responsibilities:

Drive new processes, systems, and tools to streamline, improve, and extend the quality of user-related support services across the company while maintaining a free and collaborative environment.
Work with the architecture/engineering team to design, develop, implement, and improve new data center and technical services
Confirming quality standards, satisfaction of stated business requirements, and on-time, on-budget delivery of milestones and deliverables.

Key Attributes

An experienced technologist who can successfully build and lead networks while maintaining the company's cultures and core values.
Evangelist who can maintain community and culture.
Strong design experience around complex systems.
Proven ability to lead large-scale change initiatives.
A hands on, creative, out-of-the-box thinker.
Ability to drive business growth through process, organization and technology redesign.
Successfully built and scaled large networks.
Must be extremely technical, internet, network and business savvy.

I work for contemporary artists one of their pieces is called "the shit and the cream always float to the top"

I guess an in-world broadcast that essentially said "oh crap, we got problems, grid going down", followed by a blog post talking about asset system failures (isn't that what a recent downtime was supposed to address) and silence for 25 minutes at the time of writing, is fixing problems?

Broccoli

Hopefully everyone who was let go finds comparable or better employment soon.

========================

Often when something like this happens it because the company was "losing" money (not making as much as expected).

The decisions as to who goes many times unfortunately has little to do with that individual's direct contribution.

Yeah, sorry to hear that Chosen, we didn't agree on... well anything but I respect you and I respected your loyalty to your employer but it's too bad that they gave you the axe considering that you were the one who came out in public and defended them on several occasions when certain residents, which may or may not have included me, criticized ESC.

hmm cute babies on that site.

<new message since I want to separate this from my condolence message to Chosen>


This just proves my point that ESC doesn't give a damn to anyone even their own employees, as previously mentioned there's no way that ESC overestimated by 29%, they're smart enough to not make that mistake I bet. Hopefully they'll eventually get theirs, for the time being though don't go to any project ESC had a hand in and urge your friends to do the same, boycotts don't normally work but if they're profit margins are thin enough to drop 29% of their employees then maybe when they're customers decide to fire them when people stop going to their islands they'll get the point that people won't put up with their crap anymore.

Eeek! It's a real site? I should of checked before I posted it!

I was meaning that perhaps ESC are planning to build their own virtual world system.

New Jersey?

It is real site with photos of some new born babies.

Seriously doubt it ... basically would be competing with their own customers and strategic partners.

Is there some reason for calling the company "Electronic Sheep" instead of it's proper name "Electric Sheep"?

Oh but it would be a real winner and could make a bazillion $L for ESC.

Just imagine it a world with two kinda of avi's, Men and Sheep....

Sheeplife, where men are men, and Electric Sheep are nervous*

You'll probably need to be a Kiwi or Aussie to get it.

Somebody know where digital little bo peep when, her sheep have gone astray.

I see the layedoff the wrong people gesh

I'm guessing your weren't in the inner circle. It didn't make sense that you were working for them at all. You were supposed to stop being useful to anyone else once you started working for them. Right?

I'm guessing the corporate masters (CBS) said cut, and they didn't have the maturity to resist doing a little self-selection. Right?

Burried in the article is what I believe to be the real trouble with SL, and that thing that explains why projects like the sheep's are premature:



I wrote about this at least once before...

/327/9e/225292/1.html#post1772488

But with all this talent taking the ax because of our fearless leaders' failure to provide a reliable, scalable product, by this time next year, there's going to be.

Even the mighy Electronic sleep are being comeing outdated and throw aside.... Typical of how this game workds and those related to create it. Nothing ever changes but the names of the people involved. Sad indeed.

clever plot to drive you insane, SueC!

kthxbai

They were all replaced by the bots they created perhaps?