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

[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. :)