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Fewer Employees + Same Work = Higher Productivity
LiamRandall writes "Time magazine has an article discussing the effects that recent layoffs in corporate America has had on remaining workers. While I'm glad that I haven't been laid off (like 1/2 my group) I'm overloaded with all of my new responsibilities.
On one hand I feel very fortunate to still have a job- I feel some what guilty complaining given that the computer industry is second in layoffs. While some former coworkers of mine got the axe because upper management didn't understand what their contributions to the company were, others were dead wood anyway. The Chinese symbol for crisis is danger + opportunity; in these turbulent times do you find yourself rising to the challenge or being overloaded with responsibility? Is your to-do list growing exponentially? What new work are you faced with and how are you dealing with it?"
As Homer would say...
After all, I believed all the figures about profits from big companies when they put the losses into the profits column!
they dumped some wheat, and they dumped some chaffe.
but they dumped the wheat here that made this job fun. im the lone developer now, and upper managements lack of desire to understand and know the folks in development drove my friend away.
my productivity has gone down, tho my load has increased, only because i care less about my job now that the people that made it fun are gone.
thats my 2 cents
"Old man yells at systemd"
I just got out of a meeting with my boss. He wants me to put on the project management hat in addition to my coding and database hats I alreaday wear. I won't complain. Brownie points are always nice.
Lisa Simpson: "Dad, do you know that the Chinese use the same word for crisis and opportunity?"
Homer: "Yup - crisi-tunity!"
So does this Time article also mention that workers will be more productive if you switch to chains instead of leather whips? Does it give any indication of the minimum amound of gruel and / or pizza necessary to kee an IT worker productive?
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
I don't do work - I'm a manager.
Fewer Employees + Same Work = Higher Productivity
Who came up with this ridiculous title, Michael or the submitter? The title has nothing to do with the body of the article.
In my case, my to-do list has gone down. As we lost more clients we had to lay off more people.
Today? I'm .. uh .. dead wood.
Whips + Threat of Impending Pain = Greater Productivity.
Right. No, your other right. No, the other other right.
my work list hasn't grown too bad. we're a government contractor and we're on site, which cuts down on requests to work overtime much (because the building isn't open late much. We can't stay without a federal employee here). Not that I work overtime anyway.
But, what I have noticed is a reluctance to spend much on training/extras. I've read attendance at industry shows/dev conventions is down. I've talked to other people from my former company and all agree that it's tough to get the authorizations approved for travel and classes and stuff.
It just goes along with the "less pampering" attittude. There's a bunch of guys they could hire to do your job (at least until you get detailed business knowledge that is tough to replace).
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
For 5 years, programmers, web "designers" and system administrators surfed porn sites claiming it was research, posted self-congratulatory remarks on chat sites and general did little if any work at all. Now they are being required to justify their enormous salaries and all they can do is whine about their "exponentially" grow TODO list. Cry me a river.
and we're still underworked. There's only 6 of us left, and in general six people got axed during each layoff round.
I'd love to be overworked right now, instead of posting to slashdot...
(No offense intended)
Right now, I am jobless myself. My company went chapter 7 when their software product did not sell.
I hear this a whole lot -- that the people who still have jobs have a lot of new work and that it is hard to keep up. They are being asked to work more hours on that salary pay, do more things than they ever did before. There is a big potential plus here in the recognition of doing that work -- you can add it to your resume and you gain experience from it.
The second thing that I am hearing from a lot of people is that as soon as things get better, or they get a break into another job that pays better, they are gone, zero notice, no regrets. They are being milked by the management, they know it, and they are going to split as soon as things get better.
Employee retention is going to be a big problem in the not so distant future in the technical fields. There is going to be a lot of people moving once the job market gets warmer. Unfortunately, I do not see that happening until sometime around 4th quarter 2003 or mid year 2004.
I have to go an interview in ten minutes, so I have to go. The Orlando Florida job market is TERRIBLE for technical people. This may be my only break. Bye bye!
Having just managed and just laid off an entire office of 35 engineers and then myself this hits a little close to home. I think the largest problem faced by managers are those how acutally do the day to day but arent visable. Usually those individuals are targeted along with the drift wood and those responsibilities land on the remaining staff adding to the work load and ususally undermining thier capabilites. I've seen it time and time again, where the corporate structure simply doesnt understand the dynamics of its own work force or its functionality and suffers for it in the long run.
In order for the company to survive, you have to survive. I look at my responsibilities at a job and decide whether they make sense. If they don't, I go to my boss. If I think they are requiring a level of responsibility that my pay does not compensate me for, I bring that up to the boss as well. If that doesn't sink in, I start sending out the resumes. If nothing else, the new responsibilities have given me experience the next boss is going to pay for.
"I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating. And in fourteen days, I had lost exactly two weeks. Joe E. Lewis
Why should you feel guilty about an overwhelming work load? You should be thankful you are employed, but employment is not the privlege you've been made to feel it is. You continue to have rights just as you did when the boom was flush. Corporate America would have you think you have fewer rights because you're more easily replaced (or they'd have you think you were), and they can dump your former cooworkers' duties on you. Resist this as much as possible. Pick up slack where possible, but make sure you aren't working 80 hour weeks for the same pay.
No doubt many of the layoffs were of hourly employees -- the exempt are often the bitch in the office -- they pick up slack because doing so costs no more. They are also less often unionized.
Your performance or position or maybe politics earned you a reprieve from the axe. Don't feel guilty about it. Sympathize with those laid off, and help if you can, but go on and do your job knowing that you survived the cut honestly.
I don't think this has much to do with group dynamics. I think it is a classic case of our natural fight or flight response to stress. If you think your head is on the chopping block, you have two options.. power through, work hard and try to stay alive.. or you are going to go the other route and give up and start looking for the next opportunity because you figure this one is over.
...as one of the many who didn't miss the axe. As I sit here on my ass, wondering when my savings will run out, i can't help but not feel even a little sorry for all your poor saps who now have to do my job in addition to your own, just because some fuckwad manager couldn't do his, and got the whole project canned.
Seems to be a vicious circle:
Shareholders no longer want long term growth and stability, they want profits and dividends and they want them now! When they see dips, they panic and demand action.
Companies see only one way to make short term gains - they "sell off" their easiest asset to drop - the employees.
Employees levae, taking knowledge, expertise and experience with them. Remaining employees have greater stresses and workloads, so productivity drops, some leave, some gets sick.
So profits drop, shareholders demand something be done NOW and so....
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Everyone is busy. What I don't like is when employees complain how busy they are and yet sit around playing games and looking at their fantasy football stats. Obviously there is a problem if an employee needs to work 10-12 hour days with no lunch and things aren't getting done. However, most of the companies I've been with have employees who get about 3-5 hours of work done in an 8 hour day. Ball parking it, most of these unmotivated employees could get a few extra weeks of work done a year. I know a guy who's company cut their department from 3 to 2. So the 2 guys were each working 20 hours of overtime a week at time and 1/2. It took them two years to realize they could save a fistfull of dollars and improve their worker morale by getting them back up to 3.
INSIGHTFUL? mod this troll down!
While I'm glad that I haven't been laid off (like 1/2 my group) I'm overloaded with all of my new responsibilities.
Much like the submitter, I deal with my exponetially growing responsibilities by posting inane drivel on Slashdot.
Not too long after I got into a position with an employer, part of my teammates were let go, some of them with more experience than me. The biggest problem was that the people on my specific project that were let go were more knowledgable than the rest of us.
The effects on the rest of us were dramatic, and not all of the effects were bad. We all had to rise to the challenge and figure out what the hell we had to do to make this thing go, without the benefit of the in house expertise (BTW, we were enhancing a product we authored in house). There were many, many nights where we were here late into the night, more than once past 2:00am just to figure out what was going on.
In the end, we pulled it off and emerged successful on the project, and we were regarded almost as heroes in house. We are regarded as can-do people that can rise to a challenge, but the cost to get there was enormous. We all were worse for the wear.
I have seen a trend when it comes to layoffs that is echoed in the experience I had -- for some oddball reason, it seems the management likes to trim the knowledge base at the wrong points. It stands to reason that, when letting go a very knowledgeable person, someone else must be trained up to fill the shoes of that person. This, in turn costs more money. Which is better, spending the money on a more expensive employee, and make the deadlines on time, or spend about as much to miss the deadline and train up someone new?
Yes, yes, some deadwooding goes on too, but I have seen all to often the productive ones with a higher salary cut loose solely on the basis of immediate salary concerns. I would be interested to know if others have observed the same, or if it's just been a matter of where I have been at the time...
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
I was initially employed at my previous job to handle static html pages and look after customer support for a 100k userbase.
However, after a series of layoffs when the dotcom goldrush era ended, I had to take on the added responsibilities of server administration, database administration, development of java/jsp administrative and back-office apps, software development and internal network maintenance.
Needless to say, the workload was incredible, and I cracked under the strain. Being threatened with 'The company will collapse if you don't do the tasks, and you will be out of a job' can only produce so much workflow, and there are only so many hours in a day.
I'm glad that I left that company, and the world of IT for good. I know so many people who work continuously under the same pressure as I did.
One thing that seems to be always the case, is that when there are layoffs, it is the techies who are the hardest hit percentage wise. They seem to be laid off in preference to the bloated managers/directors who in retrospect, do/did fuck all.
-- 7 string electric violin + live loop samplers
I work in an intelligent company that didn't hire 15 people to do 3 peoples job. I'm part of the IS group, even though I'm an application and server developer (New to this whole application development thing, releasing my first windows product soon.. thank you, QT) I have a pretty decent workload most of the time. There are 3 programmers here, and we're all kept pretty busy. The entire IS team is probably about 15 people, for thousands of computers, custom applications and servers.
I remember the last company I worked at had redundancy even in it's employees. It seemed every position was filled at least twice. Strangest thing. Each person did slightly different things, but if someone actually works the majority of an 8 hour day they can accomplish a lot of stuff.
Don't over-hire. Hire smart people. Hire people that work. 3 people can do what would otherwise take 15. The 3 of us do more than a development group of around 20 people at my old company.. but they aren't a good comparison, and that's why they are out of business now.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
My productivity has been forced up so high that I can't draft an interesting response to this article. When the bubble starts to grow again, I'll get back to you.
- DDT
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
in these turbulent times do you find yourself rising to the challenge or being overloaded with responsibility? Is your to-do list growing exponentially? What new work are you faced with and how are you dealing with it?"
Talk about asking the wrong crowd. Many of the people here (myself included) waste the day here simply because there is nothing else to do. See why we might not be the best ones to ask about overloaded responsibility??
The company I work for is one of the few companies that has not been hit by the recession, as a matter of fact we are growing--we have had to almost double the size of our IS/IT and software development, and software testing departments. I think part of the reason our company has been able to grow is because salaries are a little less than market value, but we get semi-annual bonuses based on the company's profitability. (Well, once it was a small pay cut, but given the choice between asking everyone to take a small pay cut for three months, which we got back plus some three months later, or laying off three employees to cover the deficit, I think our company made the right choice). This gives us a huge incentive to make sure the company makes money - in everything from turning out a quality product to keeping our office supply orders reasonable.
I am amazed at the poor attitudes I see in some of the new hires, though--the two people that were hired to help in my department are always grousing about how they make so much less money than they were making at their previous jobs and they can't wait for the recession to be over so they can go find 'real jobs'. Don't they understand that there is a reason the dot-bombs they worked for went out of business? These two new people are currently trying to convince upper management that we are sorely suffering because we are not using a $2000/seat configuration management tool. Let's just gut our company here and then they can move on to gut the next one...
</rant>
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
I was brought in to architect and deploy an ecommerce system. Did I have a staff? No. Could I contract out any of the development? No. It was like this - here's ONE server (running NT I might add), now go build us a system.
So I did. I wiped the machine clean, installed Linux, installed Perl and various libraries, Open SSL, mod_perl, Apache, and then compiled Apache with mod_perl and mod_ssl. I installed MySQL. I installed Tripwire and set up various accounts for people who needed to FTP graphics onto the machine.
Based on the user specs (not written, but vervbally communicated), I designed the entire database schema, wrote all the code for a web-based administration tool, and wrote all the code to launch the ecommerce system for external customers.
The system has been up and running for several months and bringing in over US $20K per day.
Do you think the company's cutting costs? One server and one person who acts as business analyst, system architect, system adminstrator, DBA, and lead developer. Ya think?
A more positive note: After close to a year, I've been granted additional resources (I was able to hire a junior developer) and additional servers. So maybe things are getting better???
Yes in the short term you can run lean and have better productivity... But this is bad business in my opinion...
If you have no training for your employees, not because of income, but because none of them can be spared, you are going to have to hire all of your talent new.
If you people are streched so thin, then your going to have burnout and have to replace those workers.
If your facing a 20-30% turnover rate... Your employees will have no loyalty to the company, because the company has no loyalty to them.
Personally, I think that companied that have been in business for a while, say 10-20 years minimum and have built up a staff of experienced employees. Don't really realize how much this will cost them... Traing new employees is expensive for anything except menial jobs...
