Early Morning

[handslive]

Another morning build. I'm lucky that the part of the web site I'm responsible for doesn't require fixes or changes to content all that often. I don't have to get up and do this every week like some of the other people involved. They're going to ramp this back to only every two weeks now, which seems more reasonable even if it is based entirely on budget concerns.

Things are in a funny state at work. They've had a round of layoffs in our area. We were told initially that they were looking to reduce staff by 30%. This is based to some extent on the financial situation with the company. The industry analysts are feeling nervous and we've been smacked in passing as a result. Our CEO, looking to boost confidence, has told the investment community that we're ahead of the original financial plan by a year and needs to show some sign of it by year end. And an industry survey of our competitors shows that on the whole they're operating with 30% fewer staff in this area. So this was no surprise, really.

I don't know if the initial round actually reduced staff by a full 30%. They've combined layoffs of full-time staff with letting a lot of the contractors go. Makes sense since they're "temporary" to a degree anyway and there's no associated severance cost with not renewing their contracts. They've been doing that since probably May or June.

I've been with the company long enough now to have seen other cut-back initiatives before. I don't know if they have any standard for how communication with the remaining staff is handled (a notion which sounds impersonal phrased like that), but in the past there's usually been an announcement after the fact and a meeting with the remaining staff to explain the situation or at least make clear what's happened and who's been affected. Not this time.

I would like to think that in part this is because our actual manager was on vacation when this happened and his backup, who has less time with the company than almost everybody else in his area, didn't know how to handle it. Her communication skills can be a bit abrupt at the best of times. But he was supposed to be back on the job yesterday and there still hasn't even been an "official" announcement regarding the layoffs. If she hadn't phoned me up to ask how my day was going last Tuesday, I probably wouldn't have known anything had happened.

Well, that's a lie actually. Someone else in the area had heard through the rumour mill that S was gone, but that's hardly official. Funny because she sits in the quad next to mine and given that my quad is empty except for me that makes us neighbours. (I actually suspect that I missed her packing her stuff up because I had my headphones in.) But there hasn't been an announcement to the group at large here.

They've asked staff to defer their training, which is ironic in my case. All the serious, must-do work that I was told in June would be filling my plate about now has evaporated in the budget reshuffling. This area mostly does internal work for the company, rather than work with external clients, so this means the company itself can't decide what work it's going to do for the rest of the year. The result of this is that I've spent the last two months sitting at my desk reading books or surfing the web looking at technical papers and product evaluations. All of this time goes as "training" because it serves no real purpose. I have more than exhausted my training allotment for the year, but have no option. The support work I do in addition to non-existant development work keeps me from leaving my desk and simply taking the time off because until recently I was having trouble passing any of my knowledge of the system to anyone else in this group.

And that could be a whole separate rant. I've seldom seen such foot dragging over a critical function. I've been the only one in the group carrying the pager and cell phone since February. When we've been assigned support in the past, we've always tried to divide it between two or three people, each person carrying for two weeks before passing off. So far, the only times I've been able to get off have been weekends when I specifically asked someone and always accompanied by a statement that they don't feel comfortable doing so because they don't know how much help they'd be.

I've made a concsious effort since May to document the things I do, where files and utilities are located, how the system works. I've stepped the two people assigned to this with me through several of the basic things we do as the opportunities arose. I've involved one of them in every single support call I've had to do. He's done sysadmin work before (hell, he hired me) and this is less difficult, I believe. But he'll only agree to take the pager and cell under duress.

So, I'm taking two weeks off, starting next week (well, Saturday actually) and he's stuck with it. I am so hoping something breaks, even something minor, just so he has to handle it and can't claim afterwards that he didn't know what to do. Christ, he acts like this was a hard, technical task. I've had no training for it. I picked the whole damn thing up on the fly and he's no idiot.

It might help if our manager weren't the sort of guy who only involves himself when things have pancaked in a major way. He's great in a crisis, but he doesn't seem to get involved unless there's an actual emergency. I hesitate to bring him in when I'm sure he believes I should be handling this myself.

The other funky thing they're talking about doing here is making us take unused vacation time before year-end. After this two weeks is up, I'll still have another 3 weeks and a bit left. Beats me when I'm supposed to take this. I'm going to be competing with everyone else for this time and some of them have more than 4 weeks accumulated. This place is going to be a morgue between now and Christmas. And if the company gets its act together regarding the outstanding projects that are currently delayed, they're probably going to want some serious development work done in very short order. With no development staff around because they're all on vacation.

I don't have anything planned for those 3 weeks. Hell, I don't have anything planned. Period. It's hard to feel like anyone's looking forward right now when things are so up in the air. I've never been closer to wanting to look elsewhere for work since I took this job. Not because the work sucks or the people suck or even that I think my manager sucks. But just to relieve the suspense of not knowing. Just to do instead of react.

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