Executing a Mass Departmental Exodus in the Workplace?

rerunn asks: "The recent story about the consultants from JBOSS walking out couldn't have had better timing. I'll save the drama and cut to the scenario: You and a few close co-workers make up the core grunts of 'the department'. The company relies heavily on your department for many services, some of which, other departments cannot provide. You like your job, it provides great satisfaction. Suddenly, the company realizes its in deep financial shit, and starts making cut backs. This impacts the department. You suddenly find yourself working 50-60 hour weeks, put on call with no compensation, given unreasonable amounts of work and generally treated like dirt. You get the feeling that the company is just going to take advantage of you no matter how and what happens. You get together with the rest of the department for a 'fsck this company' meeting and decide to walk out. Have you ever done this?? (We are so close!) What was the outcome?"

Comments

Re:Result

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlikely. Collecting unemployment usually requires leaving work through no fault of your own. Walking off just to prove a point or to be pissy won't cut it.

yeah, I've done this

[Triple Helix]

I came from a company that did exactly this sort of thing. I worked for a software shop that created enterprise software on a contract basis. Everybody worked 50 or 60 hours per week, and without fail every Friday afternoon the CEO would come into the office at 4:30 or 5:00 and give everybody some crazy new project due on Monday morning. In addition, he'd make all the developers come into the office on Sunday for a company meeting to discuss the progress of the new assignments. It was a complete mess.

So anyway, my project manager, two other developers and I got sick of this and decided to start a company of our own. This was back in 1998. We got some funding and made a go at it. Not two days after we quit and started up the new company did we all get slapped with a lawsuit from the previous employer. The lawsuit alleges that we stole trade secrets from the previous employer, which was completely baseless. But, it accomplished the goal of putting a huge burden on us while we were just starting out.

Fast forward to 2003. We were recently forced into chapter 7 bankruptcy, partly due to the legal fees associated with the lawsuit, but also due to the fact that my previous project manager (who was the president at the new company) was one of the worst businessmen on this planet, despite being a great project manager. The legal system is slower than molasses - we still aren't scheduled to go to trial until July of this year - nearly five years after the lawsuit was first filed! There have been some depositions, hearings, rulings, and appeals along the way, but man has this thing dragged out! Needless to say there's not any money for them to win anyway due to the bankruptcy.

Overall, walking out and starting a new company was the greatest business decision I ever made in my life. I'm getting all sorts of offers to do contract work on the side, plus one of our customers at the new place hired me with a six-figure wage plus great benefits, and actually allowed me to write a no-compete into the employment contract. In addition, they have picked up an attorney for me and agreed to pay my legal fees in the lawsuit.

If I could go back, I'd still say that the lean years at the new company were all worth it. My only regret was not doing it sooner - I'm already 24 years old and I'm not going to live forever.

Wait a minute...

[Sounder40]

I didn't hear you say anything about talking to your management. If your immediate supervisor/manager is unresponsive/ineffective, then you have the right to go up the chain until you get heard.

Most companies want to know when their employees are unhappy. Most companies will do something about thier unhappy employees because they realize that unhappy employees are unproductive.

You are the company. Be a team player. Don't go into a meeting with a manager/director/SVP/etc. making demands; help solve the problem by proposing a solution. You may have already tried some of this. That doesn't mean that you can't try again. If no one is responsive, then it may be time to move on.

But beware... The market is not good right now, and new employers will be less than enthusiastic about hiring someone who walked out on their last employer.

Good luck.

Welcome to America!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Also, there have been a couple of lawsuits where people have sued for unpaid over time... a class action suite between Walgreens & their pharmacists(sp) comes to mind. Shoveling a ton of work on you because you're "salary", "a professional", or "management" is illegal, and if you work cannot reasonably be done in ~40 hrs/ week you are supposed to be compensated for overtime put in. "

I don't know about Walgreens, but Walmart has a long history of pulling crap like that.

Re:What's really important for you?

[SiChemist]

Perhaps you ought to think about how lucky you are to even HAVE a job right now

It's precisely that attitude that perpetuates the perception a lot of bosses (and governments, for that matter) have that it's OK to treat staff as consumables.