If your company is dropping a lot of deadweight, that suggests managers that are not doing their jobs... But upper-management doing job cuts across the board are not doing their jobs properly either.
When the big name business schools changed over from teaching business from looking 5, 10, and 20 years into the future and started concentrating on quarterly income it was a sad day.
Trai
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
Sadly a lot of poeople deserve to be laid off, all they do is dick off 90% of the day. Sure i dick off 90% of the day but my job is tech support and to baby sit the few servers we have, some days i'm very overwhelmed others i spend on slashdot.
When layoffs come a lot of the people you want gone are the ones who go first, the people who piss everyone off. Also, when layoffs come so do early retirement, when the "old people" get out, new thinking gets in, new thinking is almost always good!
What happens is that all of the forward-looking projects get canned, and the remaining employees are focussed on finishing the half-done projects which were so awesome a year ago. Since you're maximizing return on sunk costs, that great in the short term. After awhile, though, you start to find that you're running out of gas, because nobody has been laying the foundations for future development.
I've seen four layoffs in a year and a half, and I know that my productivity has plummetted each time. I have maybe half as many "good days" cranking out code, for a couple months afterwards. But, what code I do write is generally better targetted at immediate revenue opportunities.
I'm interested in sustainable productivity gains, and those mostly come from growing at the right rate in the first place - hire-hire, rather than hire-hire-hire-hire-fire-fire.
My responsibilities are growing exponetially. People who leave don't get rehired but their duties get handed down. What do I do? Surf slashdot and complain about the work load!
In the University I work at we had a new management regime imposed on us. After some months we brought out a grievance against the worst of them, who was a horrible bully. Astonishingly, he was not sacked in disgrace. The entire systems team left one by one until there was no-one left (for an entire week, until replacements started arriving).
Then, the network started going tits up. Things got so bad the management were relieved of their responsibilities. One of them has now left under a cloud, and the other won't last past Xmas. Some of the original systems team have returned. The network is steadily improving to pre-management change levels. We have been vindicated!
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
My IT department was outsourced to IBM about 6 months ago. While my direct team was not affected by layoffs, our call center and its staff were completely replaced and moved to a new location. Since then my workload has quadrupled (no exaggeration) due to their lack of proper support and knowledge, and our user base has grown significantly without adding new staff to my department (field support).
I don't mind the extra work so much, but what really bothers me is the attitude of the customer and its affect on me. Users are pissed off that it takes more than a day for them to be seen as opposed to an hour or so, and they have a very negative attitude towards us now. This is a major problem in my eyes because I find it harder to wake up in the morning and feel motivated to work. I really dread what possible long term affects this may have if it continues like this.
Sound waves should be free!
The #2 in CPU's is slashing 2,000 jobs worldwide, from the Americas to Asia, in all roles and levels. The article is here at News Factor.
And I wrote all about it in my journal... [gratuitous plug]
Sorry, I can't really give a lot more details than this... =(
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
The formula that more correctly explains this phenomenon follows.
Fewer Employees + Same Work + Greater Threat of Layoff + Derth of Other Jobs = Higher Productivity
You see, there are additional contributing factors to the equation that offer significant motivation to the Fewer Remaining Employees. If you aren't more productive, there are numerous others that are presently unemployed who will happily be more productive. Basically, if you don't watch your ass, you're out of there!
The US seems to like boasting to the rest of the world about how it keeps improving productivity. How is productivity measured? Are unpaid overtime hours taken in to consideration - I bet they're not. People seem to work more overtime, but companies don't pay for any extra hours (salaried) employees. Doesn't this make productivity gains just an illusion? Heh: I'm in danger of sounding like a unionist or something!
But you have to admit he got the "posting self-congratulatory remarks on chat sites" dead on.
You would think it would be but looking for work takes up a lot of time what with scanning the job boards for jobs that really exist. I have some theories as to why some of the same jobs stay posted for months and months, and one of them applies to you poor overworked slobs who kept your jobs. And that is that HR wants a pile of hot current resumes on hand when one of you snaps under the workload and quits. Hear that sound? That's Catbert, the Evil HR director, purring.
Let's see.. Official job title: Webmaster (4 web sites to maintain)
/only/ IT person in the building)
Unofficial job titles:
Director of IT (the real one quit 2 months ago, and left me as the
Help Desk
Access DB programmer
System Administrator (Linix AND Novell AND Win2k)
Telecommunications Administrator
Everyone's bitch
lay me off? haha I wish they would actually.
and people wonder why the hell I'm always in a bad mood when I get home from work.....
We are all very well aware of the current economic crises afflicting not only American, but the world economies, and this eventually trickled down to the IT job sector.
The big question is; when should we expect an upswing? Are we going to see the hoopla and salaries of the late 90's again? Are those days long gone?
Are we all doomed?
I mean this ideology has been in the military for years...well since the 80's and the draw-downs. They claim that the military is more stream lined, yet they have put our military in the Middle east, Kosovo, Korea, and in Africa. They are doing more now then during the Cold War with a hell of a lot less people.
Some might complain that the military has been getting some phat bonuses, but do you know the President Bush also cut about 75,000 people from the military to do this? I just ask that you don't forget the military when is comes to these issues.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
Lifted from a Dilbert book the chapter was on downsizing - Your workforce goes from "Lean and Mean" to "Skinny and Pissed" ..
Gotta watch out when you overload an already stressed workforce....
From the article:
"As layoffs rise, so does productivity. The Department of Labor reported last week that nonfarm business productivity clocked an annualized gain in the third quarter of 4% over the preceding quarter."
I have given up. There is just too much being asked of me and I've hit the breaking point. I will quit soon if I'm not laid off. Either I will find something new that satisfies me, or I will blow my brains out. There is no point to living a life of frustration.
It seems pretty obvious that that would be the case. Imagine 5 computer programmers, worked together through the dotcom bubble, with high-paying secured jobs. Life was good - not terribly swamped in work, maybe surfed the web a little too much on the job, but still managed to get work done. The programmers, being the introvert sort, never really speak up about how their jobs were important, that what they were doing really mattered to the company. No need to - they did their work and the company was doing well. They just assumed that other people understood that they were contributing.
Then the bubble bursts, economy's hurting everyone, layoffs start at the big companies. Our 5 programmers aren't worried - their small company is still running strong.
Suddenly two bad quarters in a row, sales are down, cashflow gets weak, and suddenly the company is worried about being able to write everyone's paychecks. 2 of our 5 programmers, who might have had 2 or 3 bad marks (previously thought of as "minor") on their performance reviews, get canned. Our 3 remaining programmers start thinking, "Oh crap! I could be next!" Suddenly there's a real push for productivity and visibility from our programmers. Not only were they doing %40 more work, but they now make sure everyone knows about it.
Wouldn't you?
Scary thing is, if a company can scare employees into working harder with laying off a few, seemingly overpaid pieces of "deadwood", it certainly make business sense.
Hits a little too close to home for some readers out there, doesn't it?
-AAAWalrus
I could care less about not having a job to fill my time. Spend your free time mastering a new programming language, learn a new operating system or use your time to take up weight lifting or something!
My problem with the prospect of unemployment is that I am living from paycheck to paycheck. If I go for a week without a job I will have to choose one of the following:
1. Become homeless.
2. Go hungry.
3. Let the bank reposess my car because I cannot pay the loans.
If it comes down to it I will choose the third option, but that will make finding a new job a'lot harder; unless I want to work as a dishwasher at the local Dennys or something.
I've been fortunate enough to still have a job after a year of rough layoffs. I've found that, not only am I the only one left of an IT staff of four, but I have become much more efficient in what I do, to the point that I have been able to work for the R&D department in addition to my duties (oh yeah, and more time to read /. too). I've found that in times like this, you're job-attitude changes. At first, it may seem that you will be swamped with extra work, but we humans are great at adapting, and it all sorts iself out in the end, often for the better.
As layoffs rise, so does productivity. The Department of Labor reported last week that nonfarm business productivity clocked an annualized gain in the third quarter of 4% over the preceding quarter.
This makes me wonder what measurement they used to quantify 'productivity'. My guess is that it is somehow related to the number of businesses, more like a per capita amount rather than an absolute value.
If so, I can understand the value increasing as companies who were riding the dot.com wave crashed -- like thinning the herd raises the average strength of the remaining beasts.
However, I also think that it's simplistic to assume that the staff who remain were slacking prior to the layoffs. More likely, they remain because they *weren't* the ones who were slacking. At least, I hope that's the way it is.
Perhaps if corporations used the "employed for life" strategy that the federal government practices, they would alleviate potential stressors to their employees and avoid the possibility of someone busting into the office and shooting everything but the water cooler.
The ultimate problem is, when corporations treat people as if they're disposable, they feel disposable. No one ever gets laid off in Japan. And there haven't been ANY fatal shootings in offices there since right after World War II.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
is top executive pay. What else is new...
Granted, times are lean, but during layoffs at my last company, I saw more top people still doing well. All us employees lost all our stock while the top execs got new stock and pay raises with the new company that bought us. My co-worker called it 'gift wrapping a turd'. How true.
I'm sure this is a very unpopular view, but I personally feel that if the belt needs to be tightened, we all need to do it. Not just a few.
My new company pays less and has me working more - like those in the article. I'm not sure how wise this is since this makes all of us here more stressed and burnt out. Sure, we're more productive, but people can only handle so much rhetoric, 50/60 hr weeks for 2/3 of the price before they just say 'screw this'.
One thing this has done for me is to galvanize my resolve to do something on my own. I personally still feel money is out there to be made. Epecially if you have good talents that Joe-first-year-college-dropout-100k-webmaster can't match. There will always be a need for people that know their stuff. Question is, will one be able to find it?
(pardon the Katzian reference)
Shortly after Sep11,2001, I wondered how soon it would be before people got over the genuine shock and horror of what happened, stop being friendly to each other in solidarity, and start in with the Bin Laden jokes. I knew it wouldn't be long. Sure enough, about 2 months after it happened, I saw my first Tshirt with Bin Laden's face in the crosshairs. Sure, there is natural bad sentiment towards someone who did something that tragic, but the REAL gravity of what happened dissipated quickly. It was back to NASCAR and lawsuits.
Granted, this isn't true of everyone, but overall we as a country are back to business as usual. (unfortunately) I think the same can be said of the tech industry, at least from my experience. Sure, we have trimmed budgets, and cut the work force, but I really don't see any difference in how people look at their jobs as a result of that. There are still lazy people who do just enough to get by. After a layoff, people scurry around, and try to prove that they are valuable, but that subsides quickly. No sooner has the sigh of relief that you still have a job been breathed than you just settle down in your chair and get back to same old routine.
Maybe I am a bit jaded, because I was able to get a job a month after the company I worked for went under. But that was 2 years ago, on the front side of the massive meltdown. I was lucky to get with a large company that has had only one layoff since then, and it was relatively small. But I see things going the same as they were when I got here. In general, people aren't worried about losing their jobs. Not that you need to be worried about losing your job in order to do a good job, but it doesn't seem like there is an urgency anymore. I am not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing.
Jeez, where am I going with this? Well, I kind of follow a Zen style of work. I do my job, I do it as good as I can. If I get laid off, I get laid off. I have confidence that I can do my job as good or better than my coworkers, and if not, then at least I did my best. I don't do just what it takes to get by, I try not to settle in for the long haul and cruise. I have been here 2 years, and I am still trying to improve myself and my skills. This skill is lost on a lot of people, and I think it is a valuable one. I think if you are working in a manner just to keep your job, then you aren't being genuine. Be genuine, and just be. There is no prize to keep your eye on. Develop yourself, improve yourself, because you are the asset, and others will see that.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Or in some measures, GDP/number of workers. Productivity sounds like some magic economic formula but it is pretty simple. If you reduce the number of workers and the hours they work, but not the collective product, productivity goes up by definition. This is hardly news. Why else would they lay people off?
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
I am Chinese, and I have the following things to say about the "Crisis = Danger + Opportunity" link.
:). It took me quite some time to parse the writing. You can see a better version of the word here:i s
First of all, the guy's handwriting is Not Very Good, or at least he was writing in a calligraphic style which I've never seen before
http://www.mandarintools.com/faq.html#cris
That same page says that the story about "crisis equals danger + opportunity" is not true. "Danger" and "Opportunity" were not the original meanings of those characters. The web page does not say, and I do not know, what the original meanings are. I speculate that "Danger" originally meant "guarded" or "careful" and "Opportunity" originally meant "craft, intelligence", but don't quote me on that.
I am inclined to agree with the web page and place this under the "interesting coincidences of the language which are taken way out of proportion" category.
Me too! I don't do anything I don't feel like doing. US government jobs rock!
Too bad for you white boys!
Obviously things are pretty tough in this industry right now, so there is definitely no hiring going on here. That means that if somebody quits, the rest of us have to pick up the slack. I'm not complaining, mind you, because, as LiamRandall said, I'm also happy to have a job.
