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"Industry Standard" Paycuts in IT?
noGarnishMe! asks: "I was just reading about a Chicago-based company that has told all its employees earning over $60K/year that they will have to accept a 50% percent paycut for the month of May. This cut might be necessary in these times but keep in mind that the bozos in senior management just finished buying up several failing companies and paying some large bonuses to themselves. The memo announcing the cut is here. This cut, coming in such large chunk and in May, seems like a draconian shot to boost the 2d quarter financials. True, the annual paycut of 3.8% is modest but it ignores that fact that many folks won't be able to pay their May bills with only half their salary. I know that many of us have been through rough times these past 18 months and so I ask, what has been the approach at your company?" There are graceful and non-graceful ways for a company to handle a lack of cash flow. In the scramble for survival, especially in an economic downturn, many companies are caught off-guard and have to show their shareholders that they are doing something to get the company back on the road to profitability (which seems to be the issue, here). In many of these cases, the group most affected by such changes are the employees. It would be interesting to note how many of you have gone through this before and what you had to do to survive the shortfall.
I'm glad I only earn $59K/year!
if you wokred for a company that had cash in the bank to hold it over in low flow times.......
I suggest getting out of a company that does this more than one time EVER, if it is feasable for you to do.
bad managment leads to lost jobs.
that is only MHO though so take it as you like
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I worked for those fuckers. I took the special "4 week" plan back in January... man, am I glad I left that job. Apparently our department is having trouble getting approval to buy RAM.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
1: Or not, whatever.
I had to do help desk for 6 months to pay the bills. I don't feel that sorry for your one month of suffering. At least you still have a job.
I did love the part about if you do not comply you will be terminated though hehehe
Having worked for a major ISP for the past few years, and seen more than one RIF in that time, I'm just glad to HAVE a job here still. I think I'd rather take half a paycheck home for one month that to be out of a job for 6. Missing/being late on one months rent/mortgage is MUCH more appealing to me than having to miss several, and go job hunting in this market at the same time.
-- Hi! I'm a
Our company simply deferred salary increases for four months, pocketing the difference. Spread across thousands and thousands of employees, that's a healthy chunk of change!
okay i work for a small (30 ppls) engineering company and so far we are still in buisiness with all of our employees and no paycuts, but with customers of us (other big companies) there are some pretty dramatic measures taken. fot instance with company X they cancelled all en of year bonusses (13 th month) and everybody took a 5 % paycut. we are that our stock is not public, so our value is not determinjed by greedy stockholders that want to see profit gain every quarter. as far as we are concerned, every year that ends in profit is a good year.
I'd take a 50% pay cut but in exchange I would only work 2.5 days a week or 4 hours days. That would give me some extra time during the nice summer months.
You have a contract that they can't change at will. So the best course of action is simply not to accept a paycut.
True warriors use the Klingon Google
The email doesn't say, but do the managers who earn over $60K have to take the same pay cut?
I work for a company that put a 3% cap on raises at the end of last year for us normal people, claiming that's all it could afford (I know, a lot of people didn't get anything...), but more than doubled the salary of a VP one month earlier.
Hell, they're only going to pay you for 50% of what they promised... then you only show up for 50% of the time you promised.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
I am so glad I live in a country where the behaviour of that company would be illegal.
Not to say it's much better here, but...
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
IANAL, but I seem to remember someone telling me that your employer is not legally allowed to decrease your salary? that would make sense because otherwise its just another form of constructive dismissal
Is that wrong? does it only apply to permanent decreases? or a certain percentage?
or do / did the workers at this company have the opertunity to take redundancy or sign a waver over their rights not to have a pay decrease?
When the bosses talk about improving productivity, they are never talking about themselves
It sounds like these guys have a severe short-term cashflow problem, rather than a longterm profitability problem... otherwise they could have asked staff to take the cut over the next six months, or take 2 weeks unpaiod vacation some time over the year, etc.
The real problem is that cashflow problems can be extremely hard to get over... and now they've probably alienated most of their remaining staff. I would hope that this comany tried their hardest to liquidate furniture, benefits, executive cars, office space etc before they did this, otherwise they'll have a mass exodus on their hands (which may of course be what they want).
In Europe, where I work, it's much harder to do something like this, for better or for worse; most countries don't allow unilateral cuts.
Alex.
Ah, computer dating -- it's like pimping, but you rarely have to use the phrase "upside your head" -- Bender
In an IS department in Arkansas... I got the eyebrow yesterday for making a p/o for toner yesterday. Oh, we don't need to print the records for the 4 auditors sitting in the conference room... ok. We have to pay for coffee. 75 cents a cup. Under instructions that we can't buy any equipment, so I'm fixing machines with wishes. lots of fun.
- lance sanity is the trademark of a weak mind.
Wouldn't know about how the private sector is handling these rough times; our agency has never had a RIF. It is at times like this I appreciate being recruited by the fed. Sounds like it is more attractive everyday: employment for life + great benefits + transfer anywhere in country (and some foreign posts) + good wages.
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
Solving cash flow problems in this way is _not_ a good idea. First, the workplace will rumble with the roar of resumes being printed and sent to competitors by all competent staff. Second, if the customers get a whiff of this (and they might), some may decide not to do business with a sinking ship and leave (or at least postpone any contracts), and put the company in ever more difficulties than before.
Better, actually, to acknowledge that the staffing is too high, and cut some staff outright. Better for the company, and, really, better for the staff that do not have to live in a constant state of anxiety and insecurity while trying to do their job. I mean, what do you prefer: get cut outright, with a couple of months salary in your pocket and free tolook for something better; or losing half your pay for a month, maybe for the next month as well, then maybe get cut anyway (or see the company collapse) and never see that money again - and all the while expected to do your job instead of having time and energy to search for a better one?
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Take this as a sign to jump ship NOW. that or at least start looking for a new job. if you don't now, you probably will by the end of may or june.
My company decided to take a hard look around the shop and using a strong Performance Management System, cut all of the bottom performers entirely. They fired 6 people in a staff of 20 in the space of 3 months.
The good side to this is that the remaining people were the ones you want to keep - strong performers who brought out consistently good results. And they did use some more-or-less formalized and official measures, so it was not just "Who annoyed the boss today."
The bad side is that it showed a complete lack of loyalty to long-term employees. One was a 20 year veteran with a wealth of knowledge and another was a single mother in a tough situation, and those are just the ones easy to put into writing. This lead to a big hit in morale, which lead many of the top performers to leave because they had no problems finding other jobs.
Better than keeping everyone for a one-month 50% paycut? Maybe. It probably means better long-term health for the company. But it means worse short-term performance for a staff which is overworked and terminally depressed.
To be fair, I have no idea what I would do if I were a manager. This is why I have no interest in climbing the ladder of management.
Sure, they are saving money on wages, but think how much their paper and toner costs are going to go up with all the resumes being printed.
I cannot see any other imaginiable explanation.
I have in the last week been offered a job at a significantly higher sum than their cutoff number, and as a counteroffer I have been offered by my current employer a 24% share in a spinoff of ourselves dedicated to the sales and development in my area of expertise.
The coffers of companies marketing and purchasing budgets are ovrflowing since the 911 hold on most big dollar activities. Companies are gearing up to spend.
If you have a product/service that sucks, or if managment of that company is so blind to have had too much belief in an idea and over employed based on those misconceptions of the product or its marketplace youre screwed.
Big money is moving, you just need to be in the right place to catch it. If youre not its managments fault. PERIOD. Now with that said, managment will find any excuse they can to mask their involvment in your current situation, the first is to blame the economy, but even that one is wearing thin with most.
Overexpansion, Overmanagment, Underselling, Overpaid salaries (although 60k isnt much for even a howler monkey)
I looked at the company in this article, I still cannot see what tangible product or service the sell clearly, THAT is a problem in my opinion and probably has something to do with their current situation.
I wonder how much of a Pay-Cut managment is taking ?
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
No Backups.
:)
/*drunk.. fix later*/
A company does this to please their shareholders...
How do the shareholders feel about the workers' kids going hungry for their pretty portfolio?
They would crap in their pants if their stocks were worth 50% for a month right?
This is exactly the stupid kind of stuff that companies do to prop up their stock price for the two weeks at the end of a quarter. My company recently moved a whole profit sector from one division to another just to make the books look good. It does nothing for the long term bottom line. I think the only thing they are going to end up doing is angering their employees. I would accept a 3.8% cut over the course of a year if it meant helping the company, but a 50% cut for one month, with a 2 week notice is insane.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I would have serious problems working for someone who goes by the name of "Flip". =)
What gets me is that the same people who were bitching about tech workers putting them over a barrel in '99,'00 and '01 are the same people who are now putting their workers over the barrel.
What can you do?? You can't quit your job cause you might not get another for a long time. You can't be a pain in the ass.. cause there are 30 other people who are unemployeed looking for your job. MGMT know's they have their workers by the balls.. and now they're going to apply pressure..
--Hired Net Grunt
I work for a University in the midwest. Our group had a significant part of this year's budget RECALLED around January (fiscal year end is the end of June). The result: part time staff reduced from 5 to 1, I have to get special premission to replace failed hard drives, and I am still expected to keep everything running smoothly. Did I mention they don't pay overtime...
Apparently the company never heard of the studies that correlate employee honesty and employee satisfaction. If you screw your employees, a few will come to believe that it's ok to even the score.
They also seem to have forgotten that the vast majority of the employees have NO stake in the company. They're probably not going to be thrilled to take a kick in the groin to shore up someone else's stock options.
Finally, in the memo, it says if you don't accept it, notify the company and they "may" terminate your employment. Guess that's one way to find out whether you're really irreplaceable!
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
Half the salary, half the work. No salary, no work.
You have to pay people to make them work. Sorry, but big executive bonuses won't grind the bits and make the company shoot into the stars.
Just fail to come into work, use up sick time and vacation, then get the fuck out. If 75 percent leave, those overpaid execs will be out of jobs too! Might as well fuck tham, as they intend to fuck you.
divine's press releases page is proud to announce that they're the "Named Fastest Growing Company on Network World 200". Their divine in the news page mentions none of this either. They are hiring I wonder if all of those jobs start at $60,000.01?
Some of the same jokers who ran MarchFirst/Whittman-Hart into the ground are running Divine.
You can usually cut dead weight at a company pretty easily by organizing them in alphabetical order by title, and going down the list firing people until you have enough money to pay everybody else.
Chief comes before Programmer, Executive comes before Technical...
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
many folks won't be able to pay their May bills with only half their salary
I don't know whether this is typical for the U.S. lifestyle, but in the Europe you don't usually have such low reserve cash (not necessarily on the correct account, but accessible). The paycut was at least announced in advance...
I think it is still better than to be fired - at least you can search for another company while still having some income.
I'm not sure if they realize how much power IT workers yield. I've heard of terrible stories of disgruntled IT workers writing worms/trojan horses, so that if they are let go, or in this case given a pay decrease, unleash the worm, and *poof* - bye bye system. I have even heard one story of an admin altering a backup script to send out email results that the backup was working fine. Months went bye, and when the worm went into effect, it turned out all the backups were blank tapes.
I realize that this is not the moral thing for an IT worker to do, but it's a possibility none the less.
See www.fuckedcompany.com
IT paycuts are becoming the norm. HR people I have spoken with have been flooded with resumes of laid-off dot-commers and web-designers. Network engineer, java or C++ programmers and IT support positions are becoming scarcer then hen's teeth, so to speak.
Do you really think that June will be so much different? Don't accept the paycut! Workers unite!
Accepting this paycut will limit your legal rights to your full salary. Plus, what real belief do you have that once management finds that this little jewel of a tactic works, that they won't use it every quarter'e end? If you are going to accept this paycut, you should at least agree with your management that the other 50% is a debt owed to you. Write a lien and file it with your county's recorder office. This way, if they go bankrupt, you can at least collect this part through bankruptcy court.
It's one thing for them to pay you 50% now and the rest later. It's an unconscionable thing to let them just pay you 50% and have you throw away the other 50%.
Also, start floating your resume around. This ship is showing some leaks.
Digital Freedom
Hell, they're only going to pay you for 50% of what they promised... then you only show up for 50% of the time you promised.
Or you can click mouse and keyboard 50% slower...
:)
Personally, I wouldn't put up with that bull. I'm nobody's sacrificial lamb.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who let things happen to them, and those who make things happen.
The first group gets shit on by their bosses/spouses/parents, accepts mandatory pay cuts, lets everyone go in front of them in traffic, prays when things go wrong, and complains to everyone about how the world is so unfair.
The second group takes charge of their situation, demands bonuses, decides for themselves their place in life and the world, and takes corrective action when things don't go as planned.
So which group are you in?
My company has been short on paying me lately cause we're looking for new business.
Took my last $200, entered a poker tournament a week near my home, and made $3000 in 6 weeks to scrape by.
----------
ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
1. Make a product and give it away for free.
2. Stop paying salaries.
3. Profit!
Oh... Maybe there should be some incomes as well.
I
took a continuing 15% paycut and NO salary for
the month of November. The company I work for
is "distributed" into small offices accross the
country. The CEO was out here last week. We basically
told him that we were giving him a vote of no
confidence. He seemed to get the message about how
un-happy we are. I'd guess we'll close the office
ourselves by going and finding new employment within
a month we're so pissed off.
So I work there now - here's the skinny.
We get paid every two weeks. They're jacking 1/2 of the third paycheck in may and 1/2 of the first paycheck in June. That way - at least on paper - it's not so bad for people who have monthly payments (i.e mortgage) as effectivly you get two paychecks in each of May and June.
To respond to some other comments, it's EVERYONE over 60K, managers & sales included. It's also only US for now - as a poster alluded to this kind of thing doesn't fly so well in other countries.
Where I work, they froze all rasies and promotions for a while. Better then job cuts, mandatory time off with no pay, or a pay cut I suppose. Plus, once that is lifted, raises will take effect as needed.
All in the life of a techie. Do think of leaving if possible if they ever say "Well, it's better then us firing you". They have been very careful with that type of saying around here, and it does help.
Exec 1: We're not doing well this year. At this rate, we won't make profit projections.
Exec 2: We're not doing so hot this year?
Exec 3: We just spent $5 billion on our new toaster strudel division, how could we be doing badly?
Exec 2: What are we going to do?
Exec 1: Well, this will sound crazy, but, we could not take exhorbitant bonuses this year for the good of the company...
(Execs 2 & 3 tie noose and immediately execute Exec 1)
Exec 2: Phwew, that was close... Without a $1 million bonus, how will I pay for my vacation home and vacation Mercedes?
Exec 3: Well, we still have to save money somewhere...
Exec 2: Don't employee salaries cost us a lot? Let's just cut those... Hey, I wonder if I can get us a tee-time for later today... (Wanders off.)
Exec 3: Ok then, so, we cut the employees salaries?
Exec 2: (On phone) Yes Mr. Fong, two at four o'clock--Hold on-- (Covers mouthpiece) What? Oh, yeah, do whatever... It's not like those people can quit, look at the job market.
Exec 3: Great, want another Cuban cigar? I'll light it with a 20...
Who did what now?
We were notified in December that raises for this year would be delayed until at least July. Last week we had a staff meeting in which our CTO hinted there will be no raise this year, but they'll "do what we can" for bonuses. That's BS because a couple of years ago my great private company who always gave huge bonuses where appropriate was bought by a huge public poorly managed company who gives crap bonuses. So I guess I'd be screwed even in the good times. But as far as raises go, the CTO's rationalle (sp?) is he'd rather hold back raises than lay people off. No layoffs... yet.
Developers: We can use your help.
Some of us are without jobs from .COMing and downsizing.
If any of the companies' Oracle DBAs or System Engineers want to give up their jobs due to this little pay cut, send the job my way...
Jarett
7 years industry exp.
Oracle DB & iNet products, Solaris, HPUX, Linux
I've never been in a position where I've been asked to take a paycut, temporary or otherwise. I've taken a paycut to switch jobs (beleive me: ANYTHING to not have to work for EMC!), and I've talked extensively with folks in the tech sector that have taken paycuts to continue working. I've always sworn up and down that I'd never take a paycut, that I'd just walk.
Four months of unemployment, however, with no jobs out there, watching the cash I had saved up to use on buying a new mmotorcycle go down the drain, wasting it on stupid things like rent, utilities, and food, will kind of change your perspecitve, I think. I would think that it depends heavily on the company itself, and your position in the job market:
If the company is looking strong, long-term, and you're pretty sure things are going to get much better, then it might be worth it. Taking a cut could actually help the company's cashflow problems and buy them enough time to get the next big contract, or do something rebuild.
This is probably pretty unlikely, though. I'd think that if the company has gotten this bad, you're probably looking pretty hopeless, long term. In which case, you have three options: You can quit now, quit later, or get laid off later. Quitting now means no unemployment (at least not in my state, to the best of my knowlegde), and no job in this oh-so-stellar job market. Getting laid off means that you'll be looking for a job while all your former coworkers are also looking for a job, but you'd have unemployment, most likely, and possibly some sort of severange package (but I wouldn't count on it).
I'd say your best option is to take your paycut now and start shopping for a new job immediately. Job search as though you are unemployed today and need a job. Chances are, you can keep yourself afloat on the reduced salary long enough to find a new home at a company that might be a little more stable.
There's a last option that you could explore, however, lawyers are expensive and even if you did win, there probably wouldn't be any money left for you to have, and you'd be stuck with no job, no mon-ay, and a nice, fat lawyer bill.
This might be more appropriate in the "Bitch to Slashdot" section.
So this answer will probably not be welcome...
I know it is cool to talk about how stupid "management" is. Remember, "management" is not an entity. It is a group of people at your specific company. Each company has a different group of people making these decisions, so any kind of general statements about "it" are just that: blanket generalizations that are of little use to any individual.
What else you should know about these groups of people at succesful companies is, their entire job is to make decisions. The vast majority of these decisions are of the form "we have $X and we need $Y, how do we [use the extra $(X-Y)|obtain the additional $(Y-X)] in the best way?"
They know how important employees are, and they are aware of the current market realities. If they cut pay 50%, they probably have a good idea of how many people will leave, how productivity will drop, and how much they stand to make in the end. All of these are dictated by the market, and no company (in this industry) is large enough to affect the market.
These things happen...markets fluctuate, and businesses adjust in response. It has nothing to do with good vs. evil or fair vs. unfair. Rather it's the difference between businesses that will succeed and those that will fail.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Um. The company wants to become profiable by November, so they have 6 months, and they think cutting 1 months worth of IT salary is going to do it? 60/12=5 So Instead of paying out 5k per IT staff, they'll cut that to 2500. If they have 100 people, that's 250k. Anything less than that, I wouldn't consider worth the risk..
Besides, why would they need 100 IT people at over 60k?
Doesn't sound healthy to me..
My suggestion: GET OUT NOW
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
We're a small web-development/consulting shop, and things have definitely been a little slow over the past few months. We've found the best ways to avoid it turning into a mess like the one linked include things like:
-Always keep your employees informed about the state of things: finances, workload, potential customers, potential problem areas. Big surprises are bad, dramatic changes are bad.
-Let everybody know that their loyalty and willingness to stay through rough times will be rewarded in the good times. But, complementing that, don't expect them to take their loyalty too far (i.e. to the point where they can't live their lives, pay bills, etc) - let them know that you'll support them in whatever adjustments they need to make, including leaving if necessary.
-Use the experience, skills, and wisdom of your collective staff to find new ways to bring in income, reduce expenses, and streamline operations without sacrificing quality. Having 1 or 2 people at the "top" trying to make all the right decisions is too much - include the people who will be affected by them in the process, especially when times get rough.
