Valleywag
A tipster with two friends at DoubleClick tells us Google will cut DoubleClick's staff by 15 percent, trimming the sales teams that push Dart for Advertisers and Dart for Publishers by 20 percent. Google plans to give those ad-targeting services to its advertisers for free, making money on brokering ads. Most of the rest headed for the door are general staff whose functions overlap with Google's administrative workers.
The DoubleClick employees told our source that Google leadership did a "totem pole" ranking of all DoubleClick employees to determine whom to cut; in this variation of forced ranking, every employee gets assigned a number representing his value to the organization, and the lowest get the axe. The office is "very tense," our source tells us, "very tense and anxious." If the results from our latest poll are to be believed, that's because over 68 percent of them are worried they're going to have to work at Google.
Comments
The best part of that wonky HBS abstract is that Enron is singled out as a hot, high-performance company that uses the totem pole ranking. Wonder if perception of the practice has changed in the 6+ years since it was published?
um that makes no sense, why only cut 20% of the sales team responsible for a product your planing to give away for free?
Where to even begin here? First off I would like to reiterate that allegedly Google was shocked to find out that some DoubleClick employees did NOT actually graduate from Ivy League institutions. This discovery led to the first Google plan which was to lay off all city college and state university graduates. Clearly those people do not belong in a combined organization. When further analysis showed that to be well in excess of 90% of the DoubleClick work force they decided to just go after the city college graduates for now, arriving at the 15% number.
Thus, to reiterate the alleged official policy, Google is firmly committed to a diverse workforce of both Ivy League graduates who are not black and, for now, state university graduates who are not black.
Google has been The Man for awhile now. Their sad attempts at hipness, edginess, and environmental awareness are blatantly undermined by their arrogance, their willingness to accept government pork to pay for their electricity, networking and infrastructure on our dimes, and the fact that, after all the acquisitions and "20%" time spent on groundbreaking projects, the best they can show investors is an ad serving environment rife with click fraud, link farms, and duping searchers. In desperation, they are now trying to usurp retailers' own websites by enticing the user to search their sites IN Google so they can show competitor's ads, thereby steering the user away from retailers' own searches, which are obviously geared to selling their own products the way the retailer chooses to. In essence, we have an outrageous valuation on a company whose tactics are the online equivalent of standing outside a merchants door trying to bar entry and offering flyers for competitors down the street, and whose best customers are the equivalent of folks who put up fake storefronts and collect click profits from advertisers who don't know any better. Best search engine, fantastic email solution, great API development tools. Period.
Joeballzzz da man
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