I think that the interesting thing about this company is that when times are flush, they don't hire willy-nilly. Every proposed position is scrutinized to make sure that a new hire is really needed. Generally, that means that even in good times the rate of hiring is not all that high, yet this is an 18,000 employee company. The executives here make no bones about the fact that they are managing the company looking ahead 5 to 10 years, not one or two quarters. That also means that they recognize that the high tech industry runs in cycles and to lay off employees means playing catch-up in terms of training and hiring when the low cycle ends.
So, for the near term, as the tech economy slumps, we work harder to deal with attrition, but when the economy recovers (as it will), we'll be a step ahead of other companies that have to scramble to hire and train new employees. The obvious consequence is that the stock price takes a beating because it appears that we aren't being as "proactive" as other short-term managed companies in reducing costs.
-h-
My company, like a lot of companies, actually overhired in 1999 and 2000, and we were trying to do a wide range of things to open new business. When the ax fell (about a 30% cut in headcount) I looked down the list of people leaving and I didnt have any idea what most of them even did (and I thought I knew everyone and every project).
Now that we are a smaller company, we are more focused. There is too much work to do, but I feel that we are doing the highest priority things rather than flailing on so many projects.
in these turbulent times do you find yourself rising to the challenge or being overloaded with responsibility?
I suppose that if by the phrasing of the question you mean to imply in comparison to the pre dot-com bust period the answer is no. I've always given 100%, so nobody can ask more of me. Good times or bad, if you are the go-to guy (not the goto guy) you can have all the responsibility you can handle. What's different now is that if I left my job, I can count on being unemployed for a long period.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I don't think that it is such a bad idea. I was laid off from a job (I don't blame the employer, i know I was dead wood and not the best.) I decided to move away from tech altogether. A better question is "How many people realized that there are unlimited opportunities to use you skills besides coding/admining/project managing/hardware devel. Serious. I had a very good friend, who had the brain the size of a small satelite who was laid off from hp. He designed high end micropocessors for hp/s multi processor iron boxes. He's going back to school now to get his masters in EE ( he was recruited in his sophomore year) While I decided to go the way of the anti-geek. Go figure. Anyway, how many decided to get out of tech altogether (be honest) because you didn't cut it, or you found something more fulfilling?
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
Do you love your job? A lot of slashdotters are bound to say they do, if they work with computers, so let me rephrase that - do you love your employer? Do you go to work each day because you love what your company does and you want to devote your life to forwarding their mission? If so, fine, then buckle in and do the extra work because you're working towards a goal you believe in.
If, however, you don't care too much what your company does, and you just need a salary, a paycheck - then why do you do it? You just need the salary, the paycheck, to pay bills and buy necessities, right? And to purchase some entertainment from time to time?
Then why do you need to pay those bills? OK, so you want some electricity. You need to eat. You want to enjoy some entertainment now and then. How much of this can you provide yourself? And how much entertainment (movies, DVDs, vegging out to TV, buying new CDs) do you *need*? I mean, do you buy any of this stuff to counteract stress from work? Then wouldn't structuring your life differently result in less need for entertainment?
So learn to become more self-reliant for those things. Grow some of your own food if you can. Install some solar panels, use an energy co-op instead of an energy company, learn some trade skills, the sorts of things that people need to build the necessities of life.
I'm not saying go back to the trees. I'm not even saying do everything I say. I'm just tossing out food for thought...
I think many people have a job they don't like just because they think "that's the way things are, that's the nature of work - work is dull and hard, a necessary responsibility." But I think work should enrich the spirit - work should not be that thing you have to do so that you can live when you get off work. Work should be your life! You should enjoy it! If you don't enjoy your work, the answer is not "well, I gotta earn a paycheck somehow". It should be "ok, so I don't enjoy my current employment - what might I enjoy instead?"
It's fairly obtuse how an economist defines productivity -- versus the purely technical definition. If 1/2 the chicken can produce double their output, each chicken is more productive. However, the downside, of course, is that the chicken dies in six months. Run your car at 85 all the time, you cut it's life span in half. From a technical perspective -- and I argue this with my boss all the time -- we are actually LESS productive. Mostly, due in part, to the fact each person is no longer working vertically -- but horizontally. A knower of all things -- master of none.
But you all may disagree...
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
Hmm. I wonder how much more productive your company would be if it laid off all the employees that had time to post to Slashdot.
I'm self-employed, what's your excuse?
My company promoted some to VP status and then laid off several folks my level to compensate for their increase in pay. Our work level has tripled and our SLAs are really starting to show the strain. No one wants to bat for us when it comes to raises or discuss the killer schedules. I'm working every weekend until the end of January. My family doesn't understand but are coping. They state that I'm too valuable to lose but I cannot take much more of the load. There are some individuals here I would classify as friends but my loyalty in staying is really running thin lately. You wanted my 2 cents worth and experiences.
A blurb from the book quoted in the review:
Read the review for more info.
Not me. I recognize that my 401K is a long-term thing, and I don't mess with it. Sometimes it's up, sometimes it's down. But in the long run, I seem to make out about the same as or slightly better than coworkers who constantly tweak theirs.
So you may not be talking about 401K owners themselves, but rather the folks who run the 401K for the companies - essentially more of the short-term thinkers we disparage.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
(in fewer words than my last rambling post)
The real opportunity would be for all these frustrated overworked workers to get together and say, "What can we do together, for each other, instead of for somebody else?"
But that'll never happen...
As a product manager who sits squarely between IT and business, I know absolutely that the last year has seen my game improve dramatically. I'm somewhat of a wannabe coder anyway, so for me it's been a great, though very taxing opportunity to step up my skill sets.
Specifically, the external forces of an imploding market have resulted in a necessary bleeding of domain expertise, really on both sides. Whereas I understand large scale development way better than I did a year ago, most engineers in my company have a much better feel for the business end. They probably weren't as enthusiastic about learning that stuff as I was about learning code design, but we communicate way better now.
I was an "Automation Analyst" for a mainframe-based system a few years back, when upper management decided that they could "fix" all our IT problems by outsourcing the datacenter (our management was always 5-10 years behind on the business trend curve). When this was announced, almost a third of the datacenter staff bailed right away (the severence packages they offered were pretty insubstantial unless you were a lifer). Those that remained were interviewed by the outsourcing company and offered jobs or the option of waiting it out until the cut-off.
My ex-boss (one of the first to bail) offered me a position at his new gig, and I negotiated what I thought was the best of both worlds; I would continue to work my old job until the cut-off, collect severance, then go and work for my ex-boss at a substantial increase in pay.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
What followed was six months of hell. Because my background included a little bit of everything, instead of just doing my job for those six months, I did my job, I helped out in operations, I helped out tech support (including network, security, and some really nasty legacy systems), and when I wasn't otherwise occupied, I worked with the outsourcers explaining where the bodies were buried. I developed insomnia, a nervous twitch and grey hair (in my 30's!) by the time I and the rest of the hold-outs were finally laid off and the outsourcing company officially took over.
On the plus side, it was a good kick in the metaphorical seat; because of that little trauma I finally got up off my duff and finished my BS and now I'm working on my masters.
Though I do still take a little guilty pleasure when I hear from former coworkers about the stunningly bad job the outsourcing company has been doing...
"I'm a scientist! I don't think, I observe!" - Dr. Clayton Forrester
The dot com I worked at (e-bode.com) was a really small company. We had 2 rounds of layoffs. The first got 2 developers and 2 accountants. The last got the systems administrator and 2 developers, leaving the CEO, CFO, COO, CTO, 1 clerk, and 1 developer. If the last developer hadn't been working on an already-sold component, he'd probably be gone too.
To the CTO's defense: He's a great developer as well, and I suspect he's working a lot of OT coding.
in these turbulent times do you find yourself rising to the challenge or being overloaded with responsibility? Is your to-do list growing exponentially? What new work are you faced with and how are you dealing with it?
Don't ask me, I'm unemployed.
Fewer Employees + Same Work = Higher Productivity + More dropouts!
People keep talking about how grateful they are about still having a job, etc., but what it really comes down to is holding on to jobs by snitching on coworkers, and doing crappy work at the behest of their pimps --err-- managers. It feels terrible. Sure you keep your job, but the effects linger beyond the period of scarce job opportunities. Once the famine is over you find yourself continuing to do crappy work. The whole experience is poisonous to the pursuit of excellence, which is crucial to personal job satisfaction.
I am a virus, put me in your
Keep in mind the only true equality on slashdot:
michael = asshat
i'm happy to see that my campaign is now rubbing off on the mighty one himself.
I just recently got back into the workforce after doing odd jobs like delivering pizza and selling sell phones. I actually got a respectable salary and the workload isn't to hard. The company i'm working for is actually in the process of hiring, being a physical security company and all that. I was a bit leary about working for a startup but there is a lot of potential in this untapped section of the market. Now I shall see about those benefits soon enough =) holiday season approaches.
We've secretely replaced the Enterprise's dilithium crystals with Folgers crystals. Lets see if they notice.
This is an old trick. Happened to my dad several times in the 80s (luckily, he was one of the ones that was left in the shop to do the work of two employees the company just laid off)
I'm not a reflex "Proud To Be Union"-bumper-sticker-posting moron, but Corporate Greed is the greatest of those two evils.
Corporate Greed knowns no shame. And since Enron, it knows no fear. Sure - this happened in the past, but they (being greedy corporate officers) had to at least hide it - which made it less noticable or insulting. Airlines in the 80s did similar things on a smaller scale. Today we have CEOs that lay-off thousands of employees just to "make the company more 'nimble'" (Jack Welsh, of General Electric) who then -on the way to his retirement mansion- starts stuffing his pockets with money while asking "You don't mind, do you?"
So - here's a bit of help for the greedy corporate butt-pirates out there:
Don't hire anyone to a permanent position. Get all your employees as contractors or, better yet, as "temps".
If possible, hire half to 2/3rds the employees you need, and then guilt/guile/corral/cajole them into doing the work of two people. Make it well known that they need the paycheck more than you need the job done.
Don't forget to line your pockets.
Make sure your HR person knows how to write the job description you post so that you can easily tell the few experienced applicants that they are overqualified (read that as "cost too much") and make the other applicants feel inferior, so they feel lucky to have the job, don't complain, and work harder for less money.
Quality? Fuck it. Honesty? Laugh at that, then fuck it. Quantity? Fuck it too. Employee moral? Fuck that hard. Money? Money is god. And you, being the High Priest, cannot suffer to allow anyone other than you to have god. So make sure you take god away from them and put god back in the temple (your pocket) where it belongs.
Oh shit, there goes the Karma.....
I'll be the first to admit that the market is tougher than it was a couple of years ago but is it really because there are fewer jobs? My experience has been that the number of jobs is the same but the ones out there are less desirable. Suddenly every entry in the classifieds is asking for a CCNE, MSCE, and a master's degree regardless of the skill level. Additionally everything is being contracted out and often requires enormous amounts of travel. I just turned down a 20K raise because I didn't want to be away from my fiancée for three weeks out of the month. In any case, I can only hope that companies will suffer because of the outsourcing trend and realize the value of retaining highly-intelligent, well-trained individuals that are actually familiar with their specific business and goals.
Just come to DC! here if you have a security clearance that's all you need to get a job now.
And now with all the Republicans and their Homeland Defense Department that is going to grow.
Hey! and the good thing is that your job is going to be so secret that not even you boss knows that you do, so you can do nothing!
I work at a company that was started after the bubble burst, with hope that the economy would rebound quickly. Oddly enough, we're still in business thanks to continued infusions of cash from our angel investors, but the "donations" have been cut, we have a product out, and our staff is only two employees larger than it was this time last year. All because no one is buying anything.
So, the other side of this dilemma is being someplace with the promise that the company would grow, but instead finding out that you'll have to take on all the additional work that comes from releasing a product, supporting it, continually moving toward the next release, and at a reduced salary. In our case, we never had the extra people to lay off!
It's equally demoralizing. We were supposed to have help by now.
My old company's policy when everyone left was "oh, Nathan will do it." I ended up picking up the slack when everyone left or was encouraged to leave until I was doing the work of four or five people on the pay of one person, working 14 hours days and still getting very, very behind.
After a couple of months, "Nathan *did* do it" - it being quitting. I earn about half or what I used to but I work half the time too and have a much better quality of life so it hasn't been a bad compromise.
- Welcome the coming of the New World Odour
One thing that really bothers me is that layoffs are done by upper management. Some guy with his tie constricting him in an office miles away decides that employee A isn't "company material" and axes him. Upper manager doesn't even know who employee A is. All the people working with employee A talk about what a mistake it was to lay him off. Those who should go stay, and those who should stay go. I propose bringing layoffs down to the employee level.
Rather than making shots in the dark, why not use a survivor-style method of getting rid of people? Why not have tribal council once a week to vote someone off? That would give a person motivation to find themselves useful, otherwise those around the person would give the axe. Justice in its finest form, sounds good to me.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
What happens is that they make a bunch of layoffs and in the short run their productivity goes up because the same amount of work is being done by less people. While that is true, this is a temporary phenomenon. What ends up happening is that people, who are now overworked, begin looking for other opportunities. In a tight market these may be hard to find, but they'll begin to trickle in.
