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End Of Days Compensation Packages?
Waiting for the Axe to Fall asks: "I work for a larger webhosting company that has plans to consolidate one of its west coast data centers with an east coast location which they already have in place. Forget that this is a bad idea in terms of geographical redundancy--it is going to happen. The company did inform all west coast employees about the move, roughly a year in advance. This was done Im sure to ease the shock and fear of loosing ones job. This affects a small group (8-9) of employees, all of whom are tied up in operations and the data center specifically. If you were in this situation (as one of the employees), what would you require/want/wish for in this retention plan? The benefits of staying with the company, until the end, must out weight the risk of being jobless; or is this not the path you would choose? Would you leave as soon as the announcement was made?"
"As employees, the group decided to go to management and request a 'retention plan' of sorts. This is a contract that outlines specific benefits to stay with the company through the move, and help getting the systems across the country without service interruption. The support of these few is a requirement, due to the vast array of legacy and non standard systems. The job could otherwise be done with consultants, however going this route would take substantially longer, and would be at a much greater cost to the company. So, it is truly in their best interests to have the staff that has managed these systems for the past 5-8 years stick it out."
Because if your resume is as grammatically flawed as your post then you're going to be serving me fries w/ my Big Mac.
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risk of being jobless when you come out of it. If you start looking right away then you will have a year to find a position, but of course you can't tell your future employer that you will be available in a year, they will just move on to the next person. So I would ask for at least 2-3 months pay as severance, and health insurance for at least 6 months after you finish the job. That would give you really 6 months to find a job(since you can start looking about 3 months before your start date) and who knows, maybe you could land a job right away and basically get an extra 3 months salary.
Monstar L
that your "End of Days Compensation Package" is largely determined by your religious beliefs, your compliance to the requirements of those beliefs, and whether or not those religious beliefs are actually backed up by a real God/gods/force/FSM/great nothingness/etc. But I guess you were just talking about losing your job.
Would that be "Operate a video camera in the worst possible imaginable way" or "try (badly) to film a self-absorbed glory hunting SOB acting like a total jackass"?
Thats' one of the /. editors job's. Alongs with re-posting stories ad nausesm, there also their two ensure that grammer (and upon occasion speling) is held in compleat contempt.
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
Under the COBRA laws, you can continue your health care under your employer's group plan by covering the premiums yourself - that is, you have the right to pick up your employers portion of the bill, so that you can have continuing coverage.
I'd suggest that you get them to cover their end of things for a long period after the end, along with other benefits, in addition to whatever else you want. It may ease your transition somewhat.
Also, a personal appeal to your manager may be in order for help lining up jobs. Be polite and helpful, no matter what you decide, because they feel obligated to help, and you don't want to be the last one in line.
Standard Severance - 4 weeks + 1 week/year of service, sometimes capped at 5 years of service. (This varies. Well placed executives may get years of severance, and store clerks may get none)
A "Stay to the Bitter End" Bonus - Approximately an additional 4 weeks of salary or $10,000 for those who stay until the very last day they are needed.
Immediate release from all restrictions in your employee agreement with regards to working for competitors.
Verification that the conditions of your termination will allow you to collect unemployement.
Find a new job now. Tell the hiring managers that your bonuses will keep you at your current position until the closing date. Don't fret about taking an hour here or there to interview; it's expected. Besides, they're already going to let you go soon. They need you and they're not going to fire you. It's time for you to start thinking about greener pastures.
Later, if they hire you back (and it may happen), offer to do so for a 25% raise, but settle for no less than 10%. If you don't have a new job, don't let them know about it. Your new "consulting" position prevents you from speaking about it.
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
If the employees had to go to management to draft this retention plan - then management doesn't care about them in the first place.
This is a calculated slash and consolidate move - it's obvious they're trying to fatten the bottom line. No blame there. But you got to take care of yourself - look for another job now... and see if you can time it with the end of your current.
I was able to adjust my start date on a new job so I could finish up a major project in my old job and leave it in good hands. I didn't want to fark my old employeer, nor the good people I worked with, just because I decided the owner was a tool.
The company I work with now thought that it was commendable and appreciated the effort. Probably in hopes I do the same for them given I would be moving on down the road.
Short of it - find work for you, not work for now.
