GE Considers Scrapping The Annual Raise (bloomberg.com) 258
A user shares a report that details General Electric's rethinking of the annual raise. Bloomberg reports: "GE executives are reviewing whether annual updates to compensation are the best response to the achievements and needs of employees. The company may also scrap the longstanding and much-imitated system of rating staff on a five-point scale. Decisions on both issues may come within the next several months, spokesperson Valerie Van den Keybus said by phone." "We uncovered an opportunity to improve the way we reward people for their contributions," GE's head of executive development, Janice Semper, said in an e-mailed response to questions. It will involve "being flexible and re-thinking how we define rewards, acknowledging that employees and managers are already thinking beyond annual compensation in this space." In response to this news, ErichTheRed writes: First it was "stack ranking," the process where GE fires the bottom-rated 20% of the workforce every year. Now, a new HR trend may be brewing at GE that is destined to be copied by MBAs everywhere if it takes hold. Personally, in terms of cargo-cult HR trends, I'd take Google's open office nightmare over this one. What do you think this would do to employment stability if widely enacted? I can definitely see banks rethinking 30 year mortgages, for example...
Yeah, Right (Score:2)
"This will be great for employees" from the makers of Stack Ranking.
Re:Yeah, Right (Score:5, Insightful)
"We uncovered an opportunity to improve the way we reward people for their contributions," GE's head of executive development, Janice Semper said. "It will involve being flexible and re-thinking how we define rewards, "
Translation: We're always looking for new ways to screw our employees.
Not so fast. (Score:5, Interesting)
"We uncovered an opportunity to improve the way we reward people for their contributions," GE's head of executive development, Janice Semper said. "It will involve being flexible and re-thinking how we define rewards, "
Translation: We're always looking for new ways to screw our employees.
No. I thought so at first, but further digging, this makes a lot of sense and is something many companies and contractors have been doing for quite some time.
Typical negotiation with a potential employer (small/mid size company) goes like this. If the company cannot or does not want to give the salary being asked by the applicant, something can be negotiated, such as additional vacation time, or a larger 401K contribution.
I for one could be happier with an additional week of vacation over a 2-3% increase, every per year. Or additional personal holidays, or the ability to take every other Friday off (like the 9/80 programs many government contractors have.)
For single people I wouldn't recommend such a trade-off. You want to earn and save as much as you can when you do not have kids. Once you have kids (like myself), or have to travel abroad to see in-laws (again, like myself), or many other reasons, you might want to have additional vacation time. Not everything has to be a nefarious plot, even in cut-throat corporate America.
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I for one could be happier with an additional week of vacation over a 2-3% increase, every per year.
Bob had been with the company 40 years.
He now only works Tuesdays, except in winter, and retains a full salary.
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No, Bob lost 3% per year of salary to inflation, so after 10 years, is facing compounded losses probably closer to 25% of his original salary...
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I'm apparently Bob.
I got a few nice raises - due to doing some good work, and deserving them, really - a number of years ago. Ever since, I've been told that "I'm already at the top of the pay range for my position" which they determine based on analysis of other companies in the area.
May be true, may not. But I haven't had a raise to speak of since. Every year my buying power goes down and my bills stay the same or increase.
And now they're talking "involuntary separations" in a few months. Isn't that a cha
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I'm apparently Bob.
I got a few nice raises - due to doing some good work, and deserving them, really - a number of years ago. Ever since, I've been told that "I'm already at the top of the pay range for my position" which they determine based on analysis of other companies in the area.
May be true, may not. But I haven't had a raise to speak of since. Every year my buying power goes down and my bills stay the same or increase.
And now they're talking "involuntary separations" in a few months. Isn't that a charming way to say "layoffs." "Involuntary separations." I'd like to voluntarily connect my foot wit their ass.
No offense, but shouldn't you have jumped ship already? When I mention about the ability to trade salary increases for benefits, I didn't mean to do that shit forever. You do that for as long as it is financially and personally convenient and/or advantageous.
