Reminds me of my own situation in 2000. The small company I worked for
then had 200 highly technical people. The private owners wanted to
retire and sold the firm to another company whose growth was solely by
purchasing other firms. The new owner's first action was to fire the
(exactly 100) people who had the highest salaries (me included). What
they never seemed to realize is that those people were critical to the
success of the company.
The company's business was performance measurement software for
applications running on IBM mainframes. What allowed that software to
work was embedding hooks into the bowels of the mainframe operating
systems to track the operation of the applications. It required
intimate knowledge of the internals of the operating systems. These
folks were able to do that since most of them were former IBM developers
of that same or other operating system software. They had been
recruited at great expense and paid high salaries due to their critical
skills and knowledge. They were required in perpetuo since IBM made
frequent changes to the OS that might break our software.
After a year or so the more junior staff that was left behind after the
bloodbath was no longer able to keep up with the changes and the
software grew buggy and inefficient. In my opinion the company had died
but the death went unannounced. It was entirely predictable that
gutting a knowledge based company of its knowledgeable people would not
end well.
Chuck Norcutt
On 6/18/2015 2:39 PM, Charles Geilfuss wrote:
Sorry to hear that, Paul. Of course their IT support will now go to sh*t
and the CEO/CFO will scratch their heads and wonder why. They will of
course blame it on the consultants. We went through this about 15 years ago
here. Hospital essentially fired everyone who had seniority (read
experience) and promoted their underlings (at lower pay of course) and it
all went south. Took years to recover from that fiasco. Best of luck in the
search.
Charlie
On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 2:29 PM, Paul Braun <pbraun42@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Right before noon today, I was brought into the conference room and
informed that corporate had decided to restructure the IT department, which
really means, "The new CEO and new CFO really don't know what you do, so
they're just going to cut your position."
I think about half the department got let go this morning. I supported
three departments, two of them purely on my own. I feel terrible for them,
as they're good people and nobody else knows how their systems all work.
So, now I begin the job hunt nightmare. It's been 10 years. This will not
be fun.
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