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It's the holidays and many people are feeling cheerful, but if you're feeling Grinch-like instead this one's for you:
If you've been around for a while, the time will eventually come when a company you work for is in unfortunate shape and will need to "downsize." Having witnessed this at a client of mine this week, I've noticed a pattern and a few warning signs you may find useful...
Here are several warning signs you're about to be laid-off. If you've noticed more than perhaps one of these, your Spidey-Sense should be tingling—it's time to start polishing that resume/CV!
...
I. Backups
"Have you backed-up all your work to XYZ?"
...
II. Training
"Please train your co-worker on X, we need everyone up to speed on these components."
...
III. Important Project or Person MIA
Just like the old Christmas movie, It's a Wonderful Life, where the very existence of the main character is erased from history, a similar fate will happen to $BIG_PROJECT or important people.
...
IV. Mandatory Meeting
Subject: Moving Forward in $YEAR+1Content-free meeting invitations or email focused on date periods, especially late-in the year (a nod to tax purposes). "Let's discuss our plan for 2016." **gulp**
That's my list for now, please chime in with any others you can think of.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 24 2015, @02:55AM
Having just been terminated after a mere four weeks as a contract employee, I question your explanation of events.
My read is that Roche - or, more precisely, Arick - needed someone to fill in for their IT manager, Jason, while he was on a two-week vacation, in Hawaii.
So, as I reconstruct events, Roche brought someone onboard a week before the IT manager - Jason - went on vacation ... gave them a week to get up to speed ... ONLY THEN, did they tell this contractor - me - that the other guy - Jason - was going on vacation for two weeks ... THEN, after the guy - Jason - returned from his two-week vacation in Hawaii, Roche waited a few days for things to settle down, and terminated their contractor - me ... as, with the IT manager, Jason, returned, they no longer needed their contractor's - my - services.
My read is that Roche withheld the fact that their IT guy, Jason, was going on vacation from me, the candidate, during the interview phase, because Roche was concealing Roche's true short-term motives for employing me, from me, the candidate, and misrepresenting the situation to me, as a long-term relationship, when, in fact, a six-month employment contract was never Roche's true intention.
Based on information and belief, that would be fraud.
My read is that Arick never bothered to interview me, because he never intended to retain me for longer than the time required for me to cover for Jason, while Jason was in Hawaii, on vacation.
My read is that Jason never bothered to complete the paperwork that had been submitted to him, electronically, three weeks ago, so that I could get the second, "pseudo" administrative account required to complete the administrative responsibilities that I had been assigned - because he knew, three weeks ago, that I was not going to be retained, after he returned from his vacation.
Also, because his inactions gave Jason a convenient - albeit, some might say, crooked - excuse to terminate the contract.
It's a fact, that the Monday morning of my last week at Roche ... as soon as Jason had returned from his vacation - within ten minutes of coming onsite - Jason cornered me, took me into an empty office, closed the door, and yelled at me.
Jason was angry that I had helped Siemens personnel - onsite to secure the Sequencing Unit computer room - log in to Roche's "Guest" wireless network, after an administrative assistant had asked me to help, at 7:30 AM, well before the usual IT staff were onsite.
He thought I should have opened a ticket and waited until 9 AM, maybe 9:30 AM, for the regular IT guys to get on site.
WTF?
Jason was also angry at me for replying to an email - from a researcher, by the name of Amrita - asking why, if a computer had 24 CPUs, only one of the CPUs was active. I gave her a quick, four-paragraph briefing on parallel programming paradigms, along with helpful URLs.
Jason said that he did not want to confuse the researchers about the level of service being provided - apparently, I had been TOO HELPFUL, and, I now surmise, I made the level of service that Jason was providing to his customers, look ... well, shoddy.
Jason ordered me to NOT provide any desktop support, and also ordered me to NOT communicate with any customers. This was affirmed in a follow-up email - so it's in writing.
Interpreted literally, Jason was instructing me to not respond to any of the tickets I was being assigned!
There is a name for such a situation - it is referred to as a double-bind ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind, [wikipedia.org] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson [wikipedia.org] ) and it is considered an indicator of schizophrenia.
Double-bind scenarios are not an indicator of good management, in my opinion. Just the opposite. It's abuse - or worse.
I haven't even touched on the conflict that already existed, between Jason, and Amrita, before I even arrived.
From what I overheard, Amrita and her krewe were constantly trying to measure the computing resources available to them ... and Jason was constantly trying to thwart her, and her krewe's, efforts.
Why, on my last day there at Roche, I asked if I could install an open source utility called htop(1) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Htop [wikipedia.org] ) on some of the Linux servers, so that resource utilization could be better measured. Jason refused me permission, without explanation.