Otherwise, jump ship. It is not something I though needed to be broken down Barnie style. SMH.
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When you stop getting 5-10% raises each year, it's time to re-certify and begin job hunting anew. I got a 5% raise followed by a 1.5% raise and within three months of that last raise had jumped ship.
I suppose this is not true in two cases
1. You're independently wealthy
2. You've paid off your house and are already maxing out your 401k and have been for at least a decade (see 1. )
Re:Not so fast. (Score:4, Insightful)
There is one and ONLY one reason I work....money.
If I were wealthy enough to never have to work a day in my life, I'd not work. If I won the powerball, and cleared let's say...$2.5-$3M after taxes, I figure I could live on interest alone for the rest of my days. If that happened, I don't actually know if I'd bother calling into work saying I'd not be back...I'd be too busy leaving skid marks out the door.
The only reason I work, is to support the lifestyle I like with the things I can buy, travel and do....
I contract...so, I negotiate my bill rate to cover my time I want to take off annually....so, no need for extra vacation. If you want me, PAY me...pay me for every single hour I work, none of this salary BS where you get 'free' work out of me, etc. If you want to impress me, give me more money.
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Actually, you probably WOULDN'T be able to live off the literal interest. You'd be lucky to get 0.15% interest... and no, that isn't "fifteen percent" -- it's fifteen hundredths of a percent. If you had 3 million dollars earning 0.15% per year, your interest income would be a whopping $4,500/year. Don't spend it all in one place...
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If you can't find a better return than that for 3 mill, you're not trying.
Suncorp (Australian bank) is offering 2.8% p.a. for 12 months for up to AUD$499K, with "negotiated" rates for amounts over AUD$500K.
That's a straight cash investment rate, the safest but lowest-earning category.
AUD$3M will buy you 5 - 6 residential properties in fairly "nice" areas, and you'll collect about $450/week each. If you allow say, 1 place vacant at any one time, you'll still gross AUD$117K per annum.
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The stock market, on average, returns 7%, which is about 3-4% after inflation. So a big fat mutual fund is already 20x your investing strategy. Or you could invest in real estate, which, depending on how aggressive you are, can easily double that. Or (if you're feeling frisky) you could buy an existing, healthy business from someone else, and pay someone to manage it for you, for a guaranteed rate of return. Many non-profits offer a 5% guaranteed rate of return. Not to mention all the tax advantaged benefit
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Nope, with me...GIVE ME MONEY....plain and simple.
There is one and ONLY one reason I work....money.
If I were wealthy enough to never have to work a day in my life, I'd not work. If I won the powerball, and cleared let's say...$2.5-$3M after taxes, I figure I could live on interest alone for the rest of my days. If that happened, I don't actually know if I'd bother calling into work saying I'd not be back...I'd be too busy leaving skid marks out the door.
The only reason I work, is to support the lifestyle I like with the things I can buy, travel and do....
I contract...so, I negotiate my bill rate to cover my time I want to take off annually....so, no need for extra vacation. If you want me, PAY me...pay me for every single hour I work, none of this salary BS where you get 'free' work out of me, etc. If you want to impress me, give me more money.
Good for you. More power to you. Each person or household has a unique cash flow. Adapt your income and benefits ratio accordingly.
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Not everything has to be a nefarious plot, even in cut-throat corporate America.
Butters is that you? Get back here right now . I've got a plan.
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You would take a 3% paycut (inflation) every year in exchange for a static benefit? Let me know how that works out for you long term when you can't afford your vacation anymore.
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"We uncovered an opportunity to improve the way we reward people for their contributions," GE's head of executive development, Janice Semper said. "It will involve being flexible and re-thinking how we define rewards, "
Translation: We're always looking for new ways to screw our employees.
No. I thought so at first, but further digging, this makes a lot of sense and is something many companies and contractors have been doing for quite some time.
Typical negotiation with a potential employer (small/mid size company) goes like this. If the company cannot or does not want to give the salary being asked by the applicant, something can be negotiated, such as additional vacation time, or a larger 401K contribution.
