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Radio Shack E-Fires 400 Workers
KingSkippus writes "You've got mail! ...and no job! The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting that RadioShack has notified 400 workers by e-mail that they are being laid off. The e-mails state, 'The work force reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated.' Nothing says thank you for your years of service to our company quite like an e-boot out the door."
0wned!
Listen p*ssy. I'm sure your the same homo that posted earlier about alf's boner and you just want to remain anonymous fo
Let's get a hand for RadioShack and their PR skills! I've always wondered when things along this line would start to happen. I'm surprised it didn't become popular to fire people by voicemail when that was the "new" thing. Firings can become a very confrontational situation (especially since the messenger didn't always have a hand in the process), so I wonder if the messenger decided that email would be better than hell.
Radio Shack actually hired these guys from Sony's Advanced Systems Sodium-Chloride Electronics Division (SASSED). The sassed employee's were fired for explosive behavior, assault, and battery. Even though the workers were feeling blue, Ray Sirr, a manager on the project, said that other employee's were safe, and the fired employee's were pre-picked, and put in a queue, cataloging it all. I just hope that all of you, PC in all, realize what was going with, by quickly scanning what i have written.
Have you read my journal today?
I'd say this is worse than getting a job application rebuffed by a form letter. With a job application, they don't know you and you really are little more than a name (at best) and a number (at worst) to them. For termination of employment somebody really ought to know who you are and what service you have provided the company. It's inexcusible - and a good indication of what those up the ladder really think about their workers. "Your job is very important to us... please hold."
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
Reminds me of "Office Space".
Obliterate advertising!
My only question is if they outsourced the e-mail pink slip processing to an Indian firm. That would have given Radio Shack double plus style points. I would not be too shocked if someone goes e-postal over this.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
"you-can't-fire-me-I-equit"
I'd reply with, "Ha Ha, joke's on you. I've been working from home for the past 8 months, and have been selling the store's LED flashlights on eBay."
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
They should be e-happy they got e-fired because Radio-Shack e-sucks. Besides, they can always be e-hired again at BestBuy or some other know nothing e-electronics store. At least I e-think so...
Have you ever met a Radio Shack employee? Methinks they should all be fired (and replaced by someone who knows what they are talking about).
I used to want to work there, back when they sold computers and gizmos for hobby electronics instead of being a glorified cell phone store (though I do suppose cell phones are a type of radio, so it is more fitting...)
Well it all depends. How many employees left their red Swingline staplers in their stores before they were locked out?
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
Radio Shack has been in real trouble for years, since shortly before I left. The article mentions RSH stock price closing just over $18, down from around $80 before this all began. I can't say that I am surprised that they chose email as the way to go on the firings.
Make sure you don't have any beverage in your mouth when you read this: All members of Radio Shack management and all of their top sales people from the entire company, plus most of the corporate staff (thousands of people) just returned home from an all-expenses paid 3 to 6 day drip to Las Vegas, NV for a "Peak of Performance" rally. More like a valley of performance, but to hell with it.
FairTax baby!
ehhh you're quite daft for making that statement. the article clearly notes that these are employees mostly at their headquarters, which indicates they are probably mid level executives or IT staff or something like that.. not store personnel.
im sure people who work in stores make $7-8 an hour like most other retail workers.
Being fired through a form letter, or email must be soul destroying.
Now those employees can sue Radio Shack, because they can claim that every time they hear a "new email sound", they break down into tears. They won't be able to find a job working with computers.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Nothing says "e-mail what now? Must have gotten caught in my spam filter, heh..." like going into work anyway, and forcing the boss to say it to your damned face.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
One of the guys who received that mail should have followed it up with a mail to everyone@radioshack :
"Pls ignore the previous mail.It was a prank mail by someone."
Wincopy
At least in CT, sales people on the floor make $7-$8 per hour base (excluding bonuses), with higher tiers (managers-in-training, asst. managers, managers, etc.) obviously making higher bases and different sets of bonuses. No floor salesperson has their own radioshack email address, only a store-wide email account.
And no, they don't ask for home address anymore, only your zip code for marketing / store stock purposes, which you can decline with no argument. Addresses -are- needed in some situations though, for things like service plans and Answers Plus (in-store credit card) accounts though.
They got Radio Shafted.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Worked a Radio Shack in Oregon 3 winters in a row during my off-season... worked on commission + minimum wage... cleared about 4k a month for 3 months then went back to my job in febrary... the manager (this was in 1988-1991) made between 50-75k a year...
sig goes here!
...the TRS-80 Model I support team. I mean, after I splurged on the 16K RAM expansion and everything!
The Army reading list
Only Radio Shack's old employees in Korea will actually know they've been laid off.
I would love to know what pointy haired boss thought this was a good idea. I could not even imagine what it would be like to get fired that way, especially since it sounds like most of the people fired were not just retail workers (which would still be wrong) but were employees at the companies headquarters in Fort Worth. I am not one to hold grudges but if any of my employers were ever to do that to me after I had worked for them for years I would forever hate them and I would let them know it. In the article it said that there were meetings prior to the e-mails being sent out that explained they would be notified electronically if they were being laid off but still, that is just plain heartless and gutless. Spend the few minutes it takes and do it in person like it should be done. I hope whoever gave this the OK burns in hell.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
Laid-off workers got one to three weeks pay for each year of service, up to 16 weeks for hourly employees and 36 weeks for those with base bay of at least $90,000, the company said.
Hey, at least they are taking care of their upper management with up to 36 weeks of severence pay. Otherwise, they might have to actually give up a whole week of vacation in the Bahamas! Who cares about the nameless masses below them. That's why they are nameless masses!
