Omni Group Layoffs

Brent Simmons (tweet):

Omni’s been around for almost 30 years, and I hope it’s around for another 30. It’s one of the great Mac and iOS shops — they will sing songs about Omni, at maximum volume, in the great halls.

But businesses go up and down, and Omni’s had a bit of a down period. Normally that would be fine, but the current economic circumstances turn “a bit of a down period” into something more serious — and, in order to get things going the right way again, the company had to lay off some people. Including me.

For anyone who’s able to hire now, this is a rare opportunity to scoop up some top talent that’s usually off the market.

Mark Boszko (tweet):

People probably know me best for my video production work — please see the output of my last seven years in The Omni Group’s video archives — but I have also done a lot of related development work, and would love to push my career in that direction.

Joel Page:

In short, I designed applications for macOS and iOS. If you look at any of Omni’s applications, you’re looking at my work. Icons, UX, UI, but mostly the icons. I joke that being a UI designer is 95% being a production artist, and that holds pretty true.

All sorts of businesses are affected. Marcin Krzyzanowski was recently laid off from his startup:

I’m looking for new opportunity (yay!) I’ve been doing remote (EU and US) for many years. I’m seasoned iOS Developer, some Mac dev (I’m open to other tech). Interested in contract and/or fulltime.

John Sundell is helping indie developers, many of whom are seeing lower sales:

Normally, this site (and all of my other work) is funded by sponsorships — through non-tracking, privacy-focused (and JavaScript-free) ads that I run on a weekly basis. But for the next two weeks there will be no ads on this site. Instead, each day, I’ll promote a new indie app whose developer has been financially impacted by the current pandemic. For free, with no strings attached.

I hope that, with your support, these indie developers will regain some of that lost revenue through this effort, and that we will all get to discover a few great new apps as well.

[…]

Also, I’d love to see you share your own favorite indie apps on Twitter and other social networks — and if you do, feel free to use the hashtag #IndieSupportWeeks to make those tweets and posts easier to find for everyone who’s following this effort.

Update (2020-04-08): See also: Hacker News.

John Gruber (tweet):

All of this — as Brent says, gestures at everything — aside, it is hard to shake the feeling that the market for independent professional software is coming apart at the seams, fraying irreparably.

Paying for good software is in our own best interest.

Frank Reiff:

OMG. OmniGroup, the IBM of Apple indie development, has laid off a whole bunch of people. If that’s not an indictment of where indies are at, I don’t know what is. Still Apple is getting 30% of all sales and is about to increase busy work for everybody at WWDC again.

Kristina Sontag:

That said, if you need great people in test, design, marketing, support, and engineering let me know and I can connect you!

James Rowland:

Like others, I was laid off from the Omni Group. If you need a PM who knows privacy law and copyright or a Tester who can navigate iOS and Mac app review, give me a shout.

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