You're absolutely right. My previous employer often stated that an employee should be grateful to be employed and should be willing to do him personal favors and work overtime. What a load of crap!

The employer pays for services rendered; the employee supplies those services. No sane business expects to get services from other businesses for free, so why do they expect that from their employees?

Been there, done that. Twice.

[khendron]

I've been there and done that twice in my career. The circumstances were slightly different. The companies were not in deep doo-doo, but there was a well defined lack of respect towards the development team/department.

In neither case was the mass exodus (ME) planned, in the sitting around and plotting sense. It just happened. In both cases, the ME was preceded by a spontaneous, manager-led, group bitch session, where all the disgruntled employees got together and described what was unsatisfactory about their jobs. The complaints were summarized and sent up the ladder. If your place of employment has reached the spontaneous bitch session stage, expect a ME to follow.

Here are some interesting results from the MEs I have experienced.

• In both cases, I found immediate re-employment.
• In the first ME (in which a full one-quarter of the company's employees jumped ship), a number of the ex-employees (myself not included) formed their own competing company, and promptly got sued by the old employer. Today, almost a decade later, the case is still before the courts. I expect the eventual loser will be forced out of business.
• Stupid legal actions aside (see previous point), in neither case was the company that was a victim of the ME mortally wounded. Each has recovered nicely.
• In the first ME, many employees in the affected department that showed loyalty and did not quit were fired within a year.
• In the second ME, many employees in the affected department that showed loyalty and did not quit were offered enormous raises.
• I do not regret leaving either company.
• If you leave a company in an ME, expect to never be welcome back to that company as an employee ever again. This can have unforseen side-effects. In the second ME there was an employee who left the company close to the same time who were not really part of the ME. However he was *perceived* to be part of the ME, and when he tried to return to the company a couple of years later he was told he was not welcome.

Re:Result

[lophophore]

Better read the Fair Labor Standards Act before you decide to sue.

I.T. Professionals are specifically exempted from the Fair Labor Standards Act.

that's not quite true.

[No-op]

Specific sorts of professionals are exempt, and management is exempt. There's a special stipulation with regards to computer professionals, but it mandates that you must either be in management, or making more than $27.63 an hour (from the last time I looked at the regs).

So, if you're making in excess of $57k/year, and the majority of your work is self directed (or you are in management) then you're somewhat screwed.

State labor laws are also important here- State law cannot weaken the federal law ( if your employer falls under it) but it can make it stronger with more requirements. Check with your State wages and dues/labor/workforce department. They will also come in and investigate if you so desire, and can mandate that employers pay up to 2 years of back wages if they are found to have you wrongfully exempted.

have fun. it's never easy.

Re:that's not quite true.

[Matrix272]

Technically (and you WILL NEED to get technical), IT professionals with salaries are exempt. The $27.63 per hour only comes into effect if the person is paid hourly. HOWEVER, there's still hope. The company you work for must have employees engaged in commerce (sale of goods or services) and had gross sales volume of over $500,000 in order for the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to apply.

Second, your primary duty (assuming you're an IT person), must be:

The application of systems analysis techniques and procedures, including consulting with users, to determine hardware, software, or system functional specifications)

The design, development, documentation, analysis, creating, testing, or modification of computer systems or programs, including prototypes, based on and related to user or system design specifications.

The design, documentation, testing, creating, or modification of computer programs related to machine operating systems.

A combination of duties described above.

For those of you who are wondering, that basically means System Analysts, Software Engineer, or Programmer. It does NOT include telephone technical support or a "senior network administrator / project manager (see this article on pages 4 and 9... sorry, no direct link to the opinion letter, although if you get a copy of it, let me know).

To fit the Computer Exemption, secondary duties can NOT take up more than 20% (or 40% for "service establishments") of your time. For the Management Exemption, you must supervise at least 2 employees, have the authority to hire or fire people (or make recommendations that carry weight), and not spend more than 20% or 40% (see above) of your time on secondary duties.