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
Or even better,remove the 'To' field of the original mail and send to everyone @ RS.
Wincopy
I came in late and everybody was standing around excited for me to check my mail.
Do you have a meeting? Do you have a meeting?
Um, yeah, in 30 minutes.
Oh man, that sucks. Only a few of us got it, and none of the boss' friends got the meeting invite. You're gone.
They were right.
Ummm... hate to break it to you, but that wasn't a girl.
Radio Shack is now Radio Sack
Wincopy
Are you one of those guys who look lost when i walk in and ask for a BNC conector or cracks up when i ask for a rectifier for my Johnson........ outbord motor?
\
Being the late 80's, I think you probably knew what this stuff is. Most radio shack employies i come across now think the radio stands for cell phone or remote controled cars. I was looking for a metal-oxide varistor a few months ago and the sales boy asked if i could use one made from plastic becuase most thier resistors are plastic. Well thats what they looked like to him, he admited.
There probably is a reason radio shack is restructuring and fireing some people.
They won't be able to find a job working with computers.
...Although, yeah, I do kinda feel sorry for them when they get laid off like that.
These are Radio Shack people. They don't know anything about computers anyway.
When my co-workers were sacked by email I breathed a sigh of relief when I didn't get one. The next morning my swipe key wouldn't get me in the door. The guy I asked to reactivate my swipe key at lunch time was the one that let me know that I had lost my job.
Mr. Kim: You got a message.
Korben Dallas: Yeah.
Mr. Kim: You're not gonna open it? It might be important.
Korben Dallas: Yeah, like the last two I got were important. The first one was from my wife, telling me she was leaving. The second was from my lawyer, telling me he was leaving... with my wife.
Mr. Kim: Aigh, that is bad luck. But grandfather say 'It never rain everyday'. This is good news, guaranteed. Hey, I bet your lunch.
Korben Dallas: Okay, you're on.
Mr. Kim: Come on. [opens message, in a excited voice] 'You are fired'. Oh, I'm sorry.
Korben Dallas: At least I won lunch.
Mr. Kim: Good philosophy, see good in bad, I like.
I also disagree with this being "soul-destroying," but for a slightly different reason. It could have been a lot worse - TFA says that there were multiple face-to-face meetings prior to the announcement, with an opportunity for employees to ask questions. There was also a severance package. It wasn't the best way to approach the problem, but at least it wasn't unexpected.
There was a girl on IRC? Since when?
I heard a rumor from what appeared to be a reliable source that Radio Shack had to close a bunch of stores because they lost their contract with Verizon. Apparently cell phone sales were carrying the stores.
Do you need any batteries today?
The firing of employees by email is just another way to automate away just another management function. If people find it acceptable to be fired by an email, rather than a face to face meeting with a manager, then this means we are just one more step to automating away most of management in company decision making. Anything that eliminates the jobs of useless corporate butt munchers who are adept at convincing their superiors they are valued exployees in the company with "people skills" is not just a good thing, but a great thing.
This means that eventually expert systems and other AI based systems will execute all firings in a fair and objective fashion. If you fail to meet your quotas, the "Virtual CEO 9000" will fire you with a nice little trite email. If you meet your quotas, then the "Virtual CEO 9000" may indeed give you a raise. No performance review will ever again be necessary where you have to interview for keeping your own job every year through kissing up to your former human manager, rather the "Virtual CEO 9000" will instead be constantly evaluating your usefulness to the corporation in real-time and compensate you objectively.
Just imagine what this would do for a company like Oracle that has about 10 maybe 11 engineers doing all the real work in the company with about 50,000 managers whose idea of work is schmoozing with other like-minded individuals on a golf course all day long. The "Virtual CEO 9000" could cut out so much bloat that profits would go so through the roof that Larry Ellison could pay down the entire United States national debt of 65 trillion dollars or whatever it happens to be right now.
Seriously, I have not figured out why the board of directors at our largest corporations has not already outsourced or automated away executive management yet, when they happen to be the least efficient and least accountable group of people in your typical corporation these days. The "Virtual CEO 9000" doesn't need stock options to the tune of 400 million dollars like one of Exxon's former CEO's, instead it just needs some electricity to make the kind of decisions that your typical corporate bean counter makes based solely upon some Microsoft Excel spreadsheet calculation where they say "AHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAA THERE IS THE FAT WE NEED TO CUT. THAT DARNED IT DEPARTMENT IS NOT SELLING ANYTHING AND INSTEAD IS JUST COSTING US A LOT OF MONEY, LET'S FIRE SOME EXPLOYEES AND SLASH THEIR BUDGET!".
Oh wait, I forgot that modern corporations usually have a board of directors that also just happens to be personal friends of the executive management they are supposed to be directing. Nevertheless, my point still stands that being managed by a cold, unfeeling, computer application like the "Virtual CEO 9000" is still better than being managed by the sociopaths that typically run our public companies today.
In the early 80's I was a CPU designer at a large mainframe company that was going through waves of RIF's. All layoff's always happened on Friday, and the sysadmins were always given a list of userid's to disable before hand. So, it became a regular Friday morning ritual for everyone to get a cup of joe, joke about whether their login would work, and see if they could get on the system. An officemate typed his password incorrectly one Friday and nearly crapped. Most victims had their desk half cleaned out before their manager found them.
Heck, at least these people got an e-mail.
Well, if that is now really legally acceptable I know what's going to happen next, expect a new type of spam, the 'sack' spam. That also has the effect ot training your spam filter so you'll never receive the real one. As a matter of fact, it probably pretty much nukes this for the next time it's attempted.