I for one could be happier with an additional week of vacation over a 2-3% increase, every per year. Or additional personal holidays, or the ability to take every other Friday off (like the 9/80 programs many government contractors have.)
For single people I wouldn't recommend such a trade-off. You want to earn and save as much as you can when you do not have kids. Once you have kids (like myself), or have to travel abroad to see in-laws (again, like myself), or many other reasons, you might want to have additional vacation time.
Not everything has to be a nefarious plot, even in cut-throat corporate America.
But what happens with inflation. Sure I would love more PTO or a greater contribution to my 401K but if my salary remains the same while prices of goods and services rise even 1-2% a year I am loosing money and my salary will eventually "become unlivable"
At that point you look for a better job. That's what I've been doing for the last 25 years. Or what? Were you thinking about staying at a job for life?
When you do not get an increase, you look for other perks. Then you make a decision of how long you can stay there. That is your threshold, and you more or less calculate when it becomes a losing proposition (say, 5 years from now.)
So from then on, you start planning what your next job should be like, what salaries you expect to get, then you look for it
Re:Not so fast. (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, so it is easy looking for a new job, yes? Ever reach 50 and try looking for a new job? Companies only want to hire young and dumb. Your years of experience mean you are too expensive to employ. They also mean you are too wedded to what you have previously learned and cannot be up on the latest whizzy things or molded into the kind of corporate drone they'd like to see. Your health care costs will be rising as you plough through your 50's. And you'll be looking for an off ramp to retirement the first chance you get.
So why would a company hire you?
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Re:Not so fast. (Score:4, Insightful)
Listen ass hole. There's something called inflation. Raises are nothing more than cost of living adjustments. It's part of doing business and is no different than companies changing pricing.
Stop pretending this is anything other than screwing employees. And for fuck's sake no one is going to give an employee a raise less than a year when budgets are done on a YEARLY BASIS. Ass-hole.
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What's so bad about this? I didn't see enough detail unless I put my crazy anti business hat on.
Millennials are going to change a lot of things for a lot of people. Sometimes for the better, if only accidentally. And business will change, again if only accidentally for the better.
I might take a pay cut to work "full time" at 32 hours, and that might be good enough that I don't need a raise.
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I might take a pay cut to work "full time" at 32 hours, and that might be good enough that I don't need a raise.
Inflation is going to screw you.
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Re:Yeah, Right (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is in translation.
It is a great idea, rather than doing an annual raise you give employees raises when they do a great job and become more valuable to the company. (HR and upper managements vision) This means that good employees get raises every few months as rewards and you can directly show them how much they are appreciated and reward them for their contributions to the company.
Middle management on the other hand get graded by how much money they save. Thus, by not giving raises and not having to do annual justifications they save money and get a bigger bonus. Thus no one gets a raise, the middle management looks like they are doing a great job saving the company money, and upper management can not figure out why they suddenly have a high turnover.
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Other company's don't copy GE because GE has good technological ideas, but because GE has good ideas about how to screw the workforce.
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All the good employees left at GE should be in their supervisor's office _tomorrow_. For their new monthly compensation review.
Re:Yeah, Right (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm wondering if the executives also get rated.
Butters I'm telling you for the last time get your f'n a** back here right now . I said I've got a plan.
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mnnn, why do I always have to take one for the team?
What I want. (Score:5, Insightful)
Give me what I want and deserve or another employer will. That's worked pretty well for me my entire career. Sometimes they gave me what I wanted. Sometimes another employer did.
Reminding me to feel grateful for a couple percent you gave me at my formal review is annoying. I don't feel grateful. I feel like a cog in the machine.
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No, I made about 30k my first year out of school and about 50k my third. I've been putting money into the bank ever since, to the point where I could stay out for 3 to 5 years if I was willing to postpone retirement.