-Don't do anything stupid that will put you in court, jail, congressional hearings, or on the front page of the paper. Business ethics are business ethics, through good times and bad - whatever yours are, don't sacrifice them just to save this particular ship, even if it is cutting those icebergs a little close.
How's that for a dose of idealism? But really - honesty, trust, integrity and creativity will get you through a lot more crap than a 50% paycut for your employees will. It's worked for us.
Maybe they should Roll Their Own Business Desktops as a cost saving exercise. Makes about the same amount of sense.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
..is a great one. To save costs this year and avoid having to fire anyone, no bonuses are being paid across the board. 401k matching is also temorarily suspended. If the economy grew worse, every person in the company would take 1 day a month off without pay.
It's very nice to work for a company that respects its employees - seems to be rare nowadays.
Those who will sacrifice Freedom and Security will get Windows...
I'm part of the management team for a major steel producer that is currently in bankruptcy. Although I haven't heard of any 'base' pay-cuts yet, our management workforce has seen roughly a 40-50% decrease (aka - fired) over the past 18 months. There have been quite a few job combinations as well as things like taking away our pay for overtime and giving us "comp" days, and 401K matching is also out the window.
They've also broken some contracts/agreements with the union employees by laying some of the junior people off for several weeks and so forth.
Unfortunately it seems the quickest/easiest way to save money is to fire people or cut their pay. On a good note, our company is being generous to those they have let go from the management workforce. Apparently the severance package is one months pay plus pay for any vacation time you have remaining for the year. They also have hired a company to give seminars on how to write resumes and job searching skills in general for those that got let go.
Great, Boss makes a cool deal in the bonus, turns around and screws the ones beneath him. Another example of how to boost the company morality.
But then again, the current priorities in these times does not include employee morale as one of the top ten.
I remember in of my previous projects, the company blew off 100 million in an year (they were based out of Deerfield, IL) most of which was paid out to Broadvision contractors who were charging 300 Dollars per hour, for creating (GET THIS!!) the company intranet. All this for a company with around 300 employees. No wonder they burned through the whole VC fund by the next year, but the CEO still managed to get himself one of those cool G500 Merc SUV from Europe(before it was even introduced here).
In this market everyone is playing him for himself and no one else. Management doesnt give jack shit about their employees, all they care about is projecting a good-overall image out to the investors and the board and the analysts.
And one word of advice to the software engg who all of a sudden finds himself unable to pay the bills because of a pay cut. Dude..lay off on those expenses man. Like my Dad used to say, life is never meant to be simple. Start saving, or one day all of a sudden you would find yourself with out a job and nothing to do. I did!
Rapid Nirvana
Well the company I am currently employed at decided to use the current market conditions and the lack of jobs in this area to give 65% of the company less than a 3% increase no matter how much was promised (even though we have been fairly profitable over the past year not to the corporate execs liking) and many employees here where not given a raise at all for various reasons. Moral here is now low and they seem to be increasing revenue by allowing the talented and strong developers to leave and have been paying top salary for sales and marketing people (It seems here anyone who reads a sales book or can repeat marketing jargon is getting paid top salary to make the developers at this company a living nightmare).
So does this include all fields of computer study? For example comp sci, CprE, and EE grads?
Or is this article directed at MIS and other IT jobs?
This is what you get when your company goes public. You don't become a millionaire, your job security is at the whim of a bunch of greedy stockholders. As far as I'm concerned, going public is merely a sign of greed by all but the largest companies that do it. I can't think of 20 dot-bomb companies that actually had any damn business going public.
This is the price you pay for agreeing to work for them. Not me, and not anymore. I've had it up to here with the greed of publicly traded companies, and I'm never working for one ever again if I have anything to say about it. They're more trouble than they're worth.
The choices:
(I've seen it happen...recently)
Plan A: The company wishes to survive:
1. (in Asia) Take a 20% paycut OR retain pay and work 1/2 or full Saturday. (Where as before the company's IT employees normally work Mon to Fri).
2. Head count cut (aka. 'culling').
3. Head count freeze (When more work comes and overloads, you work your butt off but as managment calmly puts it: "You don't necessary have to work hard...just smarter."
4. Not related to HR, but less spending, ie perks No more free coke machine/massage/daily fruit baskets/company paid lunches/restrict car and travel allowance expendure. Management thinking: "Instead of going onsite...can it be done remotely?"
5. Your company - the Little / vunerable fish gets eaten up by bigger fish after management sees steps 1-4 are complete.
Plan B: The company closes.
1. Get your termination letter and hope the company has enough cash (or whatever's left after liquidation) to pay your entitlements.
2. Get another job at (subjective remark: lower)market rate, but hey you might get lucky and catch yourself a nice fish.
3. Gather your work team mates, go to the company's firesale auction, buy up old hardware-software etc start up a similar new company.
Free Mac Mini
As draconian as a one-time 50% monthly pay cut may seem, it's actually better than ongoing pay cuts in the long run. Divine may also be using this as a way to get voluntary departures.
Trouble is,
people in the Chicago area are well aware of Divine and Flip Filikowski. Filikowski was a con-man when he managed to Jed Clampett his way to a fortune with Platinum and he's a con-man now.
Not confidence-inspiring.
What's to keep the one-time May cut from being joined by a one-time July cut, etc? What's to keep it from being followed by an ongoing pay cut to match the annual percentage? Who says that anybody will get a rais next year?
Corporations in general (though I know that gratifying exceptions exist) and Divine in particular have not earned the trust and loyalty of their employees. A company that had treated its employees fairly and had earned their trust might be able to do something like this after getting feedback from those affected. Divine's "stick-it" approach is certain to have repercussions.
most of them are at least.
on average, for "equivalent" levels of expertise and experience, i would say that they make about half of what Engineers do.
... hi bingo
Which category does "subscriptions" fall under?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
As an IBM contractor I got two 5% rate cuts since the new year and then today I along with many, many others got the can. Those that are left will have to take a week without pay in July.
The reason behind this raping of employees is to keep a certain amount of funds in the bank to purchase yet another company so that they can continue to bleed money but not have to show it for a while longer. The Company is Viant Media We should contact Viant and let them know en masse how we feel about friends and co-workers being screwed by a company that is sinking faster than the titanic and how they don't want to be apart of said company.
Obviously this seems bad in the short-term but the long-term prospects are even dimmer. Pay cuts are usually beyond last resort, "temporary one-time" cuts are unheard of. If the company believes it will survive and be able to continue paying the original salaries, they should have credit to avoid this situation. Any employees willing to put up with this should ask themselves what the bank knows and what they're not being told.
The second memo (the long-winded "explanation" one) talks alot about venture capitalists and cash coming from an acquisition, but completely avoids the topic of simple old-fashioned short-term debts. VC money isn't real until you have it and if the cash from the acquisition is such a sure thing, why can't they access an existing line of credit until that money becomes real?
The whole thing smells very fishy. They say the bottom line is they want to show profits to make customers feel safe. The customers are not going to feel safe knowing that the profits came from driving talent away.
To me, the bottom line looks like they have a business model that isn't profitable with current staff and also can't survive without it. So now they're casting around just trying to keep alive until they can work out another model, if they're lucky.
Our whole IT department is getting outsourced - and we are supposed to be hired on by the outsourcing compang. Sure.
If it wasn't for IT departments, these companies wouldn't be in business. They should be on their knees thanking us, not firing us.
/me steals 50% of office supplies, and maybe another employee's workstation!
I hate to say it, but it's most likely time for you to start looking for a new job. I've seen this type of behavior before, and it's usually a sign of even more bleak times to come. Becides, would your company settle for the same thing? "Hey boss, I'm only going to work 50% of the time this month because I need some time with my family."
I used to work for a larger startup company which shall remain nameless. They started these type of "cost cutting" measures. They killed our bonuses, preformed several rounds of layoffs, and killed employee perks. We gladly endured "for the sake of the company". We all thought that times would get better and even offered more to help "the company". Of course, when the company looked our way with $$ in their eyes, they had no problem sending us on our way ("we" being an entire office of e-commerce employees, who had previously carried the company during the previous months).
While it seems like you are helping out "your company" and building something for the future, these measures almost always end up hurting the company. First off, your brightest employees (in theory) are the ones who make more. So you are taking money from your brightest employees. It also hapens that these same people are the ones who will get a new job faster than lower paid ones (in theory again). Remember, you are one signature away from the unemployeement line. And with a job market such as it is now, you should get a jump on your co-workers.
Anyway, remember that employee loyalty is a myth. I don't see how companies expect loyalty from employees when they have absolutely none in return. You could stick around if you want, but what's to keep them from implementing reduction again? You may find yourself in the same boat again in a month or two. Or prehaps layoffs will be next. Or even bankruptcy. Remember, your managers will say what ever it takes to keep you around ("We made deeper cuts than we had to so we wouldn't have to do it again" -said between 2 rounds of layoffs). You have to look after yourself.
I have friends that are working at McDonalds with CS degrees, and someone has the gaul to complain about keeping his job, just having one bad paycheck?
I'd be happy I could keep my job in bad times.
And, not only pointing to the memo, but stating that management is just cutting other peoples pay so they can have their bonuses?
This isn't an "AskSlashdot", this is a "publically flame my company on Slashdot."
Yeah, your pissed (I would be too), but is this the right way to handle the situation? Or are you sinking to the same level as the "management" (or at least how you view the management).
For the record, I don't work for that company (and I'm not in management, anyway).
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
What do you mean "modest"??? For someone who's making 60K a year, that's $190 a month. With $190, I could pay my phone bill, my power bill and do my wash at the apartment's laundry facilities for the whole month!
What Is my company doing to cut costs? I'll try to list all the ways I'm aware of:
- No pay raises for anyone this year (probably not next year either).
- No more free coffee for employees (they now have to buy it from vending machines)
- No electrical appliances in cubes which, along with no longer having the hot water spigot from the coffee machine, means that tea drinkers must now either buy coffee from the machine or drink at home
- No more discounts on company products for employees (this means an increase in spending of up to $50 a month for employees who were taking advantage of them).
- No budget for the IT department
- Tens of thousands of layoffs during the past couple years.
- There's probably more I'm forgetting
I'm assuming you need to stay at this job for any number of reasons (economic, depressed job market, health insurance, etc). So have some fun with it (while you're getting your act together to bail - you'll never be caught in a no-win situation like this again, right?)
;)
Suggestion #1: Conveniently forget 50% of everything you know. Hey, they're only paying for half of you now, right? "How does this compiler work again?, Err I remember my username, what's my password?"
Suggestion #2: Pick half of your body (top/bottom/left/right). That side no longer needs to conform to the company dress code since they aren't paying for that half. "Say umm...that's an...interesting...spot for a piercing, Fred"
Suggestion #3: Leave a note for the CFO telling him how you're cousin Guido can help his cash flow problems - you're in Chicago, right?
I work close to the .gov sector.
So, of course, our pay raises during the latter half of the 1990s, while good, were beans compared to what you could get in the .com boom. I seriously was looking to increase my salary by 40-50% by making the move.
Now, of course, I'm more content with the job security aspect of my position. Sure, the money doesn't follow the high peaks, but neither does it scrape the bottoms of the troughs the way it seems to be doing at this outfit in Chicago.
In that kind of market, you really need to build up some buffer of savings in the fat years to make up for the thin. If the company can't afford to do a 5 year running average for your salary, but does a 5 month running average instead, then it's pretty much up to you to do your own averaging to get an income level that you can depend upon.
I don't mean to sound callous, cause I'm sure that 90% of people adjust their expenditures to fit 105% of their income (it's the American way), but that seems to be the reality AFAICT.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Our company had everyone work one less day a week for a month... so we took a 20% paycut for the month. I would NEVER have stood for the paycut if it was not justified by the cut in work. It was difficult, but not as bad as it sounds because when you factor in 20% less taxes, one less day a week of travel (= 20% less gas to pay for), and so on, the pain was minimized.
Also, an action such as this should never be made if management is not willing to be included in the sacrifice. If they are paying themselves bonuses and then asking employees to take a cut, that is sheer hypocrisy, and stupidity. The drop in moral and trust will hurt far more (in the long run) than a bad quarterly report.
OH MY GOD! All these years of trying to be a safe, courteous driver and all I've really been is a door mat.
No artist tolerates reality. -- Nietzsche
In any case, I'd urge them to get together, get some legal advice, particularly from someone with labor experience and pass along their feelings.
Sitting still for this is just asking for the next Enron to hit where you work, and we all know how trule poor Mr. Skilling is and feel just awful for him.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
My experience has always been that this type of crap is always followed by "save the company" pushes. Basicly, (we are laying off your staff)|(cutting your pay), but need you to work extra to take up the slack, and by the way, we have these new projects that need to go out faster than usual, because we need to save the company. If you don't work harder, faster, smarter, you will be out of a job too.
I'm glad I work for the government now....
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
Looks rough all the way around over at divine. Financial news rumor is that they might be issuing a 1-25 stock split...yikes!!!
If i were the author, i'd take my two weeks vacation pay and get the hell outta Dodge!
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
I like WorldCom's new strategy...
e bbers_2.html
Instead of dumping thousands of employees, just go straight for the guy who made $360 million last year. Cost cutting extraordinaire.
See http://biz.yahoo.com/rt/020430/telecoms_worldcom_
A fifty percent pay cut doesn't say, "Stick together group, and we'll all make it through these hard times." Nope.
A fifty percent pay cut says, "We know many of you will quit because of this horrendous abuse we are imposing on our employees, and to us, this is good, because if we just fired you, we'd have to pay unemployment benefits"
Yearly raises recently came around at the company I work for, and my raise was 0.5%, a percent of a percent. So, I did what any self-respecting working stiff would do, I found a new job for a company that makes enough money to pay its employees.
I get the feeling that a number of corporations are leaning on the current state of the economy to cover up their own stupidity and lack of management skills. I always watch the want ads in the Sunday paper (even now that I am starting a new job on Monday), why? I think it is a good exercise to get a feel for where the job market is going. Should I consider pushing for training in one area vs. another, and that kind of thing. What I have seen has been an upswing in people looking for talented and experienced help. I get the feeling that successful companies realize it is better to get somebody who has some real world experience than to go cheap and hire straight from school (of course, larger operations still recruit newbies, but they have the staff to train them proper, and the need for people who'll put up with a large amount of grunt work).
Actually, even though I found a job right away, I still have to budget next month to stay afloat. The new job has a two week delay on pay, and my current job doesn't, so I miss a check. To boot, last month I had to pay Uncle Sam, and buy things for spring, like a lawn mower, etc.. Well, it was an expensive month overall. Luckily for me, I have some reserves for the tough times, and with some frugal behavior, I should be ok.
If you don't have money squirreled away, you might have to get creative. One thing you could consider doing is selling some stock for a loss. You'll get cash right away, and capital losses are a tax deduction. Also, if you have something that you could sell, you might think about that. I have the luxury of being able to sell my old car, as it isn't completely worthless yet, but most people can't afford to do that (however, if you drive a nice new car, you could sell it, swallow your pride, and downgrade - a car is for getting there, not being mr. cool).
Bottom line, I'd recommend updating your resume and sending it out. Why stay at a company that treats its employees like s#!t? A good company with solid management recognizes that people are the greatest asset a company can have, because people learn and improve their skills with time, while capital investments quickly becomes out-of-date.
Best of luck to you.
I worked in Chicago during from the "beginning" of the end of the net boom to the actual "end" and looking at this site brought it all back. Chicago, and many other places, make their money not so much off of material products but advertising, recruiting, and other various services. And you can actually see that in the web sites: Most use Flash, are bandwith hogs, contain little in the way of substance, and are made for the machines that the office workers use. I worked in training for a bit, and all these people cared about (not everyone, but many people making much more than 60K a year) was having a fancy powerpoint presentation for a web site - even when they were a technology company. Can you say Access? GoLive? For national companies...
This is just another reflection of how the net economy is finding its usefullness. When I moved up there getting a job was a cinch, but then at the end they were just, well, gone.
Also, the point regarding management might be sharp but it is appropriate. Is there anyone out there with a great manager in the technology field that doesn't feel both lucky and a bit like a rarity? Tech people might hate the idea of being a suit, but I'm begging anyone that knows what their doing and can speak well to think about getting into the ranks of the damned, because technology needs people that know technology to manage.
Amen!
... and when i hear this i am glad that i dont live there. Is it really that way over there? Here in germany (and other european countries also) its not that easy to cut wages, i have never heard anything like that before. Maybe its because there are contracts between the unions and the federation of employers wich regulate the wages. Even if the employees would accept less money, the unions would almost certainly not.
What have you done over there during the 1980s?
And you cant fire employees from one day to another. Are we that socialistic?
A "friend of mine" works for a graphic arts company in Boston, and several months ago was put on a mandatory 4-day work week with corresponding 20% paycut. The irony of the situation is that this company is incredibly sales driven, and the way the business is structured, if my friend's sales person wanted her back on the job for the fifth day he would have to pay for her labor out of his own commissions. This strikes me as an incredibly good way to solve a fiscal problem: pit employees against each other.
The real moral of the story is to stand tall. My friend called their bluff, threatened to find other work, and was put back on a five day work week.
A job may not be a right, but dignity should be, and if more people stood up for theirs and demanded to be treated respectfully, employers might look in other places to cut costs during these hard times.
This too shall pass.
In my company, that shall remain nameless (well, let's just say a defense contractor in San Diego), they layed off people last year and this year during reviews, they gave as many people a bad review as they could to insure they have reasons to make layoffs later. By the way, bad review also means no raise. It sucks.
Don't come work for us.
I work for a small software company (interestingly enough, we're a customer of Divine's now by their acquisition of our web hosting provider). During the beginning of the slump last year we all were pushed into a 15% salary deferral and since then most of us have gotten paid back... except for a few employees that left/were fired, and my company decided not to honor their contract. Until they were threatened with a lawsuit... :)
A side note - one of the most difficult aspects of this is being the head (sole person) of the IT dept. and having a budget of ZERO. Literally. I can't fix anything, buy any necessary hardware upgrades... I managed to squeeze a UPS out of my CFO a few months ago, that's been it. Ergh.
But I guess it's one way to keep costs down...
---
"how can the same street intersect with itself? i must be at the nexus of the universe!" - cosmo kramer
They have to show their shareholders that they are doing something to get the company back on the road to profitability
I'm not sure any shareholder would be impressed by the company taking this measure. This is a desparate act of a dying company.
Most companies are run on the principal of paying your people first and supplies/creditors second.
Jason.
Unless some would still like to argue the point of there being a "worker shortage".
Wow that's just plain nuts. I would quite simply be out of there before my resume is cleared from the print queue. Obviously this company has a zero opinion of its employees. Dump 'em quick!
50%? To quote Milton "I could set the building on fire"
I can't think of a worse way to do it. Lots of folks don't have the cash in bank to go 1 month at 50% pay. They want a 3.8% cut for the rest of the year (They look like the pay every 2 weeks) - cut the pay evenly over the rest of the year! What are they going to do if some of their employees can't make house payments/car payments/rent for the month of May. Let's say someones car gets repo'd - do you really think that person will be happy?
Yeah, paycuts suck, but they do happen (I was in the defense industry in the late 80s)
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
If you read the memo, it is clear that it only applies to people making over $60K/yr, and it applies to all employees - managers too.
Also, it amounts to 3.8%/yr, but they want to do do the entire cut in two paychecks. So by cutting those two checks by 50%, it amounts to a 3.8% cut on an annual basis. But then you're back to your normal pay. Well, at least until next quarter... see what happens then.
