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To: arun gera who wrote (37516)	8/10/2005 9:52:45 PM
From: shades	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

I would rather have engineer scott pass up promotion and pay to stay doing the grunt work he loves in the engine room, than do his job only looking at the next level of advancement. I meet too many like this in my life - when IBM laid off many people in the 90's - they let go of some very passionate people who would have worked for food and water - not even a whole bowl of rice - just half of one - hehe, they brought in many younger career minded college folks - who although smart - were much more concerned with the next pay raise, job promotion, larger desk etc etc than the people they replaced. It was a very bad move on some key employees. Example - one guy who was laid off, wore gray pants, long sleeve shirt with sleeves always rolled up, pocket protector, revenge of the nerds geek military issue black glasses, fine engineer - was a true company man - was replaced by fresh 20 something masters from ga tech - who was no less intelligent, but when the job offer from merck came for 20% pay raise - she bolted faster than wildfire. He never would have left for something so trivial as more green paper. Another guy, wore mismatched shoes, wireless networking genius - was in several working groups with the IEEE for 802 standards - never shaved - smelt like a goat - lived in the complex at RTP, he maybe went home 1 time a month to water his plant. Was replaced by slick PHd from MIT (previous guy was from berkley), I would say both were very intelligent, one was all about the work though, very passionate, just loved technology - the other was very concerned about career advancement and more money that the first didn't seem to care about. Towards the end of my time there behavioral management was being practiced with some science analyzing group dynamics - certain teams of people with certain mixes of personality types were shown to be more productive even though throwing those types of people together would seem counter intuitive - the computer models didn't lie - they would create new teams with similar mixes - they also went up in productivity - but after they replaced the old "culture" with the new blood who had new goals other than to eat and breathe computer science - the models began breaking down. One company guy, skipped breakfast, mostly skipped lunch, if he did eat - would grab a quick bite from the cafeteria in the complex, he got replaced by one of the VP's daughters, now she had to make sure she got her ally mcbeal starbucks like coffee every morning before coming in to work - at lunch had to meet at all the trendy places in raleigh - always fighting that traffic and coming in late. Several of the geek women in the department who brought nothing but good work ethic to the job under thier former boss, with this new manager began to feel belittled I think or maybe under utilized - enthusiasm amongst them went down as did work performance and productivity - but VP got his daughter a job - hehe. She was as intelligent as the person she replaced, but her work ethic was just very different and it affected the team. They were trying to mesh a "friends" social life with the lattes at the cafes with engineering work ethic and it wasn't meshing well. I just didn't see where you could be ally mcbeal for a few hours a day, and then switch and be engineer scott the other few hours - it was one or the other all the time. As more VP daughter types came in, they wanted to hire more like themselves who liked lunch at trendy place instead of boring cafeteria, fewer hard core geek linus torvalds type were coming in and more trendy fashion show shopping machine types were showing up - this killed the engineering culture and work ethic from what I saw. Don't get me wrong, the engineers and scientists that were being replaced were by people who also had the mit and ga tech degrees and were great minds too - but just had different lifestyle goals and passions that interferred with the work culture in ways not predicted. BTW - old company men were driving modest chevys and fords, several years old - new recruits had to have the latest shoes, clothes, cars, etc etc - just very different citizen and worker who had come up with different ethics and ideas about what work and life were about. I would much rather have a chemist working on a problem because of his passion, than for his paycheck. Would you rather read in history, Dr. Salk saves people to get highest paycheck in medicine - or Dr. Salk saves people to overcome human suffering. I fear we have too many people in the system working for the wrong goals.