More Valve Layoffs

Gamasutra expands upon the story of Valve's firing of engineer Jeri Ellsworth with the report that as many as 25 staff were fired by the developer yesterday. Details are scarce, though after contact with some of those involved, they say: "the impression we get is that these cuts were driven more by company challenges than by individual performance issues." They also have a speculative list of those who may have been let go by comparing the company's employee directory to a cached version from last month. Following up, Engadget has a statement about this from Valve Managing Director Gabe Newell:
"We don't usually talk about personnel matters for a number of reasons. There seems to be an unusual amount of speculation about some recent changes here, so I thought I'd take the unusual step of addressing them. No, we aren't canceling any projects. No, we aren't changing any priorities or projects we've been discussing. No, this isn't about Steam or Linux or hardware or [insert game name here]. We're not going to discuss why anyone in particular is or isn't working here."
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Re: More Valve Layoffs
Feb 19, 2013, 07:28
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Re: More Valve Layoffs Feb 19, 2013, 07:28
Feb 19, 2013, 07:28
 
Loose Cannon wrote on Feb 15, 2013, 12:51:
I realize that no one will probably read this, but I wrote a program to use the Way Back Machine (archive.org) to look at the employee directory. According to it:

Total Hires: 143
Total Fires: 35
Hires By Date:
04/14/2010 - 102
06/21/2010 - 1
07/22/2010 - 2
08/08/2010 - 1
08/11/2010 - 1
03/24/2011 - 1
05/13/2011 - 3
09/02/2011 - 1
09/05/2011 - 5
09/25/2011 - 12
10/07/2011 - 1
10/12/2011 - 2
10/24/2011 - 1
03/29/2012 - 1
06/25/2012 - 1
07/28/2012 - 1
09/19/2012 - 4
01/13/2013 - 2
02/15/2013 - 1
Fires By Date:
06/21/2010 - 3
09/04/2010 - 2
03/24/2011 - 1
06/15/2011 - 2
09/02/2011 - 1
09/25/2011 - 1
03/17/2012 - 4
06/25/2012 - 5
09/19/2012 - 4
01/13/2013 - 3
02/15/2013 - 9

These figures point to the layoffs not being that substantial (of course that assumes that the employee directory is accurate, which it probably isn't). If anyone is interested, I have a list of the 143 people that have been in the employee directory at some point and their hire/fire dates (Way Back Machine started crawling the site 4/14/2010, when the page had 102 people on it).

Valve had 400 employees. I don't know how they determine who goes on their People page, but it isn't even half their employees. Hell, they said 25 or 26 were laid off, but only what, 12 of them were on that page?

They announced in September they were around the 400 mark, give or take.
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 Re: More Valve Layoffs