Hmmmm... By the time I was an IBMer-- around 1998-- getting a "1" seemed to be a political decision, and, by around 2005 (+/- 1 year) getting a "2" was difficult, so a 2.5 was invented. I imagine, by now, there are 2.6, 2.7, 2.8 and 2.9. "3"s were common, too, and, towards the end, I believe, managers likely had to hand out a certain percentage of threes in order to maintain some level of attrition.
Frankly, IMHO, I believe that the first people exiting-- whether by their own choice or not-- were the least politically savvy. From my own POV, my selection was via bean-counter since their spreadsheets could not account for all of the hats I was wearing running a Q/A Universal Server Farm... and, likely, assigned me to the lowest-value hat of those I wore. There were some things I very very very much miss about the work I did and how, in running and attempting to improve the lab, I used a wide array of my skills and achieved some victories despite challenges, all to be brought down by some anonymous bean-counter with a spreadsheet. With spreadsheets it no longer takes killing a million men to make one a statistic. Leaders maximize gains; Managers merely minimize losses. The real problem, as I've seen commented elsewhere, is the regulatory environment; I recall AT&T pretty much ceased to exist for a year or so around 1999-2000 when, after that company was acquiring other companies to make sure that no matter what the next big thing was, that AT&T would have a piece of the action, I think it was Carl Icahn who basically liquidated the company. With Sarbanes-Oxley, the whole "quarterly myopia" is further reinforced. With SOX, the accounting folks see customer service as NOT adding to share-holder value THIS QUARTER. Look at Verizon; In spring 2009 they UNILATERALLY cut contractor billing rates by 10%. As hosed as IBM might be, Verizon, I believe, is further along in destroying itself. Well, that's the view from where I have usually been-- from somewhere near the bottom of the management food-chain. (At Verizon I was even lower than that since I was a contractor at the time.) I gotta admit, though, that working for a privately held firm is (slightly) improved... but this philosophy is spreading further and further and affecting the world at large. Privately held firms are, I believe, slightly more capable of looking at future quarters NOW... depending upon their management style. IBM is just one tree. The whole forest isn't dying because of IBM, but the same flames threaten everything. -soup ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