I like how they scheduled the conference call to all employees at 5PM. I guess this isn't something that is worthy of discussing on the company's time. So if you're concerned about the forced pay cut, you can find out more about it on your own time. Nice touch.
And it's also nice how he says that this action will improve their financial picture which should help gain the confidence of their customers. Isn't this kind of like what Enron did, only on a much fancier scale? If they are trying to "gain the confidence" of their customers, that makes them "con artists"!
If that were me, I'd only be doing half the work. Sounds like another brainiac management decision that screws the 'little guy'. Is it my imagination or is the corporate world insane?
For obvious reasons I'll post this anonymously. I hope enough people will see it anyway.
My present employer (but not for long!) had cash flow problems last summer. First, we all took a one-time pay cut, but that didn't solve the problem. In October word came down that the entire company would be taking a 15% salary cut until further notice. The announcement came with lots of apologies and stuff.
Here's what I was expecting: I was expecting to get information every week or so about the company's cash position, and whether and when we would be returned to full pay. At the very least, I expected to get some kind of update or status report with my next pay stub.
That was six months ago. Despite the fact that the company has since lost five employees out of a staff of 15-- all to people leaving to take better jobs elsewhere-- no salaries have been reinstated. Nor have we received any information about when that might happen.
Do not do this. Do not treat your employees like their salaries are a favor from you, to be manipulated at your pleasure. Even though we're all pretty well paid people, we still depend on that money to feed our families and make house payments; it's not all going to sports cars and yachts, you know. If you have to take some of my salary away from me for a while, make it temporary and keep me well-informed. That's not too much to ask, is it?
The poster is right. Chicago natives can tell you Divine is not really a tech company. Originally called Divine Interventures, it was begun, I believe, as a VC company right around the time of the dot-bomb.
Flip F managed to sweet talk some stupid VC wannabes out of their money, and even (as I recall) talked our Mayor-Emporer Daley into planning some kind of tech incubator building downtown. I don't know if that's on ice now or not.
As an aside, the interesting thing about both the current Daley and his father is they both care(d) a lot about Chicago. No one could accuse them of tech sophistication, but they try hard to keep business in the city so that it stays vital (as opposed, say, to the fate of Detroit). They allow corruption to fester about them (especially Daley senior) but as a means to an end. It's hard to say with certainty the city would be - or would have been - better off without it.
- Brian
The days of 200k/year are over for the vast vajority of us, and the 250/hr consultant is endangered. That's a *good* thing, I think... it makes us focus more on doing our jobs than how much money we accrue per day.
Don't go nuts and scream your lungs at the management. Just say, "I no longer feel confident in the management capabilities of this company so I am departing." But instead of giving them the standard "2 weeks notice", just give them 1 week. When they balk and complain, just say that you decided that instituting a 50% cut in notice seemed reasonable under the current economic conditions.
With GDP growing at 5.8% in the first quarter of the year, the economy is roaring for a comeback (thank you tax cuts! lets have some more). Get that resume out and start networking. Life's too short to work for inept individuals. If you have been a smart worker, you have left at least 4 months salary in the bank as cash so the bills shouldn't scare you.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
1) Invest %15 of your income.
2) Don't work for M$ solution providers. It's a shrinking market.
3) Don't work for companies so obviously full of crap.
4) Try to anticipate employer layoffs and get out before they happen.
5) If 1-4 fail, tell employer to go to hell, move to Hawaii and live on the beach. If you're going to be homeless I'd rather be there than Chicago!
Bear in mind, I was hourly, so this might be different for salaried folk, but the principle is still pretty much the same.
About a year ago, I was told that of the three people we had working a total of 96 hours a week, we had to cut back to 72 hours a week. As the lead auditor, I was given first say as to how this would work. I could choose to keep my full-time, sack the part-time guy, and screw my other full-time person out of a shift if I so chose. I told them that I would not make their firing decisions for them.
So, they chose. Everyone else got to keep their hours, and I was reduced to half-time. I told them I would not accept the cut, and if they needed to reclaim the hours, I would continue working at full-time until they notified me in writing of my termination. They hemmed and hawed, and eventually gave me written notice terminating me a month hence, long enough to train the other full-timer. I went on to a job that did not suck so much, at which I work today.
About a month after my dismissal, I served them with a request for the severance package, under whose provisions I was eligible for two weeks full pay if I was offered less than 80% of my regular wage. They fought me on it for a couple of weeks, but eventually came to realize that I had them by the short hairs.
My only regret is that I didn't get to see the look on that bastard manager's face when he found out.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
...if they offer you stock options, that will be useless anyway. (Maybe the same imbecile/criminal PHBs are running this outfit now.) This was the offer: Take a 50% cut for 4 months and we'll give you 15,000 options. Well, they got the pay cut part right and then they decided not to give me the options. I encrypted all the admin passwords, etc. with twofish, walked out and sent them an email:
"When you're ready to pay me, I'll hand over the passphrase to recover the root passwords."
They paid up. Pricks.
Several Companies have instituted pay cuts over the last year. The one I work for has used a 10% cut for 3 months, and we're working on month 6 of a 5% pay cut. (All cuts shown as a cut from the semi-monthly paycheck) The not quite 4% cut by Devine seems mild in comparison. The big difference bewteen the company I work for and Devine is that thier management chose to pass on a considerable hardship upon thier employees. I can budget for a 5-10% monthly pay cut, but not a 50% monthly paycut!
First of all, this is mismanagement, plain and simple. Of course, nowadays mismanagement is taken as a matter of course in the corporate world. The jokers pretending to run the show have become woefully ignorant of the consequences of their actions.
Second of all, I've already abandoned ship. I'm taking all those nice "excess earnings" made back a few years ago and investing them in going back to school and getting out of the computer industry. It doesn't deserve my talent right now.
I'm glad that the tech moniker is on my resume, but until some realism about who is actually generating the profits comes about and a genuine meritocracy ensues there's no need to remain.
As technology people, we must insist upon the recognition that we deserve. Managers will have a hard time of it doing the tech themselves. Good luck to them.
.as techies find other jobs and quit in droves.
has decided not to do yearly perfomance raises this year. I kind of lucked out though, because I pushed for a promotion I had been promised last year, and got my performance raise at the same time... before they decided not to do performance increases. As far as I know, I'm the only person in the company who got it this year. (It worked out to a 12% raise.) I'm using the $$ to finish my degree, and pick up an extra certification, so I'm improving the company's asset with it.
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
The Company's website didn't even survive 15 minutes past the story being posted. I guess their "enterprise content management" product works about as well as their cash management.
I work for the company in question...
They actually have cash and aren't out of money, I'm pretty sure they did this to help inflate stock prices due to the reverse split.
Being a public company often has its disadvantages...
This is the 2nd paycut, this time a lump sum, though....really harsh.
I got this off their site, a sure sign that they are going down. buzzword compliance.
"divine helps companies maximize profits through better collaboration, interaction, and knowledge sharing across their entire value chain."
Does that not sound like something out of the Dilbert mission statement generator?
Here in the insurance industry we've been hit hard by 9/11 - I mean we hold policies on WTC properties for goodness sakes. Our response has been, I think, appropriate. We will get minimal, if any pay increases this year. That results in a net loss of spending power, but hey, that is manageable. Also, we are taking a long, hard look at staffing and making cuts where needed. As one poster put it, better off letting some folks go than giving everyone a REALLY demoralizing pay cut for a month. Most folks still live check to check, so this will be a definite hardship. Of course, our company also practices belt tightening across the board (literally and figuratively). No big Enron style bonuses for the top dogs while we fight for scraps. There's a real feel of we're all in this together, and that soothes a lot of aches. We're gonna be fine, and we're all happy to pull our weight as long as we see everyone pulling with us.
A group I'd been working with for several years was hired as a group to do research for a Boston based company in July of 2000. By November they were on the ropes and told us they were going to lay one guy off. We countered with a voluntary 20% pay cut for all of us to keep the one and they took it. We all focused all our efforts after that on reducing debt and building up savings for the inevitable next round. When it came, I bailed on Colorado and moved someplace cheaper with a better job market. No bills, low fixed expenses, and lots of ready cash. That's the way to live.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
I know this might be slightly off-topic but what the company I work for did was cut costs. In 1 year they have cut their costs by over 50%. You find all the little things here and there that are wasting money; things that normally don't bother a company during boon times but now that every dime counts they are cleaning up those little corners. 3K here, 400 bucks there all in all it ended up cutting costs by over 50%. However, even after all of that there still was a need to cut down on employee costs but instead of cutting peoples pay they layed people off ( including severance packages and such )
All in all, considering the economy I think they handled things very well. I know a couple of the people that were layed off and they hold no grudges about it since they understood why it was done and that it wasn't anything personal
I know of another chicago area company who is at 50% pay. But they are only 6 people and won't cause the devistation that the one the article talks about will cause when it goes away.
However, they should both be avoided at all costs in terms of hiring them or working for them.
Why should IT workers accept less than their moron bosses?
Why should this person accept a 50% pay cut? Do you think public school teachers or Teamsters would?
One answer is that it's time to unionize. IT workers are not valued for their intelligence or problem solving ability. They're valued as "human resources" much as a company's mineral or financial resources -- to be used when necessary and discarded when useless.
If there were a union, this company would be shut down right now.
Companies should be paying attention (and paying) the people with their hand on the switch. How long could a company last with a marketing work stoppage?
How long do you think they'd operate with an IT work stoppage?
It's time to stop abuses like these before you become "too old to be retrained", replaced by an indentured H1-B visa worker, or have your salary reduced to pay for the CEOs new manor house.
Since massive layoffs make corporations look bad, pay cuts are the next best thing. They cut the salary so low that you cannot make a living anymore and are forced to quit.
$30,000 salary might not be so bad in Chicago (I don't know the cost of living there,) but if that happened here in the SF Bay Area, we'd all be seriously hurting.
I thought the recession would be over by now, but I believe we are in the first stage. The worse is still to come. Of course the media is telling you the exact opposite, they don't want to cause widespread panic.
Until recently, I was working for a french software company. It was founded during the fairy times, two years ago, and it is still ran by 3 guys who don't have the remotest idea on how to run a business. They falled into every of there traps that we dotcomers have seen so many times : no human resource policies, no salary policies, no technical policies, no management policies. The company, although pretty small (around 120 ppl), quickly became a huge mess. It was namely impossible to spot who was responsible of what.
The company only succeeded to lower average executive turnover to 4 months. In 2 years of existence, it had 6 CTO's.
So obviously these guys went out of cash someday. As unilateral pay cuts are generally forbidden by French law, they went for "volontary", "negociated" pay cuts - who were obtained through hardly untold intimidations and threats. And I'm not talking about the blatantly illegal headcuts. French law is something they could hardly cope with.
As an expectable result, the air soon became unbreathable, so many choosed to leave at this point. Some of them even got their lawyers in the loop (which is not as common in France as it is sometimes in the US).
So IMHO you'd better get your resume up-to-date *now*.
My first question in a job interview is: Are you publicly traded?
"Yes" means you are choosing to work for technophobic investors who know nothing about what you do and live every day with their finger on the trigger of the stock which either financed your first year's salary or provides sufficient cash flow to maintain that salary. Investors are emotional and stupid. The memo itself actually says that the company is being forced by the market to sit on top of huge heaps of cash in order to make the numbers dance the right way on their financials.
No means I'll continue the interview, but I'd never work for bastards like this, regardless of who finances the company.
They announced this huge cut about one week before it took effect. No other warnings.
So why on earth would anyone not believe this is a permanent paycut? At best, they should assume that every quarter will end with a 50% pay cut since the sheep are willing to accept it. That's not a 3.8% cut, that's a 15.2% cut. Or the company may just a similar announcement every month.
The other serious problem with this plan is that "across the board cuts" are rarely fair. That person making $60k, now making $30k, is probably living close to paycheck-to-paycheck. If they're lucky, they might have a one-month buffer which will now be cut in half without warning. They shouldn't have a cut of more than 10-15%.
On the other hand, people earning more than 100k should have more of a buffer, and can handle larger paycuts. And it goes without saying that senior management (which usually has forms of compensation besides salary alone) should be working for free.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
IANA(american)L (but i did go to law schoolin Canada).
.02c
First thing i'd advise is talking to the local labour board. Find out if this is even legal. Don't assume it is just because they're putting it forth.. i've seen companies do some dirty things when it comes to money and employees to try and make a quick buck. If it is illegal, you might have some recourse with filing complaints, wrongful dismissal for those who get let go, etc etc. It will take some digging, but when a company is pulling crap like this, i'd say it's worth it.
Secondly (and this probably goes without saying) I'd look long and hard at whether you REALLY want to work at a place that pulls shit like this. The last straw for me at my last job was a dirty, below the belt non-compete agreement that we HAD to sign, otherwise we'd be terminated. The agreement basically forbid you to work on the net for gods sake. Almost everyone in our section took them to lawyers and asked a LOT of uncomfortable questions about the agreement. It somehow never got brought up again (at least for the remaining few weeks i was there).
Just my
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
The company I work for is letting all us contractors go before our contracts are up. It's not the greatest feeling, but it has shown me very clearly, as I watch all the others get laid off, that I do have something going for me since I'm still here.
12 gone, 3 to go, and at least I'm one of the 3!
I'm not addicted to the internet because I have a family to feed.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Here's the problem. Go to the web site. Okay, what does this company do. I see a lot of buzz words, after reading for a minute I still have no idea. "The Bobs" would have a field day with this company.
If you make over $60K a year, and can't pay your bills after losing $2500 (less than $2000 after deductions), then you have other problems. You need to learn how to budget and not get in debt so much. Making $60K/year you should be saving some. While this might be a bit inconvenient and a bummer, you shouldn't have any problem paying bills (it might mean dipping into your aforementioned savings though). Maybe its a good thing and a wake up call. Maybe these people that can't afford to pay their bills will become more responsible.
They should probably cut their bandwidth in half. They sure don't neen it. Most other sites would've definately been slashdotted by now.
If ever having left someone's prescence, you feel as if you lost a quart of plasma, AVOID that prescence -W.H.Burroughs
At the company that I just left, our president actually sent out a memo during the budget process asking who would be willing to take a paycut. Although not explicitly stated, the gist of the e-mail was that if you volunteered to take the paycut, you wouldn't be hit as hard when the cuts were actually handed out, and that you had a better chance of not being laid off.
:)
Bear in mind that this company pays squat, and is small to begin with.
We figured it out that on average, if everyone was willing to take a 5% paycut, it would barely save one job. To make a long story short, nobody took the voluntary paycuts.
Your mail (you evil bastards) has been sent to: pr@divine.com
At my job, they fired the VP of engineering leaving just me (only a year removed from school) in development. They said it was because of poor performance and not at all due to the fact that he was overpaid and mney was tight. So I beleived them and a few weeks later bought myself a nice luxury car (as I had been planning to), discussing the matter with my bosses a number of times to see what cars they recommend - guy stuff. A week after I buy the car they tell me they can't pay me anymore. They intended to make it up to me as soon as they could, but they didn't know when that would be. I couldn't believe it. They gave me a false sense of security and let me go buy an expensive car when they knew that they couldn't pay me anymore. They were just too scared to confront me before I dumped most of my savings on a down-payment. I don't know if it's hubris or just poor people skills, but all of my experience in the working world has shown that the higher-ups are afraid or unwilling to be upfront about the company's financials. Maybe they forget who really keeps the company running - the employees.
The answer is:
Don't get yourself into that situation in the first place!
Read jack phelps dot net
And if you can find any executives who got bonuses, flog 'em mercilessly until you feel like you've gotten half your salary's worth.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Too bad, but a screw up like that should require the dismissal of a sizable bit of management -- without economic parachutes. I'll be controversial and suggest that a fair number of companies could probably have squeaked by last year's down turn were it not for being bled dry by managment salaries and perks.
Staff, as mentioned in another post, themselves should always try to keep 4-6 months in the "oh shit" fund.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
This is just bad, bad, bad. I could possible see a 20% cut for a couple of months, maybe. But 1/2 in 1 month!
During dot boom, our company got hit moderately, and management let go those people who were not profitable (we work on a billability basis). Sure, it sucked for them, and I was sweating it our for a few months, but things got better. I even got a 5% raise in December. Glad a work in the defense industry nowadays.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Last time I checked, any drop of 40% in wage is condsidered 'equivalent to a firing' and you can apply for unemployment.
Me, I'd walk. See ya bozo management.
But wouldn't required pay cuts breach contract somewhere? I'm no expert, and I don't work there, but I would expect that when you sign on to work they are required to pay you for that work.
Science may someday discover what faith has always known.
This depends highly on the criteria for performance. Those 6 people could quite well have been the guys with 90% of the knowledge who spend most of their time helping the other employees, who then take the credit. A RIF of any type leads to low morale, I'd bloody well hope they've tried other measures first (ie: do we _really_ need 9 levels of management?).
Did they ask the staff if their was a way to cut costs? Involving the employees is better in the long run.
Case in point, recently one of our employees discovered that replacing our news server with a redirecting plug on our firewall to our upstream provider's news server will save us in the order of 30K a year in bandwidth costs. (The news service wasn't being used much, but the server had to keep getting all the articles even if it wasn't being read.)
all those good tech workers are going to be out of there.
they did use some more-or-less formalized and official measures, so it was not just "Who annoyed the boss today." I would not piss off the boss if their PMS decided whom to fire.
Option 1: Everyone quit and then they still won't make their profit projections. Greedy bastards.
Option 2: Fsck em! Mail bomb salary.adjustment@divine.com and tell them to Flip off. Remind them of Option 3 and Option 1.
Option 3: Print the above offending email, take a huge dump on it (courtesy of the company restroom) and internal mail it to Flip himself. That will learn em!
Blarf.
Just read an interesting article (excerpt from his new book) by Will Hutton, noted UK economic chin-stroker & pundit to the stars (well, new Labour anyway.) He points out that many European companies which have rejected US-style, red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism aimed at maximising shareholder value at all costs has lead to rampant short-termism in US industry, with the predictable result that they have begun to fall behind their competitors. There are some other pretty interesting stats in there on management and exec remuneration, too... did you know that the CEO of Nokia earns less (much less!) than a million a year? Meanwhile in the US, board-level execs commonly pull multi-million dollar packages, with the excuse that this is the market rate that must be paid to attract top-class talent. Of course, all they're really interested in is boosting the share price so they can cash in their options and make another truckload of money. Read the article, it's food for thought.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
I suspect the IT industry isn't as hard off as it's whining that it is. Oh look at us, poor us, having to make do with single digit growth for a few quarters. They'll gladly take an opportunity to make a buck at the employee's expense, though. All the CEOs care about is ramping up the stock prices so they can cash in their stock options, take the money and run. Even if it means robbing the pension fund in the process. Hell look what Enron did -- and apparently it's legal. I certainly haven't heard of any actual criminal charges being filed there, despite all the indignant noises coming out of Congress. And Congress won't making robbing the 401K piggy bank illegal either -- too many companies have threatened to completely cut off 401K plans if they do. Makes me wonder how widespread the problem is -- how much of your company's stock is in YOUR 401K plan?
Your company has no loyalty to you. Don't ever treat them like a friend.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Bloody Irish - who let them on here anyway?
I work for a modestly sized contract clinical research organization, and the way our CEO handled the lack of incoming cash was to hire a couple "new business" associates who go around the country pitching us at possible sponsors (Big drug companies) Whether or not this strategy works, well, only time will tell. Morale however, wasn't good for a very long time, many people left the company although we fired noone due to lack of money. Wonder if Harvard Biz'll make a case study out of us...