I was burned by my last employer, and I'm looking to get him back... so I've done lots of homework about this kind of thing. If you're interested in any of the documents I have, or have anything to offer, my e-mail address is netadm2000@hotmail.com.

Don't flee - work properly: priorize, escalate

[yabHuj]

Been there, didn't do that.

While reducing staff projects upon projects were piled at a big5 company I worked for. At one point we had to say "Stop".

Did not walk out.

We compiled a list of ToDo's, went to our superior (okay, our superior's superior) and told him to give all these Priority-A-1-Alpha projects unique numbers. He has the big picture - or is at least paid to make decisions. So he decides. Not us.

He tried to argue (you must know - you're the techies), even actually tried to walk away. We said: okay, then we'll assume you hand us a blanko cheque okay to priorize. We'll then have this (interesting, but only moderately urgent) project with top priority (which still was sensible/okay but not the most urgent one) and continue down the list after finnishing.

No! He cried. Other projects...! We handed him the list again: Here. Numbers. Nonrepeating. You decide - or we have to. You know our suggestion. Decision still is your responsibility (i.e. your neck). So he told uns a preliminary No.1 - and followed up with a clean priority list.

With this we were able to work without overtime. Just worked 40(+epsilon) hours a week, and had priorities to fend off requests for "just a bit more" work (More work on your project? Then talk about priorities with Mr.X).

As for "a bit more overtime" - overtime and crunch mode only works for very limited ammounts of time (common knowledge is max. 2 weeks). After that stress-induced errors and illness have a very offsetting effect. If you're more stress-resistant that the remainder of your team, just fall back to the average to take speed and pressure out of the system. Noone can prove wether you really cannot find the one proper file among all the garbage crunch-mode-produced yestarday. It's very hard to differenciate between real symptomes of stress-induced illness or faked ones.

It even is a great opportunity to you, your team and even the company to introduce a task delegation and priorizing system - or other ones to steer projects and processes (e.g. change control procedures). Just to make sure, the really important business cases are handled properly and quality-assured, of course... ;-)

Escalation:

If the problem is your direct superior (S1), walk to his superior (S2). Or to his superior's superior (S3). If he understands the problem - fine. If not, start bouncing the problems back to them. They have to decide on priorities: "Which one - A or B - decide NOW!" - where the NOW is important as the project is important and must be complete NOW (so it's not your NOW, but his or the customer's one). You even can use it to jump levels (beyond/around S1 to S2) - simply have your colleague do the same talk with S1 simultaneously - so you can't reach him for decision and so you went to S2 because of the project's utter importance. If the answers contradict, go back to S2+S1 and tell that S1 (or S2) just ordered you otherwise (sorry for the overlap - it's just due to the hectic...), and you want a confirmation.

Simply bounce the pressure back. They have to slice the work into managable chunks - that's what managers are for. Just bounce it back for re-assignment. Because you want to see the project done, too (of course) and see THIS (chunk) will not be working (or contradicting with other stuff).

So get priorization and escalate, i.e. bounce irresponsible pressure, untaken responsibilities and not done decisions back to from where they come and where they belong. All for the sake of professional work and successful projects, of course (*NO* irony here).

This can even enhance your own position, especially if you give your superiors good (priority) suggestions and decision reationales. And suddenly you're not only programmer or admin, but on the track to project manager...

Qapla'!

Re:Result

[SlideGuitar]

Sure, but I left my job when it got bad, sold a house in LA, moved to a cheaper part of the country and I could live off the house proceeds for a couple of years without worry and still buy another house....

I'm looking for work, but I'm not worried, and dear God in heaven, I'm so glad I left the job from hell... the only question is "why did I stay so long?"

Now my motto, and I really believe it, is "do what you love and the money will follow..." to which I add, "live where you love living... and life will follow." Why live in an industrial hell hole when you can just move to your idea of the most beautiful part of the country and work out the trivial stuff like how exactly you make a living once you get there?

Most people make a living in most places, after all.

That's my theory... but I haven't got a job yet, and in the meantime I have those house proceeds to live off of... :-)