RIM layoffs

Written by

Rose Simone:

RIM spokesperson Tenille Kennedy confirmed on Tuesday that RIM has reduced some positions as part of its cutback program, “and may continue to do so as the company methodically works through a review of the business.”

I hate seeing people lose their jobs because executives mismanaged the company.



  • Iain

    That’s the way most people lose their jobs these days. And to add salt to the wound, layoffs usually drive the stock price up, so the incompetent executive makes more money.

  • Guest

    As a former Nortel employee, I concur wholeheartedly.

  • tylernol

    as a former Lucent employee, and as a current employee of a certain tech company going through a reorg, I would agree this is no surprise. Lazy executives do not see a shift in the fundamentals of their core business, and ultimately employees are the ones who suffer as the company craters.

  • http://twitter.com/Moeskido Moeskido

    How often are these layoffs aimed at the top?

  • DMX

    I am not 100% sure that “mismanage” is the culprit here. It took many years for Microsoft to fight back Apple on the Mobile field. The disrupt force unleashed by Apple’s iOS/iPhone is just too huge for RIM to overcome. and Apple didn’t get the iOS idea overnight. the late SJ built it upon the OS X foundation which traced back to NeXT.

  • http://twitter.com/kipb Kip Beatty

    I think it’s a gross exaggeration to say most people lose their jobs these days to mismanagement. The economy absolutely collapsed in 2008 and has barely begun to recover. Businesses small and large (not named Apple anyway) saw huge losses in revenue with the added, and impossible to foresee, burden of banks yanking properly serviced credit lines left and right due to the credit crunch.

    Tens of thousands of people have lost their job due to factors that have nothing to do with poor management, at least at the company level as asserted here. I can’t speak for RIM as their CEO’s seemed perpetually lost, but is a construction company, for example, “poorly managed” when an entire country stops buying homes? What about the thousands of subsidiary industries that rely on a robust home market?

    • http://twitter.com/Moeskido Moeskido

      The economy collapsed, mostly, due to poor management of necessary banking regulations and even poorer management of the risks a bank could or should take with crappy investment instruments.

      • http://twitter.com/kipb Kip Beatty

        Absolutely, but the article, and the comment by “Iain” to which I was responding (I hit “reply” but after logging in via Twitter my comment was posted as a standalone) was referring to mismanagement by the laid off employee’s company heads, not general finacial mismanagement elsewhere. RIM’s management may have indeed screwed the pooch as it were, but I don’t think it’s fair to say most people are losing their jobs these days because their bosses screwed up. Just staying out of bankruptcy the past 5 years has been a herculean feat for many (most?) small and mid sized businesses due to factors well beyond the control of most managers.

        • http://twitter.com/Moeskido Moeskido

          Fair point.

  • http://twitter.com/avbelow avbelow

    The really sad thing is that the people who made the decisions that got RIM into this mess will surely get a golden parachute