If the powers that be decide they must give you a pay cut, then request stock in its place or shorter hours. Since they need you there, they can't cut your hours. In accepting a pay cut, you are investing in your group. This investment should be shown in stock. Now, if the stock is worthless, quietly continue working, find another job, and resign without notice. If they refuse to give stock, again smile, and continue working until you've secured another position. Then resign with no notice and move on with your life.
What it comes down to is that you deserve pay for work, your share. Stock holders don't work, their money does. Unless there is a positive return on your work they don't get anything, as you must first pay your costs. Secondly, owners don't get a penny either until you've been paid, it wasn't your company to mismanage, why must you suffer.
If they don't want to pay you for your labor, they are not a good company. Look to move on. It is in your best intrest, and the intrest of all parties involved that the company fold if they cannot manage it properly. They didn't give you a 20,000 dollar bonus when your work paid off well, why now can they steal 50% of your (less then fair) share? No, an exec stole your 20k, and now wants to reach in your wallet to take your money when they've wasted their time in catered meetings.
Tell your boss to get off his fat ass and work too. Here where I work our head of ops (the highest man) does the same thing I do, and much more. He earns not only his pay, but my respect. I could never respect a company like the one mentioned. They need to be shut down.
5% paycut in effective as of 9/1/01. Then a 5% layoff three months later (Merry Christmas!).
FWIW, everyone at the VP level and above took a 10% cut and no bonus.
Display some adaptability.
I work for a small uk software house. One of our customers delayed their implementation of our software for a year, and because of that we didn't have enough cash to keep going. So they told us they would have to lay people off.
We (the developers) realised there was no way we could survive losing the number of people they wanted to get rid of, so we voluteered to take pay cuts. Management turned around and offered us time off instead. So at the moment I'm working a four day week, for 80% of my salary. We saved three developers jobs by doing this. I've been doing this since January, and because of the amount of work we now have rolling in it looks like we will all be offered the chance (not compulsory) to go back to full time and salary soon.
The approach was beneficial in that it kept the maximum number of developers and skills inside the company, and also allowed us to pick back up fairly easily when the work picked up and the money started rolling in again.
T.
Me and ten of my development colleagues have been given the boot from a large european retailor. .... :p
All the work is being outsourced to India !!
We had been working on large internal and external systems/projects and with less than 1% of anything documented
Oh, well I wish them luck
I am off to my new much better paid job (alot better paid).
ERR 411[Max number of witty sigs reached]
To take a quote from their "About Divine" page
"Want to see how divine's solutions create new business opportunities, increase loyalty and retention, and generate cost savings and additional revenue?"
I surely hope cutting pay isn't one of their solutions to increase loyalty and retention...shit..no wonder the company if fucked.
Investors need to get their heads out of their asses and realize that they can't let companies do this. For one, most investors are employees of *some* other company. Two, we all know in the long run hurting your employees hurts you as a company. If the investors (that's us, working joes with our etrade accounts) would unload a company's stock when they see the company take anti-employee action in a pinch, it would teach them to cut the golf trips and multi-million-dollar executive bonuses before they cut into the real employees.
11*43+456^2
The employees of Devine, along with everyone else in the country, are aware that the economy isn't in really gung-ho shape right now. They've also heard about Enron, along with numerous dot-com companies that basically have gone belly-up overnight. They might very well be faced with the possibility of losing their job in a moment's notice.
Yet in spite of all that, those making over $60K a year somehow are unable to save enough to pay HALF the bills for one month? What would happen if they got fired? Is cost of living so horribly expensive in Chicago that 60K might as well be minimum wage?
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Focusing on the driving aspect:
Safe, low premiumn good driver or arsehole.
1) suspended all promotions and raises except cost of living increases
2) Slashed COL increases, but promised us a bonus next year at the performance review.
3) Conducted a massive cost cutting project to trim wasteful practices.
4) Layed off a few people, not a lot, but enough to make a dent, and we are only about 300 people.
5) Increased insurance costs from $20 a month per person to $60, and from $40 a family to $160.
6) Stopped hiring altogether except by executive order.
This seems rather light, but its the reasons why that piss me off:
1) Our company had a great year 1999 and we had positioned ourself for growth in 2000. However, we hadn't been paying attention to the fact that the reason why we were doing so good was because people were buying early due to Y2k. I called this myself even and it came true (of course no one listened to me when I told them), 2000 was a disaster for us.
2) We threw tons of money into a new project, spending all this money and shrinking our margin drastically. Then when sales sour and our margin went negative, we had to "cut costs." DUH, but had you paid attention to your exceptional trends you would have not ended spending so much money on a project at the wrong time!
3) When we increased the insurance, it was spun off as "well we are below industry standards for employee insurance contribution, and to continue to afford this coverage we had to raise the contribution." Bullshit. I don't care that you can't afford it. Again YOU spent too much money to begin with. Also a 200-300% increase in employee contribution is as good as a pay cut and is way too much of a one time increase. You didn't give us a very good COLI to begin with and now you take it right back?
4) Any company should be constantly looking at wasteful spending. It wasn't until this that we started turning off lights we didn't need after 5:00 PM!!!!!! WTF??????? We leave the lights on all night? I was shocked, this being something I would have done for the entire 40 year life of the company, mostly because I am a bit of an enviromentalist. Seems silly but you should have seen some of the other things they suddenly became frugal on. This is the most frivolous example, and is due to LAZY THINKING.
Again this isn't as severe as the 50% pay cut, but its this kind of thing workers shouldn't stand for. The mistakes of the upper management need to be more severely felt by upper management.
"I can't cut my CEO level paycheck! I won't be able to afford my mortgage on my mansion or the payments on my Limo!"
"Suck it up and live in an apartment and drive a Volkswagon like the rest of us dorkboy."
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
To handle a rapid loss of business that occurred shortly after 9/11/01, the company I work for did both a RIF and a 5% salary cut. We only recently had the 5% reinstated, but honestly, I think all of us were getting by just fine on that small reduction. Plus, the company has started paying back the 5% that was withheld during those months.
It seemed a fairly elegant way to handle things, as long as you weren't part of the RIF.
An employee's home life in SOME way -has- to be a manager's concern. Why?
Because if your DBA suddenly loses her husband, and you aren't sympathetic, you lose a DBA.
If your NOC monkey's car goes poof, and he's 10-15 minutes late - then you either have to bitch at him, or fire him, and you lose a NOC Monkey.
No, its not a manager's duty to make sure that an employee's home life is peachy keen, but it IS part of his or her job to remember that serious homelife problems can affect an employee's performance drastically - and cutting them, just to preserve your bottom line will likely result in other employee's jumping ship just because they percieve an unsympathetic management staff.
Yeah, fire the slackers. But giving shit to hard workers who have something happen that isn't their fault is -really- poor management practice.
(Not assuming that's what you do, just commenting that you cannot just look at the bottom line - you have to look at the bigger long-term picture as well as the immediate short term goals)
http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl?3357354385
Yahoo ran an article about IT professionals being forced to take pay cuts. Me, personally, I'm going in the direction of starting up my own company in the IT field. My primary motivation is stuff like this happening for those who are employed. I have my plan mapped out, and I feel that in 5 years, I'll be at a point where I won't have to worry about going in for another interview.
Anyone who claims, at this late date, to have been caught off guard by economic conditions and poor cashflow, is a complete moron.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Seriously, if management starts pulling stunts like this, it will be all downhill from there. I've now been running a department at my company for 4 years or so and are really invested in my work and like my job, but for me this would be an immediate reason to jump ship. No raises or smaller raises on a case by case basis is fine, but across the board pay cuts and other displays of "corporate loyalty" are just a sign that management has run out of ideas and that the banks are not lending anymore. Usually also means that the palce is too far gone to be saved.
Got a picture of the mare?
Of course I could be wrong, they might be on the up and up and they might really be 6 months from a complete turn around ...
If you work at this company you'll have to decide for yourself.
However, if you are in a situation like this and decide not to accept the pay cut be very careful in how decline the offer. Be very clear upon the wording of your "no thanks". What ever your choice of action DO NOT threaten to quit or you may find the company graciously accepting your resignation and showing you to the door, terminating all benefits and salary effective immediately.
I would recommend you get a letter saying that you do not wish to change the details of your employment from a lawyer and give that to management. If they ask to discuss it simply inform them that the letter clearly expresses your position and do not discuss it.
This kind of thing is often a trick to get a bunch of people to "resign" by saying no in the wrong way.
would accept a paycheck while senior management is still pulling down. It's one thing if you really are a small company (mine is) and you agree to put off cashing expense checks, etc. but a pay cut? That just means the company doesn't think you're worth much. And if you accept it, that means you agree. Pretty pathetic, unless it's true.
My boss draws a salary of $0. I pull down considerably more than that. We have had some arguments through the lean times, but in the end, he's discovered the fundamental truth that I charge people what I am worth, and if you've got a solid business plan, I *will* make it happen for you.
If you don't, I'll be hitting the road.
Pay cuts are for chumps. Next time, ask for what you're worth, no more, no less, and stand firm.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
I was thinking the same thing myself.
I always thought that there was 12 kinds of people (as told to me in the astrology section of my newspaper). Its nice to know that its even simpler than that.
So you mean if they only made 30 grand a year instead of 60 they would know how to manage the money and WOULD save for a rainy day?
Hmm.
Blaming not saving on making too much money.. interesting.
Now.. I can't talk. I'm in the same boat. I am in the same boat.. sort of. I haven't saved anything. I recognize, however, that this is due to my own stupidity, not due to my making too much money.
On the flip side, I don't have huge car payments or house payments. I am not living on the edge; I simply spend a lot of money. Should I be forced to live on half what I make now, I could do it without giving up any posessions. I would not have to re-morgage the house or trade in the car. I would just have to stop eating out at really expensive restaurants 4 days a week.
Engineers were making more than managers for a short time in the 90's. This is just a return to the way it was for the rest of the 20th century. Managers are going to make more than engineers again. That's the way it is.
All of you (at least those, who are employed) _DO_ have work contracts? At least my contract says how much my salary is, and I expect to get that much from my employer each month. If employer wants to cut it to half (even for a month) they certainly has no way to win a suit in court... Though in US, things might be ... a... little weird^H^H^H uh I mean: different in courts, but at least here in scandinavia this should be simple case.
Others have already pointed out "right to work" vs "hire at will," so I'll point out your other idiocy.
An employment contract is still a contract, and equally enforceable. People sue *and win* over them all the time.
What you've overlooked is that employment contracts are rare, and only used where the person moving to a competitor will cause a lot of harm. Senior executives, TV and radio "personalities" and the like.
Working grunts rarely see employment contracts. The offer letter gives you limited protection, but usually only immediately after your employment. But as a rule most of us have no contracts, and no protection other than that required by the state.
(As an aside, some people have said that if people are fired for refusing to accept a 50% cut, they won't get unemployment benefits. I find that unlikely - you can always file the claim and if the company contests it goes before an administrative review board. They may side with the company for a mandatory 10% or 20% cut, but I doubt any board would deny benefits after a 50% cut, esp. among the lower-paid cohort.)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Well, there is the [American] Programmers Guild. It's not a trade union, but probably the next best thing to it. If you live in Washington State, however, there's a tech union that's a part of the CWA.
I'm not promoting unionization in most cases, but I recognize there are some egregious situations (like that at Divine.com) where it might make sense. A democracy of the worker pool is sometimes, sadly, the only way to counteract anti-employee decisionmaking by corporate executives. The shareholders certainly won't stand up for the employees!
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Actually, my consultancy has been in the same boat. In our case, however, the partners took the pay cut and the employees kept their full salaries.
Not enough to save the company, but the employees will be payed in full until we close up.
This mostly proves that none of the partners graduated from business school or had the traditional businessman's moral-ectomy.
I work for a small company, that does employment screening (criminal checks and what not). The owner has this year spent 57% of the company's gross income. New house, new mercedes, trips to the company condo in florida, etc. The company only makes 1.8 Million a year, and with 30+ employees it makes for a long stretch of cash. Today our water got turned off. The official statement; "There was an issue processing our bill." What a great place. We also had a huge fiasco a week or two ago where some IT work (hehe me) found a document detailing the strategic firing of key employees (myself included) in order to allow for the company to stay afloat, and the owner to keep spending 1k a night on dinner. Those plans were definately foiled when yours truely threatened to quick, report the company to the BSA, and the IRS. I worked out fairly well, I won't get my raise this year, but I sit in my office and play games without the fear of being fired!
Your advice is definitely sound, and I'm working on building up my rainy-day fund, but it's going to take a while, and meantime, I'm vulnerable.
All I'm trying to say is, some of us are no longer idiots, but still manage to find ourselves in this position.
Wow. I could not have said that better myself. There are many of us under 30 yrs old that have old credit card debt with student loans that are trying to get that stuff paid off whilst working on a rainy day fund...
I too am doing well, I too was way too stupid with credit cards when I was 18. I am working on getting that debt taken care of so I can save for the future but it freaks me out to think of how vulnerable I am.
Oh, and as for how companies are dealing with the poor economy... my company has not paid us on-time since December. You see, we are on a monthly pay schedule (one big check on the 1st of every month) which requires good budgeting to get through the month okay. Missing that by a few days can be rough, but manageable. However, this does not work too well when you are paid 15 days late, and really sucks when you are paid 30+ days late. I have not been paid for March, and I should be paid for April this week but that is not happening anytime soon. (Ramen noodles ROCK!)
So, I guess I have to start calling lawyers to see if there is any legal action that I can take... anyone happen to have had a similar experience and have advise??
The IT sector in Chicago is not that weak, but Divine is seriously messed up. I'm suprised that any good IT people are still hanging on.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Now I work for a privately held high tech company that has no intention of going public, and guess what: we just got a bonus last week for the first quarter of 2002! Even without that I'm making more money than I did at the other place, and I have better benefits and more vacation to boot.
I have come to the conclusion that, unless you are the founder (and therefore stand to make millions) that working for publicly held companies is a bad idea. This is because the bizarre short-term mentality that Wall Street has adopted in recent years puts public companies under all sorts of ridiculous pressures that lead to these ridiculous counter-intuitive business decisions.
Privately held companies, on the other hand, have to run their business intelligently and would never consider doing goofy stuff such as what is described in this story.
I hate the idea of a union for tech workers, but this is a case where unionizing may be the best bet. Even talking about unionizing may be enough to get some favorable changes.
I worked for a company INAIR in St. Louis right after college. We did web-based aviation enterprise management. We were among the first to take advantage of Microsoft's ASP scripting language and were also a case study for Microsoft's SQL Server 7.0.
Anyway, very bad money management resulted in all of us working for a few months without pay and then the closing of the company. In the end we found out that for two months our 401K contributions hadn't been made even though they'd been taken out of our checks. They hadn't paid takes in a while either. We had to get a lawyer to force them into bankrupcy. All sorts of shadey stuff going on. I'm personally owed about $8,000 and I'm pretty sure I'll never see that money. Oh well... that was a little over a year ago now. Life goes on...
I would have gladly taken a pay cut as opposed to being unemployed. Especially if the cut was announced ahead of time and was only for one month.
If you consider IT to be fixing servers and instqalling cable, thats a blue collar job. If you consider it to be programming(which is different than IT in my opinion) it generally requires a college degree(at least at a big company) its a white collar job. This generally means unpaid overtime, but higher salary. Unionizing would not be a good idea, your work couldbe dumbed down and promotions wouldnt be based on a merit system and instead rely on seniority.
If you are unhappy, do some work on the side or open up your own business.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
In many places, this would be illegal.
It *may* be legal, however, if you 'agree' to it. If you simply state you want your full wage they owe you, maybe they have to pay.
Usually you only see stuff like this with union shops, in which case it's a negotiation between the company and the union. I've seen this at a copper mine before, but that's a whole different story. THe books are open to the union, the company showed they could not afford to keep going, and everyone came to an amicable agreement as to how things would proceed based on the performance of the copper market (if it picked up, things would return to normal). It worked out well for everyone.
This sounds like a bit of a different story.
A good friend told me a story once.. the long and short of it is: If your company ever cuts your pay or withholds your pay, or makes your pay late because of financial reasons, especially in a smaller company, your first question should be of your boss. Ask the boss if HE took a paycheque on time for the full amount. If he did not, and is also waiting (he should be paid LAST, after his employees) then maybe the company really does have to do this. If he did take his pay, it's time to look elsewhere.
When I was in upper management at a small startup during the boom times went sour and the first thing management did was try to cut salaries. We all knew we were doomed but the need to survive outweighed any kind of ethics or morality. 'Take the salary cut now and we will make it through this time'. Bullshit, we were never going to make it.
As the VP of Engineering I felt a particularly close bond to these people who slaved with me on 16 hour days without complaint and with a smile. I damn well made sure that management understood, you either pay these people a full salary and then let them go find new jobs, tell them the truth about the situation or do without your technology group because I was not going to do this to these people.
My point, this is not about how people spend money etc, its about managements need to survive without consideration for the people who got them there.
If I am ever in a position where I am asked to take a salary cut I am out. Its a sign of impending doom.
I worked for a company that informed us 2 hrs before the end of pay day that we would not be receiving our checks. I would have been willing to stick with that company and try to fight through the tough times, if they had only given us enough warning to take the steps necessary to meet our own personal obligations.
My solution, I walked out the door with one of the biggest clients.
Please, get a grip!
There's a HUGE difference between giving a suddenly widowed employee six months to process the death of her husband, or an employee a few hours to deal with a mechanical failure of their car, and letting stuff slide indefinitely.
I'm not saying that a single mother has 6 months to find a husband and get married, but she needs to find a workable solution. Fast. Management can cut her some slack if her usual daycare provider is sick and can't take care of her kids, but can't let her constantly go home early while her coworkers all work late several times a week because her current daycare provider requires her to pick up the kid early. She needs to either find another daycare provider or another job, or some other solution (e.g., *always* being the first person in the office because she puts in her extra hours in the morning).
The best example I've ever seen of this was a blind sysadmin. He was regularly asked how he would get to work during interviews, and he told the interviewer that that was his concern, not theirs. He asked for no accomodation on that, only modest accomodations (in one-time purchases for things like text-to-speech synthesizers) required to do his actual work.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Tell everyone in the IT to stick together, and you may be able to "convince" the upper management, that going through with this pay cut, at ANY time, would be a "Bad Thing"
PS ... Start getting that resume polished up right now ...
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
Comments are tight around IBM. General consensus is that some raises are being given this season, but not many. IBM culture dictates that raises are given annually, announced in April and effective May. Culture also dictates that salaries are closely guarded personal secrets, and raises are almost as private.
I'm not directly in IT, but in hardware engineering. My first few years, I got between 7 and 10%, and I'm now up to just below 70k with a Masters degree. This year, I will not receive a raise, and my "0%" was not written on pink paper, so I am grateful. I believe I tend to overestimate my contribution to the business, but that could be The Man beating me down. Arrogance, realism, what is difference? Back on topic, I guess the reason I actually want to say "nothing too eventful here" is because IBM has what, 350k people? The more information we have, the better off we are to deal with management. There's one datapoint. Anybody else?
1. We need to trim the budget. Let's fire some people.
2. One of the people we're going to fire is a broke single-mom. Oh well, not our problem.
3. Cut staff.
4. Hmm, people are quitting and citing "overwork, lack of stability, and lack of loyalty to veterans and moms" as reasons.
5. We'll have to hire some more people to replace them... We wanted to keep these people...
6. Gee, good people from outside sure cost tons more than we were paying our laid off veterans.
7. We're over budget again, have to fire some people...
And the cycle goes on and on...