Companies who don't overwork their employees in this manner will find that it's easier for them to find top notch talent as people seek to jump ship from companies that do overwork them. The companies who do overwork their employees discover in the meantime that they have a number of key defections and that these people end up being replaced by less qualified people, becuase the best people won't put up with them. So they go out and hire more people because the less qualified people can't do the job as effectively as one qualified person.
So, they eventually end up with a large work force, some of whom have, in the mean time, become quite good at their jobs. Then they realize that they've now got all this dead weight again. Layoffs happen.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Smart companies show their employees some loyalty in the bad times because it will be reciprocated in the good times. This leads to an overall more qualified and stable staff. That leads to increased productivity in the long run.
or so my theory goes...
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Well, one of my employees and /. regular, Mr. eDrugtrader, could probably comment at a developer level, and we'll see if he gets up early enough to see this post and comment. But I know that from a management perspective, while we're fairly productive with what we do, we have also had to say "no" to a massive number of projects, including projects that came from the CEO or were marked "necessary." Everyone is frustrated -- our CEO has huge plans, but he doesn't have the staff to do it. Or at least, things are getting done at a snail's pace. One of my employees has a backlog of about 2 years of projects -- great for job security, but it can be frustrating and overwhelming. Here are some bits of the fallout:
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
This is a very basic social psychology term. If your curious and want a better definiton just look it up on google. You'll also be able to find out about it in text books. Basically, the more people you have working on something the more that people feel that they need to do less of that worko because theres more people working on it. It has a lot to do with how people percieve their envioirment. Theres been numerous studies and the like. It has less to do with trimming the fat and a whole other bunch of cliches. Group effort is difficult to perceive as an individual. People who are good at seeing what a group of people can do make much better bosses and leaders. Some Links: http://psy.plym.ac.uk/staff/freid/student/lecturen otes/psy227/psy2278notes.pdf
http://psychology.about.com/library/weekly/aa03150 2d.htm
http://omgwtfmedia.blogspot.com/
Yes, I have become very poli-functional in the last couple of years. In the company I used to work at, until about 6 months ago, I was a project manager, but also assumed the role of router/firewall admin, Solaris/Linux admin, programmer, some sort of IT helpdesk, etc. I usually worked way more that 8 hours a day with all those responsabilities.
However, I didn't complain (well, probably a couple of times...). I really loved what I did, and loved the feeling of being highly productive and helpful.
I do have a better paying job right now, and, even though I'm supposed to be more focused with a single responsability as project leader, I am already doing other things - do tests to evaluate potential employees, support sales, coordinate the internal soccer championship and weekend trips with the rest of the staff ("integration activities"), work on an internal magazine, etc.
I just love the feeling of knowing I did a great job during the day and helped a lot of people. Also you become essential, so you feel you'll always have a job during these difficult times.
-.
well, I'm considering going into business myself, as the maker of The Disgruntled Sysadmin Doll(TM pending)
on a more serious note, I wasn't part of the dot-bomb, so I'm not affected by that. I am affected by the downturn in the geophysical industry. Thankfully, I still have a job, even if my responsibilities have tripled, while my pay has not ( like getting a shit "raise" by being put back on hourly pay to get overtime for hours that I was working anyways...more money, but in principle it's still not a fucking raise and fighting the beancounters for every penny is driving me out of my head). The only good thing that I've seen out of the downturn in my industry is trimming deadwood.
that, and it's pretty funny to watch a bunch of useless bastards try to justify their jobs...
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
Well, I've got a team of 2 people. One writes 52 lines of code per day, the other 48. I fired the second guy. The average productivity of my team went up (and a whooping 4% - do the math - ... ). Hurray! I never saw it coming.
And another thing: Did YOU know 1+1=2?
" In order for the company to survive, you have to survive. "
Logical, but companies aren't always logical.
"I look at my responsibilities at a job and decide whether they make sense. If they don't, I go to my boss. "
Assuming that a) Your boss will agree with you. b) That your boss can do anything about your complaint.
"If I think they are requiring a level of responsibility that my pay does not compensate me for, I bring that up to the boss as well. "
See previous response.
"If that doesn't sink in, I start sending out the resumes. "
Assuming that you will be able to get another job oppertunity. Remember there's a glut of workers out there.
" If nothing else, the new responsibilities have given me experience the next boss is going to pay for."
One of the predictions that people have been making. Worker flight when the economy starts doing better. Doesn't really help the present though.
Positive attitudes help. But they can only do so much toward improving both your situation, as well as in general.
MOD PARENT DOWN
The Word Spy this week had a term for this phenomenon:
Ghost work
"After a round of layoffs or firings, the work that used to be done by the former employees and that must now be handled by the remaining staff."
If it isn't true, don't say it. If it isn't helpful, don't say it. If it's true and helpful, wait for the right time.
What it equals is more disgruntled employees and a drop in moral. Which leads to lower productivity and abandonment of the company.
Plus if its more work then can be done, then the amount of work completed decreases, thus overall productivity goes down.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Brilliant fucking observation. They only do it because they have no choice.
I'm doing my best to avoid being a corporate slave. I'm fortunate enough to have a champagne income (at 23 years old) but I live a beer lifestyle. That way I can ride out shit like this.
I'm lucky to be at a company that is smart enough to ride this shit (ie/ recession) out w/o a round of massive layoffs. Maybe that's why they keep lots of talent but pay about 10% less than what I have seen elsewhere. Probably the last bastion of corporate loyalty I have ever seen in the non-government sector...
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
my to do list hasn't grown because I was one of the unfortunate who have been laid off...
"Full sources for linux currently runs to about 200kB compressed" --Linus Torvalds 31-Jan-1992
...I used to work 50 hours a week and come home able to have a fullfilling outside life. Now I work 60 a week and come home dead tired. My attitude is poor and my pay is the same as it was before. Doesn't look as though I'll get a raise this year. I don't feel fortunate. I just feel like the economy sucks.
(With apologies to Scott Adams) dilbert.com
...
...
"Theoretically, if I reduce the number of employees and simultaneously increase the productivity, we'll have the smallest payroll around and still be a market-leader!
I wonder how they get the floppy bits inside the floppy disk?"
I say that if you become unemployed (like nearly 3/4 of the people I know in tech), count your blessings (yes, if you can afford it) and do something you've never done before: travel, start a new company, do somehting you've always wanted to.
Over here on the hardware side of things its a royal pain and then some. Shareholders want profits. CEO institues hiring freeze. Thats cool--at least no one is getting the axe.
Except Problem 1) New Wafer plant is opening to produce all those shiny new Pentium 4s. Problem 2) They fellas over at AMD are puttin the heat on you and you company wants "increase market segment share" so they ask your division to hit overdrive in producing new processors and megahertz.
So we are increasing workload and performance and have also have no people to put in our shiny new Fab. To say we are understaffed at the moment is an understatement. and the current staff is nearing burnout. Then the stock options become worthless and your incentive for busting ye olde hiney is gone. Its a vicous cycle of more work, less people. Then some people burnout and there is even more work and even less people. The same people who covered 1 plant must now staff 2 factories. Add in the switch to 300 mm wafers and our energy is sapped. Something is going to give sooner or later. Look for it sooner (and employers, do us a favor--hire an Intel process engineer and release us from bondage!).......
I don't think this is a unique situation--lets be honest-chip sales is where Intel makes its money and we support the rest of the goons around here. One would think we could get an exemption to the hiring freeze, but nooooooo. Aparently that half billion dollars per week we bring in isn't enough (7 billion per quarter or 13 weeks)--
CEOs always fund there little pet projects by squeezing the profitable divisions.
And since I'm posting about work--views do nessecarily reflect those of the Intel corporate yes-men.
"Fewer Employees + Same Work = Higher Productivity"
The real title of the article should be:
"Fear Of Losing Job + Same Work = Higher Productivity"
Fear is the greatest motivator.
Education is the silver bullet.
Interns. They're cheap, often eager to learn, and usually a solid supply (depending on your location). When I was an intern at 4 differnt places, yeah I was underpaid and overworked but I was happy to take the opportunity for the experience and resume padding. One internship led to a full time position 6 months later when a position opened up (staff leaving, not new position). I'd love to have an intern again so I can give them the shit work.
I was the Quality Manager/Engineer for a local manufacturing company and we went through 7 or 8 sets of layoffs; 3 of which affected my department (since we were considered 'indirect' labor, it was easy for execs to target us for SG&A purposes). Ultimately that meant my workload grew exponentially and when the Director of Manufacturing finally figured out that Quality was suffering, he re-hired an Inspector of mine (who does not even have a High School diploma) and down-sized me (with several degrees).....now isn't THAT ironic. I had absolutely NO say in who I could keep and they end up letting me go; wow. I hope the next Quality guru they hire realizes that the company is technically run through a misleading spreadsheet generated by the very same people who get a large bonus for 'saving' the company financially. Oh who am I kidding; I hope they sink. Then that $100,000.00 paycheck to the DoM won't mean shit for him either. One can only hope.
[SIG] Remember Mattel handheld games?
I myself being a former Tech Manager up until a month ago found out the hard way. I WAS working 7 day weeks... filling in as a developer as needed and understanding the way the market is was trying my hardest to keep the IT group out of the "overhead" area to some degree and allowing our inhouse developers to farm out work in which we could bill. THis was done just to keep good people from leaving. Worked for a while but in the end all 11 of us including some dam fine coders were dumped and they brought in some kid to maintain 17 servers. From what i hear he has 250 workstations to support also.... I'm thinking that i was somewhat lucky as in retrospect it felt all the time as if i was trying to bail the Titanic with a paper cup. I hope they die a painful and protracted death. ( now time for my happy pill) :-)
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
Management asks for cuts in the budget. Honest teams comply truthfully, accurately. Deceptive Teams cut 1/4 of what they could. Management is happy all around. Time passes. Management asks for more cuts. Honest teams already cut as far as they could. Deceptive teams have fat to spare. They cut 1/4 of their potential cuts again (1/2 of what the did before still leaving a huge margin for later cuts). Management is unpleased with honest teams. Management makes arbitrary cuts or layoffs to honest teams to cut costs. Deceptive Teams are rewarded. They still have spare cash AND full employment.
lesson learned:: do not be truthful about how much you can cut.
Management lays off people. Honest groups Survivors pick up the pieces and work harder to keep the company going. Deceptive groups people do not pick up the pieces and intentionally let projects slip and service quality drop. Management transfers people from Honest Teams into Deceptive Teams to cover their "losses" OR lays off people in honest teams so they can hire people back into the deceptive teams.
lesson learned:: do not pick up the pieces. Let management feel the pain of reductions.
This was also true in the good times.
A person who does exemplary work all the time is expected to always do exemplary work. The one day they come in with a cold and do average work they are criticized for laziness.
However, A person who always does the bare minimum on a day that they are unusually focused and produces average work (drank Jolt not water) gets praised for being a real go-getter! and gets a bonus for such wonderful work.
Every time we are asked to do our best and do so, we are punished. Every time other groups perform below average they are rewarded.
comment directly in my journal
While the added work load can be overwhelming at times, I find it rewarding to have a broader responsibility for other areas of the company that I would not otherwise have had the opportunity to be involved with.
If you are in a similiar situation, I have some recommendations for coping with the challenges of handling your increased work load.
Good luck!
trolling & insulting for England
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
OMG ... this is a troll if i ever read one... now where is my mod whip??
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
The company I work at went from 15 people a year ago to just five now. From 12 developers to 2. I used to be an Intermediate Developer. Now, I am Senior Software Developer and I'm also the only one who does system administration, network administration, backups, etc. etc. I am also responsible for maintaining ten software projects even though I've only worked on two of them here (and nobody who worked on five of the remaining is still employed...)
All the while, of course, I'm doing new development.
Heh. This can't go on much longer.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
...You've given up any kind of reasonable work to become a starving musician?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
this makes more sense to me!
they also forget to mention that most of us has to stay later and later and going to work during weekends because the boss is blackmail us on the job.
the equation should be
fewer employees + same work = higher productivity = burnout + tons of unpaid overtime + no vacation
From the author of "Peopleware" (a highly recommended read), Tom DeMarco, comes a book called "Slack - Getting past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of total efficiency", which is an excellent, high-level analysis of the less people/more work issue at the core of this thread.
To quote from the preface of the '02 Edition:
"The worday for most of us was busy and getting busier during the entire period of the 90's, while Western economies were booming. In the downturn of 2000-2001, companies have tended to respond with layoffs, so the same work has had to be divided up among fewer employees, making them busier still.
When the problem was to take advantage of the boom, the response was 'Work Harder'. When the problem was to survive the correction, the response was 'Work Harder'. In other words, managements prescription for these two very different periods has been essentially the same: Pile more work on few people, increase efficiency and cut costs.
When you find yourself applying the same response no matter what the stimulus, you're no longer acting in an entirely rational way. Your behaviour is more characteristic of addiction. Companies that are addicted to cost cutting, overtime and ever more pressure may prosper in the short term, but it can't last."