Insert
But not for the reasons you might think. The natural reaction is that it's too impersonal. That's really the least of the problems. The big problem with email is that it's not reliable, and not very official. What's to stop someone sending out a prank notice to non-fired rad-shack employees that says they're fired? Maybe you don't like the rad-shack guy you work with (and you've already been fired), so you send out a fake email to him with headers that look like it comes from rad-shack and the same body as yours. How's your (former) co-worker going to know he wasn't actually fired?
Email isn't reliable either. There's no guarantee that people read their email on a regular basis, and even if they did spam filters can filter out an email like this.
AccountKiller
...a guy from an African nation in the very next message promised to give me a new job if I help him with an international transaction.
Table-ized A.I.
It happens only in America. American corporates are a bunch of ingrates. The work culture sucks. There is no humanity, no love and no warmth. All the 'Hi, how you doin', 'Hi, how are you today?', 'So nice to see you again' and other phrases of warmth and caring are all feigned. No one really cares a shit about how you are today. All they know is that this company is not doing well, I need to search for sheep I can shear.
An example from the health care scene: I know a child with a respiratory disorder that had to wait for 2 months just to get a bed. After getting the bed, the child survived only for a day. Its really sad how cold we have become in the pursuit for money and power. We have forgotten how peoples lives get affected by our decisions. There are countless people who are such dedicated workers, people who genuinely care about the company they work in, people who suffer silently when their dedication and committment is met with a terse email saying 'Piss off dawg, we don't need you no more'.
Is it any wonder then that stuff gets outsourced to destinations like India? And that more and more workers are coming from America to work in India?
My experience with them is from 18 years ago, but the organizational style rings true.
I found this organization to be utterly classless, morally bankrupt, and totally incompetent. The sole exception to this was that INDIVIDUAL store managers and a couple of reginal guys were fantastic sales people and had solid retail skills. The entire corporate profile is designed to mass produce cheap crap and sell it at a huge margin, sucking every ounce of effort and creativity from the few good sales kids and retail level managers who give huge efforts to eek out a poor living.
The times I was in Ft. Worth for one reason or another the level of waste and incompetance was stunning to behold.
-- Please forgive the poor spelling and typos. I'm typing on a small keyboard and have limited editing here.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Actually, what might work with the cubicle set would be to put an opposing two of their partition walls on motorised rails, linked to a database that moved them inward when their quotas went down, and outward when they went up. Give them inflatable chairs, too -- so when the walls move in too close, you can fire them directly through the roof.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
As a former long-time employee at RS, let me just say this news comes as absolutely no surprise.
Their entire management structure is irrepairably flawed. Most of their top guys were promoted from store-level positions with absolutely no formal training on how to run a fortune 500 corporation. These 'executives' know only how to lead through threats, intimidation, and constant turnover.
In the 1980s and early 90s, they went from being one of the largest and most respected computer manufacturers (Tandy) to almost zero computer sales. In 1990, there was a RadioShack store in every neighborhood, yet they completely missed the boat on the Internet boom. In about 2000 they happened to be in the right place at the right time and lucked into the cell phone boom, hence their good stock performance during this time. They soon (within months) screwed that up and their stock fell to a third of its former value almost overnight.
Now they've been doing nothing new, with the exception of several scandals involving their former CEO, Dave Edmonson. I'd imaging their long term strategory at this point is simply circling the drain long enough for some conglomerate to buy their name at a firesale price for use in some branding strategy
Is this a news report or a trailer for a motion picture?
They asked you to a meeting. That is a reasonable, and professional course of action to take. People get laid off, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad. The real problem with the article is not that some people were laid off, but that they were told by e-mail not to bother coming in anymore. HP at least gave you the courtesy of a face to face.
it happens only in America
Nope.
One time, I was 1 week into a 3-month posting in Europe, and I got an e-mail from Australia telling me my 3-month notice period started immediately. I had to work through it of course. I was paid out the 4 weeks of vacation I'd accumulated, but lost the hundreds of hours of time-off-in-lieu. I'd been with the firm 8 years.
Trying to find a new job when you're 10,000 miles away from home isn't easy. And of course the customer, who had paid $$$ for my services, was not pleased, they wanted me to stay longer and work on other stuff.
Yes, I should have taken the time off in lieu, but that would have been cheating the customer. There's such a thing as professional ethics.
I took the firm to industrial arbitration, won, but the legal fees ate up nearly all of the 3 months pay I got.
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
The idea that your not even worth a face to face firing, would be devasating to most people. I don't see how it could be worse.
Who ever did the e-firing, didn't do there job. Or at least avoided the hard part of it. If you're going to fire some one. If you're going to tell them they aren't needed anymore. It would have been decent to tell them in person.
Anyone who thinks this is no big deal, was either never fired or didn't like the job they were fired from. You also can't assume the ones being fired don't care, or don't like there job. Everyone deserves to be fired by a person, no matter how much prior notice they were giving. You don't KNOW you are fired, until you are fired.
Those endorsing this problaly want to use it in the future, because they don't have the cojones to fire someone in person.
"Common decency" ... hmm, maybe exists in some 50s romantic B-movie comedies, but alas, welcome to the real world pal. That stuff never existed. Read your histories of work and industry through the ages. Watch a few Monty Python sketches if that's too boring (something about working in coal mines and getting up at 5am and being grateful for it: Victorian decency didn't have a problem with sending 5 year olds down mines and up chimneys after all). That's why unions got going in the first place, to actually give the little guys some real power rather than having individuals just sitting at home feeling shocked after layoff at the wake up call that they weren't actually working for a paternalistic social enterprise.
