8 Percent Of Six Apart Laid Off

While the U.S. goes face to face with an economic spiral, Six Apart is doing its part by laying off 8 percent of its staff. Six Apart who develops Movable Type as their open source platform and TypePad as their commercial platform published an internal memo on their public blog to inform everyone as to why the cuts were made.

So why are we doing this? First, as with many companies these days we are being proactive about keeping our expenses low. Second, with so many changes in 2008, and looking forward to the changing market 2009, we have to rebalance our organization accordingly.

Interesting to note that recessions usually make for great times within the blogosphere for hobbyists or for those who want to communicate in a more cost friendly way. So far though, that doesn’t seem to be the case. In their announcement, Six Apart lays out some structural changes such as:

The Creation Of A Genius Group: Think of this as Six Apart increasing their
sales/ad team.

Growing Six Apart Services: Six Apart will be moving available staff around to the services department in order to better serve companies who rely on them to run their site.

Technology Team: Various teams from across the company will be condensed under the leadership of one man.

Six Apart Media: Despite the rough economy, Six Apart believes their advertising agency will grow throughout 2009. In response to this, they will be increasing the number of people on their sales force.

The most interesting part about this entire announcement is that Chris Alden will be taking a 15% pay cut as part of the companies cost cutting measures. Kudos on him for being a man and actually trying to keep his company afloat instead of jumping off a building and floating away with a golden parachute.

Read more about the announcement here.