Who did what now?
Eliminate excess management and cut the salaries of highly paid executives first.
As a C++ developer I'm fine, my company can't even find enough developers to fill the current positions - if the entire development team went on strike they'd be screwed; as it stands we all expect decent cost of living increases when the time comes.
I did work for a software company that ran out of money - the directors had the integrity to tell us and take the financial hit with everyone else.
Also we have decent laws protecting employees from their employers - the law requires a minimum of 30 days notice either way, companies cannot cut your work load as a means to cut your salary, they cannot force you to work more than 40 hours per week and they cannot fire you except for a specific list of legally recognised reasons.
The answer is simple.
You should unionize.
Immediately start the legal proceedings to unionize all the affected workers (sans those
in management, they aren't eligible).
And if they terminate you due to these activities,
you've got some VERY strong protections (can you say six-figure penalties?)
This is clearly a case of a company fucking it's
employees over in order to clear it's balance sheet, and even if you do end up getting canned,
it's better than working there.
If they didn't make all the rollovers on their shiny page load the image every time I put my mouse over them...
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
What the obnoxious poster is saying, and is quite right, is that weaker worker protection benifits the economy (and perhaps workers) as a whole. In many countries, particularly in Europe, a company simple can not demand as much from its workers. It's harder to fire them, harder to get them to work overtime and harder not give out very large amounts of vacation. Many entrapeneurs looking to enter the high tech market have left Europe to go to the US where they could found a company without as much risk imposed by worker protection. This, in effect, results in a flow of high paying jobs from Europe to United States. This partly explains the much lower unemployment rate in the US and the vigor of it's economy.
Many countries, I believe France and Italy included, are now examining their laws and trying to determine if lessening worker protections would be better. This is, of course, being met with stiff opposition from unions and such. It's interesting. I'd love to see an economist come and discuss this with us.
I've seen these 'IT' people at work. Swap that CD, reinstall that PC, download some music and take home some parts.
60k$ for that!??
Weren't computers supposed to reduce the amount of work people do? How come all we do nowadays is feed Vol?? (Obscure ST reference, sorry)
The three sphere approach and the software suite of collaboration, interaction, content,
content management, web services, and wrapped in the continuum of campaign management through business analytics is the formula for success and significant value creation.
Am I caught in a time warp? Didn't this kind of shit go out of style last millennium?
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
Publicise your company's evil exploits on a popular techie website! Oh, wait..
Many commenters have said, during a discussion about Loki employees not getting paid for months, that generally when a company starts paying its employees late, it is almost a sure sign that the company is going under (i.e., if that's it's last-resort way of keeping it financially above water). I'd suggest searching for a new job just in case, and I'm not sure what legal action you can take (I'll leave that to other IANALs to answer for).
... I would be raising as much hell with its management and board as I possibly could. I'd demand an emergency shareholders meeting, to be held immediately, and I'd bring rotten eggs and tomatoes to greet the management. I'd be lobbying the other shareholders to organize a class action suit against the management for violation of their fiduciary obligations. And I'd be looking for ways to get the hell out of the investment, before the company goes bankrupt and the stock price drops to zero.
The management of Divine is killing the company, because when you alienate your best talent, you're cutting your own throat. There is no surer way to demolish a company's long-term ability to compete and survive. I've seen it happen several times. The attempt for short-term savings and profitability will cause permanent and irreparable damage in the long run. This is not the way to solve the problem.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
Here where I work. Salaries are contracted every three years. If the district starts loosing money (which we have due to Illinois budget crisis and the govonor's money problems and the State Superintendant being replaced quite a few times, etc.), we do not rehire people after June. there have been quite a few people that have been given "pink slips." already.
I know it isn't the tech field, but here in education, the crunch is felt a year a two before everyone else gets it (or so it seems).
~flogger
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
I'm not sure of Illinois law; however, in Texas, you can collect unemployment if you quit your job for a good work-related reason. Quoting the guide that Texas sends out "Examples of possible good cause are: unsafe working conditions; significant changes in hiring agreement; or not receiving payment for your work." (emphasis is mine)
I was working for a compay that last year told us there was going to be no profit-sharing, then we all got 10% pay cuts, then a group of us got laid off, and yesterday they just let everyone go from two offices. Personally, I wish I had followed my instincts and left when things started to get bad.
Andrew J 'Flip' Flipkowski was worth over a billion USD a couple of years ago. After sending out an impassioned email denying that he would ever sell Platinum to CA - he sold Platinum to CA. The sale netted him about US 1 billion. There are plenty of good jobs in the Chicago market - tell flip to stick it.
Basically under federal labor laws you cannot decrease an exempt employee's pay, if you do, you owe them back overtime plus a penalty for all the over time they worked in the passed 2 years as you just made the employee nonexempt
Divine has been nothing but hype in the last couple years in Chicago. There has always been this desire in Chicago for this city to be a bigger technology city. Divine started as sort of an incubator company and there were high hopes for it when it IPO'd as a possible highlight of Chicago technology. However, they never went too far. Then they started on this acquisition binge that has included a number of software startups and buying the remnants of another Chicago bust, MarchFirst (formerly Whitman-Hart). Divine has been mismanager for quite a while and they are frequently hung out to dry in some of the local technology trash reports in Chicago (see The May Report and ePrairie.com.)
Anyway, Divine is a terrible company and I think many people in Chicago will be less than suprised to hear about the latest antics.
Oops. Forgot to say that.
~flogger
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
Forget .coms... post 9-11, .mil is where the (steady but not outstanding) money is.
Of course, there's always contracting to worry about... ours is up in another year, but as the saying goes, I've got job security and the code to prove it. =]
Read the newspaper lately? CEOs and directors have been lying, cheating, and stealing from public companies for years. The open corruption and bribery in all levels of government (by these same companies) is impossible to ignore (well, if you try really hard). After September 11, the management of the airlines got bailouts while the workers got laid off. About 6% of people actively seeking jobs can't get one, and this is called a "recovery"? I mean, this is from an American perspective, to Americans, but I'm sure it's not that different elsewhere. Really, when will Americans grow a spine and start putting these people in jail? I wonder if the CEO of divine is going to give back his bonus? Duh, nevermind, there's a rerun of Three's Company on tv...
There are two types of people; those who divide people into two types of people, and those who don't.
IT professionals have suffered from massive layoffs, overwork for those still employed, and now possible pay cuts! All this while corporate execs give themselves bonuses. In addition, many may have noticed that the frenzy to get the product "out the door" has resulted in a shoddy quality of work for most software development.
.... Oh! Yeh ... a UNION.
In coming years we may see efforts to reduce the "costs of labor" by outsourcing projects to places where skilled developers will work for very little. People who work under the constraints of green card regulations could be brought in large numbers.
Software professionals could do something along the lines of what the medical profession is already gradually doing in response to the insurance industry take over of medical care in this country.
Somesort of professional society to promote working standards and engineering standards as well. It could even be international! What do they call it
While I agree with the content, the way this guy goes off about it is about the funniest thing I've read in months!
I work for a small, venture funded software company that decided not to pay employees for one month this past year. All employees, including executives, were affected. This may or may not have been the "right" choice at the time, but the affects on morale have been what you would expect. We lost some of our best employees instead of laying off employees we could have afforded to lose. Some employees that remained are now getting laid off as their motivation to work post no-pay-month has been nonexistant. It's a crummy situation for everyone that still is affecting everyone months later.
I'm the CEO of a small 14yo IT company. During the recent internet nonsense we were careful not to do anything blately stupid and stuck to our business plan. In doing so, we have avoided being squashed when the bubble burst and in fact are doing quite well.
However, one time in the past we hit a real rough spot. We knew we had to reduce payroll. One of the steps was a temporary paycut.
But unlike the lead story here, the paycut started with the CEO (me) and all of the executive management. Then the highest paid ($80K and up) employees on a voluntary basis. That's right, we ASKED them to do it for the good of the company. Not a single person declined.
I promised that when things got better, I'd return all of the pay. Many smiled but didn't seem to believe that was likely. But, in fact, several months later, things did recover and I tacked on all the lost pay to their next paychecks (including my own).
I think the fact that I was the first to do it made a difference. It was hard, but it worked.
David Whatley
The ad agency I used to work for had a round of layoffs last August, when they cut the production staff in half. Then, 10% paycuts and firing 20% of the company in December. Of course, they went out of business this spring, thank Bob for unemployment.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
Well all I can say is it aint all that bad. Considering these days some would wish they could earn $60k/year to take that cut those people dont have it that bad. Unfortunately for companies that realize there is a low demand for IT or flood of IT people they are just getting away with what they can. Taking a cut is always better than seeing a couple people laid off to compensate.
I don't know, I read the memo about how much the investors like to see cash on the books anbd so forth and so on. But my BS detector just kept on going ping ping ping.
IMHO, if they are not paying you at all in late May/ early June, then the reason is that they are doing so is in fear of not making payroll. Some management wonk probably figured it was better to make up this 5% dealey than to actually miss payroll.
Their is a slippery slope that a company gets into once financial misery sets in.
Do:
Good people leave,
customers get skittish,
lendors freak.
Loop.
My advice: start looking now. The company is flashing big orange DANGER warning signals, and passsing out a memo saying to ignore them, they're just for some silly regulation.
good luck
--Pete
www.avacal.com -- the home page of pete shaw
Any CEO or senior executive who takes more than a couple million is salary/bonuses and expects working stiffs to take a pay cut should get ZERO support. I am tired of hearing of golden parachutes and management bonuses for running companies into the ground. I for one will not accept a paycut if someone I am working under is unwilling to do the same.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'm currently working at a consulting firm which was forced into a similar (but _far_ less drastic) set of cuts.
As someone who has gone through this in each of the last three companies I've worked for (maybe its me?), I am beginning to come to grips with this being the inherent risk of working in this sector. The fact is, none of us were pissing and moaning when we were being overpaid (of course not, why would we?); should we expect sympathy now that there's been this "market correction"?
Keep in mind that, to the outside (read "non-programming", "AOL _is_ the Internet!") world, even with these new hardships we are all a bunch of Nintendo junkies with nothing to contribute to the world aside from internet porn, Quake and the hamster dance.
Is this perception correct? Hell no. But try _seriously_ explaining that to someone who digs ditches for nine bucks an hour with no benefits.
"Don't matter how New Age you get, old age is gonna kick your ass." - Utah Phillips
I laugh, laugh at all of those people who turned down careers in consulting because they needed "permanent" jobs because they had a mortgage to pay.
If you're consulting you're not dependent on one business and the whims of incompetent shareholders and upper management looking to give themselves fat bonuses. You also tend to save a lot more because planning for a rainy day is a business requirement, not just something you'll do after next paycheck.
It really makes me wonder. Complete and total idiots manage to survive as consultants, but smart, sharp people here are of the concensus that they're not exceptional enough.
While you could end up looking at a higher-interest rate single loan. These companies can typically help you get into a lower monthly payment.
At that point, you can do some serious saving and once you have a comfortable amount of extra savings, which should be much more than 3 months of living expenses, then start paying more on that single loan.
That is my suggestion. However, I am not a professional and must state that my above statement has to be taken with a large grain of Rock Salt. I offer no warranty, or claims that your debt issues will be resolved by following the aforementioned advice. Any choice that you make, is a choice that you make.
--
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Then I sure would have done a VERY lousy job while I was looking for a new job, and never ever say anything good about that company again.
IT workers are a valueable asset, don't forget that.
I work in Switzerland and the company I work for (as well as the major banks here) told us to take a 10% cut or take a hike. The rates are still pretty good, around $100.- an hour for good developers, so we all agreed.
This was done in the wake of 9.11. I think big comps are using 911 to cut rates and dump hidden costs on their balance sheets. Next year will be better (I hope).
give the best performers a pay raise and perhaps a raise in stature or position, then do an across-the-board temporary pay cut that includes executives.
Risking the loss of Divine's best people using such a Draconion pay cut measure is pure stupidity.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
I know of a company that just reduced everyones weekly hours to 32/week.
Their logic: If a 100 person company reduced everyones hours to 32 per week over the summer. Everyone would get a little more free time for the summer. The reduction in pay is not too painful for individuals. And the company realizes a savings that would be the same if they laid off 20 people.
The people I know at the company actually appreciated the thinking.
They are hoping that by the end of the summer they can move everyone back up to 40hrs/week..
If this tactic by divine where to make their fiscal quarter finnancial documents look more appealing, then this would be one -- albiet shaddy technique of doing so. However, the documents linked said the orginization was attempting to bring themselves back to profitability. IMHO, regaining profitability doesn't warrant band-aid solutions. it requires a definite 180 in business practices, and perhaps some unfortunate layoffs. to dock only a percentage of their employee's a whopping 50% while hypothetically sparing someone who could make only $1k less/annum is ludicrous. There is absolutely no ethical way to determine the marker for paycuts, which is why it would have made more sense for a bout of lay offs, followed by a company wide salaray weighted, percentage based paycut. say employee's earning $25-33k/annum are docked 4%, 6% for $33k-$40k... granted this method isn't perfect as a marker must still be determined for each bracket, but it's a wholehelluva lot more humaine then taking someone who earns $60k/annum and reducing that to a mere $30k! But then again -- those earning $60k/annum *should* have enough stability such that they won't be in a panic situation, which would spare that single mother employee with two children who only earns $25k/annum and who must now live off $24k indefinitely. It's a definite puzzler, but in the end it's still business, and inevitably, the decision will be made based on the bottom line and in the best interest of the owner(s)/shareholder(s).... ahhh... corporate america.
canada is no better.
dmarien
I feel the pain. My company "died" 6 months ago. A week after my boss was promoted to CTO he got canned, as did the rest of us.
I haven't found work yet so I'm enrolled to start Law School this Fall. Strange this is I've worked for 2 startups. One went belly up and the other one a very successful IPO. In both cases a common denominator: LOTS OF LAWYERS.
Who woulda thunk it would get this bad.
The affected workers should get together and file a lawsuit for loss of wages. And threaten a walkout if they don't settle. They won't be able to hire new employees if they have the press hounding them. Especially since it sounds like another Enron. So their jobs are relatively safe, though the CEO's won't be if it makes national news and their stock dives. If they are allowed to do it once, it will happen at managements whim afterwards. Unfortunately, most IT employees will cry real loud but lay down and take it. This couldn't happen in a manufacturing company, the unions would nail them to a cross.
MY company cut everyone's pay (across the board, including all the execs) by 33% at the end of last year. We had 2 months of pay cuts, totally 107% of a paycheck. (I remember this number, so if they ever lay me off, I'll know exactly how much to demand before I leave)
We were all pissed at the time, but looking back on it, 66% of a paycheck is far better than 0%
This is exactly the stupid kind of stuff that companies do to prop up their stock price for the two weeks at the end of a quarter.
Seconded
Its the mentality that has your entire work-force working there arses off and giving them all the overtime under the sun at the end of the tax year.
As soon as the new tax year starts, everyone is sat around doing fuck-all as the company has overproduced. Talk about inefficeint!
The best solution is just to take the bean counters outside and give them a good kicking :-)
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
But try _seriously_ explaining that to someone who digs ditches for nine bucks an hour with no benefits.
In the U.S.A, is there any such person outside of prison work gangs? Digging ditches is usually part of either construction work, highway work or water/gas/sewer/electrical line work, and is done with a backhoe by heavily unionized laborers. I doubt that they're getting as little as $9/hour...
---dragoness
I would start sending out resumes, and as soon as I got a different job offer I'd walk, even if it was making the same/less money.
If you cant afford to pay your employees you shouldnt be in f*cking business.
Last year my company offered to trade us our salary for its worth in options over two months. It was totally optional, but I took it anyway.
The way I saw it, it was: "I like working for my company and if I can trade two months salary in exchange for working there two months or more, I'll do it." Not to mention looking for a new job sucks.
Well, it worked out. I got my two months back and those two months of scraping by are a distant memory. Most of the posts here have advocated looking for a new job, so I just wanted to let you know that sometimes it can work out. Bottom line is you need to evaluate the total cost and benefits of the salary cut before you decide you need to jump ship.
Currently living and working in Chicago, I can attest that it's job market is aweful. There is a glut. When a job opens up, 500 programmers apply for that position. Employers take advantage of this and offer salaries in the $40's.
Real-estate here is expensive. From what I've read, we have the 3rd highest cost of living, next to San Fran and Manhattan. If you want to live in the city, $300-500k for a house. If you want to live within you means, expect a 2 hour commute and the resulting family disintegration.
I've had conversations with management friends and they've been told to gouge salaries and take advantage of desperate programmers.
Personally, our company just instituted a 20% across the board pay cut. It didn't matter if you were making $45k or $75k. If my wife wasn't working and putting 100% of her money into savings, this would have caused a panic. We're not crazy yuppie spenders. We're constantly watching the budget. But, house, insurance, car, school loans, etc, does eat up a TON of money.
I can't wait to get out of this town.
I couldn't even get disks signed off for servers with RAID 5 arrays that were compromised.. RAM was also off the list.. well nothing was getting money spent on it, except Directors cars.. teh car park is filled with big BMW's, and no one is getting a raise this 1/4, so I left (this is after they canned the whole of my team leaving me with 5 times the workload, I asked for a rise, they didn't give me one so I walked... Still the new job is far better :)
Right.
Much of tech is in a cash crunch right now, due to the deeper/longer than usual downturn.
The customers save by slowing or stopping expansion.
The service suppliers already have enough equipment in inventory to handle the slowed expansion and stop buying from equipment manufacturers.
The equipment manufacturers have to "live on stored fat" until the service suppliers start buying again.
A company can go through a long economic downturn - even unprofitably. But if the cash goes too low it crashes hard and fast.
The company I'm working for builds equipment for three parts of networking. One is still building out (though slower than expected), one is just starting to grow (though again slower than expected), and one has completely hit the wall for the time being. So we're in a moderate pickle.
Since we already laid off about everybody we won't need (unless we decide to drop one of the lines or not do a followon), we still have a cash crunch, and management doesn't want to alienate the employees who are still onboard.
So management required employees to take a minimum amount of accrued vacation - like five days per quarter.
This means the employees still get paid. But they get paid out out of a pot of money that the company had already "spent", rather than out of new spending. The employees don't take a cut, and the company doesn't lose (many of) the employees. (Five days of mandatory vacation a quarter saves as much as laying off about one employee out of about every 12 or so.)
It also tells the employees they're valued and the company is doing everything possible to keep them around. So with the rest of the sector also in a pinch they have a good reason to stick around until the upturn rather than trying their luck elsewhere.
For fairness, employees who don't have enough accrued are "loaned" vacation days - and the loan will be forgiven if they have to be laid off later. That doesn't help the books. But in a startup most employees have a bunch of vacation accrued.
You can't keep it up forever. But we did 5 days per quarter for a couple quarters (while getting the other restructuring behind us and the investors placated), then 10 days over three quarters (while the restructuring savings kick in) to give the employees relief and the ability to plan vacations better. Most of our key employees are still onboard.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Hummmmm. How to you americans go through school? With credit cards?
Us Europeans do it on a VERY tight buget, but it is mostly on government grants. 4+ years drinking the cheap beer and then we are out there.
Welcome to the Programmers Guild
guild (guïld) n. An association or corporation of persons of the same trade, pursuits, or interests formed for their mutual aid and protection, the maintenance of standards, or the furtherance of some purpose. (The American Heritage Dictionary)
This is the organizing page for The Programmer's Guild. Now that the software industry is maturing we are proposing the creation of Guild or professional society specifically for programmers. At this time programmers are not organized and this is increasingly putting us at risk.
