Boss Bitch

Send him this DVD to his office:

http://www.adultfilmdatabase.com/video.cfm?videoid=79195

Hell, send it to MY office. Looks interesting.

Well, it looks like there will be no pay increases this year, although not surprising since what with the budget and all. It sucks because I was due for a big increase after my performance reviews. On the plus side, I am getting a new Mac Book Pro for my office, although it is last year's model.

Verrry niiice.
At least there aren't any layoffs.
---

We have a hiring freeze but not a replacement freeze.

I'm moving from a very nice, on campus, spacious private office with a window and a door to a cubicle and I don't even know if there's a window room in a building set off campus. The other offices in this building are very exciting: HR, Controller's/finance, and well there are some art studios on the top floor. But hey, we're closer to a big empty field where construction on a new train station is about to begin AND a big box grocer! WooHoo!

It sucks. But my direct report said: Look, I didn't get to choose where I sit.

Enough said. :) I'm good.

We had 10% workforce reduction. 200 early retirements, 300 layoffs. I'm stunned that I survived, as a recent re-hire. I won't survive the next one.

JW:

How close are you to "revenue"?

I mean in the sense that if the company you work for "makes" something that they are paid for, are you pretty directly traceable to that stream?

Folks on the "marketing" side are remarkably expandable. As are folks on the "strategy" side of things. When times are tight operational/production/logistics/delivery are awfully hard to do without...

I write the code that makes the video slots run. But so does everybody else in my group; and that didn't spare them. Yes, the slaughter was heaviest amongst middle management, but a lot of good engineers left (incidentally ensuring that nobody in any successive layoffs will be able to find a software engineering job in Reno). I make the argument to myself that nobody voluntarily cuts "muscle" when there's an ounce of fat left. Sometimes I believe it.

I assume Lake Tahoe does not have a thriving software engineering sector?

There are some small companies up there, but not enough to soak up 300+ engineers. More webby stuff than C/C++. And the economy's turned south for everybody. If I could find a way to live and work at Tahoe, I'd be in paradise. Literally.

Everything is a trade-off. Local pluses are offset by minuses. Imagined benefits of some other place are counterbalanced by taken-for-granted positives of the present situation...

I was clicking around and saw some panel on CSPAN2 with TV news people discussing "what happened" with the election coverage. Among one of the better comments was that of a remarkably even-keeled Dan Rather in regards to the "bias toward Barack". Dan stated that the simplest answer was that "the big story" is what pretty much all the media types cover as much as is possible, Rather said 8 years ago McCain WAS a big story. He got lots of coverage until he wasn't "a big story" as the force of the , uh, "competing campaigns", shifted the tide toward the candidate that ultimately prevailed.
Does SOME of the "big story" effect the overall situation? Absolutely. But the feedback loop is not completely closed and ultimately unpredictably is THE rule...

I mention this because there are elements of this at play in the kinds of things that jw is talking about with regard to the immediate circumstances of any layoff and the broader shifts in the overall economy. Things will get worse until the "big story" is different. A few weeks back GM 'celebrated' its 100th anniversary. A pretty impressive record. Lot of talk about the Volt too. One way or another that vehicle WILL go into production. Some engineers working on it are likely to get axed, and right now there are probably some interns still working on their degrees and such that will get promoted into positions that will need to be filled as the experienced hands get sent packing. Eventually the "big story" will be about something other than the present dismal situation.

I hope it is sooner than later.

I agree, Stan. Sometimes the quickest way to make things dismal is to keep talking about it.

Not that I'm trying to say the economy problems are "all in people's heads" but a change of "main news story" would certainly help.

(unless it's about something more dismal like another bombing etc.)

Completely agree that things are NOT all in people's heads. There has been some real hard hits to the global economy. That said, probably 80% of people that were working at the stock market peak in 2007 are still working, being wages that are as least as good as they were a year ago. That is NOT a story that you'll ever see on TV or read in any newspaper.

There are new ideas being hatched inside peoples right now, and maybe someone is trying to assemble a "business case" around these ideas. Some smaller number of people will actually convert all their "in the bank" assets into money they can use to finance their fledging business. In 3-5 years they'll tell people from Inc. how they started a business at the worst possible time AND made it big. THAT will be a BIG STORY...


(or maybe things will never work that way, sorta like when the Berlin Wall fell and the Big News Story was how we'd never need a big defense department again...)

I have a coworker who is a contractor and works with some other clients outside of here. He just showed me a piece of paper that one of his clients gave him. They had a guy sketch out a solution for their network layout. This company has three sites with a total of about 50 computers between those three sites. This "consultant" drew up an elaborate Active Directory plan with a master domain, two sub-domains and one sub-sub-domain.

My first response was, "this guy recently took a class on Active Directory." My coworker replied, "That's the first thing I said!"

We were right. It's some kid fresh out of technical college.

I told my coworker that we are now, officially, cranky old-timers.

So half my staff was out sick today so I was working the sales floor all day without a break to keep up with the customers. My guys who did show up are moving at high speeds and helping everyone they can. A couple of my bosses decided that this would be a good day to come down on my guys who showed up because the back of their jeans where a little to frayed at the back hem. And then read me the riot act because I'm not enforcing the dress code because of the "excess fraying".

I think it was one of best "are you fucking kidding me?" looks as I completated walking out.

You walked out on your bosses? Is your employment imperiled?

Sorry phred

Opps, bad spelling "contemplated"

Did not walk.

A colleague and friend is about to undergo bypass surgery (for the second time in two months--something went wrong the first time), and I've been asked to take over one of her courses. I'm mostly concerned about my colleague, but my spring semester just got substantially more complicated.

Only if you want to do it well. I'd go with, "Read chapters 3-14. Multiple choice test in a month. See you then."

Yeah, I don't think the academic dean would go for that.