Dave Jones ,one of Sun’s Client Solutions CTOs and occasional blogger, was over last week and we hooked up and went to a works party. It was thrown by a bunch of the volunteers for our UK redundancy programme which you may have read about in “The Register”, here… . It was surprisingly enjoyable. The company i.e. at the party just shows that sometimes management lose track of what they’re trying to do and sometimes get blown of course by UK law. By facilitating voluntary redundancies, a company is in danger of losing their best (or most marketable) people and keeping the less able. It takes a focus, steely determination, forward looking vision and a broad knowledge of skills supply & demand by the redundancy programme managers to ensure that the outcome is best for the company and those choosing (or hoping) to stay. These skills may be hard to find when the managers are subject to redundancy threats themselves. Also sometimes, true in this case, rejecting some volunteers leads to their departure anyway. I’ve no doubt that we’re losing some talented people and some of the selection seem odd to say the least, but I’ve seen it done worse in previous years and spoke to my then 14 year old son about it, that

They [can] lose the best and keep the worst

, he suggested that you’d think they’d try to do the opposite. I could only agree.

Anyway, it was a good party and I’m sure my now ex-colleagues, yet still friends will do well. It looks like I’m staying, so we need to focus on fixing what we’re doing wrong and over come the problems we’ve caused ourselves.

ooOOOoo

Originally posted on my sun/oracle blog, republished here in Feb 2016.

More soon to be ex-colleagues
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