Regardless of the comp package, start networking the hell out of your soon-to-ex coworkers. Get names, phone-numbers, be the keeper of the list, organize pub-nights and get-togethers. When they find work elsewhere (or even start their own business) who are they going to remember and call? You, the organizing gatekeeper that you'll be positioned to be. In these situations, social schmooze power wins.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
They're telling you a year in advance- thats plenty of time to find a new job. They're doing the right thing, don't fuck them over by going in and saying give us this or we leave.
HP recently had severance that I took advantage of. 2 months +2 weeks per year of service, 5 months minimum 14 month maximum. I thought that was quite fair.
As for leaving- if they offer you severance, I'd stay until the end date, but start looking for a job before it ends. If they don't, look immediately. Also, if they offer severance, take a vacation between jobs. Its well worth it.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Estimate how long it will take you to find another job. If you're the optimistic type, double it to get to a real number. Have them cover the difference between your salary and unemployment for that length of time. Have them continue to cover your medical insurance for that length of time. Hopefully you've got other severance coming your way too... just remember that certain severance packages require them to let you go.
Otherwise, look for another job today. They're laying you off, man. There is no fanfare, they're not crying a river. You're not keeping the red stapler. The company's life will go on. Mainstream corporations, even moderate sized ones, can be quite soul less.
On the other hand, if you stick around, you can pick up a whole lot of supplies. Need about a dozen monitors?
The ______ Agenda
Let me describe what happens when you stick around in a doomed office/company/branch/whatever. Morale gets low, standards of professionalism relax. No one will expect anything from you except to show up, maybe occasionally answer a question or reboot a failing host. You'll start coming to work in sweatpants, playing solitaire all day long, taking two hour lunches. You dream up ways to spend your severance package.
Sounds like a lot of IT workers' dream job, right? But the general attitude is not a good one. You can forget about being motivated to find a new job. A couple of months of coming in to play solitaire, and you're barely motivated to get up to take the two hour lunch. The most common topics of conversation are how many days are left and wouldn't it be nice to be the one guy that gets to keep his job. No new projects to add to your resume. If you're lucky, you get to list "decommissioning" as something you did at this job. What an accomplishment. It takes five thoughtless seconds to power down a server running the product of ten years' loving work. If that's what you want out of your final months with your employer, then read no further.
But if you want to use this time postively, here's my advice. Get your resume together and start interviewing ASAP. See if you can get your current employer to give you a paper promotion now - it may help you get a foot in the door at other firms to have a more important-sounding title. Tell any company that makes you an offer about the severance package, to see if they'll match it, or at least give you something as a signing bonus. Even if you don't get the bonus, if you like the new place, go. Now. If the prospects outside look slim, talk to the dreaded East Coast management team. Find out if there are any opportunities for you to go out there. If nothing else, showing initiative in that way may get them to throw you some additional work, or a leadership role in the decommissioning. The key is to stay motivated, stay focused. Delete the games from your PC. If there are people in your group who are going to stay with the company, talk to them, find out what new projects are going on, if there's anything you can do to help.
Above all, don't let yourself be fooled into thinking that because you're on the chopping block, you're not worth anything. That's what all those negative behaviors I mentioned before are all about. "They think I suck, they don't expect anything out of me, so I'm going to suck, and I'm not going to do anything." If you get trapped into that cycle, it may take longer for you to recover than your severance package can carry you. Just don't fall into the trap.
So, to sum up, do what you need to do to stay motivated and enthusiastic. If decommissioning projects are what you love, stay, and be happy about it. Enjoy your severance. But if you need to have new and engaging projects to work on, I would advise you to get out as soon as you possibly can, severance or not.
Irony: 1a. The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning. b. An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning. c. A literary style employing such contrasts for humorous or rhetorical effect. See synonyms at wit1. 2a. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs: "Hyde noted the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she most hated" (Richard Kain). b. An occurrence, result, or circumstance notable for such incongruity. See Usage Note at ironic. 3. Dramatic irony. 4. Socratic irony.
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
Only one company I have worked for gave us a compensation package. They gave us 6 months notice and 3 months severance if we stayed through the last day. They also encouraged us to use company time to look for a new job. Not only did this give us the impression that they were not just hosing us, but it also helped ease the income-shock associated with the extremely unpredictable duration of unemployment. Every single employee (about 12) stayed until the last day.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
Unless you know for a fact that you are in an area with a skills shortage, never stay to the end. It will always say on your CV "lacked the imagination and skills to do something else", and if a future employer is looking for people with a highly developed sense of loyalty - is that really your kind of employer?
