Yet another reason why I hate corporate america...

The folks at O'Reilly Media just laid off a bunch of people. One of them was my girlfriend, Denise. But just to set the record straight, this blog isn't about that company specifically. It is about this process in our country of cutbacks, 'downsizing', 'rightsizing', whatever. A bunch of doublespeak that means "we don't know what the eff we're doing so we have to do something before the shareholders stop giving us money."

If you haven't seen Office Space yet, do so immediately. If you have ever worked in Corporate America, you will split your sides and wet yourself laughing at the perfect representation of office life. If you have not had the delight of that experience, you will still find it funny. And I might add, you can view it as a documentary. It is that accurate.

(This *might* be considered a spoiler, but it won't ruin the movie for you, and it is important to this rant. So, tough it out.) During the movie, there are layoffs. In the course of the layoffs, it becomes evident that the laying-off process is really more about reverse Robin Hooding the company: the people who do the bulk of the work are being let go, and their multitudinous tasks are absorbed by others who don't have the training to handle them and are not compensated further, while the people who 'supervise' and 'manage' others are given more money. Middle management gets richer, upper management gets richer, the workers get effed.

I have personally been through this process twice. Once was at the hands of our government, who discovered that the senior officers of the company I worked for were running a Ponzi scam and decided to shut the company down. Over 40% of the company was laid off a week later, then about another 50% of the remaining people were let go a couple weeks after that. I survived both, but realized I was just marking time until the axe fell and decided to get the hell out.

The second time was textbook Corporate America. I used to work in the video game industry. The company I worked for, Mattel Interactive, sold their entertainment division (us) to Ubisoft, and Ubisoft laid off anyone who wasn't working on the four titles they were interested in publishing. They didn't concern themselves with who the best workers were--they didn't have time or energy for that. So they kept people who should have been let go, and let a lot of people (good friends of mine) go who really knew what they were doing and could have made the company successful. (By the way, after those four titles were published, they let most of the rest of the people go, and moved the remaining handful to the city, forty miles away.)

It is as if (this is a little illustration I came up with myself and am very proud of) some folks are sitting in some boardroom somewhere. Lord High Muckety-Muck says, "Well, our racehorse seems to be about ten pounds too heavy. What can we do?" Chancellor Meek says, "Well, the left hind leg from the knee down weighs exactly ten pounds. Why don't we just cut that part off and be done with it?" Lord Muck says, "Brilliant! Simple, clean, easy--brilliant! Go forth, Chancellor Meek!" The Chancellor summons Headsman Mook, who then proceeds to severance package the ten pounds of leg, and voila! Success. Sort of.

Then Mook, Meek and Muck celebrate by giving themselves raises, and the shareholders all rejoice at the wonderful streamlining and reorganizing the company has completed. Profits stabilize (notice I did not say 'increase') and all is well in the kingdom.

I could go on, but I'm just making myself madder and madder. Feh.