If you don't like the word 'union' then pick another, but you need some sort of collective ability to organise and respond when the big guys put the pressure on. They screw around with your workmates, you all stop work and threaten to take the company down if they don't start behaving better. Drastic, sure, but the USA is *proud* of its free market hire em and fire em attitude, you aren't going to get some middle manager to change their way by asking them to remember the unwritten rules of Lord's cricket ground and the British Raj. They are watching over their shoulder as well...
The news in this is that we've reached that particular point in our society where a corporation doesn't even have to have the common decency to fire people in person.
What kind of phantasy world do you live in? Labor rights and relations have come a long way since the 19th centuries; companies didn't use to fire employees by E-mail, they used to work them to death and kill them.
You're confusing a company with a thinking, feeling person. Companies are like big, impersonal machines, and they have always been. Complaining about being fired by E-mail makes just about as much sense as taking the BSOD or a washing machine malfunction as a personal insult. The company doesn't want you anymore, so just move on. If people get fired too often in your opinion, then the solution is to fix the system (by working for more labor rights), not to whine about the form in which you get fired.
Congrats, you should be a manager, maybe even a board member or CEO, if your view of the world is that sociopathic.
Human interactions are not measured just in how many dollars they make for your (or their) bottom line. Sometimes you can take 5 minutes off your busy schedule just, you know, for the sake of making someone's day less shitty. Just because it's the humane thing to do. Someone has just been fired, and it won't kill you to just say a few soothing words and show (or fake) some compassion. Or just show that someone at least remembers their name, or that they worked there. Put a human/humane face on the whole deal, you know.
Yes, being fired is just normal and just part of how the economy works. It's not the end of the world. Etc. But it's still a stressful event in someone's life. It won't kill you to lower someone's stress a little.
It's also an awakening to the cruel reality that, for all the bullshit "we're all a big family" speeches, you're just a nameless disposable cog in the corporate machine. A cog that's served its purpose, produced all the profit that could be made, and now is disposed of when no longer profitable. All the "we're all a big family" idea not only flies out the window, but it turns out that it's never been true anyway. That's not how families work.
And that's not a cheerful thought. Humans aren't robots, and the millions of years of evolution have sorta hard-wired us to be social beings. Our brains are wired for person-to-person relations, not for a nameless-cog-to-faceless-entity existence. That's too why we build father figures in the sky (i.e., religion), or conspiracy theories with a few people responsible for all this or that, or anthropomorphise our computer/boat/gun/whatever. Because that's the kind of thing we're wired for, and the kind of thing we understand: _people_, not faceless machineries.
And the kind of email oozing an "you're one of the nameless drones we're discarding today" tone, like these people received, only serve to amplify that to the maximum impact possible. It's just twisting the knife in the wound. In the ammo arsenal of unpleasant human interactions, this is the dum-dum.
And if you're willing to advocate that just because the humane alternative is "just a total logistical nightmare"... well, as I was saying, you have some serious upper management potential.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Not at all. If I'm ever in the position where I need to fire somebody, I would definitely do so in person.
I know this is a huge deal for the people involved, and I'm not excusing Radio Shack's actions; I'm saying that there could have been far, far worse mistakes than the one they made.
I don't see anybody endorsing this course of action; I know I'm not. I just think this is not the worst possible outcome. Employees could have not been given any warning; they could have been fired without a severance package, instead of up to nine months of free pay; or they could have been escorted off the premises by security instead of a manager. Radio Shack's blunder seems mild compared to what others have done.
The other part of the story was three months ago when Radio Shack publicly stated they were closing about 30% of their stores.
In essence, store clerks unlucky enough to be assigned to underperforming locations were the first to feel the long knives although I would image there was at least some shuffling to fill in for natural attrition. Same applies to managers I would well assume. That corporate cutting came later would be the expected flow, although sometimes corporate gets the gullitine first.
No surprise then although no one looks forward to job elimination. Unfortunately this is the continuation of a growing trend.
But did not Radio Shack Corporate bring this upon themselves?
Clearly the early mainstay of the business, hobby electronics, was flagging in the classic regard but was increasing in parallel areas. Less descrete components and integrated circuits were being sold but areas such as car stereo parts was ramping up big time for example. Radio Shack failed to indentify and capitalize on the shifting trends opting to become just another consumer electronics retailer and a rather poor one at that.
That the average hobbyist was no longer building around 741 op amps didn't mean the hobbyist was going away, rather, they were simply changing venues. In the Radio Shacks around here you cannot buy speakers, enclosures, crossovers and all the rest. RS used to be a good source for this and now that every kid on the block is spending megadollars to amp out the stereo in their hoopty, where is the neighborhood Radio Shack?
By the same token there is a large market of people looking to Mod their computers. Again, where is Radio Shack? You could build quite a list beyond the two examples I mention, of RS completely missing the boat and it's sad really. RS was not known for top of the line but stuff was readily available and the company enjoyed success due to convenience and accessibility.
As someone else pointed out, Radio Shack is perhaps best known today as a tier two cellphone store but that market is saturated and highly competitive with corrosponding declines in profit margins. The halcyon days of cell phone companies as high margin revenue generators is over for now it's all about volume. Cell phone sales will not save the company and they cannot compete with Walmart, BestBuy, Comp USA and Fry's etc. Least wise not directly but they turned their back on the "do it your self" crowd and that was their market at one time.
So Radio Shack fades into the sunset?
Put it this way. If the company has what it takes to dig themselves out of this hole, they should have had what it takes to not dig such a hole in the first place. They didn't and I doubt it.
> On xx/xx/xxxx xx:xx The Employee <slave@thecompany> wrote:
>> On xx/xx/xxxx xx:xx The Management <lickmyboots@thecompany> wrote:
>> Knock, knock!
>>
> Who's there?
Not you anymore! Hahahahahaaaaa!
