The data showed that the most productive workers belonged to close-knit teams and spoke frequently with their colleagues. So, to get more employees mingling, the bank scheduled workers for group breaks, rather than solo ones.

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Earlier this year, Apple told some employees about a new initiative called “Blue Sky” that allows a small group of staffers to spend a few weeks on a pet engineering project, according to three people told about the program.

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Shares began trading for the first time since Friday of last week, after U.S. stock exchanges were forced to suspend trading on Monday and Tuesday as Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, shutting power off to hundreds of thousands in Manhattan and the outer boroughs.

The reopening of the markets coincided with the Facebook employee stock lockup expirations, which could have contributed to the dip in share price.

Lockups are built into IPO plans for many private companies going public, staggering the opportunities to cash in shares, in order to stabilize the stock price. This is the second of a series of lockup expirations for Facebook; the largest will come mid-November, when more than one billion shares will be available for trading.

In midday trading, shares of Facebook leveled off around $21.08, a 4 percent drop from its opening price.

The payments company is perhaps best known for allowing small businesses, such as taco trucks and taxicab drivers, to accept credit and debit cards using their mobile phones. It is also well known because its CEO, Jack Dorsey, is also a founder of Twitter.

Square is issuing a modest three-paragraph press release this morning announcing the details, which is ironic given the round’s massive size.

A spokesman said that Square has raised more than $200 million in the round, although he would not confirm the company’s valuation. However, according to sources familiar with the deal, Square is now valued at an eye-popping $3.25 billion. That’s slightly less than the $4 billion valuation we reported it was seeking back in April.

Investors participating in the round include Citi Ventures, Rizvi Traverse Management and Starbucks Coffee Company.

The funding will help the company continue to grow, including plans for international expansion later this year.

In an interview several weeks ago, Square COO Keith Rabois said that the company plans to start marketing itself aggressively. It already has commercials on TV, and a wide-ranging deal with Starbucks announced last month will also help. Starbucks said then that it would invest $25 million into the company, and start using the funds to process all of its debit and credit transactions in the U.S. Starbucks will also allow its customers to pay for their lattes using Square’s consumer-facing app.

Rabois said then that he was certain that the transition from registers to iPads or other tablets will happen quickly.

To date, Square has raised around $340 million, money it will surely need if it hopes to disrupt something as large as the payments industry. So far, it has started to make a dent.

A year ago, Square had about 150 employees and was processing more than $1 billion on an annual basis. Today, it has 400-plus employees and is processing more than $8 billion a year. Rabois said he expects the company to hire 100 more employees by the end of the year.

Square’s valuation is rich by at least one historical measure. In a previous story, I compared the start-up to PayPal’s early days, noting:

PayPal, which was also looking to disrupt the banking industry by enabling peer-to-peer payments online, was sold for $1.5 billion to eBay in 2002, just months after going public at a valuation of nearly $800 million.

At the time it went public, the company was approximately doubling year over year, and had generated $103.7 million in 2001, its first full year of operations — slightly less than Square’s estimated revenue ($122 million).

Much like PayPal back then, Square faces intense competition, so making alliances with much larger companies or raising big war chests is critically important.

Square also faces stiff competition and pricing pressure from Intuit, eBay’s PayPal, Google, and other upstarts, like Pay Anywhere.

And it is still possible to compare Square to a modern-day PayPal. PayPal has said it is expecting to transact $10 billion in mobile payments volume this year, which is $2 billion more than what Square is processing on an annual basis. And, as with Square, nearly 100 percent of PayPal’s mobile transactions are occurring on the phone, but it is quickly ramping up its in-store payments business, too.

Bloomberg first reported the exits, but did not know where they were headed.

Zynga declined to confirm the departures, but offered a lengthy statement regarding the company’s low attrition rate, saying, “[I]t’s not at all surprising that some would move on and or retire post-IPO.”

However, it’s hard to ignore the exits as they begin to stack up just nine months after going public.

I started hearing weeks ago that competitors had started to see a flood of resumes from the social game maker as the stock has tanked. According to LinkedIn, Birtwistle was at the company for slightly less than two years, serving as VP of marketing. Bill Mooney, who was at the company for four and a half years, listed himself as being a studio VP at Zynga’s Game Network most recently.

Two days ago, Mike Verdu, the company’s chief creative officer, announced he was leaving to start his own mobile game company, which Zynga was backing.

Other recent employees to leave include: Chief Operating Officer John Schappert; Alan Patmore, general manager of CityVille, who left to work at Kixeye; Erik Bethke, a general manager who oversaw Mafia Wars 2; Ya-Bing Chu, a VP in Zynga’s mobile division; and Jeremy Strauser, a general manager.

Verdu said on Tuesday that his exit is bad timing.