Goals of the Programmer's Guild
Promote the profession of programming
Conduct lobbying on issues that affect members of the programming profession
Set Professional Standards
Certification
Job Placement
The Programmers Guild is not a labor union and is not involved in collective bargaining.
source
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
When thinking about the overall financial scenario, my financial advisor drew a water fountain with water cascading into three sequential "buckets", each one on top of the other and bigger at the bottom. The water comes out at the top, fills the first bucket, flows to the next bucket, fills that and then flows to the final bucket.
The water is your income (wages, dividends, etc). The first bucket is your checking account, which is merely a tool which your income comes in to cover your expenses (which hopefully don't exceed your income [if so, see others' prev. comments - reduce your debt & expenses]). If you pay yourself 10% first (think of it as a bill you have to pay, too), that flows into your second bucket, which represents a liquid account such as a Money Market, from which you can access your funds whenever you want (say to buy some furniture or the new tiBook ... or you lose your job & need to cover your expenses - don't use your credit card!). Set a static $ amount for the second bucket (2 months of expenses is a good goal) and when that fills up, then you invest the rest in non-liquid long-term investments (depending on your age and risk tolerance and some other variables - see a financial advisor/planner for more details). If you're an American, I would heartily recommend investing in a Roth IRA. With the new tax laws in effect, this year, you can invest up to $3,000 ($6,000, if you're married) after-tax dollars and when you retire, you pull them out (& their earnings [Gotta Love Compounding Interest!]) tax-free! If you still have more to put into investments, you can do all kinds of things - mutual funds, start-ups, etc (again, all based on the previously-mentioned variables).
Of course, this is an ideal-scenario situation - you probably don't fit in this model and I didn't at first, but I've worked my way into it and it works for me. I do use my credit cards, but only for big stuff, like furniture & computers, and only when it's more convenient than writing a check at the store or online. When the credit card bill comes, I pay it off in full with the funds I've already allocated towards the purchase.
I'm not sure what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure lies in trying to please everyone -Bill Cosby
By cutting salaries, management is sending a signal: IT is not a highly valued part of the business, but strictly an operating expense. The semiotics of this action are clear. The smart employees will now leave (granted, harder in a down market). The stupid employees will hang around, be sacked en-masse, and will be replaced by H1b visa holders working for a fraction of their former salaries.
I had a job in the early 80's for a copper smelter. Chile decided to pay its national debt in copper. Copper prices plummeted. The company laid off a quarter of the blue collar workers and cut the remainer's salaries by a quarter. Mean while the white collar workers still got raises. When I left they were laying off the low end of the white collar jobs. Management was looking after themselves and refused to make the tough decisions that would affect them and their friends.
I wrote this a few months ago for a discussion on the same sort of thing on my local LUG mailing list. I think it actually applies here...
Yep, the problem seems to be that no matter how big of mistake any CEO
makes, they will still make money. Which leads to bad CEO's getting
practically praised for making bad decisions. If I gave my dog a plate
full of fresh bacon every time she pooped on the carpet, I would expect
much the same results.
The REALLY stupid part is for some reason, there are companies out there
who are already probably chomping at the bit to get a 'high-profile' CEO
like Bob Allen of AT&T on THEIR executive team, just so that they can have
CEO with a big name. Nevermind the fact that his track record as a CEO
sucks like a Hoover, he's got a big name, right? that's all that should
count, right?
Wrong.
I've seen so many bad CEO's run companies into the ground, I should get a
freakin' medal for not hitting them with a LART on sight. Bad CEO's will
continue to line their pockets at our expense until one of them ACTUALLY
gets punished for making decisions that an average garden slug would have
the better sense not to. And I'm not talking fines, people with money,
will always have money for little piddly $10 million dollar fines,
especially when they've got more socked away than any of us will ever
know. I'm talking PRISON, Sheriff Joe style. Bad CEO's are criminals, no
different than some doofus who goes in and robs a fedrally-insured bank,
except they rob people, REAL people.
I think that everything happening in business (Enron, etc) should serve as
a warning to bad CEO's everywhere. You can only trample on the employees
that are trying to succeed just as much as you for so long. I'm not a
superstitous or religious man, but Karma can be a serious bitch, and I
hope that the good St. Karma shows the CEO's just as much compassion and
respect that they have shown to their employees.
That's pretty much how I feel about the whole matter when it comes to a CEO claiming that there isnt enough money in the corporate kitty to make 'the investors' happy. The investors don't make a company, the people doing the work do. Respect for your employees doesnt start at the "C" level, it starts at the mailroom, and goes all the way up. If you're a CEO making 250K/yr, and you cut somebody's salary so that you can save a buck, I hope you get hit by a bus. With Dynamite on it. In Hell.
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
Don't quit. Send out resumes, start the job hunt. But tell HR you do not accept the paycut, nor will you quit. That way you're in the clear for your severance.
Would you by any chance be talking about niggers here? I think it would be more honest if you said what you meant.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
IT workers unite... Nerds gather! Grab your calculators!
that it's not intended so much by saving money through the paycut, as to persuade people to quit. A company that wanted you to stay would sugar-coat it.
In an effort to cut costs, my company outsourced development to India.
;)
Based on some reasearch I did, I suspect the savings is something between five- and ten-to-one.
USA India
------ ------
Development Programmer 41,000 8,000
Test Engineer 47,000 8,000
QA Specialist 50,000 14,000
Annual salaries, in US dollars. Figures from 1995.
ref: http://idpm.man.ac.uk/idpm/isicost.htm#compar
This is a huge growth industry for India:
In 2001, India exported $5.1 billion worth of software labor. The average annual growth from 1990 to 2000 is 42%. Looked at another way, in eleven years this business became 39 times as large.
ref: http://idpm.man.ac.uk/idpm/isiexpt.htm
Sixty-five percent of software exports goes to the US. Then next closest is the UK, which comes in at 10%.
I don't think this is necessarily bad, but I think it does indicate that the production of software, like the production of autos, is becoming more standardized. Or at the very least, this is the direction companies would like it to go.
Seems like a good time to move towards providing services and support for companies that want to use more Free Software.
Yep, it's you thoughtful take charge types that make it so pleasant for the rest of us.
Want to bet that the person who dreamed up "cut all of their paychecks 50%" was more the "Look out for number one" type, (recognized by the salute they get from everyone while driving) and less of the thinking compassionate type that recognizes nobody succeeds alone?
in the UK at least.
The employment tribunals would be overflowing, the unions would have the whole place out on strike. How are they able to get away with that kind of move?
My company (also contract), has announced that there may be paycuts applied to individuals, but 4 months latter, I have yet to hear of the first cut. We have, though, been on a much shorter leash. No new training, goodies, and the company-sponsered events are just about non-existant now.
The fortune-100 client has also been making cuts, but instead of cutting salary, they cut people. We figure the ultimate goal is to cut their IT department by 1/2 of the size it was a year ago. Projects are much harder to come by.
I think there was some discussion of this in France a little while ago. I might be wrong though. The US media absolutely sucks at reporting about the rest of the world although it has done a decent job with problems in the middle east. I get most of my world news from the BBC world service courtesy of National Public Radio late at night. But yeah, the mass production of goods stuff is interesting. I'm personally torn between viewing this as exploitation and as exporting jobs. American Unions want great pay and benifits for people in SE Asia so the SE Asians don't get the jobs the American Unions want. However, low paying jobs in poor working conditions are low paying jobs in poor working conditions.
It's a shame you have been such a jerk to people and earned yourself a -1 posting.
Based on the comments I've seen on this thread, the problem of sticky wages becomes apparent. The only reason that unemployment ever gets to where it is today is because people are more than happy to accept pay raises when the economy is doing well, but they are unwilling to accept pay cuts when the economy is doing poorly. This double standard in our expectations results in wages staying the same while they should be decreasing to keep pace with the normal swings in the market economy. Because people insist on their pay clashing with the economy, the market is unable to employ everyone who wants to work.
If are any Slashdotters who have known the pains of unemployment in the last year, you should be the first and foremost in advocating pay cuts like this when the economy is suffering! If not for the problem of sticky wages, you would never have been unemployed.
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
They actually came after me too but apparently I'm even more glad now that I turned their offer down. I'm at 69K ( and well, I'd like to stay there--ha)
The ability to save (at least for me), tends to come *after* I have things in reasonable shape. And in my case, that means replacing the fridge, the dryer, the 3rd owner couch, and making repairs on a 13 year old car and a few even on a 5 year old car.
Saving is not easy, and you tend to spend what you make.
Any truth to the rumor that Divine and United Parcel Service (UPS) will be merging, forming a company called Divine Brown?
"Hey Hugh Grant... what has Divine Brown done for you lately?"
"divine helps companies maximize profits through better collaboration, interaction, and knowledge sharing across their entire value chain."
OK, let me guess...
- The top management are all book-trained MBAs. They built the business on venture capital with handshake deals where who you know is much more important than what you can do.
- They are regularly written up in glowing articles in all the local business PR rags.
- They are in technology, but they have a VP of communications and/or marketing who previously did not work in technology, and who mocks it openly.
- Middle management is encouraged to think about their political standing within the company, and routinely value that over actually getting actual productive work done.
- The sales force dresses in Armani or similar, and drives late-model cars more expensive than $40K because it is supposed to give them an advantage.
- People who don't show up for happy hour are considered ineligible for promotion, despite the fact that behind their backs everyone hates everyone else and doesn't want to drink with them.
- No management has ever showed up at a goodbye luncheon, or if they did, they spent five minutes there and didn't speak to the outgoing employee.
- HR is the second-most powerful unit in the company (behind marketing) and establishes policies with the help of corporate lawyers.
- Golf is considered essential to one's career.
divine employees or ex-employees, how'd I do?There's no way that would hold up in court, you can't send someone an e-mail and state they are bound to the contract, and that by accepting money they're owed, they are bound to that contract. That e-mail basically stated by accepting any money from them for the pay period you agreed to the e-mail, which is not true, you can't sign away your rights. I know for one in Washington State, where they also do business, as they have a job opening in Seattle, if they tried to pull this shit, and the employee decided to pursue it, they would end up having to pay the employee 3 times what they didn't pay him.
Bring it on HR!
YES, there is a McDonald's in Hanoi Square.
I agree that there needs to be some kind of equalization with idiot executives who burn companies. I've had a CEO and CFO run a company into the ground and it wasn't pretty...but it didn't begin to look like the Enron mess. Unfortunately, most of the time these guys walk off with a load of stock options (many cashed in), plus severance and bonus pay, plus, often, ongoing company perks or director's positions.
It would be nice if there was a way to settle the accounts with them, but it just doesn't happen. The Enron fat cats walked with their ill-gotten gains and then re-invested those gains in their personal homes. Guess what? They get to keep all that money because there are laws on the books that say you can't get money out of somebody's home (even if it is an unseemly mansion...it's not like these guys are in danger of losing a trailer or 2 bedroom apartment). The net effect is that these folks got away with robbery.
What is your Slash Rating?
Always make sure that your slacking off is proportional to the pay cut, they cut half your pay slack off for twice as long. Take those 20 minute bathroom breaks and hour and a half lunches. And make sure if they are angry at you they fire you, especially if they give you the fire, quit option. You can collect unemployment if they fire you. It may seem like it looks bad but on your resume put something like layoff or managment disagreement.
I *would* be immediately on the job market without worring about arranging time to replace me . .
hawk the prof
My company has a cash flow problem. So they started a Salary Deferrment program. All upper managers had to take a 15-20% pay cut for 6 months. The difference will be paid back at the end of the 6 months, when it is assumed that skies are brighter and we can attract some new investors.
It was optional for other employees to participate. I did, donating 10% of my paychecks for 6 months. That was 5 months ago, so I can expect a nice chunk of my money back in about a month. To further motivate us, any non-management who particpated volountarily get a decent chunk of stock. So it's win-win, I help my CEO cut his costs for two quarters, and I get a little equity in the company (which will further motivate me to work hard and keep us from going under).
The only thing that bugs me is it's been almost 2 years and I haven't had a wage increase. If I get to my 2 year anniversary date, they'd better give me at least some sort of wage increase, or I'm walking. Or they can pay for my grad school, that would work too!
- Kengineer
If you lose your job in IT. 1. Put down your perl books or your MSCE library. 2. Start programming.
The company is a dog. Look on their web site and you can't tell what they are selling. Further, their stock is selling at 29 CENTS, yet their loss for fiscal 2001 is over $2.00 per share. So their loss per share is over six times the share price. Yet their CFO says they have a "strong balance sheet." Huh???
Reminds me of the story where son takes over the business and discovers they are selling their widgits at less than it costs to make them. Son asks Dad about this and he says, "Yeah, but think of the volume!"
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
The company I worked for simply said there was no money and I never got paid... this was close to 7 months ago. I have since left the state and took a job elsewhere...
That was the solution used at Northwest Airlines.
Frankly, I'd have preferred a pay cut...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
hawk
We all, of course, feel bad for those who lost their jobs. BUT, what about those of us who don't even have one yet? I'm just finishing my sophomore year in college studying CS/Networking and watching things go as they have been is really scaring me. Finding a summer job this year is turning out to be more of a challenge than I thought. Everyone I contact has been laying people off and can't afford to hire summer interns. So now those of us who were promised a birght future is we got into the technology field ans studied hard and finding ourselves looking at jobs as park rangers, and furniture movers for the next few years of our lives. Not exactly the experience builder any of us need...
This is a backwards place but I don't feel like driving in reverse.
I agree with your assesment of the tech industry. It was overpriced; it has dropped like a stone. I don't really think that's the point here.
The point is that management (as usual) is padding their wallets and at the same time burning the line employees. Moreover, the company signed contracts with each of these employees promising a certain amount of money for a certain amount of work. For them to cut salaries, then, is breach of contract.
At the same time, I'm reminded both of what happened at my old company (net32 (also known as net16 after the 50% cut in workforce)) and other companies: too many chiefs, not enough indians. From a parasitic point of view: if you (the brass) kill the host (the workers), you go down too.
What is your Slash Rating?
The only difference was, it was a mandatory 2 weeks vacation in November. I made pretty good use of it, but we were given basically *no* notice. Many people couldn't do what they wanted since planning good vacation time and buying cheap plane tickets/etc took more lead time.
Back in 2000, they did their first round of layoffs. We'd been hearing rumblings, and I knew that the severance package would be nice - they hadn't yet started having cash flow problems. So I begged to be let go.
Anyway, the package I got was 3 months severance, 25% vesting of options immediately, and my vacation time paid out. Essentially, it was like being paid to take the rest of the year off. In addition, the job market was still solid, so I found work in less than a week.
What's funny is that the poor bastards who hung in there kept getting screwed: severance got cut, so leaving actually hurt. Health benefit costs went up by 200-400 a person. In general, the morale went into the crapper, with only the loyal employees getting screwed. Now this!
For some reason, this reminds me of the way the US Gov't was being run in Snowcrash - loyalty is it's own reward, even though the employer is a shitty place to work for.
Side note: most of the ex-divine people I know refer to the company as the "resume stain"
An HP wise person once said that most companies
die of indigestion more than starvation. This is, of course, only applicable to companies that have
a valid business model, be it lean times or not.
The company I work for looks frighteningly similar to the one featured above. Its corporate DNA is simple, based on integration and professional services and labelled "solutions" - and without its people, it is nothing.
The company I work for tried simmilar stunts, first a 5% pay cut for mortals, 20% for execs. Then it proposed going to a 4 day weeek, and holiday unpaid shutdowns. Then 2 rounds of layoffs. Why? To look good on paper, so the company could get sold. Problem with this is,
with so many unhappy key techies - anyone who
might be interested in buying the company can
just steal the key people and get 80% of the value
for 20% of the cost. These managers should bear this in mind.
I have seen huge inconsistencies at my place of work. For instance, during some of my friends' recent annual reviews, one of them was told there was a salary freeze. 2 weeks later, I had mine and I was given a raise. I informed my friend that he had better speak with his manager to bring this discussion back to the table.
Another friend of mine was told by our manager that in coming up with a suggestion for what he thought his raise should be (he likes to ask you before giving you his suggestion, allows him some leeway), he should consider the fact that our company had just hired X new programmers and this, that, and the other thing. ???!!! As if the company's spending decisions were made by us, the lowly grunts! And if the company had money to spend on new employees, one would believe that we were doing well enough and could afford even a minimal raise granted to current employees! Am I wrong? How much more inconsistent could it be?
I was recently laid off from a company that Divine holds. They suck! We took 10% pay cuts while the executies in the the offices all patted themselves on the back for saving the company money.
Its all a very bizarre situation, which I could talk about for hours on end.
[FromTheMorning]
If your employer starts giving you reverse wages - now is the perfect time
STEAL EVERYTHING!!!!!!!
These bastards committed to their employees to compensate for their time at a prespecified rate.
Fuck them. If they can't remain profitable, thats their problem. All they have to guarantee is the wage shows up on time.
If your employer decides to steal from you, follow the next steps:
1. Steal
2. Take much longer breaks
3. Never work uncompensated overtime again.
Quite simply, don't let those shitheads win. You are only there because of the money.
Teamwork, comardrie, feeling of a job well done, ALL HORSESHIT! Fuck that shut. You are on the job TO GET PAID.
If you don't get paid, don't give your employer free overtime. Don't work through lunch. In fact, start taking 65 minute lunches. They won't notice 65 or 60 or 15 minutes. Trust me. They are bastards.
Fuck them, fuck them, fuck them.
According to such liberal news sources as the Wall Street Journal (who have been covering the executive pay structure over the last month), and Fortune, it's the executive pay, bonuses granted during down cycle, and options which make up more than half of their payscale that are the cause of this.
...
Should web designers (content) be making $60K? Probably not. Should web database designers be making $100K? Probably. Media people usually make low dollars - around $30K to $40K, traditionally, while techie types are worth their weight in gold.
But so long as the execs are trying to justify their inordinate pay increases, they'll try to squeeze it out of the profitable areas of the company, and loot the company.
But what do I know, I own tens of thousands of direct shares in over 40 companies and have been investing for more than 2 decades
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Contrary to what you've likely read on this site, being ambitious (and wanting to be successful/make money) doesn't make you an evil person. Showing a little heart, in fact, could be the one factor that lets you keep your job.
If you want to be the mild-mannered, unemployed nice guy, that's fine. Personally, I'd prefer to do whatever I can to keep my job.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Once you hit 35 or 40, you'll have a much harder time finding a job, even though you'll be better qualified. What kind of merit system is that?
I work in the highly cyclical capital equipment industry, and last year (july) was the first time (in the time that I have worked here) that we had paycuts. It was 10% across the board and a freeze on raises, but it was temporary. This year they have advertized that they are giving us our paycuts and raises back, but no raises for this year (and that will of course be perminent). I almost did jump ship, but transferred instead & my new boss is looking to set me up with an exemption now -- so I'm not so bad off...
Anyway, I am a little surprized that your company has waited this long to do this "cost cutting" measure... As far as I can tell we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel & your company is not... I'd have to say that if I were in your shoes and seeing such a drastic paycut... yeah, I'd be looking elsewhere. It's a bit bad out there, but I don't think its enough to justify 50% paycuts... esp. if they are perminent.
According to this (http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020429/cgm016_1.html) Yahoo! article (read, press release) they are the fastest growing company on the Network World 200 list.
Makes you wonder about the rest...
--- My dad's political betting
401k loans are good for this. As long as you have the discipline to close the accounts immediately after you pay them off. It gets you out of the financial requirements should you loose a job, and the worse that can happen is a 10% penalty tax if you DO loose your job and can't pay the loan back to your 401k.