Now I'm well in to the six figures because employers want the skills I have to offer. I recently started working somewhere with 5 weeks vacation and the ability to work from home 2 days a week. Because that's what I wanted.
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In all fairness to GE, they're not going to be eliminating ALL raises. The CEO and his executive team will still be getting theirs.
only for the little people (Score:5, Insightful)
I bet real money the executive compensation packages will continue to grow unabated.
The cockroach that came up with this one will get an extra bonus for the year.
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I'm hesitant to directly "blame" executives for tuning their practices to fit what the economy gives them. They are just doing what shareholders expect them to do.
If executives use too much altruism at the expense of profits, the shareholders will reduce their compensation or terminate them. It would be nice if they showed more altruism, but that's generally not realistic on a larger scale.
Our economy is out-of-whack, rewarding the top echelon while devaluing the rest.
Perhaps in a global market, rank-and-f
Re:only for the little people (Score:5, Insightful)
And they will still walk away with a full severance package including, for companies the size of GE, a multi-million dollar golden parachute including, in the case of HP, paying the person to relocate to a foreign country AND paying off the cost of their million dollar home.
Then, within six to twelve months they'll be picked up by another company who will reward them for their "experience" by giving them a generous salary and stock options, not to mention tons of perks unimaginable to the people who do the actual work.
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No CEOs will have the same thing! A raise every 2 months!
management (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing about performance appraisals is that they are a process. What is good about process is that while in many cases it's not required its good at rounding up the edge cases. It assures fairness in opportunity. Otherwise the squeaky wheels get 90% of management's attention. it is also a chain. It's a time when middle and upper management communicate about employees. it's a time when every employee gets time with the boss. All of these things of course should happen all the time but they can't. there isn't enough demand or time so instead we have to reserve time for it. Thus even though for most employees the process is perfunctory it's not perfunctory for everyone. Also you get surpises. You hear things you wouldn't have heard about aspirations and frustrations in these 1 on 1s because the framework of telling what you did the last year brings it out. It's a time when a manager can tell you that if you want a certain new job what you need to change to get it.
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In my experience, performance appraisals are a joke. We're supposed to score ourselves on how we've managed on objectives for the year, and typically by the time reviews roll around again, we still hadn't even been given those objectives. "How well do you think you did on hitting this target that you didn't know you should be shooting at?" And those objectives are typically vague manager-speak: "realize synergistic opportunities", "optimize organizational efficiencies", etc.
In the end, the pool of cash is p
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'Raise budgets' are dreams. I've personally taken 130% of the department's entire raise budget *. They didn't even blink. It was a mistake, never take a counteroffer. Never!
When they quote 'raise budgets' at you, point out that budgets are plans (say 'plans' but think 'dreams'; PHBs get their panties in a bunch when you get too realpolitik on them) and plans get changed _every day_, you should have a recent example on hand.
* the managers also told the rest of the team they weren't getting a raise becau
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In my experience, performance appraisals are a joke. We're supposed to score ourselves on how we've managed on objectives for the year, and typically by the time reviews roll around again, we still hadn't even been given those objectives. "How well do you think you did on hitting this target that you didn't know you should be shooting at?" And those objectives are typically vague manager-speak: "realize synergistic opportunities", "optimize organizational efficiencies", etc.
In the end, the pool of cash is pre-determined, and managers have already been told that they have to fit their teams to a bell curve. Not everyone can be a "5", even if they all deserve to be. Morale suffers.
Or, you set performance objectives based on one set of goals, and then almost immediately afterwards, high level corporate mandates and projects come down that necessitate sweeping the previous goals away and focusing the entire year on the whims of some top level manager or C-level executive. Guess which set of goals you get evaluated on next year?
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This is so not true. I've worked for giant companies most of my career. They all have "processes". Those performance review processes have been universally terrible at actually rewarding performance. In one of those companies, I'd swear there was zero correlation between my performance and my raise/compensation/incentive/whatever. You know what actually did
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Exactly.