Confession - I have only once failed to jump ship BEFORE the announcement, and I kicked myself for months afterwards because in truth I had known that the writing was on the wall. Wherever you work, you should try and build up the necessary internal networking to get tipped off before anything affecting you is decided. And when someone you trust tells you something, listen. VPs and managers have to preserve confidentiality, but there are ways, and a lot of them are uncomfortable as individuals about what they have to do.
Oh, and another gratuitous piece of advice that will be ignored. One of the smartest things you can do when younger is not to spend up to your income, and certainly not get into debt if you can avoid it. When layoffs and closures happen, you have just got so much more slack than the people who are in debt and desperate, and this will come over at interviews. As a potential employer, would you hire the guy who is clearly in deep shit and desperate, or the one who is clearly in control and managing? Depends on the company, but which kind of company would you want to work for?
Pining for the fjords
... I've been in this boat, I'd suggest these things if you're serious about keeping the employees until the job is done:
1.) Give them a pay raise for their remaining time - This will help ensure they won't randomly bail for a higher paying job.
2.) Pay out all remaining sickdays, vacation days they have left at end of period at 1.5x normal rate. - This gives them a reason to *NOT* use their vacation/sickdays.
3.) Severance bonus equal to 3 months of pay. - This gives them a "good" ammount of time to look for another job without having to take something that will cut them off from working for you.
4.) Buy them on the job lunch, dinner on a set day reguarly. - It's a good moral booster for people so they know the company cares and is trying.
5.) Give them written recommendations for their next job that is *GLOWING*. - Once the job is done, write a custom, glowing review of them so it's easier for them to get their next job... if anyone calls, tell them how it was, that these guys were the best of the best and stuck it out till the dead last for the benefit of the company and customer and how much you appreciated their dedication.
6.) If possible offer them the ability to move to the new datacenter in a similar or upgraded compacity, with paid move and assistance finding a home/appartment.
Is this a cheap route? No. If you're serious though this is the *right* route. I've had pretty much exactly this shy the offer to move (it was a department closure, we were redundant after a buyout and they were already over staffed.) Everyone of us worked till last day, all of us moved on to better paying jobs, and the all of the things that were done made this possible. Everyone was sad about leaving, it was alot of fun the last few months, even though there was a melloncoly overtone.
Shadus
Note: I'm speaking from the perspective of a developer experienced on both coasts.
I'm a J2EE dev who moved from Seattle to Florida for family reasons.
At first I was a little worried about work since Florida isn't really known for IT. Technologically, it was like going backwards in time about 10 years.
Once my resume hit the market, I got non-stop calls from headhunters. Most of the jobs here are for banks, insurance, and DoD. So, now I'm getting double my previous salary, full (better) benefits, and a much lower cost of living. I'm renting a large lake front house for about the same as my previous apartment.
But, like all things, there is a down side.
Rednecks, everywhere
Good luck finding a bookstore (don't these people read?)
I used to be the dev with upper-middle talent, now I'm the top talent
Mass transit sucks. I used to read while commuting, now that time is lost driving
Everything is a long drive
If you are a developer, and you are willing to move east, ask your company for a 20% raise and moving expenses. Also, update your resume and put it on the market.
Here is what is happening. Your comapany wants to move you because it will save them money. They are planning on canning you after completion. It won't happen. Good talent is so rare on the east coast that you'll be able to stay comfortably.
An example of how hard it is to find good devs here:
My company recently brought in a new girl for "front-end" work. She didn't know HTML (not even the basics), she didn't know how to program in "any" language. I sent her to do an online tutorial, and said to just use notepad and the browser. She came back with a problem dragging the file to the browser window. She was trying to drag "notepad" into the browser. This, for $45/hour ?!?! She managed to last a month before getting moved out. I last heard that she's working as a business analyst at an insurance company.
Being employed on the east coast is not an issue. Whether or not you want to live and work here is.
This is just the opinion of a developer.
IT janitors, whoops, I mean system admins, program managers, etc... YMMV
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
In the end everyone is dead. So far living to 100 is rare, and there are no verified cases of anyone living to 150. (Your religion may list some who have in the past, and other rumors exists). It is unlikely that medical science will make your immortal in your lifetime. You can freeze your body, but why would the next generation unfreeze your body and restore you to life - if they even can?
So you need to keep perspective. Find the right religion, and serve it correctly (assuming one exists), and can end up with a better hearafter. Otherwise you are stuck (depending on the answer to the religious question how you are stuck varies). So use the time you have wisely. Work enough to live, but don't let work rule your life. Find what is more important, and live that.