Tom discusses the mutual exclusivity between flexibility (corporate ability to change) versus efficiency. How "slack" fosters creativity, promotes quality and produces growth by providing time to think, reflect, analyze and hence make superior decisions. Something that is sorely lacking in Corporate America these days.
My own gut feel is that this "downturn" will be nothing compared to what will happen as more people burn out, check out and abandon sweatshop environments for human-sensitive ones. Many established companies will suffer greatly, and possibly not even survive during a potential backlash....but the caveat is, the economy has to improve first! Ooops...bit of chicken and egg there.
Anyway, back to my mini-book-review of "Slack". The book is a nice light read....suitable for a plane trip (and not a long one). The only issue I have is that many of the prescriptions need to be adopted and implemented by management...and pointy-haired managers are unlikely to do so.
When you can afford to (problematic for many employees in this economy), vote with your skills and go searching for a company that understands the precepts in "Slack". You'll be glad you did, and maybe, just maybe, we'll get rid of more of the PHM's in favour of enlightened management that understands the benefits of the longer term approach.
The book is available at amazon. Highly recommended for those that care about this topic.
Chaeron Corporation
6 hour work days. (I think there was an article here before on it...) Facinating stuff though, and great for the economy, the government, unemployment rates, social involvement (local politics to community involvement), all kinds of other things. So far the only downside is that increases the cost of some business'. Although... oddly enough not the business' that pay hourly wages. In many cases they get a break (less chance of overtime).
0 1m utari.htmlp ?DocumentID= 1775h tm
Here's some good readings:
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2001/09
http://www.youroffice.ca/full_arts.as
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~terrel/details.
[sorry, I can't find the one I was looking for... and I'm not in the mood to edit with tags...] It's been said that employees who work a 6 hour day get more done because there's a sense of urgency to their day - less time to get something done usually means you work harder to get it done.
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
I signed up with a temp agency at the end of '99 and have worked through them for the majority of time since then. Honestly, the state of the economy hasn't really effected me that much. Yeah, companies are scrammbling to reduce headcount, but the work still needs to get done, and temps are expensed (meaning it's a cost hidden in with all the other costs, not something that's easily definable like payroll), so there's much less of a shareholder issue.
It's pretty dumb, really, since it's often more expensive to bring in a temp than it is to hire a regular employee, but it looks better on paper, and that's worked out well for me. I'd much rather have a regular job, to be perfectly honest, but I can appreciate the varied experience I'm getting, and I've yet to be out of work for more than a couple weeks a year.
Currently, I've got the next best thing to a regular job, and the cool thing is that my department manager actually planned it this way, since he really needed to hire another regular employee and his managers wouldn't let him; I'm a temp who is the sole holder (for the most part) of mission-critical knowledge. When they say "We can't extend his contract, we're laying off!" my manager can respond with "Do you want the work done or not?" It's a really strange position to be in, but nice at the same time.
Anyway, my advice to those of you who are having trouble finding work is: go sign up with a temp agency. There's nothing like having a dedicated team of professionals looking for work for you, especially in times like these. Another tip for those who decide to go that way: They work harder for people who want to work. If you call your temp agency every morning by 9am and ask them if they have anything for you, they will call you first if they get anything that's even vaguely near your field of expertise. Sometimes that presents some really interesting opportunities.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I might also add that I think people with colleagues that have been axed work harder and take on more responsibility with no additional pay just to try and keep their own jobs. In the end what suffers is their health and the quality of their work.
Several comments to the original suggest that "as soon as things get better" folks will be leaving in droves because they are under-appreciated, over-worked, blah, blah, blah.
Where are you all going to go? Will you be filling positions vacated by others for the same reasons you left your position? Do you think better economic times will suddenly germinate new companies who will better pander to your needs?
Something has to change about this picture, particularly if you see the same thing at more than one location. The only constant variable there is you. Things WILL get better--when you realize no one else in the world really cares whether you know Linux.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Anyone who is reading slashdot and posting to slashdot from Monday to Friday during the hours of 8AM to 5PM doesn't have a lot piling up on their to-do list.
Productivity will suffer if you have either too few people on a project or too many. During the boom, there were a lot of projects which ended up with too many people, in hopes of getting projects done sooner.
With too many people, you spend a lot of time waiting for somebody else to do things so you can do your job, and you spend a lot of time in meetings relative to the amount of progress you make on the project. With layoffs, you could get the jobs of the people you'd need to talk to, and you could get the jobs of the people you'd be waiting for. Of course, you also have more work. But it might be less of a hassle to actually do your work.
Of course, at some point you get to having too few people for the project, at which point you start getting overworked and your productivity drops off (in addition to not getting done what you're assigned).
We were an office of 6 plus the owner of the company. We found out that 4 of the employees where spending about 20% of there day actually being productive. So we cut them loose, and hired 1 person. so then the 3 of us who remained were able to accomplish more than when we were six. The problem comes for us, when we are all working and all the phones are ringing, and somebody comes to the door, and there is nobody free to deal with it.
We do alright now but we are not getting as much done as we should. We started projects planning on the man power of six and are trying to complete the projects with only 3. It doesnt matter how productive we are if we are only half staff.
So while we all feel better because we know everyone is pulling there weight, we also know that everyone is pulling the weight for two, and that doesnt make any of us happy.
Now we are overworked, stressed, and unhappy in our jobs. But we are getting more done than before, but its still not enough. I wonder sometimes how we get done what we do. But that is life.
It seems to me that a high quality of life is incompatible with high productivity, that all this productivity crap is making us lose our humanity. We are expected to be pleased that productivity is constantly increasing, but I'm not. Anthropologists claim that hunter-gatherers spent four hours a day "working" and the rest of the time they were goofing off, telling stories, having sex, etc. Oh, how far we have fallen from those days!
I've been running into a lot of people that work very hard to make sure they remain one of the fewer workers. Two years ago this extra work would have gotten them an 11% bonus; now it helps keep them visible to upper management so they stay their course.
On the other hand; I've encountered a couple [desktop support types] that say if they are laid off again; or can't find a consulting job as close to home as the current one, they are headed for the car dealer lot.
I say hurray; let them go. If you chose this field just for the money; then I hope you are one of those sniveling post-dot-com brats serving drinks at your old college pub for lack of better employment. If you are here because this is what you chose to do for a living, and enjoy it, then more power to you. I know a lot of folks like us (and apparently Carmela Soprano) are suffering from what Wired calls "post-bubble syndrome", but I have a strong feeling that this is like any market - it may just have hit us far harder since it may cost more to maintain a minimum lifestyle.
If you had a good work ethic prior to this; then you will remain employed or make it back to work at some point very soon. This is little consolation to those who [like me] were or are unemployed for eight months or more; but you just need to keep looking. Granted, you may make half of what you made before but aren't you innovative enough to survive for a time? Like one of these posters said if the employers get into the "you are nothing but cattle" mode you'll be in a position to leave without notice when things level off or improve. I have a feeling that some of the turnover, salary and demand issues that prompted part of the 'good times' were a result of this kind of treatment in the first place.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
Reducing head count can have positive effects. The less people poking their nose into a project, the less time meetings, and code reviews take.
:)
One of the many problems in IT is you tend to get a couple dominate players in a project. These players will want to have input in everything that goes on. Things take longer, and code ends up getting re-written because it's not being done "their" way. Or you get all these business analysts wanting to give their input...over and over again.
So you have some lay offs, which, are usually popularity contests. The Bobs in office space are funny. But few companies actually have "experts" come in and talk to each employee. Usually a manager gets told how many people to can, and at that point it becomes based on a whim or how popular someone is.
In some cases a group becomes a well oiled machine. Other times the uber geek gets who wants to have input into everything now gets to do everything. Problem solved!
In the end though stree becomes higher and it becomes more and more likely that people will quit. The problem, I think, comes from the fact that the number of people to get fired is pre-determined. From that point, you work towards a goal. Which changes the goal from making the company more efficient, to making Wall Street happy in the short term.
Yes, in the short term, productivity increases. This is partly due to an inertia effect where existing business is handled by the remaining staff. But while productivity looks good, nothing is growing. There is little new development, and sales are typically flat.
One industry analyst, Jim Pinto, has observed three stages of cuts in business:
Stage 1: Liposuction
Stage 2: Amputation
Stage 3: Dismemberment
I think most places are past stage 1 and well in to stage 2. Many Slashdot threads have also observed how poorly the MBA crowd has served the new technology market. This is what happens when growth moves faster than training and experience for the MBA set.
The people who run the companies we work for don't understand their businesses any more. Technology has changed so many inherent assumptions that almost nobody in management knows where their bread is buttered. They have to fail and then we have to hope that new managers with better understanding take over. Many businesses won't be so lucky and we should failures right and left before we turn this proverbial corner.
And of course, TIME magazine is only one of many such victims. I'll bet their reporters are writing from first hand experience. The up-side to all this is that when things finally do come back together, they'll be more efficient and better organized than before. It sucks that we have to have so much stress and discontent for this to happen, but that's life.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
So if you're layoff survivor, wouldn't you work harder to make sure you survive the next cut? Its like the old joke about two people being chased by a tiger. You don't have to outrun the tiger, you have to outrun the other guy.
Should be interesting as disk drives, power supplies, memeory and cpu modules fail at increasing rates(we're seeing more of those last 2 as our Sun "Enterprise" servers start to age -- 3+ years).
This is something the BHPs seem to forget:
Efficiency is a finite quantity. If you let:
P= productivity
E= efficiency
N= the number of workers
W= workload
then
P=(N*E)/W
Once E = 100%, P will cease to increase by reduction of N. Decreasing the number of workers will only gain an increase in productivity as long as there is a way to increase effeciency of the individual employee.
If the employees are working at 100% effeciency, then decreasing employess will decrease productivity.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
There will soon be announced a pc support position opening in Wichita Falls, TX. Applicants are expected to be very proficient at supporting a large number of diverse Windows 9x/NT/2K/XP desktops, hopefully be Unix-savy (AIX, HP-UX, Linux, *BSD, Samba, Apache, GNU, etc), TCP/IP network savy, and general SQL language savy, and have a broad overall aptitude for a wide variety of PC applications. If hired, must be willing to stick around for a long time, and be well tolerant of being micromanaged to death by me and follow my instructions to the letter. It'll also help if you dislike MS as much as I do, and have a high level of enthusiasm for seeking out and using OSS wherever possible. Pay is only mediocre and Wichita Falls is.... well, not exactly a very exiting place to live, except during spring/summer thunderstorm season.
If anything, the remaining staff is less productive than before downsizing -- we have the same list of projects and tasks, but now half of the stuff on the list just doesn't get done at all.
It's not like the company planned to cut staff by a third -- but after the official layoffs and salary freeze, the best and brightest employees took off for greener pastures, leaving the lazy and the lifers. The only remainining IT folk either lack the skills or initiative to go find a better job elsewhere, or are just hanging around waiting to 'vest' their 401k.
Combine that with a hiring freeze, and when the really good employees quit (or the really really bad employees are fired), it takes an act of god to hire a replacement.
IT's better than unemployment, barely...
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
What I find laughable is the government slackers keep throwing out such BS as "personal income rose this month." Yeah right. Once CEO moves to a new company, gets a bigger million dollar salary and we are supposed to believe that the other 99% of the workforce are making more money. Same thing with the productivity crap. Less of us + more work means productivity is higher. It's all a load of crap.
My workload has doubled each of the last 2 months, they aren't hiring to solve the problem and more things fall through the cracks because I am strapped for time.
Productivity stats are bullshit.
I once read something-- I think it was Seamus Blackley talking about the video game industry-- about why the movie/television production model wasn't followed more often (specialists hired for a short amount of time as opposed to generalists on staff). I think it's because people get into certain fields (such as tech) not expecting to be hired for the project but for the company. It's a different mode of thinking (for both employers and employees) but I think it could be one that would work for other professions, particularly project-oriented ones like programming. It would mean less layoffs as well, especially for those people who do the actual "work".
Don't think of it as "freelancing" either... I get full benefits despite being on a production crew.
Having just managed and just laid off an entire office of 35 engineers and then myself
So you're saying you laid yourself off? Well then, I guess you have nobody to blame but yourself.......... =P
Half of this discussion is about the accuracy of the Chinese crisis+opportunity equation, the other is on the Simpsons reference of same.
Seems the geeks can't stay focused this Friday.
Sorry but I don't feel a tinge of guilt when colleges who did nothing to contribute are all of a sudden getting 15k+ lay off packages.
/end bitter Rant
Now they are re-training in "government" programs bettering their skills full time while I still work for acompany in a wage freeze, and I haven't had a raise in years.
Kinda makes it almost worth getting laid off doesn't it?
Rem: Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Replied.
Yo Grark
- Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
You can work 6-7 hours a day for years, work between 2am and 6am and call that 8 hours, do very poor work, if it's work at all, and update your home blogs and still not get fired. All you need to do is be in your chair. Uh-oh, the boss is coming, better get back to work.... 8-)
Turns out there are alot of self important/proclaimed "artists" for web design firms around my area and their customers are sick of the poor turnaround time and lacking professionalism, long story short I'm eating their lunch. Yeah it's mind numbing work, effortless, and boring though it's helped me come to a realization. Work to live, not live to work.
