Bok, our company is most of the time like an Ikea shopping experience: our employees have to do everything by themselves, from reserving a meeting room, to arrange a business travel, so HR is not an exception. Except the category of an employee and its salary, of course: but this is decided by the managers at last, this is not even a job for the boys and girls of HR. So, what I expected from them was to care about the employees, to help the company to retain the intellectual capital, or IC as we like to call it. Then, if this is what they are supposed to do, Why is there so many TECHNICALLY SKILLED people leaving the company?In some GEMs, there are departments that are loosing up to 50% of the skilled people, counting Architects, Engineers and Business Development Managers, so there are some parts of the business with their continuity seriously harmed with this situation. In the SOA area, we have even lost 75% of the people selling JCAPS in one of the countries, and the situation is so well handled by HR that it is quite probably that we are going to loose the rest of the department.
What the HR head of that country told me is that "they are really focused in software". I pledged her to stop focusing and start doing her job before the whole office went out to work for our competitors (I really miss to have the control in this situations: Jonathan, I want to talk to you about this, please, pick up the phone, I've tried to call you 10 times this week... and it's only Monday!).
Ok, it is a matter of money. There are a lot of new jobs in other companies, the sector is going up almost like the times of the bubble, and experienced people is hard to find so other companies are willing to pay much more money for our skilled people. Don't you think there at HR that we have the same need of technically skilled people? Don't you ever realize that it is much more cheaper to rise the salaries and the benefits of the people _ALREADY_ working for us, with a lot of experience, rather than hiring new _unexperienced_ people that will need at least one year to match the people they are substituting? Not to mention that the people leaving is going to work for our competitors, knowing everything about on-going deals, customer contacts, product weakness...
Bye the way, I'm also mad at Steve and Larry. It seems that people leaving Sun software departments are going to Oracle (some to BEA, but I count on Larry buying them in the short term, so...), and the people that used to sell our iron is going to Micro$oft. I guess this makes sense, as Oracle is trying to build a quite serious speech in the middleware area, and Micro$oft is trying to make people believe that they can provide enterprise servers.
Well guys, Larry and Steve, I though we were partners, and that among partners we don't steel people... I'll ask the other Steve for the availability of Moshe to take some revenge...
By the way, it's curious, but it seems that Apple is not attracting many of our skilled people so far (despite the fact that this friggin device called the MacBook Pro is very easy to see in our offices).
After having fought with stakeholders so many years to avoid lay-offs, after having left the reigns to Jonathan with the promise to keep the most skilled people and to minimize the RIFs, now that the company is making money again, this is the way I get rewarded, by letting go (and now it is true that Sun is letting go people, not firing them) the people I have been taking care of during so many years?
I'm really FURIOUS. And you'll also be as soon as I post the stories that employees and ex-employees are sending me...
Jonathan, ok, don't answer the phone, but please, do something before it is too late: unfreeze the focal processes, rise the salaries, do something before I end up working as a pre-sales engineer as in the old times...
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