I have read all the 5-rated comments and seems to me that the consensus is American job culture sucks, Radio Shack sucks.
Due to my trollish habits, I am always inclined to say something in contrary.
At the last company I worked for, there were 3 waves of firing people. In all of them a top level manager talked to them, thanked them and explained to them why they are fired. That it has nothing to do with them, that it is related to the products performance which is very little to do with them. Of course, people were not happy anyway, and they rightfully should not be: well, they were fired, but there was an effort from the company to alleviate the pain.
The company I am talking about is not the best, and it has a bad reputation in the IT industry for their cold and mindless approach to people, so I assume the situation with graceful firing is better in other IT companies.
I have to admit though that people who were fired were seasoned professional programmers, many with PhD in physical, chemical and biological sciences.
Another important comment is that the waves were about 50-100 people. When the amount of people to be laid off is larger it becomes a logistic problem to fire them at once, in one take to minimize the effect on job. It might explain the "e-mail" twist of it, but in no way it explains the "no-thanks" angle. So yes, Radio Shack sucks.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I didn't mind when I got fired from a dollar store, on the phone no less, and they didn't even have the balls to tell me I was fired, just that I didn't get any hours that week. I only didn't mind because I hated that job. . . and that I got a job a few months later that pays more than twice what my boss was making. I also got a good laugh when I learned 2 months later that ex-boss got fired for being a dipshit.
If it had been a decent job (even Radio Shed would have been a better job) I probably would have been a little more upset with that kind of firing. Had I been fired by a company form letter (which I normally filter to my delete folders anyway) it would have been much more embarassing when I showed up for my next shift not even having read the letter. . .
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
I once worked for a company that was as chickenshit as this. One of the partners was diagnosed with cancer so he sold his holdings and went to Ireland to live whatever he had left. An ex-wife of his son had a job in the company and they wanted to get rid of her quietly so they sent a process server to the bungelow she was staying in on Maui with her final check and severance. She hired a lawyer in hawaii and filed suit there after renting a house that her lawyer found her for residency reasons. She sought 3 million in damages and the company had to deal with the whole thing,including depositions by all of the parties involved in the buyout, in hawaii which damn near broke the bastards. She never figured to win, she just wanted to see them jump through hoops. They eventually settled out of court with the usual NDA but I know it had to be a good chunk because she sent all the people she knew in the company a 250 dollar gift certificate for Walmart that christmas saying she knew the company wouldn't be able to afford the usual christmas turkeys that year.
While it is certainly wrong to e-fire someone, a company I once worked for did one worse. The company got bought out and the new owners started downsizing. I worked in IT, specifically, I was in charge of the user accounts for the network, email, etc. I would get a list of accounts to disable every so often, sometimes with a note saying it was urgent and they needed to be deleted NOW. So I deleted them. Within 10 minutes, my phone was ringing off the hook with people complaining that they couldn't get to their email. They had not been told that they were fired, and I had to let them in on the secret.
When I then started complaining to the asshats in management about that, they informed me that they had sent the people emails about their impending loss of a job. I later found out that this email was sent about 5 minutes before they told me to delete it, thus none of them had actually received the email.
I was later fired as well, though I was pretty happy about the situation since I got a sweet severence.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
:wq!
You know, I usually am the one who says we don't need new laws, but in this case, I think it's justified. Noone should be fired or laid off in any other way other then in person. Not on the phone, not by a voice mail, not via text message and certainly not via e-mail. Any other way should be considered invalid. There should also be other rules also....rules that say you have to be human about the whole thing. None of this shutting down card keys and removing desks or anything else.
Gorkman
I don't feel at all good about the precedent of firing people using email, but I'm reluctant to make an assumption based on the tone of a slashdot story. The article states:
If this is true, it at least means that the company had given employees some warning that bad news was coming. In another, more complete article, it's stated that employees had a good chance to ask questions before the emails, and meet with management staff after the emails.
To be honest, it does sound a bit dehumanising with the way it's being reported, but put in a different context, it could also be that sending the actual notifications via email (after sufficient warning) was simply the best way to do it, for everyone, in that particular business.
- Radio Shack Canada is no longer affiliated with Radio Shack USA
- Radio Shack Canada no longer exists
- Radio Shack Canada is now "Circuit City: The Source"
- They now carry more electronics components than they have in 5-10 years
At least there is some place local where I can buy SOME components again. I'm happy. Digikey is great, but you just can't run out and grab something you suddenly need when your main supplier is mail order.
I just wish they still carried those little Archer PCBs etched for a single ~14-pin DIP. I used my second-last one last weekend.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Maybe the company had an "A Team".
I used to be a technician at a plant where the day shift had what we referred to as the "A Team", a group of mostly polictical appointees deigned to be the best design and problem solvers we had, so deigned by their buddies the management. Additionally there was only one good tech on the graveyard shift and once when he was on vacation one of the machines went down and stayed down till dayshift arrived and the A Team decided to take charge of the machine's repair. When my 2nd shift came on we were instructed the machine was down for repairs and not to touch it as it was under the control of the A Team. After discussing the issue with the graveyard crew when they came on that night we had a pretty good guess as to what was wrong with it, which brought us puzzled looks from the graveyard crew. We left a note for the A Team with our suggestion and went home for the night, when we arrived the next day we were told our guess was wrong, they had not checked it mind you but they "knew" we were wrong. Three days later the machine was still down but they wanted us to do some routine maintenance on the machine while it was down. Thus with permission to work on the machine we proceeded to do the routine maintenance and while we were at it slipped a new latch relay into the control circuit ran by the cam timer. The next morning the "A Team" "fixed" the machine. We were greeted with some evil looks when we came in that night.