So in my free time I work on my Alphas and write firmware. That comes -after- I spend time with my friends and 'live'. Guys, You're life outside of work must be more engaging than work itself otherwise you'll always have this split loyalty. Fuck what you do for a living. Make money any way you can and live your life.
If the economy swings the other way and I can get a job doing what I used to do. I'll have to seriously reconsider leaving what I'm doing now for that instead. After all, It's just work.
Peter
www.alphalinux.org
I believe that this is an example of what they call "sarcasm". Or it is a possible explanation of the thinking of managers responsible for the current loss of jobs.
Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all....
--Thomas J. Kopp
The biggest flaw in the "fewer workers, same output, higher productivity" is that it's eating the seed corn.
To be sure, there are many jobs there this doesn't matter. Perhaps most jobs.
But development is different. We need downtime to make the next big leap. When we're in the active development phase, we can productively spend 40 hours/week doing real work. Hell, those of us who got into this field because we like it, not because it seemed like the easiest way to make some big bucks, will probably want to work far more than 40 hours/week because of the sheer joy of producing something.
But when that's over, the fields need to lay fallow for a while. If you try to keep the same pace up, just like a crop field you'll see your the true productivity fall off.
At this point some fool suggests bringing in new people - equivalent to changing the fields - but that doesn't work either since it limits your product development to what can be comprehended and enhanced in the period between hiring and burnout. Assuming you can even reliably identify suitable candidates.
It's no secret that many of us have been attracted to OSS, in part, because of the fact that this change in environment allows us to remain productive far longer than we would be if we just kept doing the same thing. Ironically, this outlet isn't available to us when we succeed in finally finding a job that lets us use Linux in the workplace.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Two years ago, I knew that hard work and initiative would be rewarded with bonuses, raises, promotion. Today I know that no matter how productive you are, there is no chance of any such recognition, and the best most productive model employee has more immunity from "downsizing" than the least productive clock-watcher.
krinsh writes:
Sounds good, but what if I am here because this was what I had chosen to do for a living, and I used to enjoy it, but now cutbacks, overwork, and micromanagement (as managers try to protect their own jobs) are making it more and more difficult to drag myself out of bed each morning.
I could quit, but unless I want to move out of state, there are no job openings in my field here. Even my quitting would not create a job opening in my field -- few companies are hiring to fill open positions, including positions created by employees who quit or are fired for cause.
It used to be that if your job turned into a nightmare you could always quit and find a new one. These days, few employees can afford to quit, and the employers know this and take full advantage of it.Sure, I may in a position to leave when things level off or improve, but what is there to keep the abused employee sane and productive until then?
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
I'll be first to admit I'm sure the downsizing did trim deadwood. In fact, having been in IT some seven years, I can definitely say I've worked with a few too many people who shouldn't be in the profession. A third of my job has been cleaning up after them.
However, I don't think the trimming went too well. I lost my job, became a contractor, and then did two contracts where extremely expereinced developers were needed. The companies in question didn't have people to fill these positions - so they spent more on me (on one contract the company probably paid 250% to 225% of what it'd have cost to have me as a regular employee).
Yet I've run into complete incompetents with stable jobs. Some of them the very people whose bad code and designs I had to fix.
The downsizings weren't that rational, from what I've seen. I dearly wish more of the deadwood had been cut, but I keep running into it.
IT seems to have a pretty high turnover rate - and I'd hate to think how recent grads are doing. When the economy improves, when companies add to their IT staff, what will they be left with?
My guess? A mix of the high-powered people who managed to survive the downturn, the lucky, and the improperly retained incompetents. The glow will be off of IT, so I don't expect people to rush back.
Then what will hiring be like?
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
If your workload has increased, but your pay remains the same, isn't that the same thing as a demotion?
As the only IT staff at my location, I am leaned on heavily. Anything that has electrons in it must be my problem. When a beancounting manager sees IT overhead on his monthly budget, he no doubt sits around dreaming up more things to make me do. This seems to be a common problem with IT staff. Is it not true that (especially in this engineering firm) computers should serve to make a technical field more productive? How is it that we have come to be seen as a liability?
-Necessarily Evil
Isn't the graphic in the story rather meaning "Danger of Opportunity" for "Crisis"?
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
It is also possible for management to start removing responsibilities from your job description and create a new job from what was removed. In this way, you can be fired and replaced with someone who requires less trainig and qualifications, commands a smaller salary, and is easier to replace. The same "benefits" apply to the newly created job.
Ravi
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
OK, this schema is about as credible as the dot-com productivity theories.
What's the difference between automating a factory and forcing the workforce to work twice as on pain of being fired?
The first strategy is sustainable and leads to real progress. The second just drains energy till people finally fall appart. What's the next "productivity tool"? Fire half *the remaining* and the really get "productivity".
Oh, if they add enough of this kind of "innovation" we'll be right back at 1900. A lot of people can sense this.
Investment in education, infrastructure and basic science has had long-term payoffs in total social productivity. BS like this has merely drained existing social productivity.
http://www.webcom.com/maxang
Companies chipping away at any sense of dignity in this field right now + any future turnaround = massive quitting in the future. Job jumping, etc. will be even more than it was in the late 90's.
And you HR/recruiters trying to get "revenge" on developers....shame on you. You'll pay for this in the future, so I wouldn't be so petty right now.
"Humanity" is filled with sycophants. Corporate America has nothing to do with that component of our species.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I keep trying to tell this to my employer. My company pays it's technicians 1/4th what the guys installing TVs at job sites get, we don't get benefits, often our shifts change from day to night (one day's notice), and most of us travel three hours daily to get to obscure school construction projects. Our managers wonder why we seem despondent and inattentive, I tell them that they would be too if they did a professional's work and got paid $12/hr, especially if the company was getting $140/hr for each of us to be onsite. There's only so long you can whip your workers before production starts DROPPING.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
After all, you're now "company heros", you're on your way to becoming indispensible and that would mean hight saleries, more training and a bit of say over what can happen.
And how many more sleepless nights can you take?
When my team was hit (a couple months after I started), the only people to be let go were ones who'd been working in the system for a very long time. Our software is fairly complex (pictures lots of clients speaking a proprietary bidirectional protocol on top of TLS doing all kinds of stuff all of the time). After the initial shock and all went away (a week or so), we got a *lot* more done. After my team was cut in half, we have cut our average processing times in half about three times now while adding consistently adding features and we're enjoying ourselves greatly.
At my last job, we went from over 100 engineers down to about 10 and got an absolutely incredible amount more work done. It was all good team dynamics and not spending so much time teaching the other 90 guys how to write code, or worse, rewriting everything they did attempt...
I don't think I've stayed until 1900 a single time yet, however. I don't really see what it would gain me. I'm not going to be productive feeling trapped in the office trying to make an unreasonable deadline. Instead, we keep our deadlines reasonable, and we make them, and people don't complain about us leaving on time.
That said, I was supposed to have today off, but I might have to go in because I never set up VPN access and my team broke something today. Ugh.
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
I've worked with several companies, most of them small. One required everyone to work from 8am to 5pm, half hour lunch and to clock in and out. The boss would fire people on a regular basis to try and keep costs down. Needless to say, most of the people there didn't do a very good job for long. It's hard to do a good job when your boss has no concept about management.
I've also worked with another company, the hours were 9:30 - 4:30, 1 hour lunch. (Mon - Fri) The boss was a manager for over 10 years, and understood how to manage the employees. Guess what? Productivity went thru the roof! People wanted to get their projects done. They stayed for unpaid overtime when necessary. People came in early to discuss projects, etc... It was a great place to work.
Both companies are out of business. The first one because over 85% of the staff walked out one afternoon after the owner announced he was going to move the office to another state to save money. (He died about a year later, stroke, high blood pressure, who would have thought?)
The other company was a victim of some bad financial calls, most of their customers going bankrupt, and being located in downtown Manhattan on Sept 11th.
Go figure.
Your company puts big heaping hunks of your money into 401k investment firms. In turn, these institutions talk to your boss's boss's boss and tel l them about "market expectations". When your company does not make it's earnings goals, they treaten to unload stocks, which would sink the price and your company. Your boss, and you too, have their savings wiped out.
This is why I did not buy into my company's 401k plan. It's good when it's good, but I got in at a market peak. Did the US economy really grow five fold in the 90s? No, it did not, in fact manufacturing and other important segments contracted as we sold our souls to Chinese imports. John Kenedy senior got out of the market when a shoeboy gave him stock advice. The year was 1929. Today, shoeboy is a troll and his alterego, streetlawer, will be happy to give you stock advice. I wish those two would do something interesting, their advice is evidence that they are underutilized and that we are all have less than we think we do.
The 401k "managers" second guessing my company and creating incentives for my bosses to get rich quick with bonuses, unrealistic expectations, and other silly games has undone many great companies. Look forward to more accounting fraud, bankruptsies and other badness. The last place I worked had it's "grateful" people working 12 hour days to keep their jobs but they got fired anyway. Something really stinks about that.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Same Work/Fewer Employees = Higher Productivity
?
How about, everyone stated working becuase they didn't want to get the axe. Most peoples credit card bills, car payments, morgages, rent, hbo subscriptions, etc are enough incentive to make them work harder so they don't loose their job. Unlike a failing marrage, you can't get more money becuase you "were use to a higher quality of life". I'll do just about anything I'm asked with a minimum amount of fuss these days. Infact I'll do stuff I wouldn't have even considered taking on before, and I'll do it with a smile, just to keep the checks rollin in. Especially after you've watched friends and coworkers brave the current job pool. Talk about motivation. There you have it. Simply put, we have the same (maybe a bit more) work to do, but everyone's afraid NOT to do it. Almost as much as they are afraid to miss a ship date. I predict burnout will be a lot more frequent, and turnover may start to go up. Or maybe it'll just be career change.
Fewer Employees + Same Work = Higher Productivity
Fewer Employees + Same Work = Lower Morale
Lower Morale = Lower Productivity
Lower Morale + More Employees = Same Productiviy
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
here in 2001, Shoeboy told us that Open Source was dying and that Mozilla would never work and usability would never come from free software. Funy, I'm posting this from Mozilla on the most usable software I've ever owned, all free. So the advice was bad, but that's not the point. The point is that stocks are overvalued because there has been an incentive for them to look that way.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Strange things here on Ottawa. Unemployement stayed about the same - 6.9% - this in spite of the fact that Nortel, JDS Uniphase and others have laid of about 25,000 people over the last year or so.
It's great living in a government town.
Semper ubi sub ubi
So, you claim that managers actually DO work?
I think of crisis as:
Crisis = Review the past + Look for the Future + Make Decisions
A crisis means you cannot hope things to resolve themselves, nor that you can act like you are going to solve everything in a second. You have to understand what happened and make real but prudent decisions even though some people may not want the status quo to be altered.
unfinished: (adj.)
The first set of layoffs took out most of the "dead wood" and non-essential personnel. It was also accompanied by a project re-organization. At the time we were spread too thin - too many projects with 1 or 1.5 people working on them. After the first layoffs, my workload went up maybe 10%, but I was also working on some more interesting stuff. We hired/fired/worked for a year. At the end of the year, the number of projects had grown by 50%, but it was still managable.
The second wave of layoffs were much more problematic. Since not much dead wood was left, this layoff target high-priced individuals - sr. research scientists, directors, long-time technical professionals, and the founders of the company. More than a little of this had political implications. The second layoff was not managed well. Subsequent employee disgust/defection in the weeks following nearly doubled the manpower reduction. Although the workforce was "reorganized", the work was not. Same schedules(deadlines), same feature set. By two months after the second layoff my workload had doubled. I could see my productivity suffer, although it apparently wasn't noticed by upper mgt. All of my friends were gone.
In an attempt to retain key personnel (including myself), the company bribed us to stay with large grants of short vesting stock options (no money of course). To minimize capital gains taxes, those of us with enough cash exercised these options as soon as they vested (six months). By the end of the year, burnout was imminent. Only two of us had any historical knowledge of the system (and the other guy didn't show up to work very often). My productivity was way off. I couldn't seem to make a dent in the work load. Our project had lost most of its support staff. We were left with 1 QA person, 0 tech writer, 0 product marketing, 3 (three?) project managers. Nothing was fun anymore. I was feeling quite exploited, but I felt loyalty to the technology and product (not the company).
Then the stock market crashed. Our customers stopped spending any money. The company stock dropped 70%. Those of us that had exercised but not sold those stock options found ourselves with a tax liability that was 3 times greater than the street price of the stock. Last April I owed more money in income taxes than I grossed in 2001.
I took a look at my job: severely overworked, no sense of accomplishment, job not fun, no friends left, job COSTS ME $120,000/year. I left and haven't worked since. I still find it difficult to commit to a project.
Just call me - Cinder.