“I personally don’t want to add to the noise level,” he said. “I think this will be a good thing for me and for Zynga. … I’m concerned about how this might be viewed with what else is going on, but it’s not a function of anything else going on at the company.”

In a statement, Zynga spokeswoman Dani Dudeck, said: “Zynga’s voluntary attrition rate was around 1 percent for the first four years, and our current attrition levels are not only below what we expected and modeled in our post-IPO planning, they continue to stay well below the industry average. Developing great leaders is an essential part of Zynga’s core values — we’re proud of our record in that regard — and it’s not at all surprising that some would move on and or retire post-IPO. Zynga continues to lead the industry with the top talent in social game development. We’re proud of the teams working hard to create the next generation of social games including the recent launches of The Ville, ChefVille and the coming launch of FarmVille 2.”

Some of the employees have seemingly innocent reasons to leave the company, like Verdu, but the number of people leaving won’t help the company’s stock price.

Shares are down 2.3 percent, or 7 cents, to $2.89, which is right above the company’s all-time low of $2.66 a share.

It’s funny because it’s been on my mind lately
Having a dope beat, dope idea.
Sixteen bars ain’t enough!
How the f*ck can I squeeze my whole life into a 16 bar verse?
—Rick Ross, Sixteen

After I wrote A Good Place to Work, people flooded me with feedback about one-on-ones. About half the responders chastised me, saying that one-on-ones were useless and that I shouldn’t put so much emphasis on them. The other half wanted to know how to run more effective one-on-ones. It seems to me that both groups are likely talking about two sides of the same coin.

Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company. The architecture might include the organizational design, meetings, processes, email, yammer and even one-on-one meetings with managers and employees. Absent a well-designed communication architecture, information and ideas will stagnate and your company will degenerate into a bad place to work. While it is quite possible to design a great communication architecture without one-on-one meetings, in most cases one-on-ones provide an excellent mechanism for information and ideas to flow up the organization and should be part of your design.

Generally, people who think one-on-one meetings are a bad idea have been victims of poorly designed one-on-one meetings. The key to a good one-on-one meeting is the understanding that it is the employee’s meeting rather than the manager’s meeting. This is the free-form meeting for all the pressing issues, brilliant ideas and chronic frustrations that do not fit neatly into status reports, email and other less personal and intimate mechanisms.

If you are an employee, how do you get feedback from your manager on an exciting — but only 20 percent formed — idea that you’re not sure is relevant without sounding like a fool? How do you point out that a colleague who you do not know how to work with is blocking your progress without throwing her under the bus? How do you get help when you love your job, but your personal life is melting down? Through a status report? On email? Yammer? Asana? Really? For these and other important areas of discussions, one-on-ones can be essential.

If you like structured agendas, then the employee should set the agenda. A good practice is to have the employee send you the agenda in advance. This will give her a chance to cancel the meeting if nothing is pressing. It also makes clear that it is her meeting and will take as much or as little time as she needs. During the meeting, since it’s the employee’s meeting, the manager should do 10 percent of the talking and 90 percent of the listening. Note that this is the opposite of most one-on-ones.

While it’s not the manager’s job to set the agenda or do the talking, the manager should try to draw the key issues out of the employee. The more introverted the employee, the more important this becomes. If you manage engineers, drawing out issues will be an important skill to master.

Some questions that I’ve found to be very effective in one-on-ones:

• If we could improve in any way, how would we do it?
• What’s the No. 1 problem with our organization? Why?
• What’s not fun about working here?
• Who is really kicking ass in the company? Who do you admire?
• If you were me, what changes would you make?
• What don’t you like about the product?
• What’s the biggest opportunity that we’re missing out on?
• What are we not doing that we should be doing?
• Are you happy working here?

In the end, the most important thing is that the best ideas, the biggest problems and the most intense employee life issues make their way to the people who can deal with them. One-on-ones are a time-tested way to do that, but if you have a better way, go ahead with your bad self.

Ben Horowitz is founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz. He was a co-founder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by HP, and ran several product divisions at Netscape. He serves on the board of companies such as Foursquare, Jawbone, Lytro, Magnet, Nicira and Tidemark, and blogs at www.bhorowitz.com.

Yes, indeed, if morale at the San Francisco-based social games company continues to sink as quickly as its stock has been dropping.

It’s the unfortunate flip side of a company that has stressed that its employees should be their own CEO and “move at Zynga speed.” It’s a culture driven by analytics, where every move is recorded, measured and evaluated.

Now it appears that the long hours and taxing work environment are causing the inevitable — some are deciding to leave, especially as shares trade 70 percent lower than the company’s public offering.

Several sources at other companies say they’ve started seeing a “flood of resumes” in recent weeks from Zynga developers looking for jobs or trying to raise capital.