Why would a system manager deliberately go out of his way to deny his customers - even his own L3 support engineers - access to the very open source tools that professionals use, everywhere, to measure capacity and performance?
I wondered if Jason and Amrita had both come from 454 ... and if there had been a grudge between them, even before the company had been absorbed, by Roche.
My sympathies were with Amrita - whose efforts to install a Nagios server were undone when Jason discovered it, and destroyed the installation.
Why would Jason do such a thing? The Sequencing Unit does not lack for computing and networking capacity.
(Those problems the Sequencing Unit experienced with the NetApp server, while Jason was on vacation were, I think, a consequence of Sequencing Unit's IT staff using default NFS mount options - leading to a network lockup - precisely as I had warned, on my very first day at Roche Molecular Systems.)
I was so upset by the event, with Jason - in the office, with the door closed - that I looked up Jason's manager - Arick - and Arick's manager - Aleksandra, in the employee database, RUD4ALL.
My analysis is that this action of Roche's is a violation of my employment contract, insofar as the termination decision was based upon fraud and deceit.
My read is that the agency that placed me was probably a willing party to the deception.
My analysis is that because Roche, and the agency, deliberately engineered a situation where I was manipulated into leaving the premises with equipment that I no longer needed - as I was no longer employed - that the burden and cost of recovering that equipment is the recruiting agency's, and Roche's - not mine.
So I'll be happy to ship it back to those bunglers who placed me Roche ... or directly to Roche, via FedEx - as soon as you all give me a FedEx account number to use.
Not a moment earlier.
I'm not spending any of my own money returning equipment that could have been recovered by either:
(a) Arick, or
(b) Jason, or
(c) Farhan, or
(d) one of the other two IT guys in the building, or
(e) one of Roche's security people onsite, or
(f) one of half a dozen people working at the agency.
In vernacular Olde English: Fuck you!
Where is the excellence? What have you done with it?
I've worked with excellent people.
I've worked FOR excellent people.
I know excellence when I see it.
I also know how to identify incompetence and knavery.
I say to you, that none of you are excellent at anything - other than, perhaps, misrepresenting the truth.
It's hard to feel sympathetic for you or your organizations - you all set out to find the smartest, most-experienced, fastest-learning computer person you could find, on short notice ... and then, you tried to lie to your contracted employee, to trick him, to fool him, and to abuse his trust.
You even tried to trick your contract employee into returning, at his own expense, the very equipment that you, yourselves, had manipulated him into removing from the premises!
You are some very sick people.
In closing, I also want to ask: what does Roche Molecular Systems intend to do about that hepatitis B vaccine sequence they requested me to initiate?
As part of working at Roche Molecular Systems, I was encouraged to get a hepatitis B vaccine.
After receiving the first shot, I was THEN informed that it was a three-shot sequence, spread out across slightly more than six months - that is, it would take longer to finish the hepatitis B vaccine sequence than my contract was intended to last. I felt the first stirrings of concern. That didn't seem very diligent on the part of Roche Molecular Systems.
Now, it's two weeks later. The contract has been terminated.
Does Roche intend to complete the vaccine sequence that it requested me to initiate?
Or are they just going to apply the first shot, and walk away from it, as a bad investment, and let me deal with the medical fallout?
Inquiring minds want to know.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday December 24 2015, @03:37AM
Inquiring lawyers should ask.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 24 2015, @05:41AM
Hepatitis B isn't usually an occupational hazard for IT staff. If I were in your shoes, and it wasn't obvious how hepatitis could be a risk in that job, I would have asked. If you plan to have sex with lots of Asian people, it may be in your interest to get the rest of the shots—ask your doctor?
About your offer to return the equipment that was issued to you if the company pays the shipping cost: how about writing a letter to them, informing them of that offer? If you send such a letter by certified mail with a return receipt, that receipt could prove useful, should the company sue you over keeping the equipment. If you do give it back, it would be wise to get a receipt.
Regarding the agency, with the suspicion you have about them it would be best to find another agency or apply directly to employers. If you were working in Pleasanton, California and you signed a non-compete agreement, it's nothing to worry about because non-compete agreements are illegal in California. If your paychecks came from the agency, well, you're the employee of that agency, not of the company to which they farmed you out. The agency hasn't fired you, has it? So when speaking to future employers, you might be able to put a more appealing face on this. If this keeps you from getting other jobs, that will be very damaging.
This could easily have turned out worse, for instance if they hadn't paid you or if you moved and leased an apartment. Anyway, best wishes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 24 2015, @06:31PM
Part of me is really sorry for you, and part of me can't help but stick my foot in the crazy by wondering if your take is right...
