New Media Business Math Quiz

Hobbes

New Media Business Math

1. Company A has 100 employees, and 20 are upper management. Company B is composed of the same proportions of management and general workforce. Company A assimilates Company B, and the combined company lays off 40 percent of the rank and file, but keeps all of Company B's management. The two most important things to Company A are keeping the stock price at a certain level, which only remains at that level through the purchase and assimilation of other companies, and keeping the total number of employees the same. Since the job market is so tight, none of these managers are willing to leave except at gunpoint, and all of the new assimilations have contracts guaranteeing them employment for life in exchange for selling out their underlings. Given that every subsequent merger and staff reduction follows the same pattern, how many companies can Company A consume before its entire workforce consists of upper management?

2. You just laid off a staff of 2000 programmers and other IT employees today. In a given 6-day, 72-hour work week, said employees each consumed one large pizza per day at $20 per pizza, drank 7 cans of soda per day at 60 cents per can, purchased an additional 5 bags of chips and other snacks per day at 75 cents per bag, and purchased an average of $300 in action figures and Nerf guns from the local Toys 'r' Us at each biweekly payday. How many minimum-wage food service positions with discretionary income of $20 per month will need to be created to replace the revenue to local businesses when your staff discovers that Unemployment can pay for rent or utilities, but not both?

3. Company A was a dotcom that provided "content" to the Web, usually involving the latest bands or comic books. All of its content providers went from lively careers writing about the latest rumors about "Star Wars: Episode Two" to unemployment when the VCs financing it realized that the cost of the content was higher than the advertising revenue that came to the site, and that paying $50,000 a year to staffers was unnecessary when dozens of other nerds were willing to provide the same content for free. Considering that Unemployment insurance in Company A's state pays approximately 30 percent of their old salaries, how many fruitless interviews for tech positions will each of these content providers endure before that "Help Wanted" sign at the corner 7-11 starts to look tempting?

4. You are the new head of a Yahoo! regional branch, and you've been told to improve profitability at all costs. You start by laying off all of the developers and replacing them with fresh college grads who cost half as much as the original developers. However, since all of the new hires are otherwise unemployable MBAs whose parents are in upper management and whose skills consist of surfing porn sites all day and masturbating like caged apes, 10 new hires do the work of one original developer, and this if they can find the "Perl For Dummies" books at the local bookstore. How many new hires can you take on before you resign "to spend more time with your family" and let Yahoo! shut down that regional branch and fold its staff into another office?

5. You are a young, dashing New Media veteran. Out of the ten companies you managed in the last five years, three imploded before their IPO went through, four imploded right after the IPO went through but before you and your board could cash in their stock options, and three were shut down by the FBI as fronts for money laundering for the mob shortly after you left for greener pastures. How many more companies can you head before News.com stops prefacing your name in its reports with "wunderkind" and replaces that preface with "pathological liar" or "dog-felching weasel"?

6. You have worked as a Senior Manager for several prestigious companies, half of which still operate. Unfortunately, you have a habit of walking up to female co-workers, exposing yourself, pulling your Dockers' pockets inside out and yelling "I'M AN ELEPHANT! GET IT?" One third of the subsequent sexual harassment suits have been settled out of court, one third are still pending, and one third were "settled" by threatening to firebomb the plaintiff's house or "destroy her career". Considering the standard jury award in similar cases, especially since one of the plaintiffs took a photo for evidence, how much money should the company pay you to get you to leave the country and never darken the company's door again?

7. You have been the head of Promotions for your tech company for the last six months. How many more months will you have before otherwise credulous News.com and ZDNet reporters realize that your company has not shipped a working product in its entire existence and stop reprinting your ecstatic press releases verbatim?

8. Your company uses a considerable number of permatemps to deal with such annoying problems such as having to pay for benefits or sharing profits. You currently need 100 permatemps to make sure that your new software gets out the door. As each permatemp reaches his or her third month with the company, s/he realizes that you will never ever hire him/her, and has a 20 percent chance of leaving at the end of any given week without advance notice. Recruiting companies constantly call to offer you more permatemps, but each one can only supply 4 contractors before you throw a hissy fit and cancel the contract because the company is no longer a "preferred vendor". Considering that the software life cycle is two years, how long can you continue to choose new "preferred" vendors until the number of recruiting companies that have dealt with your company exceeds the number of stars in the known universe?

