On Aug 13, 2007, at 9:30 AM, Craddock, Chris wrote:
----------SNIP-----------
This is pretty much exactly what happened across the industry in the
late '70s through the mid '80s. Even to peons like me. I got a metric
boatload of formal classroom training, for which I was (and am) very
grateful. But the company that sent me off to that training evidently
did not recognize that they had made me more valuable and for several
years, they declined to pay me any more than I had been getting
beforehand. As you can imagine, loyalty only goes so far!
So I think the reality here is that the companies that were "losing
out"
after providing training were just idiots! If they had simply made
a few
market adjustments to their own staff, this would have been a
non-problem, or a much less severe problem. Economics 101 dictates
that
they're going to end up paying the same (or more) than the rest of the
market anyway. Holding the line, in this case, just made it much
worse.
Goes to show bean-counters should never be allowed to run corporate
policy.
CC
Chris,
Agreed but somewhat different. We had a similar situation we were on
the "largish" side (for back then). Corporate was screaming about the
money that was spent on hardware and they were also pinching pennies
about labor costs. I think it was an issue in that groups were not
getting charged back for usage fairly. We spent quite a bit of money
on software and hardware to figure out where the cpu time was going
(long story deleted). Once we got the kinks ironed out it was found
that a subsidiary was really getting off lite. They were put on the
auction block and reasonably sold off soon. Our management was able
get more education dollars. So the way our management people did it
we got tons of education and little salary improvements. This went on
for several years and it finally dawned on them that we were due for
a COLA. It was a breath of fresh air as soon as everyone got the $ it
was time to go out looking for a job there were a lot of people
quitting. Soon there after the division was relocated to florida. The
"lifers" went to Florida and the rest of us stayed. Corporate never
did understand the issues other than $'s. I am just glad that we did
not have to put up with corporate politics.
There was a fair amount of corporate loyalty as our management did
their best to shield us from it. I was working on a daily basis with
people in corporate so I knew a little what was going on and was
happy that it did not reach us. I spent a few months out in
corporate and disliked the people altogether.
Ed
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