Are you a dot-commie. Just someone working with computers. Someone who know’s what it’s like. I read this the other day and found it strangely appropriate. I got it from this site.
http://www.sfbg.com/SFLife/tech/19.html
Job go boom
by annalee newitz
RIDING HOME IN a possibly-too-expensive cab from a night of karaoke, Susie
(owner of susie.com) starts telling me about this weird impromptu party she was at,
at which 50 employees who had just been laid off from a large Bay Area tech
company decided to celebrate the absurdity of the universe. Apparently, 150 people
had been laid off from their company that day, some of whom had been hired the
day before. What else could they do but get fucked up together?
A few days earlier I chatted with someone who said, "I'm quitting Evite.com because
they're about to go under"; a bit later I talked to another person who said, "I just took
a great job at Evite.com for lots of money and stock because they're really going
places." In an unrelated conversation, new-economy management maven John
Kao (owner of IdeaFactory.com) told me that today's uneasy techno-corporate
economy is going through a "correction."
So, we're being corrected. Our jobs could evaporate in the next nanosecond. What's
a tech worker to do? Become a job slut, jumping from one company to the other in
the hope that one day you'll find a corporate culture that truly loves you? Or become
a job monogamist, clinging desperately to a not-so-perfect position because it
seems stable and you don't want to grow old without the companionship of some
vested stocks?
Even more important, how do you know when to bail and when to stay? After
consulting major industry experts and some people I met at a rave recently, I've
come up with the I.T. Company Disintegration Warning System. Here are some bad
signs to watch out for.
**1. Strange e-mails from your manager combined with meetings that have no
disclosed purpose** When Reel.com was in its death throes, employees reported a
number of bizarre e-mails that referred vaguely and semi-apologetically to "the
future." Whenever your boss starts talking about the future in e-mails, and she isn't
trying to get you to meet a deadline, be worried. Of even more concern are meetings
to which you're not invited and which seem to serve no recognizable purpose. Why
are all the project managers meeting on Thursday at 9 a.m.? No, it's not to discuss
how great you are and when the IPO is coming.
**2. Sudden, inexplicable stopping or redirection of a major project** Beware of any
company that (for example) hires you to do a database, then decides you're doing a
search engine, then decides that you're actually creating the world's greatest
meta-shopping cart. These are not related projects, and if they are, I'd really like to
see the business plan that combines them all without exploding into multimedia
nothingness. Are you halfway through a major feat of engineering with your team,
but your manager is telling you he's just not sure what direction to take it? Be
worried. This was what happened right before SGI decided to eliminate software
production.
**3. Weird, frenetic hiring in the marketing department** People always think that
layoffs are a sign of corporate doom, but in the "I.T. space," we know that a true sign
of impending corporate suicide is when there are two marketers for every one
engineer or designer. Executives always hire a zillion marketers right before they
eat themselves alive. Blame Steve Jobs, who always tries to solve engineering
problems with good advertising. Just because Steve can do it doesn't mean your
25-year-old CEO can.
**4. Key managers leave or key managers stay** This is one of those Zen things: your
job may be a goner if your manager is scurrying off the ship, or if she's not.
Sometimes, important management types are asked to stay during a major
shakeout to "ease the transition." And anyone who is enough of a corporate
brownnose to stick around for that ain't going to tell you that your job is about to go
boom. Of course, the mysteriously disappearing manager probably won't tell you
either.
**5. There is no logical source of revenue** The revenue-less business plan is so
1999. That was the year when tough, smartass companies like Snowball.com
ramped up to go public with S-1s that said things like "Our business model is
unproven and may fail." If your fabulously beautiful Web site is chock-full of nifty stuff
and "is about to implement an e-commerce phase" or "expects to break even by
2003 through advertising revenue," be very afraid. Especially frightening are
companies that offer a lot of things for free in order to "get people to sign up" for
whatever dorky service they're offering, but then never seem to know what won't be
for free in "the future" (see no. 1).
**6. None of the T-shirts have been given away** Remember the salad days of your
company – say, six months ago – when the promotions department ordered up
1,000 T-shirts with your corporate logo, and they arrived in big cardboard boxes that
everybody tore open and raided for all the XXLs? So why are those T-shirts still
sitting in boxes in the break room? Wasn't there supposed to be some big
promotional push for your widget/service/product? Why wouldn't the execs be
pushing your company's logo down the entire world's throat? Can you say
"bye-bye"?