Man, I sympathize with the OP - I’ve seen good companies run into the ground by one or two bad apples at the top. It never ceases to amaze me at how easy it is for a few guys in senior management to completely change the direction of a company…and how fast it can happen.
That said, I’ve seen the other side as well. At one of my jobs, I heard from ‘staff on the ground’ about how horrible the new bosses were. Laying people off, forcing everybody to cut costs, work harder, etc. Well, as luck would have it, I got hired by that very company about a month later, but in an overseas branch. I spent about two months initially in the head office. And boy, if there was ever a bunch of people that needed to be laid off …it was this bunch.
Apparently the company used to have a decent product several years ago, then rested on their laurels for the next 10 years and took the easy gravy train route. I’ve never seen a bunch of people with such a misguided sense of entitlement.
It sure seems like the OP’s case isn’t such a case, of course - sounds like that before the buy-out they had a rare combination of skilled and dedicated employees. That’s a rare combination, and it sucks that the Powers That Be didn’t realize what they were messing with.
But please let me defend my fellow senior management brethren - not all of us are complete idiots…
But really, once good software is written, additional sales are almost pure profit – printing a manual and making another CD of the software is a minuscule expense. There are costs for maintenance & bug fixes, but not much if the software really is ‘good’. Anyway, commercial software such as this usually is sold with annual maintenance contracts, so there is a continuing income stream to cover this.
So the software company ought to be able to do fine with happy customers using their product & paying annual maintenance fees, plus new sales to other customers referred by their current happy customers.
They could produce additional, optional modules to sell to their customers. Selling should be easy to existing, happy customers – if the additional module meets their needs.
The same applies to new versions – if you can’t persuade your existing happy customers to move to the new version, your programmers have probably been adding meaningless bells & whistles instead of useful new features. (And if there aren’t enough useful new features to be added to make it worthwhile for existing customers to upgrade, why are you producing a new version – just to suck more money from your customers?)
However skilled and dedicated the employees may have been, Sirsi has been in the process of collapsing under its own weight for the last 10 years. It expanded its customer base rapidly - too rapidly - in the late 90s/early 00s, acquired DRA in 2001, and from a customer’s perspective everything seemed to be suffering. Delays in patch and upgrade releases, increased problems with new versions, and worst of all for the customer - decreased responsiveness from support on top of the increasing software problems.
The “merger” with Dynix just increased the unwieldiness of the organization.
And yet, they do expect all sorts of loyalty and m extra time at work, extra work to fix fuck ups by management, “donated free work time” and plenty of other nonsense from employees. I’ve seen it happen.
Loyalty has no place anymore. A company can move you, terminate you, or move and then terminate you (seen that happen too). It’s just business. So, then you can and should give them the same level of loyalty - none. It’s just business.
Amen, brother. I’d like to ask the people in this thread doing the knee-jerk bashing of MBAs and VPs and “suits” if they think some sort of magical, malevolent change comes over people when they rise in an organization.
Down on the line, where you’re busting you hump and your sampling rate is once every fifteen minutes, you don’t get the opportunity to see what’s going on across the firm. You are looking at the world through a drinking straw. Your boss, one level up, has a length of garden hose through which to view the world. Her boss has 2-inch pipe, and his boss has a drain pipe and so on up the ladder. It’s only at the top where people have visibility into the whole organization.
Yes, we closed your location and laid off 100 people. And whether you believe it or not, we agonized over the decision. But we also knew if we didn’t cut 100 today, we would have to cut 1,000 next quarter.
Don’t fantasize about making it into management then running the company the way “it ought to be run” – do it! And when you get there, don’t be surprised if it’s a lot harder than you thought it would be.
Oh, not at all, I am sure they were assholes from the day they received their freshly minted diplomas. Rising through the corporate ladder weeds out the people of conscience, and promotes those who are focussed on maximizing their bonuses at the expense of everyone else.
Sure they’ll survive, if they’re large enough. They’ll just outsource to CantSpeakEnglish, India. The 5 will be kept on as “Computer Analysts” until India is up to speed on the application, then the 5 will be looking for jobs as well. Only now in Provo.