But at that point, would you rather have 10% penalty or bad credit?
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Quick... everybody sing!
Some people might end up taking this job:
Human Resources Development Canada "Senior Web Developer" Position
A company in Reed City Michigan (Nartron)
has a favorite time for laying people off.
That time is right before the christmas holiday
or before thanksgiving.
This is the owner's way to show his dislike for
the christmas season and to save a few dollars
on holiday pay.
A paycut even of 50% would probably be preferable
in such a time when nobody hires anyone for 3 to
4 months.
A warning for those stupid enough to consider
working at Nartron.
A long time ago, I got a job right out of high school making $14.75 hr to start doing CAD work. It was the 'new' thing in the design and engineering industry. Then all of these 'schools'(boy am I using that term loosely) opened up and mass produced CAD users. The pay scale fell out of the industry from what I was making to $7.50 an hr and it stayed that way for a few years. At that price per hour I decided that cleaning pools(at $9.00/hr) and bouncing people out of night clubs(at $50-200 per shift) was a much better paying series of jobs.
Over time many firms realized that a good draftsman who understands what they draw is a quantum leap forward of people who can 'do' CAD(like a real expensive etch a sketch). I eventually went back to the world of architecture and the pay scale had moved back into the high teens/low twenty dollar per hour range for people with my background.
So, I can't say this surprises me to see this happen in IT. This won't be the last time the industry sees this happen, especially when everyone and his brother is rushing out to become an MCSE because they are (if you belive the radio ads) 'in demand and paying more than $60,000 a year to start.'
Good luck to the folks in that sector. You all are going to need it.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
the fact is, people dont understand. as is so comicly out-lined at www.userfreindly.org mangers and "the bussisness savy" are ignorant to the fact that some 23 year old sitting at a computer is making sure that ever memo he ever sends will get to the addressed person in a timely fashion. to think out-side the box you have to have someone fixing, networking, and coding ON a box. wake up and smell the java... that virus your boss was worried about you stopped by putting up that firewall you never told him about. now they want to cut pay rates? let them try. o whats that?! a new virius is out boss?
Careful what you say around me.. I will assume you mean it.
about this type of story is hearing that upper management got their bonus and such. In some cases upper management bonuses are worth more than the pay cut they ask their staff to take. I work for a company where the CEO actually got a bonus for firing a significant percentage of the staff to cut costs. This seems like an oxymoron to me, cut staff to reduce expenses, but then accept a 3 million dollar bonus. Not only does this defeat the purpose of the cuts, it destroys morale for the remaining employees.
IANAL... But I play one on
But it's not too late. In this case, it sounds like management was looking for the easiest way to please the stockholders with the least cost to themselves. If the employees let themselves get screwed, it will only get worse.
Imagine if management saw that the 50% cut would have repurcusions -- when they kick the employees, the employees kick back. Then, when they are doing their cost-benefit analysis, cutting employee pay has extra costs associated with it, forcing them to look elsewhere to please the shareholders. Of course, employees standing up for themselves might push the company under, but with a company like that, who really cares -- sure, you might lose your job, but better to lose it on your terms than to work for another year dreading layoffs, working longer hours for less pay only to show up one day to be greeted by security guards telling you to never come back.
If my company made such an announcement, I'd walk out with my coworkers -- let's see the board of directors keep their servers running and develop software. Fuck 'em.
But if you walk out, don't quit -- if you do it right, you can walk out at 10am and be back to work without a pay cut by 2pm. If you quit you're gone and most likely won't get your job back, but if you go on strike you have a few protections. And you don't need to be represented by a union to go on strike, though you will want advice from an experienced union organizer and/or labor lawyer.
Of course, you might just want to quit -- but rather than using that as a chance to yell at your manager, hit 'em where it counts. Organize with coworkers you trust and all quit at once. Companies can cope with losing employees in a trickle, but you can't replace your whole workforce from scratch.
As for who to talk to, I'd talk to WashTech or the IWW if they aren't in your local area, they can refer you to someone closer or give you some advice.
How's this for an approach.
I took on a job with a small company 4 weeks ago as Lead Tech, Jack of all Trades. The day after I was hired I heard about employees checks bouncing and other bad things. So, sure enough, my check bounced, I never got my medical insurance, and I'll be taking the CEO to court to get my one month salaray he owe's me. 65K/year.
Oh, and BTW, my wife and I had our first baby 3 months ago and our first home mortgage got approved the day I left the company. Others left as well of course.
This is the kiss of death, point rated at 175 with this new info. If i were an employeed of this company i would be bailing out quickly!!
How come you rarely see the "Management takes a 50% pay cut??". It's cause they are all greedy bastards.. that's all they teach them when getting an a MBA (remove soul and insert greed).
we also got 2 days a month off to compensate. It was a last ditch attempt to save the company by reducing cash flow. This was a startup and we couldn't get any additional funding and failed 2 months later. This was a couple weeks ago.
I think it's a poor method of handling things in general and it does show poor management. It also really dropped morale. If you want to do this then you should compensate the employees. give htem a reason to help save the company. Give up a larger percentage of the company. It might not be worth anything, but if you want people to gamble their future and try to believe in a company, you have to reward them in good times, not just take away $$ in bad.
I would recommend that anybody working for this company hands in their notice today, backdated to March 31. You signed a contract with them, they are using it for toilet-paper. Vote with your feet.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
When I first got out of college in '88, the big thing was computer graphics. We had just got off a gaming high (where the money was in computer games), and computer graphics were starting to be the "next" big thing. (You couldn't throw a rock at a computer convention without hitting a computer graphics, computer visualization, or computer animation CEO in the head.)
Then the market crashed in around '91. Games started making a comeback around '92 or so; things started heating up shortly thereafter with Doom and it's clones showing a new dimension (pardon the pun) in gaming.
The game market collapsed around 96 or so, just about the time the web started taking off.
I've noticed about a 5 year cycle on these things: for about two to three years you can make a hell of a lot of money if you are in the right place at the right time (I was, in 95, in children's games--bought a house), but you can starve as the market readjusts and tries to find the "next big thing."
My advise: recognize the market is cyclical, with about a 5 year period. Presume that you will have two very dry years. (I did; most of the money I made on the child's game went into savings which paid the bills in the next two years when I didn't make squat.) If you are making $60K/year, pretend your budget is $45K/year and save the other $8K (after taxes) in a secure investment for the year when you will only make $30K. (Hell, I went in one year from $250K/year to $50K/year just fine with this philosophy.)
And keep your eyes out for the next big thing, so you can get on the roller coaster ride and stash some more money.
Or, go work for the government where paycuts and the like literally take an act of congress...
Oh, please. Do you really think that managers really know who is dead weight and who isn't?
It's sort of like "Idea boxes" with monetary bonuses for accepted ideas. In practice, the people evaluating the ideas only understand accounting process improvements or "common sense" improvements. So, the only folks who get monetary bonuses are accounting department employees.
Similarly, the people doing the laying off only understand management jobs. They have no idea what those poorly dressed programmers or those guys in bad ties in engineering actually do. Managment understands glad-handing each other, and janitorial services. Everyone else is mysterious, making them superfluous, and therefore eligble for RIFing.
The company I was last contracted to found that it could not pay it's employees.
The difference here is that they didn't tell anyone until payday, at which point they gave everyone pink slips instead of checks..
Funny thing is that they tried to re-hire several of these people only to find that no one will return their calls.
Reality is in the mind of the beholder - me 1996
If it gets to bankruptcy, there's only a couple of things that get paid ahead of employees (particularly, the costs of the proceeding; otherwise noone would get paid.).
If the company is that far down, and behind in wages, a group of employees, in their status as creditors, can file an involuntary bankruptcy petition against th firm.
If there *are* assets to pay out (not enough to pay everything, just enough to be worth selling), it is entirely possible that you can get a bankruptcy specialist to take it on with little or no up-front money--he is part of the administrative expenses that get paid early.
hawk, esq.
This is a common misperception... companies can do **whatever the fuck they want** and frequently do! You should see the shit that goes on at my workplace ... now if the company bullshit rubs your contract the wrong way, then you can sue them to enforce it.
Lawyers are expensive, just to talk to one would cost 5k I'm sure. And thats what they are figuring! Cut your salaries just less then it might cost to consult with a lawyer. What they need to do is get together and class action devine(someone must have mentioned this already). Thats the only way they could hope to recover enough to pay their legal fees.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Extending the Enterprise
Business processes today reach beyond the four walls of a company and into the extended enterprise. This is new territory for many organizations, but at divine it's what we do.
divine helps companies maximize profits through better collaboration, interaction, and knowledge sharing across their entire value chain.
FUCKING RUN.
RUN HARD.
RUN NOW.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
For *very* long term, the best you can hope for is about 10% (7% after inflation)--this is the historical return for the market. For safe, non-fluctuating short term, you can't even keep up with inflation today.
So pay the high cards first--you can always charge again if you need to, and two months of not paying interest on the money (as compared to getting nothing for it in a safe liquid savings) is enough to pay the new cash advance fee, anyway.
bottom line: don't borrow on credit cards at all. If you don't have cash, you can't afford it.
This is one of the fallacies of the IT world that so very many young IT guys think. THey think they are all powerful because they run the computers.
Well guess what.
Any worker could come in at night and smash the place up with an axe. Or burn the building down.
The accountant could steal money. Does that make them all poweful?
Either way the action is illegal.
If you think you could trojan/delete/sabotage the company's systems and get away with it.. you are mistaken. It is illegal, you will most likely a) go to jail and/or b) never have a career in IT again.
you bought into that line of shit, eh?
wait until next quarter - the growth in the GDP is due entirely to one-shot government spending increases... aka Military Buildup.
These expenditures dont improve infrastructure or provide for permanent economic growth.
and with Massive Deficit spending, comes massive amounts of inflation.
Hope you enjoyed your $300 "advance", you'll be paying through the nose for a long time to come.
If you want to live like a republican, you need to vote democratic.
... hi bingo
Well, something's gotta give... I've worked several places now where I've seen IT spending grow almost without bound over the past 5 years, both in terms of staff & technology.
I hold that this is ridiculous, the technology is supposed to reduce staffing costs, yet for all of the "progress" in this industry IT costs have risen sharply for many.
At my present job (for a very small outfit) I've chosen to use staffing as the benchmark: if I have to hire more help, the solution is too complex.
Simplify. Reject ridiculous, complicated software. Build on things that work. Throw away things that don't. This ain't rocket science, and never was.
Asking a boss for advice about unions is like asking a car thief for advice on which car alarm to buy...
As an IT guy you have access to all the dirty laundry. So why not just have a little fun at your employer's expense. Take a peek your CEO's email to see if he's cheating on his wife. Blackmale is always fun. Or hey if you just want to piss em all off - find out how much all the top assholes in the company are making and email out to everyone or just print it off and leave copies laying around the water cooler.
Look if you are getting fucked, why not take everyone who deserves it down with you?
There are graceful and non-graceful ways for a company to handle a lack of cash flow
...is to move to a subscription base.
I worked for a company for a month. They announced that they had been bought and were closing their NYC office (this was a bit of a shock - the company's been around for 148 years, and always headquartered in New York.) instead of canning us all immediately, they offered us our old wages until the office was officially closed, plus vacation, plus unemployment, plus a stay-pay bonus of 2 months pay for sticking it through to the end. The advantage? I guarantee that none of us who eventually got laid off has a single, bad thing to say about the company. T'was smart of them.
Triv
In some states (Massachusetts), its a felony for corporate officers if you miss payroll.
What's the legal basis for a cut 50% of gross for two periods for a 3.85% pay reduction?
It looks like they're grabbing half of two paychecks to pay off the salary reduction for the whole year - including the months up to now (i did the math quickly, and 3.85% of my annual salary comes out to approx half of my monthly salary)
However, if it's 50% pay cut to pay a 3.85% cut on the entire annual salary, it looks to me like they're applying the cut to the salary they've currently paid up till now. Aren't retroactive pay cuts illegal? (note that I'm assuming it's illegal because it makes sense to me that it ought to be illegal, not that i know of any particular law that makes it illegal)
Is the 'In the event you do not wish to accept the reduction, you must advise the Human Resources Department immediately' a CYA line that lets them do a retroactive cut?
(Pls note that I'm not too savvy in this area, i'm asking because it doesn't make sense to me that they'd be able to do that - maybe I'm reading it wrong)
Code or be coded.
I work at Acxiom corporation, which underwent the same thing about a year ago. I came to work one day and *poof* I took a mandatory 5% paycut.
That sucked..
It sucked more for our bosses who took 10 and 15% paycuts in addition to having the raises they had been counting on for months simply vanish. This was done to try and avoid layoffs, but in the end a slight layoff did occur... but I suspect it was better than it would have been.
In the end (a year later) the company is really back on track and we'll be getting our pay back over the next few months.. and that's great. The company surivived more or less intact and as an employee I really can't complain to much.
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
On the other hand, democratic unions like WashTech are organizing.
As for not having the balls to get beaten up on a picket line. More nonsense. Have you ever seen a picket line? More likely than not you'd fall asleep from the boredom. And most organizing drives don't involve strikes.
And the only sort of "balls" you need are for realizing that you have more power if you stick with your coworkers than if you stand up alone. Speaking of "balls", the truth is that while union membership in the U.S. isn't really increasing, union membership for women is.
And there is no need to scream "F**K YOU" at your boss -- though a union might give you the power to do that and still keep your job... :)
Absolutely true about used cars being a great value. However I worry about reliability, particularly with american cars. Pickups, however, are more reliable. There are probably a lot of car experts who would disagree, but in my experience pickups last longer and require fewer expensive repairs. Another way to save money is going standard as opposed to automatic transmission. Not only is the cost of replacing a std. transmission much less. But I believe you also conserve some gas with a standard, be it car or truck.
Furthermore, small pickups are classified as Low Emission Vehicles. For example a Ford Ranger gets about 21mpg whereas a ford taurus gets like 29mpg. And pickups are so handy! AND you can look cool in a pickup even if it's not a shiny new one.
I think just about everybody (in the US, at least) grows up with the mentality that says "I'll be making more money in the future, so it will be easier to pay off then." Only it isn't.
The biggest impediment to getting out of debt that I'm struggling with is health insurance. All of the HMO and PPO plans I'm looking at now want $1000+ every month. That's 2 car payments, one mortgage payment, or a 14 month payoff plan for the credit card debt.
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." --Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
That it costs $20/day?
I run about $120/month for food.. And no, I've never eaten Raman, and haven't had Spagetti in a year.
Pay cuts here have as of yet only been for Contractors. What they've done is send a letter to the contracting company asking if they want to participate in an optional bill rate decrease, or don't take the decrease and get all of your people out of here. We have had 2 over the past year, the first was 5% and the second 18% (instead of the originally asked 35%). I don't enjoy making less money.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
ENGINEER comes before EXECUTIVE. . . .
to thank slick willy, who signed a nice bill that dramatically increased the H1B visa limits to deal with our terrible tech worker "shortage". Even the ones who have to return home now from losing their jobs have good work experience from here and will likely just work in the outsourcing market from their own countries...for about 25% or less than you or I would have to ask to live decently. (Not extravagent folks...my car's got 123,000 miles on it, and my apartment is a hole...but at least I have modest student loans and a healthy "oh shit" fund in the bank.) Life can be a bitch for the early years of being a developer.
Welcome to the harsh realities of supply and demand folks. Don't say I didn't warn you anyways...
Now, if i were to have my pay cut in half, i'd say nothing, cut my effort in half and use the spare time to get a moonlighting gig. if my boss found out about my respone, he'd blow a fuse and maybe fire me. SO WHAT. I live on less than I make and thus have a war chest that I can use to keep me afloat during transition.
If you know who Dave Ramsey is, you have heard that savings accounts and paid off mortages are a Good Thing. As geeks, we generally have a good enough market position to command salaries with room for some discretionary funds.
Now, what if all the geeks at that company had war chests and budgets that allowed them to live for the next six months without a paycheck. Six months would allow you to start your own company and then you could get successful and subject your employees to a 50% pay cut.
This is sucky advice if you've been pinched by your employer in this way. What you'll do is tighten your belt and get through the hard times. I did it when i was laid off a decade ago. AFTER I started working again, i continued to live in skinflint mode for several months. AFTER I paid off all my mortgages, I loosened up again and started buying toys again.
Incidentally, back in '80 when i got my first credit card, i vowed that the month I carried forward a balance, that month I'd cut up all the credit cards. Credit Card debt, like the Lotto, is a voluntary tax on people who are bad at math.
My advice is to live on 80% of what you make and then bank & give away the rest.
- Executives take 50-100% pay cuts
- Staff cuts get made
- "Surviving" staff gets 10% paycut, with proviso: Company makes it to given date, next paycheck, your old pay is restored AND you get double the amount of your paycut back as a lump sum. Plus X additional shares as a grant of stock. .
.
Unfortunately, the place that did this didn't make it, but we tried, knowing that if we succeeded, we'd be rewarded. . .after shipping a good product engineering was cut by 50%....thanks guys
MONEY
theres not a supply problem, thats a complete myth.
Programs like that start becuase its cheaper to hire them than to hire you.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
... made a list of the highest paid non-management, then laid them off in order from highest paid down till they were 'making a profit'. Now they are scrambling to explain why nothing is gettin done.
Management's first responsibility is ... to keep people to manage.
If they hack the salaries of the company's best and brightest, at least some of these people will leave, perhaps many of them, but the dead wood remains. Morale spirals. Product quality declines.
If a company is in such deep schmutz that they must enhance their revenues by scalping their own employees, it is time to leave.
Many people have trouble leaving bad jobs because they have stock options in the company which they very much hope will someday be worth something. Waiting for the next wave before jumping ship. This is a terrible pressure, a monkey trap, a pyramid scheme where the senior management swindle their own employees. This actually gives management an incentive to keep stock prices low, for fear of suddenly hemoraging their best.
All of which does very little to inspire the stock market or potential customers.
I am more impressed with what Steve Jobs did: waved his salary for a year, all of it. That adds up to quite a few employees who didn't take a cut. And sets a good example. He won't be jumping ship.
=brian
Cutting pay TEMPORARILY to make the books look good? So we're going to misrepresent our numbers to the stock holders? Call the SEC, make the bastards suffer.
Things are bad, everywhere. I couldn't find a job, so I talk with my advisors at CMU and many grads there can't find jobs either. You can cut people's pay because there is no place else to work at.
God spoke to me
Every day I don't see my current employer there, I consider a good day.
If they pay themselves bonuses while pulling this type of shit on the workers. The ironic thing is that if they DO achieve profitability in the fourth querter, it will be on the backs of said workers....yet who wants to bet that the scumbag upper management will take all the glory and get all the credit (and $$) for this? Personally, I hope that half the company leaves and this transparent fraud bites them in the ass!
... was when I got my job 6 months ago. I knew I could make at least 50k doing what I do...
they only offerend me 40. I had to take it regardless, student loans chasing at my feet...
hopfully by the 12month review I can convince them that I do kick as much ass as I do.
This young man understands things exactly. Keep modding him up.
If you have kids, your grocery bills will be significantly higher. Maybe you can skip a meal, but its child endangerment to give them noodles instead of real food.
What a silly argument. A couple of you guys are stuck at $35K a year and all of the sudden everybody should only make that much.
Losers.
Amazing how an IBM GS employee -not EDS according to your resume- like yourself would be such an expert on what EDS does with their employees.
/.