Working at the same place, doing the same job (IT Architect) for 3 different managers, I got one mediocre review, one bad review and several very good reviews.
It depended on how much the manager understood my role, how much they were willing to put up with flak when I did my job right, and how much they valued my input.
The funny part was the bad review did not cost me my job... but it cost my manager her job. When the VP heard what my review was, she hit the roof and said she would fix it.
Said manag
Great way to pay people less! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's right, it's all about "being flexible and re-thinking how we define rewards." Scott Adams already figured out this system [dilbert.com] 20 years ago.
Got this (Score:4, Insightful)
I asked my boss how he scored me 5 on our scoring system which is used to calculate our bonus. He admitted that he didn't do the scoring, and has no idea how the scores work. He also does not know who does do the scoring.
Needless to say I'm not the only person looking for a new job.
Bad news (Score:2)
"...he didn't do the scoring, and has no idea how the scores work. He also does not know who does do the scoring."
Translation: he gave you a zero.
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Yeah, but you can't get one of those jobs without an H1B visa.
The MBA's mind (Score:2)
Re:The MBA's mind (Score:4, Interesting)
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You could game that. They usually pay your accrued vacation at final pay rate. If salaries are going up faster than investment returns, you can afford it and they don't have vacation balance limits in play this could be a decent angle.
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Most places I've worked with such a scheme had leave accrual expiration. Even in my last job where I didn't have time to take the ridiculous vacation they have us they eventually put in a system that anyone with over 10 weeks accrued needs to take 6 weeks leave per year to be eligible for their performance bonus.
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Notably, 5 days is a work week, and there are ~52 weeks in a year. :-P
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So presumably that's extra vacation days every year (eg, 5 extra in year one, 10 extra in year two and so on...) until you reach the point where you don't work at all and they're still paying you the same salary they were in year zero?
Because if it isn't like that, you're getting screwed on inflation, without the raise.
We just gave the top 20% a 3% raise fer chrisakes (Score:5, Insightful)
And we laid off the bottom 20%, leaving us staffed at 60% to do all the work.
WTF, and management wonders why we can't get anything done.
As for me? I'd be tempted to cross GE of my list of places to work, except they weren't on it in the first place.
Re:We just gave the top 20% a 3% raise fer chrisak (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Here is what happens to me in EVERY job with this review nonsense:
First year. Great review! You're a rock star. 5% bonus.
Next year: Good review. 4% bonus.
Third year: That guy's getting paid too much, find a way to screw him because he failed to read one e-mail, even though he saved the company millions. 1% bonus.
Find new programming job: 10% bonus.
Re:We just gave the top 20% a 3% raise fer chrisak (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish I was just being bitter and cynical, but this just seems to be the pattern. Some of the jobs I plain quit, I didn't even hate the job. I would have been happy to stay there -- provided it didn't mean staying there, year after year, doing the exact same job with the same title for about the same money (or a "raise" that barely matches inflation). Not one effort made, not one single finger lifted to retain me as an employee, no matter how many compliments I got on my performance. Quite literally, talk is cheap. So I'd quit, everybody would act surprised, and I'd take my salary increase and my new title at another company down the road.
And it kind of boggles the mind. Imagine if the first company hadn't wasted all the years they invested in training me and me gathering institutional knowledge and know-how. All of that was investment. All of it cost money. And instead of using what they paid for, they let me walk away and apply my skills elsewhere, occasionally with the competition. No wonder they can't afford to give raises.
But that's not just one company, it seems to be every company now. It's the American way of doing business. Human capi^H^Httle management.
New Employee CYA Plan (Score:2)
Back stab everyone on every team.
take credit for everything
save all blackmail material
study all the get ahead schemes
it's every man/woman for themselves.
GE broke with the most unethical sociopathic employees..
multiple product liability lawsuits with lots of "not me" finger pointing
someone steals millions of dollars thru an underhanded plan.
