The details of this are difficult to relay without blowing the cover of who my employer is, but I’ll try.
The topic of our meeting was as I expected: RIF. Those three nasty letters expand to “Reduction In Force” and are well known, lately, by IT professionals, application developers, and those in the telecommunications industry around the world. What does it mean? People are getting fired. “No, no. Not fired. We need a word that sounds nicer. People like getting laid. Let’s use ‘laid’ in the word we use for this. Oh, I know: laid off. There we go. That sounds nice.”
It turns out that we do, indeed, need to reduce effective head-count by 4300 by the year-end. Our department has been squeezed, and squeezed again, and are already working severely under head-count. They like to do that to groups like ours because we are management and therefore, they get the same overtime hours out of us, without being required to pay overtime. It’s a win/fucked-up-the-ass situation. Fortunately, since we are operating severely understaffed, our department, from Director down, only has to reduce by 7%. While this sounds bad, this is outstanding compared to other departments who are cutting 10-16%.
7% of our staff equals about 6 people. (For those of you who don’t know math, are slow, or are too lazy to figure it out, that means we have about 85 people in our department). My company has also decided to reduce the number of points required for retirement, and many of the other groups in my department are rather… old. By old I mean that Fixodent is given out as awards in place of the usual “Dinner for Two” coupons. This means that it is likely, though not assured, that 6 people will volunteer to be fired laid off because it will actually mean more money in their pocket. However, if 6 people don’t volunteer, the remaining head-count will be removed from our current staff.
I’m not sure what the process looks like for deciding who goes and who stays. Buy me a tube of KY Jelly and a nice red lipstick and I’ll do whatever you want to keep my job.
Maybe they should employ principals of natural selection. The six people who do their job the worst over the next 2 weeks get fired; the rest stay; no holds barred. Since my team and I run almost all of the systems they use to do their work on a daily basis, I’d like to see them process even one order. Then again, maybe they should put us all in a paint-ball arena and let us fight until six of us pass out. While everyone else goes running Kamikaze style at one another, I’ll walk right out the back door and wait until the shooting stops.
If, indeed, I do get a pretty piece of pink paper with my name on it, I get 2 weeks of severance pay for every year of my life I’ve wasted here of service, plus I get paid out for my vacation time and my banked vacation time. This amounts to about 13 weeks, give or take a few days, which means I have about 3 months of full pay to find a job or a cardboard box built for two.
One would think I didn’t have much to worry about, since I am the leader of a team that writes applications that enable the workforce to do more with less (which is what is needed in times of total corporate abandonment RIF). However, my company seems to be of the persuasion that “pro-active” teams that don’t directly assist the sales teams or deal with customers are just extra fat just waiting to be cut off.
In all honesty, I think 2 or 3 people will volunteer to leave, leaving 3 or 4 more to go. I can think of more than 4 people in our department that could be replaced by a simple shell script. Hopefully, my boss and my boss’ boss will see that too.
