Livejournal matters

[winter]

However I may personally feel about the LiveJournal staff layoffs, there's an official statement about them now.

Most of LiveJournal revenue is in rubles. Their labour costs were in USD. Economically, it's a textbook move, especially since they already have a Russian technical and product development team - who are paid less.

Best of luck to everyone involved, especially those who got the bad news :(

Comments

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

The ruble/USD exchange rate is a rather frightening thing to behold. I knew it had dropped, but that it had dropped by 30% in six months...

[winter]

The PLN/USD dropped the same, so I'm familiar with it. It's really an explainable move, though very cold. I'm wondering how many people SUP has - I'm betting it's more than 30, which is why it would be nice if people stopped panicking about "all the staff being gone".

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

I was wondering about how many people you actually need to run LJ if you stop developing new features. For the financial and marketing side, I bet they can go on with the staff they are keeping. And why, Russian engineers will be so much cheaper...

My bet is that they'll keep it running on the level it's now, not toss out new features, and look for new ways to make money with it. Either a sale, account price increases, or more advertising. And we can probably expect a drop in uptime if the server crew is reduced.

[winter]

Fingers crossed, server crew won't be reduced :) And just checked, and in Russia, SUP employs 150 people. A few years ago I've talked to people who worked with Russian software guys - they were full of nothing but praises. Russia does have stellar mathematics education, which tends to turn out good programmers. Fingers crossed.

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

Move the server crew to Russia then. Or India depending on the ruble/rupia exchange rate. :-)

It wouldn't even surprise me much if this had been planned for a while and just happened a bit sooner because of the economic climate. Cut costs and do the actual engineering closer to home. They're so heavily focused on Russia after all, it would make sense if they start considering that their primary market.

[winter]

Server move would cause an outrage ;) And according to this, main server guy, main volunteer herder and main user-side spokesperson are all staying, which makes me optimistic.

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

So it's a matter of trimming things down and cutting redundancies. The US office will have to get used to the idea of just being a branch office.

[sukeban.livejournal.com]

It's not technical knowledge. My (IT outsourcing multinational) company has a site-wide IM app, and I've talked with tech support guys from India. The problem is that they are tossed from company to company every three months or so, they have next to no on-site training, and by the time they begin to know the codebase/ platform/ group organigrams they're sent to the company next door in the big tech campuses in Bangalore, Chennai, Pune or wherever.

If it's the same with Russian techies, I'd be very wary of this move.

[winter]

All in all, I think Russia's got a somewhat different work culture. Mind you, my experience is second-hand, but SUP only has a few projects and their people have been coding LJ-code for over two years now. They've introduced some features for Russian users, and generally seem to more-or-less have their act together enough to survive, for now.

[sukeban.livejournal.com]

It depends on whether they decide to cut more costs and replace the expensive, experienced programmers with cheaper codemonkeys.

I'm managing servers for [big automaker] and [American human resources outsourcing company], and they're also cutting costs and undermanning teams like crazy, so I'm not that optimistic about this kind of thing. Luckily my job isn't endangered, but our workload is very likely going to grow a lot in the near future for the same pay...

[winter]

*sighs* Don't get me started on my current situation. I'm not in danger either, but going through calming pills like candy.

[owl]

I've had the same experience. My project flips between us and the Indian devs every couple of years. We get it in shape, they hack about with it, the business goes WOEZ and hands it back to us to fix...
I would ask why they have this culture as it doesn't seem the best business model, but it keeps me in a job so I shouldn't complain. :)

[alice_montrose]

The RON/USD and RON/EURO dropped as well, so no big surprise there?

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

There will be drama, though -- LJ users aren't exactly famous for thinking in terms of what's good business sense, particularly such individuals as are not inclined to think of LJ as a business.

[winter]

I think they're expecting it by this point.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

You're probably right; I'd love to know the proportion of users still shell-shocked about the very notion that Six Apart was an actual company, let alone that SUP Fabrik is. (This is the Internet. All good things should fall down from heaven, free, fashioned only with the bare hands of cheerful amateur pioneers operating from their parents' basements.)

[winter]

It's amusing watching these attitudes versus some other portions of the internet. It seems to have divided itself into social networks (which are commercial, ad-laden, and all this is expected) and blogs (which are ad-supported so that plucky writers can make a living). LJ's the only big place I know where people are still offended by ads.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

It's a mystery. Perhaps there's a heavy element of web nostalgia here, echoed in that old-established rallying cry of the ten-year vets: "Brad Fitzpatrick said no ads!"

[winter]

I wouldn't put it past them. While LJ's not a walled garden the way Facebook is, it's incredibly self-sufficient with the way it functions as an RSS aggregator. For a lot of people, LJ is the internet.

[ithilwen.livejournal.com]

What a sucky Christmas gift - both for the unfortunate employees who got laid off, and for LJ users who now need to worry about the long-term viability of this site.