I won't mention any names, partly out of respect for (work)days gone by, and partly because I didn't have the guts to dig for proof positive of my superficial impressions and cynical assumptions.
The back-story is that I needed to look up contact info. for a former employer this week--the one that offered me my first "real" I/T job, in fact. On the day of my interviews, I'd managed to lock my car in my garage, and ended up having to put a brick through the garage door window to make it there on time. It was worth it and then some: They were good to work for, even for a place that rented bodies during the dot-com boom. I jumped ship mainly because I knew that my options with the client would be either being laid off or doing the work of multiple people for a single worker's paycheck.
I'd kept in and out of touch with a few folks from those days ever since moving to La Crosse, but somehow gossip about the company itself never reached my little twig on the grapevine. Dispelling that ignorance was a depressing experience. For tasters, my branch office has ceased to exist. And when I called the corporate HQ number listed on the website, I wasn't even shunted into the usual touch-tone labyrinth: A somewhat British-sounding female voice instructed me to leave the usual name, number and brief message. That was yesterday early afternoon. I didn't hear anything for the rest of the day. Nor to I expect to hear anything, ever, if that's how the world--client, staff, media, etc. is greeted.
In one sense, I shouldn't be surprised. The business model of renting technically-trained brains to clients has been deeply affected to the proverbial race to the bottom. The bean-counters of the corporate world still fool themselves (actively abetted by the likes of WiPro, InfoSys, and any number of "American" firms like IBM) that they can buy Tiffany's quality/service at Wal-Mart prices. But I wonder at the wisdom of following the crowd into outsourcing--meaning bringing development work into company facilities rather than place people on the client site--while trying to maintain the illusion of higher-level services as the differentiator.
This next isn't my idea, actually. A blogger whose identity I cannot recall suggested years ago that Sun Microsystems might have served its shareholders better by simply liquidating while the company had deep cash reserves, and giving the shareholders their money to spend on other things. That didn't happen, of course. But given how there will be less carcass for Oracle to pick each day before it takes the keys, the idea seems tragically prescient. The case with my previous employer was slightly different. Although they were conservatively managed (i.e. no debt), they didn't have the treasure chest of patents that Sun could boast. Liquidating what we jokingly called "a body shop" would have yielded considerably less cash for the stakeholders.
For all that, I'm not convinced that it wouldn't have been the worst thing that could have happened--assuming, of course that it was done professionally and (for the soon-to-be-unemployed staff) humanely. The shell lives on; the "cut above" ethos that gave the company its soul is quite obviously gone. Perhaps someday I'll have to decide whether surviving into the next quarter, fiscal year, etc. trumps losing all or part of the company culture and standards. I honestly don't know how I'll react. But I do know that I won't consider a "business plan" complete without the corporate equivalent of a living will.