On the inside, employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, described morale as “grim,” while another characterized the feeling as “anxious.”

To be sure, at times, it can also be business as usual. During the company’s 16th all-hands quarterly meeting today, CEO Mark Pincus reportedly talked about the company’s future, and fielded tough questions from the crowd as he usually does, according to a Zynga spokesperson, who declined to elaborate on the state of morale.

But if an employee hasn’t bought into the company’s mission by now, the past three weeks haven’t helped.

On Wednesday, Zynga’s COO John Schappert resigned, after only 15 months on the job.

And two weeks ago, Zynga reported a second-quarter earnings flop that led to its stock sliding by 40 percent. It has remained relatively stable at these depressed levels ever since, and closed today at $3.01 a share.

In addition, the company has also been hounded by at least two lawsuits — one targeting its management team, and the other, its games.

Employees at Zynga’s headquarters gather around the atrium at its 2012 Unleashed event.

The first suit is alleging that executives made false and misleading statements in order to liquidate their personal holdings at elevated prices four months after the IPO. In the suit, filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court of Northern California, it named Zynga and a dozen of its executives and board members as defendants. In the company’s secondary offering, Pincus sold about $200 million in shares; Schappert sold $3.9 million; and CTO Cadir Lee sold $13.6 million.

But low-level employees were prohibited from participating in the sale, which also isn’t helping with morale, according to numerous staffers.

The second legal blow was a copyright-infringement lawsuit filed by Electronic Arts, which alleges that Zynga is making an “unmistakable copy” of its game, The Sims Social.

In some respects, Zynga has made it fairly far without a talent drain. In comparison, it took only three months for there to be at least three notable departures from Facebook, the social network that it works with very closely, and which is also suffering from post-IPO stock woes.

Another point that employees can celebrate is that most have been awarded stock grants, and not options. The benefit of grants is they can’t ever be underwater.

That said, for employees who are heavily compensated by stock, it may not mean much, as they’ve watched their net worth on paper drop by 70 percent over the past few months. At those rates, it’s the difference between being able to afford a nice house and buying a nice car.

For a majority of the 3,000-plus employees, many are also short-timers, which creates another issue.

Without a long history at the company, it may be hard for some to feel nostalgic about staying during difficult times. According to a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Zynga said 80 percent of the staff has been there less than two years. In fact, many employees have joined the company through a dozen or more acquisitions. This short tenure could potentially represent an ongoing challenge for Zynga to manage, as it tries to figure out how to create a sense of dedication among its employees.

Otherwise, Zynga can be like many other Silicon Valley companies offering free lunch and other perks. But now, some employees think it might be the time to pull out the checkbook and spend some of the $1 billion it raised in its IPO on retention bonuses.

In a statement, Pincus said that Schappert’s departure was amicable and had nothing to do with the company’s operations — in other words, it was Schappert’s decision to resign.

But if Zynga doesn’t find a catalyst to get its stock moving in the right direction, it’s not a risky bet that investors could see other such “voluntary” departures in the near future.

Rather, it is alerting customers to a tuition-reimbursement program for full-time hourly employees working at the company’s many fulfillment centers.

By making such a big splash about the program, Amazon clearly wants to assist with its recruiting efforts as it gets big fast. Additionally, the program may give customers a warm and fuzzy feeling about shopping at Amazon.

The Amazon Career Choice program, as it’s called, will pay up to 95 percent of tuition, textbooks and associated fees, up to a maximum of $2,000 a year for four years.

In a letter posted prominently at the top of the site, Bezos calls it “unusual,” because Amazon isn’t willing to pay for just any education.

Instead, it will pay exclusively for study in areas that are well-paying and in high demand, based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, such as aircraft mechanics, computer-aided design, machine tool technology, medical laboratory science and dental hygiene. And it will fund those areas regardless of whether those skills are relevant to a career at Amazon.

“Many of our fulfillment center employees will choose to build their careers at Amazon. For others, a job at Amazon might be a step towards a career in another field. We want to make it easier for employees to make that choice and pursue their aspirations,” Bezos writes.

In the past, Amazon has defended its worker safety record after reports cropped up of unsafe working conditions in its warehouses. It reiterated its claims today that it is safer to work in an Amazon fulfillment center than it is in a traditional department store.

In 2010, the company added 13 fulfillment centers, and last year it added nine more. As of November 2011, Amazon had 15,000 full-time workers in its order-fulfillment centers, according to the Associated Press, but it is unclear how many of those employees are paid hourly.

At the end of the letter, Bezos made no long-term commitments to the program. As with many of Amazon’s innovations, this “is an experiment,” he said.