Hobbes

9. After your last layoff, your company was bought by Microsoft, but Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer demand to see full documentation of your new, ready-to-ship product before the deal is finalized, and said documentation must be understandable by a general audience. Sadly for you, the technical writers were the first people you laid off, and your head programmer offers to write the documentation himself because "I've been a writer for years." Also sadly for you, your head programmer's sole experience with writing consists of writing "Star Trek: The Next Generation" fan fiction featuring the erotic exploits of Wesley and Worf for a GeoCities site, and he spells individual words correctly in these stories about 15 percent of the time, with proper punctuation and syntax being deemed "unnecessary". How many rim jobs will you have to give Bill and Steve in a 24-hour period before they decide that their own tech writers can handle the assignment?

10. You have managed to run eight companies in the last eight years, successfully driving each of them into the ground and receiving a job offer from another just before the previous company suddenly had no money to cover the payroll of your former employees left behind. How many more can you gut-and-flip before someone outside of ****ed Company notes your track record and decides to challenge the PR gibberish being printed about you in the "Wall Street Journal"?

11. You inherited a once-profitable media company with one large paper and several TV stations about twenty years ago, and you saw the Internet boom and subsequent stock market speculation as the perfect way to make a fortune off what many of your underlings thought was nothing but a fad. Unfortunately, you made some truly asinine decisions, such as investing $38 million in the CueCat and taking your company public, where the stock price dropped from $30 a share to $10 and stayed there. Your company's only hope is tied to advertising revenue on both Web sites and standard media. Out of the few advertisers remaining after the dotcom crash, 15 percent will declare bankruptcy and never pay their ad bill, 23 percent will require the services of very high-priced lawyers before they finally pay their bills, and 18 percent took advertising because their CEO was a fraternity brother of one of the board members, and calls about payment are answered with "You don't understand. Ray and I have an _understanding_ about those ads." How many of these flakes can your company withstand in a six-month period before you have to consider kidnapping cameramen and reporters and selling their body parts on the black market to keep the company solvent?

12. While going over your company's books, you realize that your company is doomed to bankruptcy next week, and you have no way of covering employee payroll. You currently have 500 kilograms of "essential office supplies" such as titanium golf clubs in your office, that must be cleared out before either they are confiscated by the bankruptcy court or before the employees discover your deception, put a gasoline-filled car tire around your neck, and set you afire in the parking lot. You can carry out 10 kilograms of "office supplies" per trip to your Lexus without your employees becoming suspicious, but your Lexus can only hold 75 kilograms of cargo at a time. How many trips can you make before the staff gets wise and starts ripping out the copper pipes from the walls as "compensation"?

13. You just shut down your dotcom after telling employees for months that the financial situation was "wonderful" and that they should make longterm financial decisions that they'd never make if the company was foundering, leaving 5000 hard-working employees on the street with no warning whatsoever. Since you invested every penny of their 401(k) funds in Enron stock, they are now penniless. You, however, are not penniless, having cashed in your stock at the first sign of trouble, and while you publicly empathize with your poor suffering ex-employees for the TV cameras, you have no intention of sharing a penny of your $30 million windfall with them, not including the $2 million you awarded yourself as an "executive retention bonus" while the bankruptcy goes through the courts. About three weeks later, as you and two $2000 ladies of the night are out celebrating your grand luck and fortune, fifteen of your former employees greet you at your SUV parked on a dark street. 20 percent of them have riot clubs or lead-filled pipes, 15 percent of them have steel-toed boots, and five percent of them have dental picks to help remove your gold fillings. How many months will you spend in the Intensive Care Unit after your much-deserved beating and gang-rape before you relearn such advanced skills as color vision and bowel control?

Civilian_Target

Quite funny, shame the last one doesn't happen more often TBH.