Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Another Group Bites the Dust

Well... I guess I was just oblivious to the world. On Saturday, when Rachel and I came to get my bike, I was surprised to see my co-worker Rick here. I asked him why he was in and he told me he'd decided it was finally time to clean out some of the crap in his office. And yesterday I still didn't put anything together when our office admin sent out a terse and insistent meeting request for this morning. So, I hauled ass in here on my bike and just barely made it before the meeting started. They announced that because they're expecting a pretty even year with little growth they're having to "take action" but most of the layoffs will affect Engineering. Did they ever. We lost 5 Engineering managers. Now, I'll grant that one might have been able to argue reasonably that we didn't need that many managers, the one they've kept is the least competent, least well liked, and (this is why they kept her) least well paid. That makes nine layoffs I've been through since I started working here in 9/2000. Heck, I've only had my office moved 5 times...

It might be time to start looking a little more seriously. I'm going to call Sterling's recruiter (and Shaikh & Dave K's) later today to touch base. And I'm sending my resume to the company my old boss JaeSon went to. He can't recruit me because of their internal HR policies, but he can champion me once I send in my resume. I really don't want to have to take a drop in pay or have much worse overall conditions, such as a longer commute or more travel, but I'm not sure I really like the idea of staying here longer. It finally feels as if the bilge pump isn't going fast enough to keep the ship afloat. On the other hand, I do have a lot of work already signed and seemingly a lot more coming. PSO is really the only unit of our practice or division or whatever you want to call us that's making any money. Of course, when we were sold we were told that the point was that this company acquiring us had all kinds of money and was going to pour it into us to keep us going. That never really happened, though they did put some money in... but most of that was just to prove the ability and then implement offshoring of a lot of the QA and bug fixing functions. Then they bought another company which they may be putting more money into and certainly seem more intent on. And now they've axed huge swathes of Engineering which will completely cripple our ability to do more than sustain the product until we start selling more. If we ever do.

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