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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?"
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
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.
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
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.
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*/
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". =)
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!
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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!
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."
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)
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!
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.
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"!
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
First it may be illegal to willfuly destroy your company's property. Second it's not a good way to get a reference.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Addendum:
Illinois Labor Board is located at
http://www2.state.il.us/ilrb/index.asp
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
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!
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.
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?
good theory for 1.5 years ago. these days jobs are not elsewhere. there are lots of people who might gladly take a technically challenging job for 60% of last years salary.
i know i sure as hell would....
the non-technically challenging are the jobs that need to pay 150% of salary (imagine converting long, marketing type ms-word documents to html pages for 40 hrs a week, every week, over and over...)
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
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.
making sure a resume is in order and making contacts, yes. jumping ship. not hardly. that's risking severance, vacation payout, and unemploymen t payment.
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
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.
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.
Yeah, but with half a brain it's easy to make it look like a regular screw-up, or something that came from outside, or was just plain someone else's fault. IT workers do have a tremendous amount of power over many businesses today, and few people on either side really seem to realize it. It's worth keeping them happy, or at least not screwing them over.
I often take out a little 'insurance' if the people I am working for make me uncomfortable at all. Never done anything so far, but if someone tried to hose me badly (for example, most recently I was worried about getting canned right before annual bonuses came out--which I had stupidly agreed to count toward my desired base salary; didn't happen, fortunately, but would have been an easy way for them to get a year's worth of cheap work out of me) I wouldn't feel much compunction about returning the favor. In a world where the people with the most money hold most of the cards, I don't see a problem with using what I do hold to stay in the game.
No relation to Happy Monkey
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
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 U.S. is the birthplace of the modern labor movement. And we are accepting this why?
Whatever happened to dotspot.com? Wasn't that a divine venture?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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
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. =]
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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
a reverse split wouldimply that they do not have money pal...you reverse split to reduce the shares in circulation and raise your price so as to look more desirable to investers who are to stupid to read your publications.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
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
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.
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.
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
"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?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?
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Uhhh no, actually I know only one black woman at current a very educated person, my mothers best friend.
:) (of course closed countries like China this is probably not an option)
The person I was reffering to was the Daughter of an Employer I had about 10 years ago. White.
I live in a rural area that isnt very ethnically diverse if you want to be a PC wimp about it. She came from a good family, she had a good education, and her family was well off and willing to help her at every juncture. She CHOSE the course she did, THAT is my definition of trash, when you boss asks you ino his office and asks that when you are on client calls you drive through the less savory parts of town looking for his daughter hooking for crack, who the police are after because she left her children at home for 3 days with no food and water. THAT is TRASH.
I know more asian people than black. I am , and was raised colorblind, I dont care what race you are, Nationaliy is a different matter, Nationality for the most part is a choice, you can in this day and age do whatever it takes to move elsewhere, im not saying it will be better but you can move. My family did, we are now in America
So if your definition of a nigger inludes white people of european descent then yes otherwise no, Ill be honest the whole time I was reading and thinking a black person never crossed my mind.
I will say If your intent was to aggravate me you suceeded. I think the problem lies less with people like me. People who make assumptions about what other people are thinking, even though the thought never crossed my mind.......
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
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.
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
Asking a boss for advice about unions is like asking a car thief for advice on which car alarm to buy...
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
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... :)
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.
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...
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
Exactly. They know they'll lose staff and that is obviously a major part of the intent here.
I used to have a boss who prided himself on having very low unemployment insurance because he never had to fire anybody. What he would do was subtly make you so unhappy with your job that you would decide to quit rather than stay there and deal with the crap. It was never anything blatantly obvious, but you could tell when someone made his "phantom layoff" list because he would start to be a real asshole about stupid things like being there at 8:30 on the dot (no matter if you left work late every night) and taking too many personal calls.
I think it would seem everyone in this useless conversation needs to add a color to a simple definition in one way or another, except me.
If someone thows a big-mac wrapper in your yard do you bitch to your wife you have to go out in the rain and pick up 'yellow trash' ????
Why such the need to associate a color with a socioeconomic standing or lifestyle ?
He, with a question like that maybe I missed my calling as a Shrink......
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
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
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.
Did you not read anything or are you just attempting to invoke class envy where it doesn't even exist?
NOBODY is saying ANYTHING about the fact that a $60K per year person is making too much, only that they SHOULD be able to save adaquately over a period of time to afford a down month.