The same way we make other decisions: by waiting for someone to decide that it’s the right thing to do, and then letting them recruit other people to work on it with them. We believe in each other to make these decisions, and this faith has proven to be well-founded over and over again.

– From page 13 of the Valve Handbook for New Employees

Most recently, Roseman (pictured on the right, with Zynga’s CEO Mark Pincus on the left) oversaw last month’s launch of Zynga’s social games platform.

The platform, code-named “Project Z,” enables games to be played directly on Zynga.com, rather than through Facebook, making it an important strategy for the company as it seeks independence from the social network.

In addition, Roseman also served as the manager of the San Francisco-based company’s office in Seattle, where he helped to recruit engineers.

When reached by phone, Roseman briefly confirmed that he had left the company about three weeks ago, after the launch of the platform.

Roseman said one of the main reasons he was leaving was because he spent three to four days a week in San Francisco, and was looking forward to spending more time with his family in Seattle. He has not decided what to do next, but said he is looking forward to something entrepreneurial.

Before joining Zynga, Roseman was CEO of Evri, a semantic Web start-up funded by Paul Allen; before that, he was one of Amazon’s first engineers.

Zynga declined to comment on Roseman’s departure, but confirmed that Jim Veevaert is now managing the Seattle office. Previously, Veevaert was president of Jerry Bruckheimer Games, a games studio founded by the famous Hollywood producer; he also worked at Microsoft for more than seven years.

In January, Zynga told me it employed 50 people in Seattle and was hiring.

Since the Seattle office’s open house in April 2011, it has grown significantly.

To help attract talent over the past year, it acquired Gasworks Games and CupidsPlay, two Seattle-area companies. CupidsPlay developed a game that merged social games and online dating, which I’ve written about. The two acquisitions are fairly minor, and were primarily for talent.

According to LinkedIn, Gasworks Games’ co-founders Toby Gladwell and Andrew Kaplan have been working at Zynga for the past several months. Likewise, the co-founders of CupidsPlay Diwakar Gupta and CJ Huang have updated their profiles to reflect that they’ve been working at Zynga’s Seattle office for the past year.

Most recently, the Seattle game studio helped to launch Slingo on Facebook.

The blueprints would more than double Amazon’s current footprint in Seattle, and hints at the rapid corporate-level expansion the e-commerce company anticipates over the next decade.

Last month, Amazon purchased three contiguous blocks in downtown Seattle. Terms of the sale were not disclosed, but the multimillion dollar — maybe billion-dollar — deal will represent Amazon’s first significant land purchase, once it closes.

Last night, Amazon’s architects presented plans to Seattle’s review board, laying out the company’s vision for an urban campus, complete with three 37-floor office towers, an auditorium, retail space and a few shorter, six-story buildings, reports Eric Pryne, a reporter at the Seattle Times, who attended the meeting.

A 36-page report detailing all the different layouts and scenarios can be found on the city’s Web site here. An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on its plans, and apparently no company spokesperson spoke at last night’s meeting.

The plans are fairly shocking, given the company’s rapid growth over the past few years. Clearly, the company’s leader Jeff Bezos has a lot more surprises in store that may push the company beyond its core online retail and digital businesses,  including the Kindle.

At the end of the year, Amazon had 56,200 employees, up 67 percent year over year. Most of the hiring occurred in operations and customer service, including 17 new fulfillment centers.

It’s not clear how many employees Amazon has in its Seattle headquarters, but it already leases about 2.7 million square feet, including 1.7 million square feet in the so-called South Lake Union neighborhood, which has recently been revitalized by Seattle tech leader Paul Allen, and sits just outside the downtown core.

The comments follow a less than stellar fourth-quarter performance in which the gigantic e-commerce provider spent nearly as much money as it brought in the door — even during its busiest quarter of the year.

Profits for the quarter fell 58 percent, while annual earnings were cut nearly in half.

Some analysts were hoping that the end of the year would be a low point for margins and that Amazon would start growing in 2012 as it benefited from the steep investments made the prior year.

But that’s not part of the plan.

“We’re incredibly optimistic about the opportunity that we have, and that’s why we have invested the way we have and why we’re continuing to invest in the business,” said Amazon’s CFO Tom Szkutak in a conference call with analysts.

For clarity, Piper Jaffray analyst Charles Munster asked again: “So, your outlook in terms of investment philosophy hasn’t changed versus last quarter going forward?”

“No, no,” Szkutak said. “We are continuing to look as we always do. We learn every week, month and quarter about customer adoption. We are looking at a lot of positive things across the business in terms of adoption, specifically Kindle growth from a device standpoint and content that’s following that.”

Other categories seeing growth, he said, include clothing, consumables, consumer electronics and Amazon Web Services.

“There’s a lot of interesting opportunities that we continue to invest in. So we are pleased with the performance in Q4 and what it means going forward for us.”