Amusingly when the one decent third shift tech returned from vacation his fellow shift techs were telling him about it and he asked them "did you replace the latch relay on that cam timer circuit?" He just shook his head when they said it was turned over to the "A Team" and was down several days. Noticing us laughing into our hands and looking at us with quizzical eyes we simply said: "after a few days they had us perform general maintenance on the machine and then the next day they fixed it." He was still laughing when we clocked out.
As a picky note, you didn't really have to tell them they were fired. You could have told them you were looking into the problem and that they should contact their manager.
How long until doctors just text-message the family: "The surgery seemed to be going well, but he didn't pull through. Sorry." Then the hospital can add a $2 charge for the text-message (yes that's ridiculously high for a text-message, but have you seen what they charge for an aspirin?)
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
Many years ago I was working as a system admin for one of the largest computer companies in the world. We were going thru some major downsizing. Our standard procedure was at the end of the day, we were shown a list of employees who were being let go, our computer operators would disable their accounts that evening. The employee would show up next morning and the person's manager/supervisor would then inform them of the bad news and would walk them to their desk and let them clean it out and escort them out the door.
Of course, the person's manager/supervisor would be too cowardly to show up on time on the day the employee was being let go. The employee would show up at say, 8:00 a.m on the boss would show up at 9:15-9:30 (deliberately late). When the employee couldn't log into their account, they would phone the system admin (me) and ask me to reset their password. I told them I couldn't do that (because their name had been on the termination list the previous day) and they were annoyed at me for refusing to do so. I asked them to talk to their manager (who wasn't there). After a while people had heard about this. The next time they couldn't log in, they would phone me and when I told them I couldn't enable their account, they would say "am I getting let go", and I would hear the "I just bought a house", "my wife is pregnant", etc. They shouldn't have to hear that they were being let go from me. It just shows you how cowardly the local manager of that person was.
Once we had people with the same first initial and last name (such as Carol Brown with login name of cbrown and Christine Brown with login name of crbrown). Lets say that Christine (crbrown) was being let go. The computer operators disabled cbrown (Carol's account) instead. Carol Brown thought that she was being let go when she couldn't log in.
Someone later told her "sorry for the incovenience".
My boss works two hours from my site. I had been with the company for 30 years. When it was time to let me know that I was history, my boss wanted to drive to where I work and tell me in person. My boss's boss didn't want to pay mileage so I got the info via phone.
What a company.
Companies are soulless and heartless. I am surprised more people don't go postal these days. Also, when people are let go, the workload doesn't go with them, its dumped on the poor suckers who remain behind.
After reading the posting calling you a sociopath, I figured I'd chime in to say I agree with you.
/are/ largely an anonymous cog in an impersonal machine. All of the lip-service paid to the "we're all one big family" idea is just that - lip service - and all but the dolts know it.
Working for corporations means you
I've been laid off once before, and if I had to choose between an email and having it done in person I'd take the email.
Feeling like you got special, personal treatment being laid off in person is like feeling you got special, personal treatment from the greeter at WalMart. It's meaningless fluff.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Even if they do have what I need, it's usually hideously overpriced. I've given up on Radio Shack (or The Source or whatever it's called now) for my parts. As nice as it is to be able to get things from a brick-and-mortar (since I'm very impatient), I've found that using http://www.digikey.com/ is just better all-around.
"I was later fired as well"
Let me guess... they gave you a list of accounts to disable, and your name was on it?
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
I once worked for a small ISP that was bought by a big ISP. The big ISP layed us all off only to bring us back a few weeks later because they didn't know how the stuff worked. Then they moved us to their home office. I worked there for a few years. I got a girlfriend and we were going to get an appartment. I noticed the signs that they would be doing a layoff soon. So I approached my boss and told him I was going to sign a lease on a new appartment (with increased costs) tomarrow and I wanted to make sure my job was secure. He said it was secure and the layoff rumors were just rumers. Then he reminded me of our saturday morning meeting to cover policy changes. So I went home, signed my new lease, work up saturday morning and went to work for the meeting. When I got to the meeting we were told we were all being layed off and asked to sign a Non disclusure agreement to get our last paycheck. I walked up to my boss, put my fist though the wall directly next to his head and left. My paycheck came on time.
Being the product of a recent major layoff, I can definitely add some thoughts to this. Had my employer of 8 years taking the b*tch way out and sent me an email letting me know I was one of the unfortunates who was being let go, I more than likely would have been angry and beligerant about the whole affair. Sure, they had meetings discussing their intentions, but still, its demeaning to have a souless company further prove that point by issuing a sterile, cold email letting you know that your life has just been flushed down the toilet. And yes, the severance is a nice gesture, but I'm gonna tell you right now...I got 27-weeks worth of severance when I was let go and while it is a nice chunk of change...it bites you in the a$$ in the long run as you're taxed higher for the lump amount, leaving me with $12,000 of my $19,000 severance. While this isn't the worst thing to do to someone, it still would be demoralizing to know you were the recipient of a form email that took someone 3 minutes to type and no emotion whatsoever. At least with my layoff my boss was there and I watched the man break down in tears. No matter what the circumstances, someone being let go needs compassion and encouragement...sending a "get out" email doesn't do the trick.
Well, while getting the axe is tough, I really fail to see what difference it makes in how your told.
Most people at one time or another, I guess, have been laid off/downsized/fired at some point in their career. It is something that is never easy to hear, but, really I don't think it would matter to me if it was by email, phone or in person. Actually, I'd almost think it would be easier to get by email...that way you don't have to sit there feeling weird in front of the person telling you your services are no longer needed.