And by the way, proper nutrition can be achieved for a family for significantly less than $600 a month. Its the prepared meals and the dining out that jacks the price up significantly.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
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
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
I know you meant this as a joke, but what you'll find is that in practice this is what will happen. Folks will be more and more disillusioned, depressed and generally less willing to put in effort. It's human nature. I was there myself last year with a dying dotcom. You don't give a shit. And it will show in every corner of the organization. Folks will come in late and leave early, surf for jobs on work time, and screw off a whole lot more. the end result will be either they'll find a new job and quit, or get laid off entirely as company productivity plummets even further.
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
This may be true if you're planning to drive the car until it dies, or the resale value is negligable anyways. But the last car I owned had a standard transmission, and selling that thing was heinously difficult. I heard from probably a dozen people who lost interest when I mentioned it wasn't an automatic. I ended up going significantly below the blue book value just to get rid of the thing.
I misread.
It's a pity I have to look this far down in this story for a metion of the totally, completely worthless company that is taking this action.
As someone who makes software purchasing decisions, I will be sure to never buy any software from this company ever.
Any company that does this kind of things doesn't deserve to exist.
Salary cuts -> low morale -> people leaving -> poor future products, since the best and brightest leave first -> no support whatsoever -> less income for company -> eventual demise of company.
I give them 18 months to live, maybe less.
...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
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...
Your situation at the moment may be good. And what if in 3 months your employer asks you to take a 50% pay cut or lose your job. Will you still smugly maintain that you have equal bargaining power? Only a union can give you that power. Sooner or later every employee will find himself at the bargaining table without an economic boom and an exuberant job market to back up his demands. Why would this be only relevant to blue collar workers? I should think that higher educated labour should be smart enough to see this, it's so obvious.
All your other arguments are basically based on the half-assed implementation of unions in the U.S. Certainly my union is not opposed to pay according to performance. They get consulted by companies as soon as problems become apparent, so that if cuts must happen, they will happen with the cooperation of the union, and not in the almost criminal way I see slashdotters constantly whine about.
And your examples are purely emotional. Can you give me one reason why collective bargaining is not good for workers, whatever their education? You sound like a spoiled kid: "Whaaah! The janitor is only making half of what I do, instead of one-tenth". Tell me, would you still program if you got paid less or nothing for it? Lots of people do just that. Pay for performance is important, but do you really need to make massively more than someone else to do your work properly? I suggest that if that's so, you're in the wrong line of work, as you obviously only do it for the pay.
Sheesh. I thought that the average slashdot reader was smart enough to make a distinction between concept and implementation. Guess I was wrong.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
How about the 8-hour day, though. Remember that? That was a big slogan of unions in the late 1800's. By the 1930's they had won the fight, and laws were enacted to solidify the gains the unions had made. After decades of unions declining, people seem to have forgotten that anyone ever had an 8-hour day. Want to roll the workweek back to 40 hours? How about just to keep it from getting any worse? It won't happen without unions. If you have kids or plan on having kids, remind them to thank you when they enter the workforce and a 10-hour day is considered utopian nonsense.
Doh! We will just have to change those job descriptions to "network engineer" and "systems engineer". Now if I could only find a way to move sales up in the alphabet.
Enigma
Ah, you're one of the hot-shots that can get anything you want. So I take it you have an individual contract that gives you the salary you want with a maximum 40 hour week and 8 weeks paid vacation? There are a small number of tech workers out there that wouldn't have much trouble getting such a contract, but I doubt you're one of them. Let me guess... you don't have such a contract because free-time isn't really that important to you. Yeah, keep telling yourself that...
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.
move sales up in the alphabet.
Customer Consultant.
sig?
Get real. While it was said humorously, it wasn't a joke. Employment is an exchange. When the employer drops what he's willing to give, there's a (minimum) corresponding drop in what he gets. I give the ma'am my time, energy and loyalty (I have a good boss). In return I get compensated with money. I think the money I get buys a lot of time and energy. The loyalty is to the person, but that affects my valuation of my time/energy vs. the money. If suddenly my boss decided to halve my pay, things would change. I'm not suddenly "worth" less money- I generate revenue, keep accounts happy and keep a lid on expenses. I'm just worth less as an employee, or a person- she takes a hit on loyalty for that. She is worth much less than half to me, because the loyalty affected the money's worth. I'd be gone, probably with anything not nailed down, making more money at some place that values me just as little- but hasn't betrayed my loyalty.
Loyalty is so easy for a company to get, it's pathetic. While money is important, even vital, it's not what keeps people. Management giving itself bonuses while announcing pay cuts- well, they're just smoking too much crack. Flee this company. It's more of a pyramid scam than a business. I'd be surprised if the employees don't start hauling off everything down to the furniture real fast.
What gets me is that shareholders actually seem to believe that a company cutting itself off at the knees is a good thing. We need more controls on accounting practices. These losers are simply Enron with less ambition.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
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
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.
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.
-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.