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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?