I just left a company not too long ago because, in my opinion, it was unorganized, poorly managed, and refused to give raises while the owners bought new BMWs.
I found that the job search-engines and staffing agencies are USELESS. Often you don't even get automated replies until several months after application.. if you get any reply at all.
I found my latest job by simply asking a co-worker if he knew anyone looking to hire. Within 15 minutes I had myself a new job. USE YOUR CONNECTIONS. The company I am now working with rejected me based on my CV, yet hired me with recommendation. (Regardless of having a strong CV).
Hypothetical example: It is easier to get a job with a recommendation from John Carmack than it is with 15 years of experience in game programming with Nintendo; who cares if you worked on Mario Bros if we never heard of you?
For those who may say that search engines worked for you, they worked for me too.. over a year ago, but not in today.
If you're wondering, I'm currently working in what I affectionately call the 'ghetto-hosting' industry.. budget webhosting, leased/dedicated servers and co-location. I do "Software Engineering/Programming and Unix Systems Administration".
...but I don't have time.
Shouldn't that be Same work / Fewer Employees = More Productivity?
Mmmm.. Donuts
Here they kept the dead wood and....
:-)
Interesting concept.
So in other words don't ever pick a line of work just for the money, because working at anything just for the money is immoral and evil or in some way bad. It doesn't matter if you are doing this so you can become independently wealthy quickly and be able to retire from said line of work and pursue your own interests for the rest of your life from the moment you become rich on, no you must make sure to placate and satisify the purists in any given line of work.
Gotcha.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Who told you that? The same idiot trying to prove productivity is up by micromanaging your hours? Did they also tell you how last year was "the best year ever"? Work you do that no one noticed until it was not done will now be noticed.
I'm sorry, but this big dog lead downsizing at big companies is clueless and likely to get rid of talent first. The "deadwood" has been there forever, and likely to sue for age discrimination. The fact is that most of the fire decisions will be made based on things previously considered "minor" problems that were easy to document. It's especially stupid when it happens in stable sectors of the economy, but somehow it's a national obsession. It realy agrivates me to see companies spend arms and legs on "security" and more silly Windoze software, trumpet their "best year ever" then turn around and fire people so that there will be enough money for your and your boss's bonus.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The bottom line is the bottom line.
A stratification class I am in, demonstrated some rather alarming figures regarding the corporate elite, as compared to the corporate prole. In 2001, Lawrence Ellison made $706 million dollars for the year. Thats almost $2 million a -day-, 160 times that of the highest paid CEO in 1950 (Charles Wilson of General Motors). "The average CEO of a major corporation made $11 million in 2001, including salary, bonus and other compensation such as exercised stock options"
If workers pay increased with inflation, and productivity gains, average hourly earnings would be $21.71, not $14.33 that they are today. In fact, workers make on average, 9% -less- than they did in 1973, if you adjust for inflation. Minimum wage earners, earn 38% less than 1968 workers. "It takes more than 3 jobs at the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour -- $10,712 a year -- to support a family." Since the last minimum wage increase, Congress has raised their salaries by more than $16,400, and have another $5000 raise pending.
But I got off topic. The GATT, NAFTA, IMF and the World Bank are all attempts to allow the shipping of jobs to other, cheaper countries. It makes business sense to move that factory in El Paso, across the river to Juarez, and go from paying $8/hr, to $8/day for employees. Throw in corrupt officials, less stringent environmental controls, the dropping of benefits and retirement, and you have a vastly cheaper production cost.
Furthermore, if executives can shuffle more workload onto a smaller workforce, in an economy that has a large available workforce (too many of you damn CS ppl out there :), those who want to protest, can be replaced. So people bear the brunt, because they know they will be replaced. But People have no collective long-term memory. They remember when their skills were in demand, and they could set the bars that they wanted. Desks made from legos, workstations that pivot slightly over the course of the day, nerf guns strapped to their chairs, Aqua Joe in the water cooler.. People also got lazy. They knew that if they slacked off, the job'd still be there, because they were indispensible. Unfortunately, things changed.. and it seems that nobody remembers the 1980s. When there was struggle for the good paying jobs, and good paying jobs meant you worked your ass off.
Hell, computer professionals now get to realize the crush teachers have always felt. More and more work, without any added compensation.
Quotes are from a commentary by Holly Sklar, co-author of Raise The Floor: Wages and Policies That Work for All Of Us and can be reached via email: hsklarATaolDOTcom (she had it at the end of the commentary, so i figured i'd share)
creativity is the art of concealing your sources
After being laid-off and still owed a months back pay, my former boss tried to get some free productivity out of me.
Some people have a hard time understanding that when the paycheck stops I don't give a damn that the company's mail server crashed.
The two most common things in the Universe are hydrogen and stupidity. -- Harlan Ellison
New Chinese Saying: "We take you job, half money, twice hard work. Yanky pump gas!"
My Oxford Concise English/Chinese dictionary, that is. The first character, wei, literally does mean danger. It also means imperil or dying. The second character ji has a number of different meanings: 1) machine 2) airplane 3) crucial point 4) opportunity 5) organic 6) quick witted.
So, yes, the equation is literally correct. It's just that to see the correct meaning of the two together, you have to allow for the multiple possible meanings. If you use meaning 3 of ji above, for example, you can see how the "crisis" meaning forms.
It's not unusual. Trying looking up a word in an English dictionary and you will often come up with a multitude of meanings too.
Lameness filter avoidance. Lameness filter avoidance.
Lameness filter avoidance. Lameness filter avoidance.
Yeah, I'm in the delivery business. I decided to boost productivity by selling off half our fleet. The trucks used to drive 55 MPH, and now I just have them drive 110 MPH. It's amazing how much more productive they are.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
If you've actually read the article then you aren't follow slashdot protocol.
Pay based on seniority, not on merit
Merit shmerit. The commercial PHB's want young workers because they don't yet have families (overtime and distractions) and because PHB's pay attention to superficial things like icon-drags-per-minute rather than the things that experience helps with: long-term maintainability of complex software and the ability to spot bad vendor hype.
I don't know if unions are really the answer, but one thing I have noticed is that if you have no political power, you get stepped on by those who do. The big companies are lobbying like crazy to make it easier to hire or rent cheaper foreign workers. Congress is easy for them to buy.
If geeks don't find a political voice of some sort, we WILL get stepped on. It is simple as that. Be it jobs, digital/IP rights, etc. They are already stepping all over our digital/IP rights, what makes you think they won't somehow do the same to our careers? The writing is on the wall.
Table-ized A.I.
I've worked through 3 recessions. Each has been worse than the last. The last one was '90-'92. Every 2 weeks came an announcement of a couple thousand people laid off here or there. This go-round, the frequency of these announcements is about the same but the size is an order of magnitude bigger.
The personal computer pulled us out of the stagflated 70's and early 80's. The internet pulled us out of the early 90's recession. What's going to pull us out of this? Companies have hollowed out and sent manufacturing overseas during the late 80's, so it won't be that. They were unsuccessful in exporting tech work to the cheap labor so they imported cheap labor and brought it to the tech work. So, it won't be that kind of work that turns us around. I might add these last 2 changes are nearly irreversible. What is going to turn this economy around? Whatever it is, it ain't in sight yet. At the rate we're going, we'll be a 2nd world country before long.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
murderer
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Actually, even by the measure of dollars paid per dollars of product (the manager's idea of productivity), according to this Bureau of Labor Statistics report - productivity goes DOWN with layoffs.
Quote:"Information technology professionals have been working longer hours but achieving less throughout 2000 as the turnover rate has grown dramatically, according to a study conducted by the Stamford, Conn.-based IT consulting firm Meta Group. It found that information technology professionals in the United States are working an average of 2,157 hours per year, up 36 percent from 1999 levels."
That study is a bit out of date - 2000. But if we are working harder now - 2157 hours per year in 2000 is already an average of over 41 hours per week - without vacations. Didn't people die for the 8 hour day?
Productivity for whom? Working faster doesn't mean I like the code I'm writing, or that I'm able to do the best job I can on the servers I'm maintaining (just two right now as a consultant). The folks that are still doing tech support where I used to work are swamped and aren't able to do their job. Their customers are complaining but it isn't the lone customer service person's fault: management blew the business plan and the workers have to handle the heat.
. This sig unintentionally left blank. I meant to put something here, but I'm busy.
I am an IT worker.
I am good at what I do... however the company I was at had a VC back out because he was losing his shirt on the stock market (even though we were not publically traded). So the company was forced to lay off 80% of its employees. I do not blame the company for this as it was a good company and they kept us informed.
HOWEVER I have only been out of school for 1 year working, and I didn't go for any mickey-mouse certs (eg: MCSE, A+) but actually went to a real school. I have now been unemployed for almost 3 months... and I have had 1, count it, 1 interview. It would be sweet if I could get it, but that should give you an idea.
There are a few people who went into IT because we are good at it, and went to school before this whole .com thing, but came out AFTER it blew up. We have been screwed because we have to compete with the MCSEs, the people who hold masters degrees, and the people with 10 years exp.
And I'm sorry but I don't have a massive amount of cash saved up to go back to school for 2-5 years.
Consider yourself LUCKY to have job in IT. And I'll tell you that most of the layoffs aren't due to deadwood, but the company just paring down.
An example: I apply to company X. Company X gets 500 resumes. About 400 of those are mickey-mouses, but let us say that some get interviewed anyways. About 50 of those people have lots of exp, are good, and desperate for work. These will make up the majority of interviews. Then you have about 50 people who have traditional schooling, and Now, looking at that... tell me where the problem is. HOW CAN YOU GET MORE EXP IF YOU CAN'T GET A FREAKING JOB! and if you don't have exp, you don't get the job.
RoundTop
Excellent...
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
An HR Person and a Marketeer are doing lunch.
HRP: I don't know what to do about the incessant demands from Software Development.
M: Oh? What's wrong?
HRP: They keep asking for more people. A year ago, they needed a few developers, six months ago they needed a few developers, now they need several developers and a manager. They're driving me crazy!
M: Wow! What do they do with all those developers?
HRP: I don't know. shrug I never hire any.
(Dedicated to those companies that have listed the same jobs on their web site for over a year.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Well...
When it-department i was working at last year got cut down, we who remained had to work between 10 - 15 hours a day to keep up.
After a few weeks of that, you actually get *less* done in 15 hours than you used to do in 8.
So the idiot who cuts down to much actually ends up shoting him/herself in the foot.
You'll also alienate the emplyees and end up being hated by them.
Not that every person in such positions actually care what their personell thinks about them, but if you're a company in a small town, you'll eventually end up being unable to employ new staff, since rumors about bad companies spread quickly.
Anyway...
I got burned out in a couple of months and quit.
That was over a year ago now and I'm still not recovered.
But at least I didn't have one of those idiotic "can't work for competition" contracts.
Not that it would have mattered, since I got so tired of working with computers that I've decide to make a career change.
My tip is to quit *before* you get burned out.
It's a hell to get your act together again after it has happened...
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
I've been in this industry for over 6 years in an admin/developer role and I'm no windows newbie or technical novice.
I've been unemployed for almost 5 months now and am having to seriously consider work in another field for a lot less money (hopefully only temp. situation).
Hey, I've got a family to help support as well as a mortgage payment and bills that add up way too fast!
Hell, I'd work 70 hrs/week if need be and throw in a lot of distateful Winblows machines and lusers.
Some of us would love to be overworked and EMPLOYED!
Do your work, shut the fuck up and quit complaining!
-- "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."- Albert E.
they "sell off" their easiest asset to drop - the employees.
You can't 'sell' employees. Employees are a figurative asset, not a literal one. You can put them on your Schedule C. They don't appreciate or depreciate.
'Employees as assets' is a figure of speech. Do you understand that?
Most firms have a huge amount of slack between what they're paying for and what's getting done. And usually, there's a two to three employee cushion.
Just look at yourself. Are you posting during work hours? Or when you could be working?
And the end of your 'cycle' doesn't hold. When profits drop, shareholders want MORE costs cut. They sure as hell don't want to invest in more new employees. At least not here on Earth. Don't know about your planet.
Get some business books before you start talking about business cycles.
The opposite of progress is congress
Sorry, you have to quote Homer in order to get the Simpsons Karma Score Bonus.
Ah, okay, got it.
D'oh!
Having been in the IT field for 13 years, there is one thing that is clear. Most of us in IT work to live which is diametrically opposed to what the high ups prefer, live to work. Unfortunately, the high up eecutives are never or very rarely promoted from the ranks of IT. They are almost always from marketing. Usually, the marketing people also try to push the BS on us like dress codes.
Since I live here in Colorado Springs, one of the big employers is MCI-Worldcom. I worked there back in 1995/1996 for 8 months. The managerial structure always pushed for long hours including weekends. Colorado offers great recreational opportunities and went against what the executive wanted, you living to work.
There is a Wall Street Journal Article about the executives and marketing people in Wash. DC griping about moving software development to Colorado Springs.
"In Washington, I judged the productivity of my workers by how many pizza truck s showed up in front of our buildings at 6 p.m.," Mr. Ditchfield recalls.
