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Wednesdays are the worst kind of Mondays
Oct. 2nd, 2002 10:44 pmSince yesterday featured the big layoffs announcements, today was the start of the process of figuring out exactly who gets the boot. A meeting with the boss-types of our department was scheduled from 1pm until 5pm. Or so. Which, since I usually get into the office around 10am, didn't leave all that much time for anything else to get done.
Which was, of course, why one of the tape libraries decided that tape-drives are boring things, and refused to let the SAN see that its drives existed. And since I am at the moment the only one working with those things, I had to try to fix it. By the time I'd narrowed it down to the SCSI-FC bridge, I just about had time to call for service on it and snarf some lunch before it was time for The Meeting.
At this point, a word about the Swedish employment laws may be in order, since they probably look quite weird to foreigners (USAnians in particular).
In short, it's really hard to let people go. To fire them, one must have a documented history of seriously bad behavior. When letting people go due to more people than work to do, one has to adhere to "Last in, first out" order. That is, those most recently employed must be let go first. ...kinda.
The order only applies within a field of expertise. So if our most recently employed person overall is a Unix guy, and we have too many Windows dudes, the most recently employed Windows dude gets laid off rather than the Unix guy who started working yesterday. There's also a sort of domino effect. For example, say that we have two Truly Serious VMS Admins who has been with the company for respectively ten and fifteen years, and we only have work for one of them. We also have a Lightweight VMS Admin, who has been with us for only a year. In that case we have to offer the ten-year Truly Serious VMS Admin the lightweight job, and if he accepts it the Lightweight VMS Admin gets the boot. If the Truly Serious VMS Admin doesn't accept the offer, well, out he goes. We only have to try once.
Complicated? Yes. Abusable? Certainly. Slowing down the labour market? Absolutely.
But overall it reduces the general level of worry in harsh times, and it takes a lot of burden off the shoulders of the bosses who would otherwise have to do personally choose who gets to keep their jobs and who doesn't. It also means that people dare be more honest towards the bosses, which is a very good thing.
So. Anyway. Today's long meeting was about which positions we can do without, and what to do with the people filling those positions today. In the end, the result works out more like the intuitive selection process than you might think. The people you want to keep are usually of the highly-skilled quick-learning multi-competent kind. Which means that when the position they now fill vanishes, it's easy to find a new place for them. "Sure, she's a C++ developer -- but she's developed against Oracle databases for years, and she filled in for the DBA when he was on vacation, she can easily take a DBA position." The people you want to get rid of are, in contrast, lacking in skill, slow learners and with a limited skill-set. It's hard to place them somewhere else. When you have one Solaris admin too many, and the most junior in the group has hardly learned to do his current job in a year and a half, what do you do with him? Technically, he might be able to handle a phone-support position, but personality-wise he'd suck beyond belief at it, and that's at least as important as technical skill in that position (Goddess knows I could never do what the first-line people do; I'd go postal after half a day at most).
The list we ended up with after the meeting is only tentative. We have to synchronize with the other departments in our division before we know for sure who gets to go. But so far our list has about a 75% overlap with the "wish list" of people we really want to get rid of that we drafted back when we first got told that layoffs were coming (which we got told and had to keep silent about for three weeks before the Board of Directors saw fit to make it public). And that's without any kind of cheating at all. It's just that the people we want to get rid of just generally suck. They don't do their jobs now, and they're highly unlikely to do any other jobs either.
The deadline for the layoff process is three weeks from yesterday. It's going to be some interesting weeks, that's for sure. It's also going to be interesting to see how it'll affect our morale. At first, I was certain that it'd utterly demolish what little morale we've still got left after the last year, but now I'm not so sure. If we can get things to go along the lines we drew up today, we may actually end up with improved morale. Which would be extremely welcome, since it's now so low that some people doesn't even bother to pretend to work, and that kind of thing spreads.
Which was, of course, why one of the tape libraries decided that tape-drives are boring things, and refused to let the SAN see that its drives existed. And since I am at the moment the only one working with those things, I had to try to fix it. By the time I'd narrowed it down to the SCSI-FC bridge, I just about had time to call for service on it and snarf some lunch before it was time for The Meeting.
At this point, a word about the Swedish employment laws may be in order, since they probably look quite weird to foreigners (USAnians in particular).
In short, it's really hard to let people go. To fire them, one must have a documented history of seriously bad behavior. When letting people go due to more people than work to do, one has to adhere to "Last in, first out" order. That is, those most recently employed must be let go first. ...kinda.
The order only applies within a field of expertise. So if our most recently employed person overall is a Unix guy, and we have too many Windows dudes, the most recently employed Windows dude gets laid off rather than the Unix guy who started working yesterday. There's also a sort of domino effect. For example, say that we have two Truly Serious VMS Admins who has been with the company for respectively ten and fifteen years, and we only have work for one of them. We also have a Lightweight VMS Admin, who has been with us for only a year. In that case we have to offer the ten-year Truly Serious VMS Admin the lightweight job, and if he accepts it the Lightweight VMS Admin gets the boot. If the Truly Serious VMS Admin doesn't accept the offer, well, out he goes. We only have to try once.
Complicated? Yes. Abusable? Certainly. Slowing down the labour market? Absolutely.
But overall it reduces the general level of worry in harsh times, and it takes a lot of burden off the shoulders of the bosses who would otherwise have to do personally choose who gets to keep their jobs and who doesn't. It also means that people dare be more honest towards the bosses, which is a very good thing.
So. Anyway. Today's long meeting was about which positions we can do without, and what to do with the people filling those positions today. In the end, the result works out more like the intuitive selection process than you might think. The people you want to keep are usually of the highly-skilled quick-learning multi-competent kind. Which means that when the position they now fill vanishes, it's easy to find a new place for them. "Sure, she's a C++ developer -- but she's developed against Oracle databases for years, and she filled in for the DBA when he was on vacation, she can easily take a DBA position." The people you want to get rid of are, in contrast, lacking in skill, slow learners and with a limited skill-set. It's hard to place them somewhere else. When you have one Solaris admin too many, and the most junior in the group has hardly learned to do his current job in a year and a half, what do you do with him? Technically, he might be able to handle a phone-support position, but personality-wise he'd suck beyond belief at it, and that's at least as important as technical skill in that position (Goddess knows I could never do what the first-line people do; I'd go postal after half a day at most).
The list we ended up with after the meeting is only tentative. We have to synchronize with the other departments in our division before we know for sure who gets to go. But so far our list has about a 75% overlap with the "wish list" of people we really want to get rid of that we drafted back when we first got told that layoffs were coming (which we got told and had to keep silent about for three weeks before the Board of Directors saw fit to make it public). And that's without any kind of cheating at all. It's just that the people we want to get rid of just generally suck. They don't do their jobs now, and they're highly unlikely to do any other jobs either.
The deadline for the layoff process is three weeks from yesterday. It's going to be some interesting weeks, that's for sure. It's also going to be interesting to see how it'll affect our morale. At first, I was certain that it'd utterly demolish what little morale we've still got left after the last year, but now I'm not so sure. If we can get things to go along the lines we drew up today, we may actually end up with improved morale. Which would be extremely welcome, since it's now so low that some people doesn't even bother to pretend to work, and that kind of thing spreads.
