Should I stay or should I go?

Lord Ellingson has recently announced, internally, that there are to be some job losses in our corner of the MegaCorp world.  At least, that's what we're assuming he meant by 'reductions in function' and 'streamlining of teams'. 

I think we all knew redundancies were the reason for the specially convened conference call (with no agenda or information in the invite), and our suspicions were confirmed when the phrases turned from 'focus on our expenditure' to 'consultation period'.

Such an announcement is not a total surprise, as we figured that MegaCorp couldn't possibly avoid an opportunity to move on some talented and experienced (read:expensive) staff under the umbrella of 'difficult market conditions'; after all, they'll be able to rehire some graduates or newbies for a fraction of the cost in only a few months when the 'upturn' of the market begins.

It's not clear how at risk myself and fellow non-dims are at; our 'dim' bretheren are on decidedly shaky ground.  However, it's at times like these my thoughts quickly turn to "should I stay or should I go?"

I've previously posted that escaping the 'suck' of the MegaCorp black hole is an extremely difficult task to complete, so if they were to push me out of the door, better yet with a fistful of dollars, would I take the money and run? 
I like the idea of a wedge of cash in the bank, being able to go out into the brave new world and pick up some work, contracting perhaps.  Maybe I could start my own firm?  Maybe I could travel?  My mind soars high, carried by a wind of fantasy and indulgence into a sky of freedom...

But what about the mortgage?  My overall mortgage isn't that huge, in relative terms, and is below the average house price, but it's still a huge slice of my monthly takehome.

BOOM! The port side engine begins to trail smoke.

What if I can't get a business off the ground?

BOOM! The starboard engine coughs, splutters and dies.  We're merely gliding now.

What if I can't get another job or a contract?  What if I'm so institutionalised by MegaCorp that my skills are useless?

CRACK! The airframe creaks and groans; we're nose down now, losing altitude, fast...

What if I can't look after my family? What if the house gets reposessed? How do I explain all of this grief and pain to my son?

BANG! We just hit the ground, and a thousand miles per hour.  My mind plane is totally destroyed.  No survivors.

The fear grips me tightly; I'm scared.  Without even trying, I'm afraid to be split from MegaCorp; the "suck" is as strong as ever.

Ever wonder why battered wives stay with their abusive husbands?   Fear. 
Fear of the unknown, of what's might happen, of leaving the world they know, as painful as it is.

MegaCorp - wife-beater to thousands upon thousands of people.

Creating a productivity vacuum

I love how Dimlord thinking operates. When times get tough, simply make the internal bureacracy even more impenetrable. Productivity won't increase, the share price will still fall, but hey - we're doing something about it! At any rate, we're doing something.

Case in point: I was entering a 'Work Effort' into our management substitute application ITBlows earlier, and (after I'd spent twenty minutes staring at the web browser and trying to explain how I was maximising productivity by filling in an incomprehensible form) I got to the end and hit 'submit'.

I wonder if a psychologist has ever investigated why so many bureacratic forms end with a button marked 'submit'. Granted, it's easier to fit on a small button than 'I'm greased - go ahead and do me up the council gritter, big boy'. Still, if the 'submit' button became the 'fuck it, that's got to be good enough' button, or the 'cancel' button were instead marked 'bollocks to this, I'm off for a nice relaxing crap', I'd feel more honest when pressing them.

I digress.

So, I hit 'submit', and as usual was left feeling slightly soiled. My submission, degrading as it was, was not sufficiently abject for ITBlows. I received the following cruel rejection:


What the fuck does that mean? I write software, that's what I'm paid for. Not only do I not know what half of that even means, but the stuff I do understand I can't answer for the simple reason that it refers to stuff I don't know and don't want to know. At all. I mean, 'Relative Annual FTE cannot be blank'. FTE is 'full time employee', what the hell does one make a person annually relative to?

We're all forced to fill in stupid bloody forms all day long, and (apparently) most of them are means by which our productivity can be measured. It seems relatively obvious to this drone that if I have to fill in forms before, during and after doing stuff, and then can't fill in forms because I either don't know what they mean or can't answer the questions, then they already know my productivity level (definition from The Free Dictionary):

2.productivity - (economics) the ratio of the quantity and quality of units produced to the labor per unit of time

Since I can't work without the form, and can't fill in the form, my output is zero. That makes the maths easier, since zero divided by anything is still zero.

Maybe if I use alternative productivity calculation as championed by our traders, I will still get a big bonus. After all, I've only spent my entire working life at MegaCorp frustrated by meaningless bureacracy; those blue shirt, yellow-tie, stripy-suit wearing barrow-boy ponces have properly broken the world economy.

I should get a medal for being merely useless.

MegaCorp motivation

Examine, if you will, the following gem of righteous Dimspeak from Borodino Bonaparte of MegaCorp application development division:

Based on your input implementing fine grained ACLs in MegaCorp-hosted SVN would need additional engineering to enable the functionality for all users. I see the value in it for your use case, will you be able to provide us any information on what is the $ benefit that you are projecting to your business for moving the repository into MegaCorp hosted/managed SVN? We may be able to justify a one off that suits your requirements if there is considerable cost benefit to the business.

For the uninitiated, I have translated this into English:

I am very lazy and don't know how to do my job. You are cleverer than me, and I know it. Luckily I can hide behind cost savings and avoid doing any work. Hopefully you see the silliness of my questions and will kindly fuck off.

By this means, shareholder value is maintained. Unnecessary expenditure due to increased developer productivity and use of economies of scale are avoided. Strategic thinking worthy of his namesake.