Executives vote themselves a bonus for having some cash on hand before bankruptcy f
GE needs the Molly Maquires . . . (Score:3, Interesting)
About 10,000 years ago, in Honors US History in High School, in scenic New Jersey . . . I had a teacher who we called "Smiling Jane". The 1800's in the US were full of nasty stuff, like children losing arms while trying to couple trains, the US Calvary giving smallpox infected blankets to Indians ("Casino Indians", not "Out-Sourcing Indians") . . . and if you get hungry for a hamburger during class . . . "The Jungle", from Upton Sinclair will transform your ideal of a Big Mac into a pile of weevils and maggots. At any rate, good old "Smiling Jane" would flash a rack of teeth during these lectures, that would put most of Hollywood to shame.
Put the absolute epitome, was her description of the "Molly Maquires":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
In case you are too lazy to read the article, or didn't have Honors US History in goddamned New Jersey, the big mining monopolies created "mining towns" for poor immigrants (H1Bs?). They were not paid in US cash, but in "script" that could only be used in the stores . . . owned by the monopoly. Sound like Microsoft, anyone?
Smiling Jane flashed her rack during all of this.
At any rate, some of the enslaved created a group called the "Molly Maquires . . . they would relieve a foreman or a manager from his head, and dump it somewhere. A lot of these heads ended up in jars in the windows of funeral parlors, with the note, "Do you know whose head this is?"
Back to "Smiling Jane" . . . she went to a funeral in Eastern Pennsylvania, and told the funeral director her tale. The Director answered:
"Oh, yes, we still have some unclaimed heads in the cellar . . . would you like to see them . . . ?"
A fellow student suggested to me that we should beg, borrow or steal a black Cadillac, drive to the town, and scream, "Show us your heads!"
Getting back on topic, GE executives who rake in millions, while producing nothing of value . . . could in my opinion end up in a funeral parlor in Eastern Pennsylvania.
Re:GE needs the Molly Maquires . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
You instructor, and her flashing teeth, were pulling your leg, big time.
The Molly McGuires did exist in Ireland, but whether they ever existed in the United States is seriously open to question.
Essentially everything reported about the McGuires in the U.S. is the uncorroborated testimony of one man, James McParland, who was a Pinkerton detective, a publicity hound, and an admitted perjurer (never tried for it though). It was not foreman and managers getting murdered, it was ordinary miners, and they violence started after the Pinkertons showed up. Along with McParland's say-so, inmates reporting "jail house confessions" or men getting freed for their testimony constituted the 'evidence' under which the men arrested as McGuires were tried and hanged. It is entirely possible that McParland, a native of County Armagh, Ireland, used his knowledge of the real McGuires to fabricate a fake plot to assist in the successful crushing on coal field labor resistance.
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History is more than anecdotes teachers tell students and students repeat their whole lives.
No, the US military did not hand out small-pox blankets; pure unadulterated horseshit, that one. And recently invented.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/pl... [umich.edu]
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I think you mean scrip [wikipedia.org], not script.
Agreed, no raises for execs (Score:2)
Make it a salary and bonus and stock cap of 20 times the earnings of the lowest paid contractor and that sounds fair.
Oh, you meant just for the 99 percent.
Never mind.
Light the torches, boys!
What's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
GE is considering replacing the ritual of an annual performance review with having managers constantly give employees feedback. That makes a lot of sense to me - praise or criticize performance throughout the year rather than keeping a file and trying to remember what exactly it was the employee did eleven months prior.
Second, they are considering something similar for pay increases - no reason to wait until the end of the fiscal year to give a raise. The top 20% will still be pampered, the middle 70% will hang around for a while until they get tired of lousy raises, and the bottom 10% better keep their resume up to date
In response to this news, ErichTheRed writes:
First it was "stack ranking," the process where GE fires the bottom-rated 20% of the workforce every year.
Erich has it wrong. Welch advocated trimming the bottom 10%, not 20%. And having worked for GE for several years, I can assure you that those who were let go were never missed. The bigger problem was the top 20% who got most of the raises - they were all either ass kissers, children of managers, or helped along because of their "diversity".
