|
|
 Originally Posted by BennyLaRue
Some of the ppl I work with? Try 0, or possibly a negative contribution.
didn't read whole thread, but this is a huge problem, most of the people in corporate america (and I assume elsewhere) ime are incredibly stupid and just can't actually do anything useful. I am not sure if most people are just useless, or if it is ingrained from the culture. Most of the good people are handcuffed by morons or policies made by morons or spend most of their time managing stupid people or cleaning up stuff the stupid people 'worked' on.
In general the best way to get something done was to put less people on it.
At my old job after 9/11 we laid off 8 people out of a 16 person team, was as big as 20 around 2000. I still remember going out to lunch with the other 7 and all of us saying "how will we get anything done?". Answer? We got more done than ever and we did it much better. One good IT guy was given low level tasks that 3 people used to do, and he automated most of them in about a week. People who had been made 'team leads' which amounted to mostly baby sitting the morons got back to work and started contributing again. Everyone was less bitter - it's hard to care when you watch someone get paid more than you while they do 5% of what you do - so we put more effort in. etc etc. Similiar stuff happened on other teams that worked with us which again improved our process.
All of this happened while we knew we couldn't get raises or promotions, although to be fair we were very motivated by the fact that there were no job anywhere in the industry and the axe was looming.
Sadly, it could not last. Eventually once head counts started opening, they were filled with the remaining rejects from other departments. I vividly remember getting a new team member and sitting in my bosses' office 3 days later while she lamented how useless he was. He had been passed around from dept to dept for years, I have no idea who he was sleeping with. This was in a company that was nearly bankrupty for a 3 year stretch.
By then time I left in 2006 we had bloated back to two depts of 10 each with 3-4 useless people in each.
No one wants to fire idiots, for these reasons:
1) the stupidity is across all levels, so you have to 'save' people to lay off. If we had fired 5 of those idiots in 2000, we'd have probably ended up having to can 2-3 good people when the big cuts came in 2001. Arguments like 'but our people are good' just don't cut it.
2) your status as a leader is largely measured by how many people report to you.
3) hiring someone is a huge process that costs money and takes a long time. Not only is all that 'wasted' if you fire the person, but then everyone else has to do the job they were supposed to be doing. this then proves that you didn't really need the headcount to begin with. It is much better to have someone else do two jobs and carry the moron. In almost every case where we added a person to my team, our team & company would have been MUCH better off giving someone a 25% raise to do the extra work and not hiring someone. This never happened, or was even discussed afaik.
4) you might get sued.
so the idiots all stay until the next round of layoffs come. Any departments that are staffed appropriately are punished, and the big winners are groups that have a bunch of useless people sitting around.
I don't know how you fix it but until it happens people will still be sitting at desks all march working on their brackets and fantasy baseball drafts. It's the only real way to 'beat' the system. For me, stealing as much time as I could was the only thing I could do to maintain some semblance of self respect.
TL/DR:
most people are dumb and ill suited for their profession
fire them when you figure this out
most jobs would then pay so much you could work for 5-10 years and then retire young at 30-50 hours per week
or you could just work 10-20 hours a week with tons of vacations until you turn 60 or w/e.
|
Reply With Quote