Look, I’m sure that many upper management and executives really don’t want to have to make such decisions and don’t want to close sites and fire people. But both the Peter Principle and the Dilbert Principle were formulated for a reason, because they describe common experiences in corporate life. And hey, maybe they’re as unhappy with the short-term thinking that plagues American business as us lowly peons are. But it doesn’t take much before the well is poisoned.
I don’t think I’d go quite that far, although it’s a decent sort of shorthand for what seems to actually go on.
In my experience, what actually happens is that the metrics by which workers are judged typically measure proficiency in performing the job at hand. The rewards for being good at it are promotions and pay.
What this does in some cases is elevate a group of people who are good at something into jobs they’re not necessarily good at. Some proportion of them are actually good at the new job, while the rest are not. This happens at each level of the business. Most businesses would do a decent job of weeding out the incompetents from being promoted any further, if that was the only variable in play.
What fucks it up for everyone is the politics and human factors issues involved- how many people do you see getting promoted because they look the part, go to church with the VP, talk a good story, are the son of someone with power or influence, or some other factor that has little to do with how well they can do their current job or the next job up the line. They’re not necessarily bastards, but seemingly not playing by the same rules as everyone else.
It seems to be that the real route to corporate success is to first look the part, act the part and figure out what the bosses value. Then, be moderately competent at what you do, because if the bosses have to make a decision between you, the golf resort shirt wearing, slicked back hair having, thin, tall guy, and the fat, nerdy supremely competent guy, they’ll probably choose you for that promotion, even if the fat nerdy guy is a better all around choice for the company.
Furthermore, most people HAVE to sell a company at some point: in most industries, you are either growing or dying, and the skill set to start and build a company is very different than the skill set needed to shepherd a medium-size company into a dominant position in a competitive field. Sometimes the best thing you can do for your employees is let someone who knows what they are doing take over (and you can go start something new, since that’s what you are good at).
Okay, but why do you even have to lay off 100 people? I suppose the new version of Product is not selling as well as you had projected. Who designed Product, who is marketing it, selling it, who green-lighted it in the first place? You may agonize over it, but if that location has to be closed, it’s because someone in management couldn’t find useful, profitable work to be done there.
When times are good, the people at the top justify their salaries by saying that they provide the guidance and decisions that are responsible for the state of a company. When times are bad, why do 100 people at the bottom lose their jobs?
Not just maximizing our bonuses. We’re always on the lookout for people who can come up with creative new ways to screw the workers. It makes our company stronger, more productive and more profitable if we utterly crush their spirits. Who wants a bunch of daring and innovative initiative-takers when instead we can have legions of unmotivated sheep? :rolleyes:
It’s not about whether you want to make the decision. You have to. Companies are not democracies. Neither are they pure autocracies. At least, not the successful ones.
Oh sure, the golf shirt will get you in the door. But you’re going to need treachery and blackmail (always carry a digital camera – always!) to keep your trajectory upward! :rolleyes:
The definition of “times are bad” = bad things are going to happen. You don’t think sales people and managers get laid off, too? What I am saying is that the people running the ship at the top are not so different from the ones turning the wrenches down below. And in many (most?) cases the latter have earned themselves a place at the top via hard work, dedication, perseverance…You don’t turn in your humanity card at the gates of management.
Tired of working for the Man and being held down by the Man? Then become the Man (or WoMan) and do something about it.
In the companies where I’ve worked, managers get laid off at a higher rate than employees - but they also screw up worse.
But there are humane layoffs and inhumane ones. In one case, when a project was canceled, there were layoffs, but there was also an internal job fair to make sure every opening we had was filled by someone from inside. At the opposite end, when AT&T split into 3 pieces, the Lucent piece got severely downsized, both through incentives and layoffs, to make the IPO for it easier. There was no thought about the disruption. And then there are execs who cut staff to save money, but then give themselves big bonuses for saving all that money.
