Just over a year ago
Jul. 10th, 2002 02:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophiaserpentiaLately I've been thinking about being laid off about a year and a half ago. I find it amusing, to say the least, that the American public is just now "discovering," as if in shock, that ::gasp!:: so many highly respected capitalists have turned out to be cheating, criminal swine. LMAO! Swindling, and its close cousin ineptitude, have been the captains of our nation's businesses, large and small, so long we would barely know what to do with honesty and competence if it bit us in the ass.
The worst of course was what happened in the dot-com world.
The company that brought me to New Orleans is a good example. Originally I was brought in from Texas to work on multimedia projects. The company had, for years, built a small but solid reputation locally as a good producer of multimedia software modules like computer-based training or the "what to do in New Orleans" kiosk at the airport.
Then the damn dot-com bug bit. They developed a half-way decent concept for a website and shopped it around to investors, finally scrounging together a good bit of money that was supposed to last three years.
Less than a year later, it was all gone. The company had moved its headquarters to Houston, furnished the new office opulently, and hired a bunch of hot-shots at good salaries. Practical issues were allowed to turn into crises, and people were brought in as contractors at outrageous salaries (over 6 figures) to solve them quick (which they couldn't). Good projects got shelved. Every three months there was a "restructuring," and teams were broken up, and reformed, and projects were "reprioritized." Long-term customers who had fronted money to see projects through became furious.
The multimedia team, a good collection of programmers and artists, fled the company like rats escaping a sinking ship. I hung around because I wanted to try my hand at coding. I did okay, but of course I just wasn't as good as the others, and didn't have a degree in programming. One project to which I had contributed design and major input was shelved, and I found myself trying to learn an unfamiliar programming language working on a bizarre project. My days were numbered.
Mercifully I was laid off in February 2001. I say "mercifully" because, to my knowledge, I'm the only one who got a final paycheck, pay for unused vacation time, and severance pay. Several of the others, I later learned, worked for months without a paycheck hoping to keep the thing afloat.
The worst of course was what happened in the dot-com world.
The company that brought me to New Orleans is a good example. Originally I was brought in from Texas to work on multimedia projects. The company had, for years, built a small but solid reputation locally as a good producer of multimedia software modules like computer-based training or the "what to do in New Orleans" kiosk at the airport.
Then the damn dot-com bug bit. They developed a half-way decent concept for a website and shopped it around to investors, finally scrounging together a good bit of money that was supposed to last three years.
Less than a year later, it was all gone. The company had moved its headquarters to Houston, furnished the new office opulently, and hired a bunch of hot-shots at good salaries. Practical issues were allowed to turn into crises, and people were brought in as contractors at outrageous salaries (over 6 figures) to solve them quick (which they couldn't). Good projects got shelved. Every three months there was a "restructuring," and teams were broken up, and reformed, and projects were "reprioritized." Long-term customers who had fronted money to see projects through became furious.
The multimedia team, a good collection of programmers and artists, fled the company like rats escaping a sinking ship. I hung around because I wanted to try my hand at coding. I did okay, but of course I just wasn't as good as the others, and didn't have a degree in programming. One project to which I had contributed design and major input was shelved, and I found myself trying to learn an unfamiliar programming language working on a bizarre project. My days were numbered.
Mercifully I was laid off in February 2001. I say "mercifully" because, to my knowledge, I'm the only one who got a final paycheck, pay for unused vacation time, and severance pay. Several of the others, I later learned, worked for months without a paycheck hoping to keep the thing afloat.