Dear Roche Molecular Systems,
Having just been terminated after a mere four weeks as a contract employee, I question your explanation of events.
Terminated from what contract position? What was your job title and responsibility set?
My read is that Roche - or, more precisely, Arick - needed someone to fill in for their IT manager, Jason, while he was on a two-week vacation, in Hawaii.
Was your contract position to replace the IT manager, somehow?
So, as I reconstruct events, Roche brought someone onboard a week before the IT manager - Jason - went on vacation ... gave them a week to get up to speed ... ONLY THEN, did they tell this contractor - me - that the other guy - Jason - was going on vacation for two weeks ... THEN, after the guy - Jason - returned from his two-week vacation in Hawaii, Roche waited a few days for things to settle down, and terminated their contractor - me ... as, with the IT manager, Jason, returned, they no longer needed their contractor's - my - services.
My read is that Roche withheld the fact that their IT guy, Jason, was going on vacation from me, the candidate, during the interview phase, because Roche was concealing Roche's true short-term motives for employing me, from me, the candidate, and misrepresenting the situation to me, as a long-term relationship, when, in fact, a six-month employment contract was never Roche's true intention.
Based on information and belief, that would be fraud.
Depends on the contract. It only takes one paragraph to allow the employer to terminate your contract early. You *did* have a lawyer review your contract, right?
My read is that Arick never bothered to interview me, because he never intended to retain me for longer than the time required for me to cover for Jason, while Jason was in Hawaii, on vacation.
My read is that Jason never bothered to complete the paperwork that had been submitted to him, electronically, three weeks ago, so that I could get the second, "pseudo" administrative account required to complete the administrative responsibilities that I had been assigned - because he knew, three weeks ago, that I was not going to be retained, after he returned from his vacation.
Also, because his inactions gave Jason a convenient - albeit, some might say, crooked - excuse to terminate the contract.
It's a fact, that the Monday morning of my last week at Roche ... as soon as Jason had returned from his vacation - within ten minutes of coming onsite - Jason cornered me, took me into an empty office, closed the door, and yelled at me.
Jason was angry that I had helped Siemens personnel - onsite to secure the Sequencing Unit computer room - log in to Roche's "Guest" wireless network, after an administrative assistant had asked me to help, at 7:30 AM, well before the usual IT staff were onsite.
He thought I should have opened a ticket and waited until 9 AM, maybe 9:30 AM, for the regular IT guys to get on site.
WTF?
Was it your job to allow the offsite personnel access to the guest network? Or was that the job of the regular IT guys to do so? The way you tell it, it could be equally construed that you went beyond the scope of your employment in a bid to "be helpful." Were there good and valid reasons to wait to allow the regular personnel who provide such access to do so? I can tell you that if you did that in my department, your ass would probably be canned that day.
Jason was also angry at me for replying to an email - from a researcher, by the name of Amrita - asking why, if a computer had 24 CPUs, only one of the CPUs was active. I gave her a quick, four-paragraph briefing on parallel programming paradigms, along with helpful URLs.
Jason said that he did not want to confuse the researchers about the level of service being provided - apparently, I had been TOO HELPFUL, and, I now surmise, I made the level of service that Jason was providing to his customers, look ... well, shoddy.
Yeah, you see, the problem is that you're part of a team there. And you're the FNG on the team. It sounds like Jason was communicating to you that you're providing a level of support that the rest of the department is not prepared to. And yeah, that is a problem, even though you had the best of intentions.
Jason ordered me to NOT provide any desktop support, and also ordered me to NOT communicate with any customers. This was affirmed in a follow-up email - so it's in writing.
Interpreted literally, Jason was instructing me to not respond to any of the tickets I was being assigned!
There is a name for such a situation - it is referred to as a double-bind ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind, [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org] ) and it is considered an indicator of schizophrenia.
Double-bind scenarios are not an indicator of good management, in my opinion. Just the opposite. It's abuse - or worse.
Again, it depends entirely on WHAT your job was supposed to be, which you never told us what it was. Were you supposed to be providing support and communicating with customers? Or was your job to administer the systems internally?
I haven't even touched on the conflict that already existed, between Jason, and Amrita, before I even arrived.
From what I overheard, Amrita and her krewe were constantly trying to measure the computing resources available to them ... and Jason was constantly trying to thwart her, and her krewe's, efforts.
So you already knew there was a problem between your boss and this other person, and you just stuck your salami right in the middle of the situation. Not smart. Maybe the better move would have been to communicate with Jason before replying in the first place.
Why, on my last day there at Roche, I asked if I could install an open source utility called htop(1) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Htop [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org] ) on some of the Linux servers, so that resource utilization could be better measured. Jason refused me permission, without explanation.