Over the past year, Amazon has invested heavily in infrastructure, including 17 fulfillment centers around the globe. At the end of the year, it had 56,200 employees, up 67 percent year over year, with most of the hiring coming in operations and customer service.

It has also invested heavily in the digital content business, including the Kindle.

It’s widely assumed that Amazon is breaking even or taking a slight loss on the sale of each Kindle Fire. It’s also securing expensive partnerships with content companies across music, video and books, and giving some of that content away as part of the $80 Prime membership, which also includes free two-day shipping.

All of those are bets that Amazon is hoping will reap profits over the long term, as customers continue to consume after they purchase an e-reader or tablet or sign up for Prime.

So far, it’s too early to see how the investment is faring, especially when it comes to new categories.

“It’s very, very early,” Szkutak said, “but so far, we like what we see, so that’s why we are continuing down the path of adding more content and making Prime better. … Because we are investing a lot, we are making sure we understand it very well.”

A lot of details, like Kindle sales numbers, are still being kept under wraps, but he promised Amazon will someday share more about how it is doing.

Unfortunately, the market isn’t as patient. In after-hours trading, the stock was down almost 10 percent at one point. During the session, it ended up down, 8.7 percent, or nearly $17 , to close at $177.50 a share.

The e-commerce giant (a term typically reserved for Amazon in these woods) is one of the larger examples companies from the Bay Area that are setting up shop here and looking to soak up some of the Northwest’s rich engineering talent.

Other companies with satellite offices in the Seattle area include Google, Facebook, Zynga and Salesforce.

“I’m surprised I ended up at eBay, but the story is compelling,” said Ken Moss, who was hired in November to be eBay’s VP of managed marketplaces technology; Moss is GM of the Redmond office.

A long-time Microsoft employee whose claim to fame includes inventing the Pivot table in Excel, Moss more recently co-founded CrowdEye, a start-up focused on search technology and later on stock market prediction.

He said eBay’s dedication to the region is one of the biggest selling points for recruitment.

Most of the 75 employees that currently work there were hired over the past few months, and a small team has been here for seven years. Among the newbies I met were a number of Microsoft veterans who had been there for 12 to 15 years.

Moss says he will report directly to eBay’s CTO Mark Carges, which is “a signal to the whole company that diversified development is for real.”

“We are first-class citizens,” Moss said, referring to sometimes strained relationship between remote workers and a company’s headquarters.

Eric Brill, VP of eBay’s research labs, is also based in the Redmond office, and has been working part-time there since joining the company in 2009.

Moss said eBay will be looking to hire a range of technologists, from college graduates to senior leaders, including developers, testers, researchers, data miners and other positions.

While I was at the office on Tuesday, the mountains were peeking out from the clouds and were easy to spot from the floor-to-ceiling windows on the fourth floor. It was easy enough for everyone to have a window seat in the open-floor plan.

Although the employees just moved in on Monday, a sign outside the building already announced eBay’s presence. Inside, workers were busy putting the final touches on the space to make it feel like eBay. Primary colors of red, blue, yellow and green highlighted the office walls; with a bit of Seattle flair, conference rooms were named after Northwest tribes such as Puyallup and Quinault (and other names that might be difficult for San Jose-based employees to pronounce).

But missing were some of the perks that some recruits expect these day — no shuttles to and from work or fancy cafeterias, for instance. 

In fact, eBay has a long way to go to compare with what Google has done here. Since entering the market seven years ago, Google has hired more than 900 employees, spread across two locations, a spokesperson confirmed.

One office is in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood; the other is on the Eastside.

The two offices are geographically divided by Lake Washington, which can be crossed by one of two floating bridges — or by boat, if you are crafty enough. The traffic bottlenecks make for a horrendously notorious commute, so having two locations that straddle both sides is a huge perk — like having offices in both San Francisco and San Jose.

Because of Google’s size here, many of its perks are similar to its Mountain View headquarters, including free meals prepared by chefs, frozen-yogurt bars and other, mostly food-based, luxuries.

In eBay’s case, the new digs are located deep on the Eastside, a couple of miles past Microsoft in Redmond, and roughly 15 miles from Jeff Bezos’s empire in downtown Seattle. Recently, Amazon relocated its headquarters to a brand-new campus in South Lake Union, a neighborhood being revitalized by former Microsoft executive Paul Allen.

Other outside companies that have also established sizable tech centers here include Facebook and Zynga. A couple others have gained offices through acquisitions. Electronic Arts, for instance, now has a large office here, after acquiring PopCap; EMC now has big expansion plans here, after purchasing Isilon.

And Geekwire, a Seattle-based technology blog, is good at keeping an ongoing tally, including recent moves into the area by Jawbone and SweetLabs, a San Diego-based start-up, based by Intel Capital and Google Ventures.

