A missing layoff survival guide: Learn from us experts that have already gone through what AT&T putting you guys through as it gradually lays off each of you domestic counterparts with cheaper offshore workers. 1. Don't write any code comments, or if you do, don't explain how things work 2. Create silos of local work groups and work face to face.. No email on how/what you've done. 3. If overseas teams ask you how to do things, give a broad brush overview, no details. 4. Write more complicated code that is more difficult to understand, provided it does not affect the underlying performance/reliability. 5. Don't write complete design documents. IF you write design documents, write enough to get management to think it's done, but not enough for engineers offshore to do anything useful with it. 6. Occasionally, take a vacation day off on short notice, and let things just "blow up" after you hand off your work to offshore teams. When you come back and things are completely not working, send lots of email about what a terrible job people have done... 7. Always blame problems on offshore teams, no matter how small. 8. Always blame the reason why you problems can't be fixed earlier is because there is a 15+hour timezone difference between headquarters and those remote offices. 9. Hold meetings at times that is convenient for you but in the middle of the night for those offshore teams. 10. Make sure your meetings you conduct locally are as efficient as possible and make your local U.S. totally in sync and ahead of the work schedule before you even meet with the offshore team. That way, it makes them look incompetent. 11. The best meetings are the ones held at 5:00pm PST on Friday, since that will be Saturday overseas, so the ones that most won't show up.And the ones that do show up, end up having to take time off their personal schedule to do it...Make sure this is a reoccurring weekly meeting... 12. At the last minute, reschedule those meetings for the next week (but continue to meet locally and carry on your business). 13. Make sure you send out a meeting notes to senior management, indicating who attended and more importantly, who didn't attend... 14. When someone screws up overseas, always make sure you take the initiative to fix the problem, and make sure you send out 5+ emails telling management how you fixed the problem, describing in extreme detail how things got so screwed up and how you fixed it. And most importantly, if you're going down, you might as well create as much havoc internally inside the company as possible. Nothing is worse more than a company has so much internal conflict that efficiency and productivity comes to a halt..It's 10x worse than any sort of external competition....And that's the predicament corporations and will put the company in when it starts trying to just save on "cost" by offshoring.... TAGS: (document, layoff, outsourcing, documentation, process)
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My survival guide is doing as little as possible, keep the AT&T pink slip machine rolling ......
AT&T Will continue Cutting Jobs to Increase Profits." How much profit is enough? How much unemployment is too much?, This is not an isolated example of corporate greed and its rush to maximize profits without even considering the human costs and the social costs to communities across the United States. We witness the massive layoffs of auto workers, steel workers, miners, rubber workers, and now communications workers. Who is next?
ATO is a cesspool. It's sad how favortism is the only thing that matters there. Certainly not skills or abilities.
As for coding, OP forgets to make your code as confusing as possible. Create functions that don't do anything and make things look circular.
All the favoritism at ATO and ad hoc salary increases are pretty well known by employees. The gossip that is being shared by employees continues to expose all the unfair tactics that the leadership team is continue to employ. It's time to come clean and be actual leaders which means being objective and fair and treating people based on their contributions and not based on who they know, who they are, or what you think they might do (like leave the company).
Good post, I think his idea is about keeping the job you already have, and been Proactive tours the survival guide makes sense,
....but in the end, none of these steps will save your job when AT&T plans to outsource it. They will just attempt to fix what isnt working after the fact.