Why would a system manager deliberately go out of his way to deny his customers - even his own L3 support engineers - access to the very open source tools that professionals use, everywhere, to measure capacity and performance?
So you were hired as an L3 support engineer and you're answering helpdesk questions about parallel core processing? Yeah, that does sound like you were operating out of your scope a little bit. And again, as the FNG, it sounds like it is a little early to be suggesting installs of any kind without clearly building your case to the manager as to why you need the tool when others apparently have not - even something as simple as HTOP.
I wondered if Jason and Amrita had both come from 454 ... and if there had been a grudge between them, even before the company had been absorbed, by Roche.
My sympathies were with Amrita - whose efforts to install a Nagios server were undone when Jason discovered it, and destroyed the installation.
Why would Jason do such a thing? The Sequencing Unit does not lack for computing and networking capacity.
(Those problems the Sequencing Unit experienced with the NetApp server, while Jason was on vacation were, I think, a consequence of Sequencing Unit's IT staff using default NFS mount options - leading to a network lockup - precisely as I had warned, on my very first day at Roche Molecular Systems.)
Well, if your sympathies are with those outside your department rather than with those inside your department, yes you have a problem. Again, if someone decides to bypass my department and just install a server, damn straight my first move is going to be to kill that, since installation of servers into my network is my direct responsibility, along with network security.
I was so upset by the event, with Jason - in the office, with the door closed - that I looked up Jason's manager - Arick - and Arick's manager - Aleksandra, in the employee database, RUD4ALL.
My analysis is that this action of Roche's is a violation of my employment contract, insofar as the termination decision was based upon fraud and deceit.
My read is that the agency that placed me was probably a willing party to the deception.
Well, if you're there less than a month and already jumping not one but two levels above your boss, yes a very serious problem exists. Either you are being railroaded, or you're shoving your interpretation of your job and responsibilities above what your boss wants. Or both.
My analysis is that because Roche, and the agency, deliberately engineered a situation where I was manipulated into leaving the premises with equipment that I no longer needed - as I was no longer employed - that the burden and cost of recovering that equipment is the recruiting agency's, and Roche's - not mine.
So I'll be happy to ship it back to those bunglers who placed me Roche ... or directly to Roche, via FedEx - as soon as you all give me a FedEx account number to use.
Not a moment earlier.
I'm not spending any of my own money returning equipment that could have been recovered by either:
(a) Arick, or
(b) Jason, or
(c) Farhan, or
(d) one of the other two IT guys in the building, or
(e) one of Roche's security people onsite, or
(f) one of half a dozen people working at the agency.
In vernacular Olde English: Fuck you!
Yes, you should return the equipment at their expense if they ask for it. And you have a responsibility to notify them, at least once, that you have their equipment.
Where is the excellence? What have you done with it?
I've worked with excellent people.
I've worked FOR excellent people.
I know excellence when I see it.
I also know how to identify incompetence and knavery.
I say to you, that none of you are excellent at anything - other than, perhaps, misrepresenting the truth.
It's hard to feel sympathetic for you or your organizations - you all set out to find the smartest, most-experienced, fastest-learning computer person you could find, on short notice ... and then, you tried to lie to your contracted employee, to trick him, to fool him, and to abuse his trust.
You even tried to trick your contract employee into returning, at his own expense, the very equipment that you, yourselves, had manipulated him into removing from the premises!
You are some very sick people.
And you just completely torpedoed any possible goodwill or credibility you might have had. You are demonstrating that you let emotion get in the way of relating information, and just made Jason's case for your termination plain.
In closing, I also want to ask: what does Roche Molecular Systems intend to do about that hepatitis B vaccine sequence they requested me to initiate?
As part of working at Roche Molecular Systems, I was encouraged to get a hepatitis B vaccine.
After receiving the first shot, I was THEN informed that it was a three-shot sequence, spread out across slightly more than six months - that is, it would take longer to finish the hepatitis B vaccine sequence than my contract was intended to last. I felt the first stirrings of concern. That didn't seem very diligent on the part of Roche Molecular Systems.
Now, it's two weeks later. The contract has been terminated.
Does Roche intend to complete the vaccine sequence that it requested me to initiate?
Or are they just going to apply the first shot, and walk away from it, as a bad investment, and let me deal with the medical fallout?
Inquiring minds want to know.
It's up to you if you want to continue on with the vaccinations. Probably a good idea, but do expect to be exposed to Hep B in your current position?
I really am sorry to hear you were terminated - being laid off or fired at a holiday period (especially Christmas) really sucks. But you really need to suck it up and see what you can learn from this experience. Especially about how ANY tech job is only secondarily about the technology, and primarily about pleasing your boss and those responsible for evaluating your performance.
I really wish you the best of luck!