Layoffs: Round 3

We're still entirely top heavy with more managers than you can shake a stick at. In the first couple rounds of layoffs most employees who lost their jobs were small time. Hourly wage, paid with peanuts style salaries. Hardly any supervisors or department managers were hit. From my perspective it's aggravating because we've lost some real hard working people that didn't cost much compared to useless managers who bring in high paychecks for doing next to nothing. Low overhead employees directly contribute to our success. Managers don't. If anything else they just sap company resources and muck things up worse. For every deadbeat supervisor who continues to suck down fat stacks of cash we could have spared ten above average production workers.

Round number three of layoffs has snared some management. I'm happy to see it happen. The interesting thing is instead of these individuals being shown the front gate instantly most of them are being shuffled over to work on Oracle for a few months. Then they are thrown out. Oracle has been such a colossal disaster since it was launched that there are literally hundreds of people working long hours trying to make it function properly. Apparently a whole army of consultants are working on it as well. Because Oracle's databases and supporting software turned out to be a gigantic steaming pile of shit many employees will be able to hang on for a few more months before their final day arrives. What a strange set of circumstances that must be. You've been eliminated, yet in order to receive your severance you are obligated to assist the company with repairing a massively broken project. I wouldn't be very motivated to put forth more than a token effort if that happened to me.

Recently I had two friends in town from Ashland, Oregon for a visit. I invited them here to work for a tour. Neither one of them had seen anything like this before. While we walked from department to department we passed by an empty floor of one building that had nothing but hundreds of office chairs stacked up half way to the ceiling. Every piece of office furniture and equipment had already been removed weeks earlier. You could see clear across to the other side of that building in any direction from where we were. The only things out there were those piles of chairs cordoned off with yellow tape like you'd find at a construction site or a police crime scene. I mentioned that this is where our microcircuit department used to be, with three shifts working nearly seven days a week. I pointed out across the shop floor to the chairs and I said, "Every single one of those chairs used to belong to someone who was laid off. They're all gone due to offshoring."

That put things into grim perspective for my guests.