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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?"
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)
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 -----------------------------------
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 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???
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!
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
Funny, last month my company was looking like it was going to go Tits Up and I started floating my resume. Within two weeks I had my pick of four offers. What downturn? What recession?
For example, a quick peek at the Pittsburgh Tech Council Website shows that since 11/1/2002 there have been 104 IS jobs posted that are still open.
Geekfinder shows 744 positions open in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 434 in Maryland, 799 in Virginia, 936 in New Jersey, and 1322 in New York. So within 4 hours of here, I have over 4300 jobs to search through. Not to mention the local listings which don't make it to Dice.com, and even openings that never make it to the papers but you find out about through friends and contacts. If you can't find a job right now, you're just not looking hard enough. Nuff said. Have a dog biscuit and quite your bitching.
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
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 &
I stated: "Whips + Threat of Impending Pain = Greater Productivity."
How in the *heck* was my comment moderated as a *troll*? Sure, it was terse and sarcastic, but my point was completely on-target.
I will "read between the lines" of my comment for anyone who saw a pointless troll in my comment.
Productivity can very easily be increased by applying a threat of negative consequences for lack of productivity increases. "Work harder or I kill you" will usually acheive a productivity increase. Productivity gains by negative consequence threats are hardly news, yet the story linked above makes this sound like it *is* news.
I have survived many layoff cycles, and have had the work of up to 5 "former" employees delegated to me. Did I do all of their work? Yup. At the cost of me working frantic 16 hour days for months on end, under the fear that if I didn't complete their work, I would be the next to be laid off. To report that my productivity increased while at the same time neglecting to list the true costs of my productivity increase (my personal life suffered so much that I quit, leaving all of my work to be done by several undertrained co-workers who soon quit after I did) is to tell only 1/2 the story, and makes a net loss situation sound like a net gain in terms of productivity.
Right. No, your other right. No, the other other right.
"Go look at how much post-doctorate researchers make, and you tell me how a $70K salary is justified."
Um, I'm looking forward to the grad school existence. There's much more to it than salary. For one thing, the typical $30,000/year you'd be giving the university, is waived. For another thing, when you need the time to do academic work, take courses, field research, etc., there won't be a pinhead boss who fails to understand the importance of you doing all that "school stuff".
All in all, it's not so bad making $40k as a postdoc, if you pick up all the perks. Especially in a recession, where you would not have a job anyway!
There seems to be a widespread notion that school is some necessary evil, a stepping stone to something else. Rarely does anyone reflect to me the understanding that education is not something that one can ever "be done with."
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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.
--
Evan "Not a native speaker, but talked to several who never thought of it"
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
And management has to realize that sometimes (and very often with sysadminning), the guy spending 90% of his day dicking around is the most productive guy they have!
A "lazy" sysadmin who spends 90% of his day with his feet up on the desk while alternating between Bugtraq, Slashdot, and a certain USENET newsgroup for monks, is probably doing a vastly better job than a "busy" one who's running around the office with six pagers all beeping at once.
The word "therapist" means someone who goes into your mind, and is made up of the two words "the rapist", but that doesn't have a bearing on the classical meaning of the word, even though anti-psycologist speakers will hammer that breakdown in their writings and speaches. It even has a very poetic feel to it - a therapist goes into very personal aspects of your life if you want them to or not. They are the rapist of your mind.
That doesn't mean that's where the word came from or even that it was a common observation about the word until modern times.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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
My employer may have to lay off a lot of employees in the next few months. Personally, if I get laid off again, I'm acting on the assumption that programming work (in the Portland area) will be VERY hard for me to find. I'm teaching myself Visual Basic and C#, getting certifications (some people actually look for them .. I can't afford to get overlooked by these people), and looking for opportunities to work menial type jobs so I can get insurance until the "real job" comes along. Or until I start my own business. Or until I win the lottery.
Finding God in a Dog
My company, meanwhile, has repeatedly shown that when you make your employees your top priority, your customers and your shareholders end up being extremely happy too.
:9
It's not that the cycle is vicious, it's that most executives apparently combine the rapacity of a shark with the intellect of a teletubby.
Mmm... sharkotubby...
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
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
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