Live data from Hacker News

Opera sends 90 out the door

translate.google.com

1–10 of 120 posts

Re: Opera sends 90 out the door

#3

Good browser engine devs are very hard to come by. I expect they won't have too much trouble landing on their feet.

Difficult to make it out in the translation but if they laid off engineers good enough to work on Presto they must not be a technology company any more. They must be transitioning to something else entirely, as your technical team is an asset and browser engine engineering requires some skill so you if you had to downsize you probably wouldn't want to get rid of those guys. Although I guess they can't be cheap. But I figure you could sell that team as a division and instead of paying severance you would be making money. I just don't understand what kind of crazy thinking would go into this. Maybe they just had a bad team that was unhappy?

Re: Opera sends 90 out the door

#5
I thought their press release of less than a week ago said those people were supposed to improve WebKit :-)

Can imagine that quite a few of those fired would have been tough to motivate, though. Nobody likes seeing their lifework put out and shot.

Re: Opera sends 90 out the door

#6
post #5

I thought their press release of less than a week ago said those people were supposed to improve WebKit :-) Can imagine that quite a few of those fired would have been tough to motivate, though. Nobody likes seeing their lifework put out and shot.

Yep, usually all these announcements come with a massive dosage of bullshit.

I hope they can keep their engine alive elsewhere... not likely though.

Re: Opera sends 90 out the door

#7
post #3

Good browser engine devs are very hard to come by. I expect they won't have too much trouble landing on their feet.

Difficult to make it out in the translation but if they laid off engineers good enough to work on Presto they must not be a technology company any more. They must be transitioning to something else entirely, as your technical team is an asset and browser engine engineering requires some skill so you if you had to downsize you probably wouldn't want to get rid of those guys. Although I guess they can't be cheap. But I…

Many from the core team have worked there since 1995. They may also have thought that this was a good time to move on to other ventures.

The unemployment rate her in Norway are around 3%[0], and probably 0% among it-engineers, so thus guys will be picked up right away.

0: https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z8o7pt6rd5uqa6_...

Re: Opera sends 90 out the door

#9
post #5

I thought their press release of less than a week ago said those people were supposed to improve WebKit :-) Can imagine that quite a few of those fired would have been tough to motivate, though. Nobody likes seeing their lifework put out and shot.

A culture crash may have contributed to that so many are leaving. According to the Opera CEO, iOS and Android are the future for Opera now[0].

One could argue that Opera now are in more need of 25 years old iOS developers, that 40+ C++ specialists.

0: http://translate.google.no/translate?sl=no&tl=en&js=...

Re: Opera sends 90 out the door

#10

How many engineers will they receive from the Skyfire purchase?

As of March 2012 it looks like they had 44 employees and were looking to hire another 20: http://it-jobs.fins.com/Articles/SBB000142405297020337060457...

Not sure how many of those ~65 would be engineers. Somewhere in the range of 30-50?

Post reply on HN