

Digg Cuts 10% of Staff - rosshudgens
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/06/digg-cuts-10-of-staff/

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marknutter
I'm surprised they cut so little. I could never understand, for the life of
me, why they had such a big staff. It seems to me Kevin Rose could have made
himself a very nice living off the site with a staff of around 5 people
maintaining the site, but instead they had to get all "future of news" and
overstretch themselves.

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ericb
It's been my experience that, if a company has not had recent layoffs, there
is almost always a bottom 10% that is bad enough to be worth cutting. This has
been most noticeable to me at companies of 100+. I've always wondered if
smaller periodic layoffs would work better than waiting for a downturn to make
hard decisions, which seems like the norm.

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rosshudgens
This would become a morale nightmare if employees were ever aware this was
taking place, unfortunately. Pretty hard to pull off with consistency/as a
standard because of this.

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jfager
Jack Welch strongly advocates for this approach, and it's how GE operated when
he was CEO (I don't know if they still do or not). NetFlix also does something
similar.

Why do you think it would be a morale nightmare? If you're doing well at your
job, wouldn't you take comfort in knowing the person down the line who isn't
pulling his weight will be cut out of the company at some point? High
expectations are motivating.

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matwood
Well you could be pushing people to only be about themselves and their team
and not the company as a whole. Why would I want to work with and help another
team if it means I may move them above the 10% line and me below?

So while you're right that it would push people to do their job well it could
also push them to submarine others.

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jfager
The point is that companies shouldn't waste a lot of time trying to salvage or
put up with people who aren't helping them succeed. If a person is hovering
around the bottom 10% and they think the solution is to screw someone else
over, they probably should go. I know I wouldn't want to work with them.

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afterburner
The idea is the manager doesn't know the sabotage happened, and only sees the
results. The failed sabotages, yeah, of course those don't help.

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rwmj
They have 72 staff? Doing what??

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furyg3
For comparison, reddit has four people (I think).

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wheels
And about 10% of the traffic. This isn't exactly an apples to apples
comparison:

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com+digg.com/>

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apphacker
Reddit also has considerable more uptime and speed issues than digg. I like
Reddit, but it is slow and recently often experiencing issues.

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mogston
I haven't used Digg much in about a year...it lost its charm when they started
to make the site too complex with unnecessary features and ever-so-slightly
related vertical topics.

K.I.S.S. like HN !!

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lurkinggrue
The site was slow and if you read via RSS you couldn't get to the article
without going to digg first.

That alone drove me to Reddit.

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PonyGumbo
Does anyone know what kind of revenue they have?

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ojbyrne
Last report was around $15m. Presumably the new shady ads have bumped that up
some.

