Me and my friends are in QA. Many engineers had already been laid off earlier so we knew it was our turn. They decided to start early in the morning. One guy got the call, went to HR office and boss was there - came out - you looked, you saw and avoided eye contact - as if layoff is contagious and you will get it through the eyes. And then you just look at your office phone and hope and hope that it does not ring. You leave your cube but you come back - it's in the air. And then it does ring, it is an internal call, it is for you, it is from HR ! tag you are it! You come out of the office, you need to get a moving box and others don't look at you

It seems like the structure bloated way too much and the organization lost its priority over a period of time. While the benefits are good, HR seems unusually disorganized. There is no surety of job, no matter you are a top performer, benefits are for those who lick the boots of senior management. If you want to sustain your job, you need to be one of the favorites of management.

My 10 years were for the most part great. I was recruited out of college into a group that worked very hard and played harder. Sometimes we worked 18 hr days then had a BBQ at someone's house right after. Then started it all over again the next day. My team knew how work together. Unfortunately not all good things last. The wrong people got promoted, times got hard and good people left and got laid off.

But through it all I've always been proud of what SMI stood for. Quality hard/software, open source, moving computing to the network and most of all taking care of it's people.
The layoff have been tough, and no doubt we'll go through it again at Oracle, but I hope Oracle execs do what they say and keep many Sun employees. They won't be disappointed!

its just 4 months i have joined this company and it feels its the best place i can ever work at. i mean it "THE BEST" -- ok you guessed it -- there has been nothing but turmail

The party is over, folks. The sun has set on Sun Microsystems and the employees are getting what they hadn't expected- Huh Layoffs. Since the economic downturn is getting deeper -- the job crises are considerably increasing. The management is bent on sweeping the people off I their quest to get a good deal from IBM.