Layoffs at Flickr

Former Flickr Chief Architect Cal Henderson.

Om Malik reported yesterday on more layoffs at Flickr. Most notably Flickr Chief Architect Cal Henderson seems to have left the company and is rumored by All Things Digital to be working on a stealth gaming start up with Former Flickr Chief and Flickr Co-Founder Stewart Butterfield (who had probably the best resignation letter of all time when he resigned himself last year).

Engineer Rev Dan Catt, probably my favorite character on Flickr, is also leaving and says on his blog that he’ll be moving back to the UK near Manchester. In his blog post he hinted that he’d like to work for Google. Among other things, Rev Dan did a lot of work on the geotagging of images. I think that’s one of the more exciting areas on Flickr and am disappointed to see that he won’t be working on that directly anymore. I’ve got thousands of my own photos geotagged on Flickr at present.

In looking at an Apr 23, 2009 23:58:04 GMT cached version of Flickr’s about page, which includes who they list on the Flickr team, it looks like others who are gone include Ashot Petrosian, Sara Wood, and Neil Kandalgaonkar. An updated version of the team can be found here.

Silicon Alley Insider reported that Yahoo laid off 600 in total yesterday. Yahoo had announced on their most recent earnings conference call that they were going to lay off about 700 employees. In December during a previous round of layoffs, Yahoo laid off three other Flickr team members including Flickr Designer George Oates.

Last month San Francisco magazine reported that Flickr had recently become profitable for Yahoo.

Update: Earlier this morning I listed Kevin Collins as one of the Flickr employees whose name no longer appeared on the about Flickr page in error. I’ve corrected this and removed his name as one of those absent. It was also brought to my attention that two additional names who are no longer on the about Flickr page are those of Eric Costello and Serguei Mourachov, both long-time Flickr team members. In September of last year both Costello and Mourachov were listed on the about Flickr page, today they are not. I suspect that both may have left Flickr prior to this most recent round of layoffs. Or they could both still be at Flickr but for some unknown reason removed from the about Flickr page.

Update #2: Another Flickr staffer, Do Kim, now appears to be gone from the about Flickr page. Also Om Malik is now also reporting that “we’re hearing that further changes at Yahoo’s Flickr are going to be announced shortly, including exits of some senior/director-level people.”