Twitter's a-buzz with news of EMC cutting 2400 jobs.

If you're one of the victims, you can join the EMC-alumni network on LinkedIn and get me admitted. That way I might be able to help some of you find jobs. You can also go to my extracurricular blog www.BrilliantJobSearch.com; it's free and it's for the recruiter-less unemployed.

Finally, and without any judgement at all, you might want to join me in pondering what kind of people (as managers, employers, employees, stockholders, consumers) we want to be, and what kind of companies we want to work for and invest in.

I'm an EMC stockholder, so I should be delighted with EMC's cost-cutting measures, the bounce its stock took, and its Q4 results... but I can't help but ask myself at what cost. You see, I can't get something Barry Diller said a while back out of my mind; namely:

The idea of a company that's earning money, not losing money, that's not, let's say 'industrially endangered,' to have just cutbacks so they can earn another $12 million or $20 million or $40 million in a year where no one's counting is really a horrible act when you think about it on every level. First of all, it's certainly not necessary. It's doing it at the worst time. It's throwing people out to a larger, what is inevitably a larger unemployment heap for frankly no good reason."

A few seconds later, he added:

"It's not that you don't want to earn as much money as you can - it is your obligation, of course - but companies have obligations beyond that and they certainly have obligations beyond that at certain times, in the times in which they operate. And they also certainly ought to know that meeting and beating expectations is probably yesterday's game and it will be increasingly so, which would be by the way very healthy for companies. Running a company that meets and beats expectations, and that runs their company accordingly, are companies that I would question why anyone would invest in."

I know that EMC has some great products and a bright future; I bet that Joe Tucci had a few sleepless nights before he made this decison; and that the managers who have yet to make the layoffs are dreading it.

I wonder what they'd think of Diller's convictions?