I sure as hell know it is easier to give bad news of other kinds by phone or email rather than in person.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I'd made a post earlier that I really didn't see the big deal of being let go by email. I actually thought it would be a bit easier in that you didn't have to sit there and feel uncomfortable in front of a person having to tell you in person. I just didn't get it, but, then I read your post and maybe I do. The part where you liken losing your job of 8 years to having your life 'flushed down the toilet'. Wow...I've just guessed I never associated my work/job with my life or self worth before as it seems you may do. I guess there are a good many of people out there that associate their job with their self worth or image. That's just foreign to me.
Don't get me wrong, I like my job...I'm often passionate about my interest in what I do, that happens to also earn me a living...a good one. But, it is just a job. Where I do it, and who for really isn't the biggest deal in my life. The second I leave work...I completely leave it (unless on call or something). I don't really think about it till I walk back in the door the next day. I don't have any loyalty really towards any company, because I feel in this age, they have none towards me. But, I've felt that for a long time. Currently, I'm in a semi-contract mode...W2 hourly employee for a contract company. Work is good, pay is good, benefits are good. I'm friends with the owner of the company and often have drinks with him. I'm a good employee and contribute to the company. But, if I got the ax tomorrow...and it could happen as that the area I'm in is New Orleans...well, I'd take a little hit on my pride, but, mostly just worry about getting the next gig.
But, losing my job, doesn't really mean I lost something that defines me. I work ONLY to make money...to enable me to buy and do things that make me happy. If I won the lottery tomorrow, trust me..I'd never work again, I'd do nothing but stuff that was fun.
I guess that explains a lot of the posts I read here...I was actually shocked that so many people described the firing process so emotionally...and took it so personally. I didn't realize that the job people hold defines them so much. And I think that is sad.
A job should be nothing more than a means to supporting your lifestyle. Sure...hopefully you can enjoy your work, but, really...does it matter who you do it for? Your job should not be YOU.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I always wanted to break up with a girl via electronic greeting card:
"moyix has sent you an e-card! Click here to read it!"
*click*
"Yeah, I'm breaking up with you. Enjoy this cute picture of a kitten, though."
A job is basically an exchange of skill and effort for currency. In some cases the measurement of skill and effort is based on hours worked, and those employed in this way are called hourly workers or contractors. In other cases skill and effort is not measured, these permanent employees are given a guaranteed salary. Contrary to what the term permanent implies, in both cases the majority of jobs are actually at will, which means that either the employee or the employer may terminate the relationship at any time, for almost any reason.
It should be noted that it is the employer that invokes at will termination in the vast majority of cases.
If you don't know the person who signs your paycheck, they don't know you. You're just a number on a spreadsheet. Quit now before they realize you're number is too big.
Before you know it, people are going to start e-dumping each other.
Because of this I wont be buying anything from them anytime soon (they are called "The Source" here in Canada). Oh wait...because of their prices I don't buy from them anyways...being so inpersonal with their employees makes you wonder just what kind of level of service they can actually provide to a customer once he's paid for something How hard is it to actually tell someone in person that he/she is being let go? Yes it's not a given but is a much better method than emailing someone.
Because if I got laid off in person I would be escorted off site and handed my keys in. With an e-mail like that I'd likely take the inventory with me. Seing that the whole store was likely closed no-one else is being paid to care.
(while I kid I do know someone who was fired over the phone because the DM was a chicken shit. $10-15K in high end camera gear dissapeared overnight).
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
"A job should be nothing more than a means to supporting your lifestyle. Sure...hopefully you can enjoy your work, but, really...does it matter who you do it for? Your job should not be YOU."
You don't have kids eh?
The moment you have a family depending on you the "just a job" bit takes on a whole new meaning. We're a family of 4 on a single income in north/central california. I barely make enough with the cost of living. If I lost my job then I would be hard pressed to continue to put my spouse through school, she would likely have to drop out and enter the workforce early.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
"The Man has requested a read receipt, would you like to send that now?"
While I sympathize with you...I'd have to suggest that you all didn't plan very well for those kids, did you? You should have money put back to fall back on...I call it my "fuck you" money. Why did you not work and save a bit to fall back on before having kids? With proper planning, you could have the money saved to put the wife through school, etc. Why are you living in CA? You could move somewhere else where your income would buy you more...
I'm not trying to be callous, but, people do get themselves into fixes...and they have to deal with it. If you have kids, you need to plan for them, and make sacrifices for them if you have them. Maybe your wife will have to drop out of school for awhile, sad, but, hey, if you'd not had kids till after she was out, you might not be in that fix. There are things you could do...but, you gotta research what's out there, and make the effort.
My comments earlier really were made more in the direction of people being emotionally tied to their jobs....not so much financially tied to their jobs. But, with the kid thing, yep, it is tough....but, people should do planning before having them. I mean, you check your finances and budget before buying a new car don't you? You save for a house don't you? Why should you not do the same thing for kids, those are bare min. 18+ year investments!!! It is like credit card debt...if you get into it without thinking...you gotta do what it takes to make it up and get out of it.
You may indeed have to consider moving to where you can afford more, and indeed your wife may have to drop out of school till you catch up. Tough, but, it can be done. Either way, I'd not ever consider my employment at a company anything more than temporary, you can be let go at the drop of a hat.
Good Luck to you!!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I've heard stories where they having something like a fire drill or a company meeting, to get people away from their desks. While outside, the IT departement is busy revoking access. Then they call out the people who get fired/laid off and escort them to their desks to get their belongings.
When a man lies he murders a part of the world.