Two years ago, Facebook opened an office in the heart of downtown Seattle. It plans to move soon to a 27,000-square-foot space that will have room for about 135 employees. The 70 or so engineers in the office today have worked on projects such as video calling, the Facebook iPad app and other big issues, such as security.

Last April, social game maker Zynga opened an office in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square neighborhood, hoping to absorb some of the game talent here, spawned from Xbox and Nintendo, and cloud-computing knowledge from Amazon. It has 50 employees today, but declined to say how many it planned to hire in the near future.

As with most of these companies, eBay believes it can find a diversity of talent here that can’t always be easy to hire in the Bay Area.

As a Seattle native, and having covered tech here for the past 12 years, including an eight-year stint at the Seattle Times, I might not be the most unbiased on the subject. But I’ve seen first-hand the breadth of talent here, from Microsoft, Amazon, Expedia, T-Mobile and many others, including a strong start-up pool.

Despite that, the local tech community often suffers from an inferiority complex when it compares itself with the Bay Area, which is much larger. Still, it seems that Silicon Valley companies are finding a number of excuses to travel north to drink from the area’s plentiful tech waters.

Ryan called AllThingsD this morning to clear the air after a report in BetaBeat painted a fairly grim picture of the situation.

BetaBeat reported this morning that as many as 170 employees would be laid off today; that Gilt Taste, the company’s high-end grocery site, was likely to be closed down; and that Jetsetter, its travel operations, was likely to be merged with Gilt City, its daily deal division.

On pretty much all accounts, Ryan declared not guilty.

“We are not closing down any businesses. We are not closing down Gilt Taste, and we aren’t merging Gilt City and Jetsetter,” he said.

Additionally, another new division, Park & Bond, which sells full-priced men’s clothing, is also doing well. “In its fifth month of business, Park & Bond did more revenue than any other business in its fifth month,” Ryan added.

The one grain of truth in all of it, he said, is that over the next couple of months, he expects to selectively trim staff by roughly 50 employees.

But for emphasis, he added, the company will still end up having more employees by the end of March than it does now.

“It’s pretty minimal in the scheme of having 900 employees,” he said. “Not only will we do that [have cutbacks], but we will continue to do that. What Gilt needs to be, and is doing, is to create a fantastic consumer experience while running an efficient company.”

He said the company achieved its goal of generating $500 million in June and now is setting its sights on transitioning the business from a money-losing organization to cash-flow break even this year.

He also said that Gilt Groupe, which raised $138 million in capital last May, is on track for an IPO, perhaps as early as the fourth quarter, but more likely in 2013.

“The timing feels about right, and we are on a steady progression,” said Ryan, who declined to give revenue estimates for this year because the company is in the sensitive lead-up to a public offering.

Ryan named two divisions that may see cuts over the next couple of months: Gilt Taste and Gilt City.

In October, Gilt City purchased BuyWithMe, and although it hired only 20-25 of the deal provider’s 190 employees, Ryan said they probably don’t need that many going forward now that the integration has been completed.

Additionally, he said there are some inefficiencies within Gilt Taste.

Ryan characterized the site as “doing great,” but said it will need fewer staffers now that it is up and running. At first, it needed to negotiate deals with dozens of vendors and shoot photos of the more than 1,000 products on the site.

Now that they’ve hit a baseline of items, they’ll probably add only a couple hundred new products a year, reducing the need for so much staff.

“There’s much less work to do there,” Ryan said. “With flash sales, you have to do that process every week, but in the full-priced business, there’s greater start-up costs. That’s part of the business.”

In particular, BetaBeat said Park & Bond President John Auerbach was likely to leave the company.

Ryan said there’s always the chance one of the top 15 executives could leave, whether it was their decision or the company’s, but that Auerbach is still working there as of now.

Conversations with current and former Yahoo employees reveal that they are looking for Thompson to articulate a clear vision, to narrow the product development focus, and spearhead more transparency from executive management. Meanwhile, some employees expect that headcount reductions are coming.

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The drop-off in players affected almost all developers, but did not hit all titles equally.

For example, Electronic Arts saw 1.2 million fewer monthly users over the past week for its top title The Sims Social; Zynga’s Empire & Allies game lost one million monthly users, and its newest game, CastleVille, lost 900,000, according to AppData, which publishes such information.

On the flip side, many of the games that performed well were old favorites; these logically would have longer-term, more-committed players, who would make a point of returning during the holidays to take advantage of seasonal promotions.

The games that benefited from the holidays include Zynga’s Words With Friends and FarmVille, which gained 1.3 million and 800,000 monthly active users, respectively, according to Inside Social Games. Other gainers rounding out the Top 5 were Tetris Online’s Tetris Battle; Wooga’s kingdom-building game, Magic Land; and Men vs. Women, a role-playing game by Social Point.

