Firing Employees - Literally

Breaking news here in Silicon Valley is that a worker, laid off from a small, fabless semiconductor firm earlier in the week, just went back and shot to death three co-workers.

We saw this happen earlier this century when the last bubble burst, and I'm very sorry to hear that we are headed into such ugly territory once again. Condolences to the families of the victims who died from a such a brutal, cowardly and utterly uneccesary act.

Laying-off employees is never easy, regardless of whether it's one, a hundred or over a thousand. Having now to think about as well which ones are likely to go postal on you certainly doesn't make things any easier on either side of the divide.

With all this in mind, Jonathan Schwartz at Sun might want to go and buy a bullet-proof vest right around now ... they just announced up to 6,000 additional jobs will be cut.

I'm not especially picking on Sun - I'll leave that to others better equipped than I - because as we've seen there are firings happening all around us. However, they do earn the tag of being serial offenders in this particular area. How the mighty can fall in but a few short years.

It's all scary stuff out there, even before fretting about lunatics with handguns stalking the office parks of Silicon Valley.