At my college job, we had to turn in some forms to get a schedule for the fall semester. I started at the beginning of summer semester. I turned in my forms and never got a schedule. I kept asking about it. I knew there might be some problems because I wasn't work-study and thus not free for the university. About a week before the fall semester started I ran into a coworker at a party. He says, "nice working with you," then walks away. As we were both trashed I couldn't tell if that was past tense or not. Two days later I received an email from a bot informing me that I had been removed from the employee listserve. The manager never even contacted me. A couple weeks later I went in for my last pay check and she acted as though it was perfectly normal to let a script fire someone. So Radio Shack employees should be grateful that a human fired them, even if it was through email.
It makes a big difference to hear it in person, I think.
When I was laid off by Unisys back in 1992 after working for them for almost five years, it helped cushion the blow to see how hard my manager (who is the one who told me) was taking it all. He was told from above to let three of our four-person programming team go that same day - our side of the Airline Center ended up laying off 20% of the staff all told - and it really shook him up, even though we all knew for months that it was coming.
When I was laid off by Northwest Airlines in January 2002 after eight years, hearing the news from my director also helped, since he was obviously not happy that the layoff was occurring, and again that helped a little to cushion the blow (and I needed it that time, since that was a layoff I *didn't* see coming since I'd survived the mass layoffs after September 11th. We thought they were done).
An e-mail message telling you you've been let go is impersonal as hell. I'd really be angry about something like that. Hearing it in person shows a little bit of class on the part of the organization, at least IMO.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Some of us aren't like that. I chose to work for Northwest Airlines, for example, because I had a few years of previous exposure to the airline industry and I wanted to work as a programmer FOR A MAJOR AIRLINE. Period. And while I worked there, I wasn't just a programmer, applications, one each. I was an applications programmer in the heart of their flight operations group. If my code failed, the airline didn't fly. Literally. And it felt good to feel like the stuff I was doing was a critical part of the actual operation.
Northwest was a company I felt very strongly about. I loved working there, and I'm still proud to know that I have something like 100,000 lines of code still running in their WorldFlight production system and handling a large percentage of their ACARS and surface weather traffic, as well as doing various other things. But it hurt me quite a bit personally when I was laid off because I'd invested over a decade of time (between contractor time and employee time) in that system, and I was really proud to be part of that particular group.
It hurt to leave, but I'm glad I was there. I do like where I am now, and I'm proud of what I do, but it's not the same.
I want to create software that actually MEANS something. I like working on projects that will have a real impact on some aspect of the company, and I sometimes put a lot of time and emotional energy into the designs I create.
Coding is a means to an end, certainly, but for me it's also an end in itself. The problem solving and design aspects are satisfying IN THEMSELVES for me, and I'm actually quite proud of some of the things that I've been able to accomplish so far in my short 18-year career as a programmer.
When I was at NWA, I would still be working there even if I had won the lottery. Why? Because that was a working and technical environment that I very much enjoyed being a part of, and solving problems in that context was a fun activity in its own right. I *WANTED* to go to work every day.
I believe that programming is art at a certain level, and I believe there is nothing wrong with an artist feeling some form of emotion over the works he creates.
If you don't get the kind of satisfaction that I do after coming up with a particularly elegant fix for a problem or a particularly efficient design, then I feel sorry for you because I think you are missing out on one of the really neat things about being a programmer. Our profession is to weave webs of logic and structure out of nothing! I think the whole virtual world of computing is an amazing thing, even magical in a way.
I agree that your job should not be you, but I don't have a problem with people who are willing to put some of their heart and soul into their work. It's one of the things which differentiates good software from great software, I think. For some people, passion is important. I was just going through the motions here, I'd be ready to find a different career. Instead, I'm doing what I love: writing software. I hope I'm able to do it for another 18 years, and hopefully until I retire...Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Does anyone know of any other countries where such childish, sensless, brutal, inhumane and counterproductive employee termination techniques are used? My former (U.S. based) company used voice mail on recent firees (They couldn't fire me, I quit way ahead of time! ;-). The U.S. division of my current company uses immediate firing within the U.S. but employees outside of the U.S. are generally given time to get things in order, finish what they were working on, use company resources in the job hunt and talk to collegues to help ease the transition. This technique works! I've never heard of a case of an employee going postal or sabatoging the company here.
So is it U.S. employees, U.S. managers or U.S. HR people who are being childish?
I have a friend who was working in Europe when they decided that they were closing up a section of the big IT company he was working for. He was on contract and happened to avoid the cut, but he witnessed another employee walk into a common area and detach a large LCD screen from the wall (others were taking CRT monitors, laptops, etc).
That's sort of 'collecting severance' I suppose. The funny bit is that the manager, also axed, walked in and caught the guy detaching the big LCD TV from the wall. (Maybe it was plasma... doesn't matter). Anyway, instead of kicking his @$$ and sticking security on him for a quick lesson in the use of the PR-24, he *HELPED* the employee dismount the screen and transport it out to his vehicle.
It seems the (former) manager had a lot of sympathy for his (former) employees that day and wasn't particularly interested (any longer) in the interests of the company, especially since it was shipping off a whole whack of work to the Pacific Rim.
I'm not saying this sort of behaviour is right, but the way some business decisions get made and implemented, you find it hard at times to have much sympathy for the company.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
I'm right with you here.
Radio Shack used to be a place where the hobbyist/student/geek-in-training could go to get stuff that no other local retailer offered. Back in school (70's) the campus store got a ton of business from the EE's and even from us students in the Art and Communications schools building small audio/video projects.
Now my local store is trying to be Best Buy but with 1/20th the floor space, 1/20th the selection and prices that are 15% higher. Did not some MBA over at the Shack's Ft. Worth headquarters have the temerity to point this out to the PHB's?
* * * * *
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--Dave Barry
"You've got questions, we've got blank stares."
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.