Outsourced Odyssey

A tech veteran explores the human impact of a bout with outsourcing.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Think I'll skip the welcome mat

I received an ominous e-mail this morning.

My manager’s boss is coming to town, for an in-person “all hands” meeting. We were told to reserve Tuesday, February 27th for a short meeting. Our manager said we shouldn’t worry, it’s likely just a “meet and greet” session.

Yeah, right. Managing 200+ employees, she’s going to drop everything, fly across the country from the East Coast, to have a “short meeting” with her 12 West Coast associates.

There can be only one reason for this trip: she will be laying off people. Per company protocol the news has to be delivered in person.

This is the same script from last year. The unexplained higher level East Coast manager visit. The advance note to make sure everyone is “available”. The promised “all hands” meeting as a cover.

The original performance was bad enough – was a sequel really necessary?

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Thursday, February 08, 2007

Rampant rumors

A former colleague from Florida called a couple days ago with the grim news that he was amongst those laid off February 1st. We are in the same department, but he's on a different team. He had been expecting it, since he was the right hand communications man for the now-retired executive. Like a change of parties in Washington, formerly secure jobs quickly become insecure when the top boss goes.

The cutting is not done, and even heavier layoffs can be expected next month - according to him. Next month they will be letting go now-redundant workers as our organization is swallowed into a much larger one. That was not what I wanted to hear.

I had been hoping an optimistic rumor was true: our two organizations would operate independently for the remainder of the year. As we had been told by our leader only last week, "most of the layoffs" have already occurred. And if things would operate independently for a while, maybe I would be safe for the rest of the year.

Without the benefit of my rose-colored glasses, the heavier layoff rumor seems more probable.

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