Still, the general direction for the week was heading down.

That contrasts with other game platforms, such as consoles, PCs and mobile, which largely benefit from the holidays and from more free time in general.

Console games often skyrocket in popularity as kids and adults unwrap new titles for Nintendo, Xbox or PlayStation on Christmas morning.

PC gaming also typically surges during the season. EA timed the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic ahead of the holidays, in hopes of drawing new players who would be sold on sticking around for months, after spending time on the game during their time off.

But perhaps the biggest competitor came from mobile, which benefited from breaking records for the number of new Android and iOS devices that were gifted during the holidays. Flurry reported that more than one billion apps were downloaded worldwide during the last seven days of 2011, breaking the all-time weekly record. Games are often one of the most-downloaded categories of apps.

So the more important question to ask is, why would Facebook be an exception, if other platforms performed well?

Clearly, all of the platforms are competing for a limited number of minutes in the day, and so are other forms of media, like the Internet, TV and the movies. But when it comes to Facebook, a larger driver may be the environment — after all, it’s no big secret that a lot of social networking and social gaming is done in the workplace.

In a study conducted last summer, advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi found that 47 percent of respondents said they play social games at work during a typical day, and that 28 percent play for at least 30 minutes. Without that dedicated time in front of the computer every day, people may have had the opportunity to be more obsessed with other screens, such as phones or TVs.

Another potential reason that Facebook and social games did not see a lift from the holidays is because they have not yet figured out how to capitalize on the Christmas economy.

For years, console games have been timed with the end of the year, so they could be wrapped up and placed under the tree. More recently, smartphones and gift cards for music and apps have helped mobile prosper. Perhaps there wasn’t enough hype and promotion for social games to compete for people’s dollars.

Regardless of the reasons, the drop may ultimately be a small a blip on the radar screen for most game developers, who also see several spikes in activity during the year.

The bigger impact may be felt at Facebook, which takes a 30 percent cut of all virtual goods sold inside social games, and would feel the cumulative impact across all of the games.

Since the rise of Facebook and Twitter, companies believed they had the right to fire employees who posted complaints or hostile or rude comments online about their employers.

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According to multiple sources, 75 percent of the company’s 500-plus employees received the bonus. The dividend was based on tenure, with some of the longer-term employees receiving as much as $100,000.

Big Fish CEO Jeremy Lewis declined to comment, but confirmed that the dividend was given to shareholders and vested option holders.

The dividend shows that the privately held game maker is flush with cash, and that it may have big plans to come.

Big Fish has been considered an IPO candidate in recent years; the latest rumors hint it could come as soon as next year.

Since being founded 10 years ago, the company has grown quickly. It has hired 50 employees worldwide over the past few months, including new CFO David Stephenson. Prior to the job, Stephenson was VP of finance at Amazon.com.

The company specializes in producing games for the casual games market, including puzzles, hidden objects and other strategy games, but has steered clear of the recently popular free-to-play model adopted by newer games companies, like Zynga.

Instead, many of its games are sold through a monthly subscription online or for download on the iPhone and iPad.

“Better check yo self before you wreck yo self”
– Ice Cube

Everyone in the technology industry seems to agree that people are paramount, yet nobody seems to be on the same page about what the people organization — Human Resources — should look like.

The problem is that when it comes to HR, most CEOs don’t really know what they want. In theory, they want a well-managed company with a great culture. They know instinctively that an HR organization probably can’t deliver that. As a result, CEOs usually punt on the issue and implement something that’s suboptimal, if not worthless.

Interestingly, one of the first things that you learn when you run an engineering organization is that a good Quality Assurance department cannot build a high-quality product, but it can tell you when the development team builds a low-quality product. Similarly, a high-quality Human Resources organization cannot make you a well-managed company with a great culture, but it can tell you when you and your managers are not getting the job done.

The employee life cycle
The best way to approach management quality assurance is through the lens of the employee life cycle. From hire to retire, how good is your company? Is your management team world-class in all phases? How do you know?

A great HR organization will support, measure and help improve your management team. Some of the questions that they will help you answer:

Recruiting and hiring

• Do you understand the skills and talents required to succeed in every open position?
• Are your interviewers well-prepared?
• Do your managers and employees do an effective job of selling your company to prospective employees?
• Do interviewers arrive on time?
• Do managers and recruiters follow up with candidates in a timely fashion?
• Do you compete effectively for talent against the best companies?

Compensation

• Do your benefits make sense for your company demographics?
• How do your salary and stock option packages compare to the companies that you compete with for talent?
• How well do your performance rankings correspond to your compensation practices?

