by John Bruce

”You don’t think it’s a big deal that Mike’s going to have stacks of ‘360 degree review’ forms from everyone dinging all of us to take to the higher-ups?”

”Mike’s trying way too hard, and he doesn’t know what’s really going on. He’s a big wannabe, but he’s out of the loop. In fact, he doesn’t even know there’s a loop.”

”How’s that?”

”Do you think they’re actually in the process of deciding who’s going to get laid off?”

”That’s what they said in the big meeting.”

”No. That whole decision was made weeks before they announced anything.”

”How do you know?”

”Let’s just say I have my sources. But even if I didn’t, look at it like this. What did they do in the 1930s purges? In the basement of the Lubyanka? They didn’t tell the prisoner they were going to shoot him. They said, ‘Your case looks bad, fella. I’m not going to sugar-coat things. But Soviet law gives you the right of one final appeal. You can write a letter to Comrade Stalin explaining your whole case, and he’ll decide if he’ll grant clemency.’ Of course the guy jumped at the chance. So they said, ‘Just come along into this little room with a desk and some paper, and you can write your letter.’ As soon as the guy sat down at the desk, they pulled out the pistol and shot him in the back of the neck. Made the whole thing a lot easier.”

”So everyone here’s trying to screw everyone else, but the decisions have already been made?” said someone else at the table.

”Makes it a lot easier. Nobody raises questions about why the CIO and the other members of the part-of-the-problem club get to keep their jobs. And by the way, it makes human resources look really, really important. The whole big lie is their show, after all.”

Whatever sources Al had, they were good. Mike sent out the 360-degree review forms to everyone but his own people, and they came back predictably, filled with all sorts of angry payback. Mike gleefully passed these on up. Mike’s peers, and even some of the higher-ups, thought Mike was an up-and-coming guy, but the ones who thought that, oddly enough, weren’t in the loop any more than Mike was. As a courtesy – for whatever that was worth – to the managers who would be laid off, they told Mike a few weeks before the actual announcement that he wasn’t going to stay.

On the other hand, they kept Bill Imbler on. The question of Bill had been raised in an early meeting, according to Al Shultz’s unnamed source, but when someone said Bill ought to go, the data center director – the guy for whom the people on night shift worked, the ones who were always calling Bill over problems – simply said, “You’ve got to be kidding,” and that was the end of it: Bill stayed.

Even so, Bill decided soon enough that it was time for him to leave. Pete Denning, the manager who replaced Mike Garner, was worse, not better: the bigwigs moved him over from another area, and he knew nothing about the new one. His response was to stay behind a closed office door, and he designated a junior staff member to serve as his intermediary. “Pete says you’ve got to. . .” was the form in which all subsequent instructions were conveyed.

Bill, in fact, could have sent his resume out any time over the past half dozen years and gotten a good response. He’d hesitated because the systems where he was working had become his pets, and he liked eating lunch with Al Shultz and a few others. Once Pete Denning and DDT took over, he realized his pension benefit wasn’t ever going to get better, he started looking for other work, and an offer came quickly. He took a contract with a job shop where he managed several other programmers, which, he began to realize, was the kind of work he should have been doing all along.

Meanwhile, the DDT deal hadn’t worked out with his old company. After a couple of years, they realized they’d saved some money by laying a lot of people off, but otherwise, nothing had changed. If 20 percent of the people did 80 percent of the work, they’d nevertheless failed utterly to identify or keep the 20 percent they needed, and the company e-mail was still regularly down for days. So after acrimonious discussions, the company bought DDT out of its deal and started going outside again to find new people to fix its computer problems.

The job shop where Bill was working got a faxed copy of the RFP from his old company asking for proposals to come in and fix that long list of problems. Bill and the other people he worked with found this intriguing, to say the least, and Bill thought he had a good idea of what needed to be done, since he’d spent 15 years there. He and his new associates worked long into the night putting together a very detailed proposal giving specific ways to address each of the issues. One of the other guys hand-delivered it on the day it was due; Bill didn’t want to take too high a profile.

The company was enthusiastic, or at least it seemed to be. They’d brought in a new guy to handle the decision on the new contract. “Your proposal has all the others beat,” the guy said. “You clearly understand our environment much better than the other bidders, and you’ve got the lowest bid because you have a much better idea of how much time it will take to fix everything.” But then they didn’t hear anything more for several weeks, and then that time stretched out to a couple of months. Finally they heard via roundabout channels that the company had picked one of the other bidders.

Al Shultz still worked there, and one day Bill was able to call him and find out what had happened. “There was a big factional fight,” said Al. “There were a couple of new guys, and they were all for bringing you in. But then there were the ones that the CIO had kept on after DDT came, and they were against it. You know what they did? They finally found those hokey 360-degree review forms Mike Garner had sent out and then given to those guys, along with his recommendation that they lay you off. The new guys who wanted you in couldn’t do anything after that. You were too controversial.”

Bill’s job shop had plenty of work, so the loss of that contract wasn’t a financial disappointment. And Bill wasn’t badly off for money anyhow; he’d had 15 years in with that company before they’d terminated their pension plan, so he had that, too. And in any case, not too long after that, the company was acquired by a bigger competitor. The CIO got out with a golden parachute, but a lot of others, new and old, were simply laid off. The whole point of the acquisition was that the two companies merged needed to spend only a little more on IS than one company had needed to spend before the merger.

So even if he’d gotten the contract to go in and fix all the problems at the old place, he’d never have been able to follow through. In other words that whole history didn’t really make much difference as far as his life was concerned, except that in later years, as he thought it over, he realized it was the point where he’d started to become an old man.

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