But in Colorado Springs "the parking lot was emptying out by 4:30 p.m., and by 6 p.m. the building was a ghost town," says John W. Harding, a senior manager. "I was stunned." He says he and his fellow managers' came to expect transferring workers to show a 50% productivity decline in the months immediately surrounding their move, and a 20% drop after.
The slower pace was introduced, in part, by new local hires who required start-up time and who had strong family commitments and interests in the outdoors. "This whole notion of having a balanced life is something the Colorado people didn't just give lip service to," Mr. Pingho says. For MCI veterans, the mood was contagious. "I began to buy into that culture myself," says Mr. Harding, who estimates his average work week fell by about 15 hours. "If no one's there to work with, there's no point in being there."
Still-frenzied MCI marketers in Washington and Atlanta grew impatient and resentfu l, and began to go elsewhere to get projects finished quickly. That culminated in MCI's 1995 purchase of SHL Systemhouse Inc., a Canadian software-engineering concern that mirrored Systems Engineering's talents.
This article came out in April 1996, about a month after I got fired from there. In my last two months there, our management instituted very late afternoon meetings that went from 4 pm to 6 pm especially on Friday. That pissed me off. I usually took off for the weekend and wanted to get out at 1pm to beat the traffic and I am disciplined enough to put the hours in early to do that. When I was fired, one of the things they mentioned is I didn't make work #1. They mentioned that I had no ambition since I didn't work Saturdays. It was very similar to the movie Office Space. The article put it into perspective on why things happened the way they did. Management got pressure from the executives in Wash. DC to force people to make work #1 like the useless afternoon meetings.
They were definitely a live to work organization and they are in shambles today. I myself believe and live as a work to live creature.
My experience has been that the number of jobs is the same but the ones out there are less desirable.
Where the hell do you live? Here it is dry as a desert lizard's skeleton. Please let me know. I'll travel if I fricken have to. I don't care anymore. I just want to program for survivle money instead of serve fries. Please please tell me. I am desparate. I even tried to pass off as an H-1B, I swear to God, but they only wanted "sales experts" from the US.
When all you people bitching about your jobs finally burn out.....someone like me will be there to take the job and excel at it. So...go ahead and quit...get out of the field and sell ice cream or something (hey open a coffee chain...I hear they are going places) so I can go back to earning a decent wage and doing a decent day's worth of work.
You keep going until you die..."Me".
Productivitity is what means we can get more gadgets every year. The printing press made books affordable to the masses. Interchangable parts and the assembly line is what led to our modern world of cheap plentiful non-handcrafted goods.
Productivity is how much output we can produce per hour, as an aggregate. Now, the more we produce per hour, the more we can consume per hour of work. So, 10% more productivity accross the board means that my paycheck can buy 10% more goodies.
If GDP is a measure of the material wealth of a civilization, then it can only increase in one of two ways: More people working, or higher productivity.
With increasing productivity, EVERYONE wins.
A bit off-topic, but in my case, being laid off was certainly a much better opportunity than if I had stayed...
I got a nice redundancy packet, letting me enjoy a year or so without having to work, giving me plenty of time to work on launching my company, and probably soon selling my services to my old company at four times the salary rate, because nobody else knows how to do this job!
I pity those who have to stay and endure the stress of work overload and job uncertainty.
Anyone who goes back to work after half their co-workers get laid off is a coward. Don't pick up the slack for the people who are gone. In fact, don't even do your own work anymore. It's time to start screwing the shareholders instead of the workers. Nobody owes anybody a profit.
The English word for cupbaoard is CUP+BOARD, but that does not mean I will always find a cup in there.
No
Fewer Employees + Same Pay + More Work Per Employee = Unhappy Employees
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
Karoshi: Death from Overwork
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
blood soaked murderer with a temper
wtg
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Not always. For example, my high school cheated on 'rank in class', reporting a class rank that was misleading, if not entirely dishonest. My graduating class was just shy of 400 students, but the lowest ranked kid was ranked as "325/400".
Class rankings were calculated on a big old mainframe (IBM MUSIC/SP), which would print out your class rank on your report card each quarter, and on the official transcript provided to universities with your application.
The "trick" was, the administrators felt it was unfair that if you had a grade average of 103.1 (due to honors, AP, etc 'bonus' points), at the start of the senior year and were ranked #3, and #4 and #5 improved their grades and at the end of the first quarter of senior year all three of you had a 103.1 average, then they would not lower your ranking, they would rank all three of you at #3. Ditto for everybody else down the line.
The didn't correct for these when reporting "top X percent of graduating class", so the "top 25%" of students made up closer to 40% of the graduating class...
End result, Nearly seventy percent of my graduating class came from the top half of the class.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Been there, done that and pawned the T-shirt.
My company has laid off thousands in the last couple of years. Nobody was touched at my location, though several people just quit(with 2 minute notice) because they were tired of the bullshit. One of my co-workers left to go work for Lowes.. he took a pay cut but doesn't have to deal with bs anymore. As far as productivity goes, it has plummeted big time which is due to any lack of morale. There has been no layoffs at my location, but we're very understaffed due to alot of people leaving during the tech boom of 2000, these people were never replaced. Also quite a few workers were migrated to another directors office so he would have higher headcount. So, we have about1/4 to 1/5 of the staff we used to have and the same amount of workload. Are we stepping up and being more productive? Not at all, I used to bust my butt putting in 16+ hours day in the eary 90's, not now, I'm out the door when my 8 hours are up. Things are getting neglected, big mistakes take place. Some big fuckups had to happen and now some small things are changing to boost morale, like extra vacation days and small perks in the breakroom that make the day go quicker(but this was stuff we used to have anyway which was taken away) So, yeah, I'm now responsible for alot more systems, but I can't be as thorough as I used to be, so basically, if it ain't broke, don't break it.
I got a few bones to pick with westerner's portraits of chinese characters:
1. The characters are BADLY written. It looks like written by a four year old who got hold of a pen brush. I know it doesn't matter to you dumb Americans, but do you like to see mispelled english quotations in foreign publications?
2. "danger opportunity" in Chinese is not "symbols", it is called "words". Would it be okay if I say the American "symbol" for ground beef + bread is called "hamburger" ? sounds wierd huh? It's your language, use it correctly.
Okay, get that off my chest.
--- You make things foolproof, and they'll find you a damn fool.
In nature, sometimes a forest fire actually makes for a better forest once it grows back.
At work, layoffs give the company the opportunity to rid themselves of people who are slow, in pissy moods all the time, uncooperative, and incompetent.
The people who eventually replace those let go are told what the new rules are and they don't have any preconceived notions of "the good times" before the new boss arrived, etc..
I hate the thought of layoffs, but sometimes I think that companies don't trim the fat often enough so it drags the company down because of lost productivity.
It sounds like the poster thinks job cuts do wonders for productivity. I started working at my current company as one of four in-house Techs. Flash forward three years and now I'm the manager of a one person in-house repair department. While it may appear that business is good, the bottom line is: less capacity means less billable labor done. One person also means repair backlogs prevent anything like proper QA, repair tracking and process improvement. Being short staffed gives eager employees a chance to shine.. and also burn out.
The point here is, if there is enough work they will hire more people to do it. They just had no idea how much work needed to be done, nor how to apportion it, and got rid of enough people to force a proper reorganization. When you come up with too much and tell them, they should get someone to help. If they don't, tell us, and we'll short the shit out of their stock, because they're too dumb to run a business.
What a guy! I am impressed with your logic and human decency!
Cheers,
e.
Therefore, to raise the number of employees, those of us who are still working (those who aren't goofing off already!) should slow down, take longer breaks, go home ON TIME, etc, and then more employees will be required, after the productivity gets really low, n'est-ce pas?
Please have respect for people with different abilities, especially children.
I find it curious that you aren't allowed to criticize something unless you have a substitute readily available. Saying "this sucks (and here's why), but I don't really know how to improve/replace it" is somehow wrong.
Well, actually, it isn't. It's perfectly okay to point out the flaws in someone's argument or theory. It is not up to the critic to make a better theory, it is up to those who claim they have all the answers to defend their supposed Omniscience. And let's face it: traditional Western economics is supposed to be the best possible solution to all the world's problems.
I guess pointing out how that is false makes one pretty unpopular with the masses that have invested in it. Those of us with less to lose should keep on hammering the point home. Screw the orthodoxy.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
In the article, this process is called a speed-up by the AFL-CIO, because it is more physically grueling for blue collar workers. For white collar workers, it is more mentally straining, as the people from this article say.
As the article said, for the companies things are good right now and getting better. But basically they are shafting workers who if things were in equilibrium would have those people back doing the workloads they had to pickup, or would be getting paid more. Neither is happening.
A lot of the posts here show a lot of economic ignorance. This works against all IT workers. IT wages dropped for the first time in a decade a few months ago, yet many people talk about how they're happy this is happening. This would only make sense if they're not doing IT but are an owner, or perhaps in upper management.
Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and so forth give millions a year to the ITAA to spin IT economic news in their manner as well as lobbying Congress. In terms of associations for IT people who figure out what's in our interest, most of the organizations are nascent - the Programmers Guild, CESO, Washtech etc. (not IEEE-USA which is a disaster). Our wages are being hurt due to not enough people discussing how financial matters affect our profession with each other, and so forth. This can be done in the aforementioned organizations, on mailing lists and on usenet. I have a web site that discusses some of this.
...and out of towners often pronounce it in the spanish "boh-Ka ra-Tahn", but it's actually pronounced "Book-a Rah-tone" and it doesn't mean mouth of the rat (other than literally)
It doesn't mean "mouth of the rat" literally or figuratively, it means mouth of the MOUSE.
And the out-of-towners are pronouncing it (historically) correctly, even if the in-towners would like to pretend it's a bit more tony than it really is.
(I traipsed through Florida last year, from Jupiter to Miami, and liked Palm Beach and Boca Raton. But the posturing! Ay!)
From this page: Boca Raton (Florida): from "boca de ratónes," a Spanish term applied to nearby inlets. It translates as "mouth of the mouse" (not "rat," which is "rata") and may refer to the jagged rocks at these inlets. It has also been suggested that "ratónes" was a term used for the pirates who might hide in such a place.
I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there. -- Richard Feynman
There is power in the word "no" -- and we, particularly we here in America where 'organized labor' has become a dirty word, have lost sight of it.
...who would be more wealthy if she said 'no' less often, but much less happy...
"No" as in "No, this schedule is unreasonable and I will not give up my vacation to meet these arbitrary, marketing department-driven deadlings."
"No" as in "No, I'm not available to work all weekend, just because the Quality Assurance group found all these bugs and they now need to be documented. I promised my daughter I'd see her in her first soccer game and that's a promise I mean to keep."
"No" as in "No, I've given you late evenings four nights already this week, the world is not going to fall apart if I go home ON TIME this Friday, because my spouse has prepared a lovely anniversary dinner and he'll be mighty pissed if I miss it... again!"
I'm serious. This 'higher productivity' bullshit has come at the cost of our lives and what's worse, we continue to pretend to think that sacrificing our lives for the almighty spreadsheet somehow will entitle us to the life of the wannabe dot-com neuveau riche.
It's rubbish. The whole game was rigged from the start, except perhaps for a few lucky 'lottery ticket' winners -- most of whom are either now broke (again) or have sold their souls to Beelzebub (aka the Almighty Dollar).
Technowitch
Michael, ... until we have weakened our markets and induced recession.
The alternative to all this layoff and downsizing mishigas is TIMEsizing - trimming hours for everyone instead of jobs for a few, and a few more, and
Check out our website on this strategy -
http://www.Timesizing.com
Phil Hyde
webmaster
I am reminded of one company that laid off all the loading dock workers to save money. So they had >60k/year design engineers unloading trucks.
Productivity is increased by decreasing the overhead. That means fewer managers and more productive workers.
In 1990, major US companies averaged 5 management personnel for each productive worker. When did the organizational pyramid invert?
NRRPT/RCT
Watch the "ignorant American" stuff, Yang. Only someone who was almost entirely ignorant of Japanese would claim that "hon" meant notebook in Japanese. My guess is that you speak Chinese, and you are assuming that since "benzi" is notebook in Chinese, then "hon" must be notebook in Japanese.
Ironic that you would make such a statement then spout off about ignorant Americans. Perhaps you should be more concerned about ignorant ethnic Chinese lecturing fluent Japanese-speaking Americans about Japanese.
The chinese word for crisis is made up of two characters, wei1+ji1.
Now, wei1 means danger, and ji1 does mean opportunity, but in chinese that does not necessarily have positive connotations, it simply means there is a chance that something may occur. It could be better translated as occassion.
ji1hui4 is the TRUE word for opportunity, and it could be translated literally as:
ji1=opportunity(occasion) + hui4=can/to be possible/to meet ==>an opportunity or occasion to meet
to it as not as cut and dried as many motivational speakers would make it out to be.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
It's simply unbelievable how much energy and creativity people have
invested into creating contradictory, bogus and stupid licenses...
--- Sven Rudolph about licences in debian/non-free.
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