Training and integration

• When you hire an employee, how long does it take them to become productive from the perspective of the employee, her peers and her manager?
• Shortly after joining, how well does an employee understand what’s expected of her?

Performance management

• Do your managers give consistent, clear feedback to their employees?
• What is the quality of your company’s written performance reviews?
• Did all of your employees receive their reviews on time?
• Do you effectively manage out poor performers?

Motivation

• Are your employees excited to come to work?
• Do your employees believe in the mission of the company?
• Do they enjoy coming to work every day?
• Do you have any employees who are actively disengaged?
• Do your employees clearly understand what’s expected of them?
• Do employees stay a long time or do they quit faster than normal?
• Why do employees quit?

Requirements to be great at running HR
What kind of person should you look for to comprehensively and continuously understand the quality of your management team? Here are some key requirements:

• World-class process design skills: Much like the head of quality assurance, the head of HR must be a masterful process designer. One key to accurately measuring critical management processes is excellent process design and control.
• A true diplomat: Nobody likes a tattletale, and there’s no way for an HR organization to be effective if the management team doesn’t implicitly trust it. Managers must believe that HR is there to help them improve rather than police them. Great HR leaders genuinely want to help the managers and could not care less about getting credit for identifying problems. They will work directly with the managers to get quality up, and only escalate to the CEO when necessary. If an HR leader hoards knowledge, makes power plays or plays politics, he will be useless.
• Industry knowledge: Compensation, benefits, best recruiting practices, etc., are all fast-moving targets. The head of HR must be deeply networked in the industry and stay abreast of all the latest developments.
• Intellectual heft to be the CEO’s trusted advisor: None of the other skills matter if the CEO does not fully back the head of HR in holding the managers to a high standard of quality. In order for this to happen, the CEO must trust the HR leader’s thinking and judgment.
• Understanding of things unspoken: When management quality starts to break down in a company, nobody says anything about it, but super-perceptive people can tell that the company is slipping. You need one of those.

Acknowledgement
I would like to give a very special thanks to my head of Human Resources, Shannon Callahan, who taught me everything that I know about this subject.

The old contract will go back into effect Tuesday, while negotiators continue to work towards a new resolution, said Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America, which represents about 35,000 Verizon employees. He said workers were willing to return because the company seemed ready to negotiate.

“The strike was about the process. We are now convinced that a change to the process is possible,” Mr. Cohen said. “The risk of going back to work while negotiating this is worth it to us.” He said talks would resume late next week.

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Facebook’s use as a job-recruitment tool remains small, but its appeal may be growing. Some recruiters say they have all but eliminated their spending on job boards, which can charge a few hundred dollars per job posting, depending on volume. Others note that while LinkedIn contains a more comprehensive résumé database, candidates tend to value referrals from their connections on Facebook more.

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The five new facilities will add about four million square feet of space and hire thousands of new employees.

But that’s just the beginning. The company has plans to expand even more as it adds more merchandise to its inventory and tries to speed shipping to meet the popularity of services like Amazon Prime.

In all, the Seattle-based e-commerce giant plans to add at least nine fulfillment centers this year, of which roughly half will be located in North America. If the company’s growth rates continue, it may end up building even more, execs disclosed during its last earnings call.

It is the second year in a row that Amazon has built out more capacity, having added 13 fulfillment centers in 2010. The company currently has fulfillment centers in Arizona, Delaware, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia.

Today, it announced it will build a fourth distribution center in Phoenix, spanning 1.2 million square feet, making a total of 4 million square feet in the state. For perspective, that’s the equivalent of nearly 70 football fields.

Yesterday, it said it was adding 900,000 square feet in Indiana.

Amazon hires thousands of full-time positions at these facilities, including roles in picking, packing and receiving, and shipping.

Amazon did not specify how many employees would be necessary at each location, but said for example that it was seeking 2,000 workers in Lexington County, S.C., and 2,700 in Hamilton County, Tenn. (not including 4,000 seasonal workers).

The company’s impressive growth was put into context earlier this year by Geekwire, which reported that Amazon had hired 4,200 employees in the first quarter to bring its total to 37,900.

While Amazon must build these facilities to keep up with demand, the investments are costing it significantly. In the first quarter, Amazon’s revenues jumped 38 percent, but net income fell by 33 percent compared to the year-ago period.

Still, it’s a price that must be paid. You can’t store everything in the cloud.

The world’s largest mobile-phone maker by volume said it will consolidate its research and product-development sites so that each has a clear role and mission, and expects to expand some sites and to contract or close others.

Nokia also said it plans to outsource all Symbian software activities and move about 3,000 employees to Accenture PLC. Accenture, meanwhile, will provide mobility software services to Nokia for future smartphones.

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