Amazing how IBM keeps you around as an employee when you post 1-3 comments a day on
At my company we had to take a 5% cut and a postponement of raises. However the people making more than 80K, IFRC, got 10%, and the real high ups got over 15%. Not to bad. At least here the pain is felt more by the ones who are responsible.
As for the thread on savings. I was well on my way to having a nice buffer, then last year happend and the buffer was spent. Had to refi a bunch of things and mover stuff around. You can complain all you want about people not saving for a rainy day, but its raining NOW so keep that in mind.
Mike
www.drunkbunch.com
Because of a lack of cash flow, my company decided to lay off half of us, then lay off the other half a month later and shut the doors.
Yeah, pay cuts suck, but just be glad you still have a job.
--Mythos
They can fire you, but they had better not even reduce your pay by even one red cent.
Then tell them that only a suck ass company can't make payroll.
Then ask for a 10 percent pay raise, or you will walk. Hell, why not, they are going to fire your ass soon anyway as they go under.
I know you are shocked to learn what Americans tolerate in their economy but let us tell you we are equally shocked to see what Europeans tolerate in thiers as well. I have to admit I am paraphrasing an earlier poster who said something like: "You (meaning Europeans) may value job security, but we value the more important job availability". Its only fair to point out that Germany has DOUBLE DIGIT levels of unemployment. Thats a big deal. Whats the point of someone having a job if EVERYONE can't get a job?
Its very difficult to tell the average laborer of any nation that less job protections, after job protections have reached a human level of course and they are human in the US, are better for them than more protections. Companies and thus the industries they make up need to be flexible and nimble in response to changing economic conditions. When the economy slows down, companies need to trim their budges and the usual way to do that is to layoff people. There's nothing sinful about it. What would be sinful would be to keep them employed even when they aren't needed at the expense of the future health of the company. Its a matter of do you want 5%-60% of a company laid off or 100%? If you restrict the firing practices of corporations you end up with less overall economic activity and much higher rates of unemployment. Even during the lightning quick recession over here unemployment was very low and as of March 2002 its at 5.7 percent nationwide. Frankly as an American I just don't understand how Europeans can tolerate so many individuals being out of work and making the situation even worse by giving unions so much power and writing very silly anti-business laws such as the 35 hour workweek in France.
Oh and the fact that in the US most people are employed "at-will" meaning a company can fire you when it needs/wants to as long as its not discriminatory.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
you're an idiot.
you're in the top 1%, congradulations, you pay 50% of the taxes, and still make 80% of the money.
looks to me like you arent paying your fair share, and need to be taxed more.
about "welfare" program - do you honestly think that every single person on welfare or some such "governemt assistance" program is a crack whore? The vast majority of people use these programs to live the american dream - work hard and you'll make it. They just needed a hand up.
i'm from a family who used those programs to do just that - get ahead. christ, they came from a dead coal town in PA and now have "made it". But they wouldnt have, if not for a couple hand outs from Uncle Sam.
i feel sorry for you. i hope that you never find yourself in the situation where you have fallen on bad luck and need some help. I also hope that the assistance is there if you need it.
as for those "crack whore's" and those who you consider beneath your level - would you rather give up that extra two percent in your paycheck, or see crime go up in your neighborhood? Seriously, think of it as an insurance policy against civil unrest. Think about it - you're paying to be left the fsck alone in your nice suburban house.
oh - and i'm a 2nd amendment liberal who understands the true intentions of the right to bear arms. Armed populace are citizens, Unarmed are subjects. not a damn thing to do with hunting (and if you're a hunter, we need to get rid of some more of these damn deer in PA - overpopulation, please assist.)
as for your crack about my "obvious" low salary... look - i'm far from in the bottom tax bracket, buddy. (and i still have to figure out wtf happens to my taxes when i get married in 5 weeks... bleh)
as for the canyoneror - you'll need that high salary when gas prices cross the $2/gallon line.
cheers.
... hi bingo
People in the IT industry have the right to unionize just like man workers have done before. Why not create a kind of labor union that forces corporations to be more negotiable with its workers. This way it's harder to short change employees, and it's harder for employees to justify short changing corporations in the kind of jobs they do. sure we have standards (MCSE, CCNA) that are there to ensure a kind of quality amongst IT professionals, but if a union were to make a basic outline of contracts agreeable to both sides there would be much less complaining, more job security, and many many other benefits. If anybody knows of such an organization that already please post the URL.
I was looking at the extreme case and what the original post was about. The previous comment was a good starting point.
Thanks for keeping me honest.
I think this fellow should plan on leaving, but should not leave until it is convenient for him.
The company has seriously mistreated him, in that the company is removing his reward. During tough times, if a company has everyone tighten their belt, it can be fairly done if compensation is deferred, but unilaterally changing the deal like this definitely unfair. If the company needs to reduce salaries, they should probably lay off and rehire as needed (although that kills loyalty, it is more accepted among most employees).
Hey cats n' kittens. Skip and Muffmuff here. We're the pink sweatered VC wonks from McKinseyBainSturmDrangNacht und Nebel LLC brought in to kick your commie fucking asses into shape. So here's the deal kids. We get paid. You don't. Sucks to be you. So we fucked up, so what whatcha gonna do? Hey here's an idea. Go to an Ivy League school like we did, marry well, network the shit outta everyone and get a fat juicey job with gobs of money power and trophy chicks/hunks. And then you can sit in this chair and fire someone else's ass out the door.
Now get back to work - whatever the fuck that is and be happy we don't have you killed. Which if you so much as take one fucking pen, we will.
I have to say I would trod on the skulls of my fallen enemies before I let this happen to me. But then again I'd toss my mother out of the lifeboat if I had to.
I would be a trouble maker and see if senior management did the same thing, including their bonuses.
After all if they are not doing a good job managing the company they do NOT deserve the bonuses
--Tim
TKrabec Pahh
What it boils down to is responsibility. There are companies with CEO's that are not publicly traded and they use that corp to screw people. Whereas other business owners are actually decent and care about their employees. Sure they can trade in their car for the latest Mercedes S 500 but instead they give raises, seasonal parties, and help out their employees when crises strikes, this used to be the case but now its all about greed and take no prisoners.
Technology changes. People do not. There are only two kinds. Wolves and sheep. Got sheep?
pharphetch
Yup. You couldn't be more right.
As a senior manager making a decision to terminate or keep a staff member, I always go with the person that refuses to consider anything that doesn't suit them, over the ones that go along. I fire people that agree with me, and keep nothing but troublemakers...
Sure.
What color is the sky on your planet?
That said, you're right.
If you cannot make ends meet, for whatever reason, pay your house, your car, and your utilities, in about that order. If you're renting, you may want to pay the car first. In most states eviction is a bitch for the apartment owner to go through. Foreclosure and repo is a lot easier.
Credit cards expect chargeoffs. I used to work (more or less) for a credit card company. It's not a good thing to do, since they will trash your credit history if you do it. But if it's between your house and your credit history, the house comes first.
Unions do not serve to protect weaker workers at the expense of the hotshots.
Yep, they do. They average. They bring down the top, and bring up the bottom.
Whether you like that or not is irrelevant - the problem is that historically that's exactly what happens. The drive to succeed and exceed is damped down if not taken into an alley and beaten badly by union presence.
Frankly, the imbalance in bargaining power between employer and employee is such that the only way the workers can get a reasonable wage and decent working conditions is by collective bargaining.
So my wage isn't decent? Working conditions are bad?
Not at all. If you want to talk historically, yes, there were reasons for unions to exist for safety. Those have been incredibly superceded by the Governments at the Federal, Local, and State level.
If an employer can't pay union scale without going out of business, that means that he is not profitable enough to pay his employees a decent wage.
That depends on the Union Scale employed, and the contract. How many unneeded and unused employees are guaranteed wages? (And who, per the contract, don't have to do work that isn't being done)?
If you're talking about unskilled labor, unions make more sense. The more skilled you get, the less they make sense. The less you can predict exact jobs, the less they make sense.
Unions add a whole nother level of bureacracy and management (yes, management) to the mix. That's another inefficient layer, adding to the costs, for a certain (which depends) marginal gain (which may be negative).
I certainly don't want to have to wait in line for a promotion when I'm more qualified and harder working than the "senior" people.
Nor do I want to see a business go under because qualified personell weren't allowed or wouldn't do work that was required.
But the best argument about unions I've always found was:
A dedicated Teamsters union worker was attending a convention in Las Vegas and decided to check out the local brothels nearby.
When he got to the first one, he asked the Madam, "Is this a union house?"
"No," she replied, "Of course not."
"Well, if I pay you $100, what do the girls get?"
"The house gets $80 and the girls get $20."
Mightily offended at such unfair dealings, the man stomped off down the street in search of a more equitable, hopefully unionized shop. His search continued until finally he reached a brothel where the Madam responded, "Why yes sir, this IS a union house."
The man asked, "And if I pay you $100, what cut do the girls get?"
"The girls get $80 and the house gets $20."
"That's more like it!" the UAW man said. He handed the Madam $100, looked around the room and pointed to a stunningly attractive blonde. "I'd like her for the night."
"I'm sure you would, sir," said the Madam, then gesturing to an drooling, obese 85 year old woman in the corner, "but Ethel here has seniority."
Addison
Zathrus: 60k per year in the SF Bay Area is chicken feed. Try renting an apartment on that here. Even after the .com crash.
I misread.
...to check out the XML Resume Library. :)
--Bruce
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
What about the AMA or the AAUP? Do doctors and university professors qualify as "skilled workers"? How about state bar associations? Are lawyers skilled enough for you?
I don't think there's any inherent reason why skilled workers can't be organized into unions, but getting from here to there might be easier said than done. Like it or not, many HR departments view IT workers as fungible resources, even if they're not. If some IT workers try to unionize, chances are good that the company would fire the lot of them and find replacements. Unless you're indispensible and they know it, forget about trying to form an IT union.
Now, whether or not unionizing IT workers would be good or bad for them, I don't know. Like most things, it would probably have pros (job security) and cons (union scale pay). Of course, with the levels of job security recently, maybe IT workers will start to change their priorities?
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
The Great Depression had a full third of the workforce out of work. Thats 33% unemployment. Right now we're under 6% unemployment. Is there anything else you like to exaggerate about?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Same goes for California -- it's 9.3% on the income above $37,725 (after deductions), not 9.3% on the total income.
P.S. This isn't to say that I like anything about the current tax system. I've lived in wonderful places like NYC, so I know what it's like to have more than 50% of your income spirited away without so much as a word of thanks...
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
hotdogs are just as bad as ramen and spaghetti!
-- Find the Truth...
My hi-tech company just announced yesterday
a 10% salary cut across engineering, executive
staff took >10% cut, till 1/1/03 and in
compensation for each $1000 lost in salary
we get 750 options that vest 100% in 1 year.
this is all following quarterly lay-offs for
the past year.
time to write the resume.
=D
My company implemented a furlough program. It's basically 8 days of unpaid vacation. You can take the days anytime throughout the rest of the year, but the pay is deducted evenly throughout the pay periods in this quarter.
It's not altogether a bad deal. The extra days off are nice and all said it's only a 3% paycut when you spread it out over the course of a year. I just worry that a move like this will be followed by something similar (or worse) next quarter.
"Perl 6 will give you the big knob." -Larry Wall
That memo is one of the few situations where I
would consider it appropriate to find a new job
and give no notice.
It's typical in this corrupted economy.
I had been laid off by the manager who spent vast dollars for Oracle licenses our company never used and then, right before to resign, spent his vacation in Africa's Safari. I was in opposition to that Oracle deal - that's why they laid me off.
Nothing can surprise me in this economy after that.
Don't want to be in yours. That is for sure. The words self serving come to mind. OF course, based upon the premise of your argument, you have a RIGHT to be self serving. And instead of letting people go in front of you in traffic, you are the one cutting everybody else off because you have placed yourself at higher priority. You sir are an asshole. I'll be in the other group. I may not get somewhere as fast as you, I may not get that bonus that you did, or I may complain to somebody else, but when it is all said and done, I treated people fairly. You just looked out for yourself.
Which "CAMP" do you want to be in?
Have a look at this article, which explains that sabotage does happen, and denying it is part of the issue:
http://www.cio.com/archive/010102/security.html
The whole point of unions is forcing employers to give reasonable compensation (in money and in other ways) for the work their employees do for them. But it's generally not a one way street - the employees have to commit to things, too, even if it's only an implicit "Give me this standard of wages and conditions, and I'll work for you without complaint".
/good/, for everyone.
Unions like the AMA do more than that - they require standards from the employees, as well, standards to protect both sides. You get union protection, but only if you meet union standards. That probably sounds as terrifying and horrible as taking due responsibility for flaws in your software, but it's entirely reasonable in a skilled profession where your responsibilities are high. If you claim to be able to do something, you should be responsible for the results if your claim was false.
Historically, unions have done some screwed things. They've also made more and bigger changes to the standard of living in many countries than anything else in the last five hundred years. Get the implementation right, and they're
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
Out in PDX, OR.
2% layoff, 4% pay cut, no 3% cost-of-living increase [nor again for this year], no 401k match.
That's about 6k$ off of the typical salary--typical American families have about 2k$ in solvency and after six months this has resulted in hardship for the employees with families.
At first, the employees fell for it--but then, the executives took "only" 1/2 of their bonuses. Then we issued our stock dividends anyway [and still at 2x industry average]. And [like temporary taxes] the 4% won't be coming back officially.
Moral is at an all-time low. People are [rightfully] pissed. The better employees are leaving and those who remain are suffering under the strain of picking up the work.
All in all, it's not a pretty picture.
You have a job... Might I suggest starting to send out your resume...
Is $60K even an IT wage? How could I aford to eat if I slipped below the six figures we are all entitled to?
I am unsure that this cut is as universal as people think. First of all, the assertion has been made that it will drive all IT professionals away. In reality, it will only impact those who make over 60K. Some of these may be experienced and valuable, but I'm guessing that the company considers them older, overpaid, and to a certain extent obsolete. Why pay for those experienced in outdated systems? Yes, I know that there may be a few, or perhaps many, who are well worth their pay, but this may not be the company's perception. There are still a lot of IT professionals who are fresh out of college, proficient with recent technologies, and cheap.
Someone mentioned the state of their webpage and its incompatibility with other browsers. Yeah, it has its problems. Perhaps this company really does have a sick IT force and is looking to purge it.
Also consider that this may a bluff for those who are not expendable. Cases likely will be dealt with on an individual level, with those who are worth 60K+ and threaten to quit being offered the chance to stay with the same or higher income. Perhaps the company is trying to appear universal and fair in their cuts while at the same time getting a census of loyalty and removing extraneous employees.
Its not nice, but obviously the company thinks the benefits outweigh the costs, definitely in the short run and perhaps in the long run as well. Certainly you have worked with other IT professionals who you consider expendable, and management sees it the same way: Bad employees are expendable, and sometimes trimming the dead branches means injuring some of the living. As has been said, it wont be much a blow to the truly talented employees, as they can go and get new jobs.
The market is never nice, but the nice thing about it is that when someone shoots themselves in the foot, they generally feel the pain.
~Kumomancer
Hey, if yer blowing through more than $2500 a month in real expenses, and you haven't SAVED any of those big bucks, you deserve what you get. Stupidity is sort of its own reward.
Derek
imo that's an illusion.
everyone has their reasons and burdens. if I cut traffic off that's because that one rare day I need to get to a job interview I don't want to be late for. And lately because I just got _fed_ up of other people cutting me off, leaving me to a daily virtual standstill of 25-40 minutes on that one traffic junction. (and no, I don't have alternatives)
end of the argument, there are just too many people in traffic that place, that time going that direction, and you have either those that DO make it in time and those that don't. And we all got costs and families to care for, and all us being there at the same place generate the situation.
If you wanted to treat others fairly, just stay home. That way they can make a normal journey to their jobs, earning a living for their families and themselves.
so "fair" is a very personal subjective assessment, and trust me, when a person cuts a line, they always have a justification and that makes it a "fair thing to do" to their point of view at that very time.
so netto you're left with those that make it and those that don't. (and yes, I too have been unemployed for 5 months this year)
I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that a company in the UK couldn't do this without being in breach of contract. Surely you could both sue for the missing pay and then claim <insert legal term here>, the one where you're not fired but you're basically forced to quit by the requests made of you. (Thereafter, I think you get all the same rights as if you'd actually been made redundant, as far as financial compensation, reasonable time to seek alternative employment, etc. go.) Anyone know what the UK take on this would be?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Somebody mod this guy up. This is about the clearest, most concise explanation of the functions of and the need for labor unions I have heard in a long time. Thank you.
Republicans are idiots.
This is what I call leadership! I was in the Army. Do you know what the relationship between officers and men is like? Example: You are in the field, and it's lunchtime. The first people to eat are the junior enlisted men, then the noncommissioned officers, than the brass. It's called taking care of people.
Lee Iococca worked for ONE DOLLAR during Chrysler's financial crisis. Forgoing a couple million dollars in salary isn't going to save a humongus corporation, but it does serve as an inspiring example when you are forced to ask your employees to make sacrifices. Of course, most CEO's never served in the Armed Services (many of them played the system during the draft in ways that would make you wish you never talked about Bill Clinton going to Oxford), so they wouldn't know anything about leading by example.
Republicans are idiots.
The whole idea of capitalism is that the capitalist (shareholder/investor) risks their capital because they reap the rewards (profits). This company is seeking to have the employees assume the risk, without offering something in return.
Employees have a contract that the company cannot change without the employees *agreement.
(one party cannot unilaterally change a contract, it needs the agreement of both parties).
If the company wishes to pass on [some of] the risk of doing business (losses) the employees want something in return, a share in the upside.
These people have a contract the company should honour it.
If the company is likely to survive I would demand stock as compensation for the change of terms, if survival seems unlikely I would decline the change of conditions and start searching for a new position.
The worst thing they can do is invoke any severance clause and they usually includes several months salary and gardening leave, a pleasant though given the imminent arrival of spring/summer.
Not quite right, there are acutally 3 types of people in this world:-
Those that make things happen, those that watch things happen and those that wonder what happened.
-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
I do not understand can someone help me. Company informed employees that salary would be reduced by 3.8 %, by not paying 50% of the regular check two times.
Does that mean compnay appropriate money that has been earned before paycut.
Or company withdraw money for salary that employee expected to earn in future.
In both cases it cannot be called salary reduction.
Start an IT union. Why not ?!? Nothing to lose except lame pay checks and lots of pride when the assholes have to negociate.
did anyone notice that they are cutting pay, but have some 30+ jobs posted on their site as OPEN. Why are you hiring if you have to cut the current people's pay? (Unless it's a position that ABSOLUTELY CANNOT be filled by an existing employee)
-=+=-=+=-=+=-=+=-
following my instincts not a trend...
This isn't something that I think I can go out and fix by myself, nor can anyone, really. What needs to happen is for CEOs to change THEMSELVES. It's the skewed morality of this society which causes problems like poverty, discrimination, etc.
And I don't think it's limited to the rich. As the other person who replied to you pointed out, there are a bunch of people who sit on their butts and live on the government dole. They should change too. I think that the little folk CAN make a difference, but the big folk can make a difference much more easily and quickly. A few benevolent, wise, and altruistic CEO's (and other high execs) in the really large companies could make a world of difference in the health -- socioeconomic and psychological -- of today's society.
It's a dog-eat-dog world. But it doesn't have to be.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
Thanks. It appears someone doesnt agree with you though, as I already got a -1, Overrated on this one.
Ah well, thats what you get for defending unionism on a forum full of wannabe libertarians.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?