More Slow Growth, Time to Move Back to Cash (Score:2)
So let me get this straight, GE is going to act like a startup to try and be hip and attract more young workers with flextime.
Here is the reality of the GE professional workforce, they work you like a dog. Offering flextime and more time off is a total ruse. Even if you take time off you will still be hounded by your peers and India to help solve IT, engineering, and production problems. The main problem at GE is that they have a mature bureaucratic culture full of kingdoms and each kingdom is chronically
Cost of living (Score:2)
Getting ready for the new OT rules and the added (Score:3)
Getting ready for the new OT rules and the added pay for some people needs to come from some where.
Also this will help us get more H1B's that don't stand up for them self's.
No pay raise is a pay cut ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... after you factor in inflation.
Well, most of the time anyways - yes, I know the USA has had a recent period of near-zero inflation, but that's not the norm.
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Presented without comment for your consideration:
http://www.shadowstats.com/alt... [shadowstats.com]
http://www.chapwoodindex.com/ [chapwoodindex.com]
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Lies that it is a period of ZERO inflation. costs of living have increase while pay has stagnated. that means the value of my dollar has dropped. Just because they changed the definitions does not mean the effect has gone away.
We have had nearly a 25% inflation over the past 10 years. What you could buy with $10 10 years ago, now requires $12.50 That's real inflation, not the bullshit the government wants everyone to believe.
Plato the fish. (Score:3)
Whenever I see HR criticised, I think of this guys hillarious real world trolling of HR.
http://multiversity.blogspot.c... [blogspot.com.au]
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"Can I just mention that your ideas to rename HR whilst amusing are unlikely to be take up by the university"
In light of the realisation that the term Human Resources is antithical to our diversity policies (which by the way were crafted by HR) I hereby suggest some alternatives:
* 'The department of paper, rules and dogma'
* 'Directorate (in an equal opportunities non directive type of way of course) of Valued Employees'
* 'The communist party' - I think party has a nice focus to it, different to directorate
If you are in IT... (Score:3)
Idiots at the wheel. (Score:2)
"GE executives are reviewing whether annual updates to compensation are the best response to the achievements and needs of employees."
Because we all know that the employees really dont need money. In fact we are hurting them by paying them!
I guess I'm lucky (Score:2)
I'm lucky that I sold a bunch of my GE stock at the opening bell... before hearing of this news.
No Worse Than Other "Incentives" (Score:2)
Having managed at companies where IT is a support to (i.e. not the focus of) the company, the handling of IT compensation, annual reviews, etc. is always painful.
TRANSLATION!!! (Score:2)
"We uncovered an opportunity to improve the way we reward people for their contributions,"
We had this brilliant idea to STOP paying cost of living wage adjustments. Why bother, we can always hire H1B replacements at a meager $65K/year. Instead, we will give merit raises. Most all of these will go to mid-level management who usually impedes work rather than aids it. These are people we want to move up to low level executives.
Those who work hard, are merely doing what we hired them for. So we won't reward th
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HR is a horrible department that exist only to give jobs to obese, other-unemployable women.
Re:GE is not the enemy (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest problem with firing the bottom 20% of your workforce every year is that you're always going to have a "bottom 20%" no matter how good your employees are doing. If 20% of your employees exceed expectation, 70% meet expectations, and 10% are below expectations, you're going to wind up firing 10% of your employees who met their expectations purely because you decided on that 20% number. It doesn't matter that they are perfectly good workers and do everything they're told to do competently, you committed to firing 20% of your workforce every year so off they go.
Meanwhile, you need to hire new people to fill those vacant slots in which case, you're likely not saving much in salaries. If anything, you pay more because you need to train the new staff with your systems/processes. And if the new staff takes too long to get up to speed, they might hit the bottom 20% and you'll wind up training someone new.
If you don't hire new staff, you're going to wind up with an ever-shrinking workforce both by bottom-20%-firings and by people leaving because they're sick of the ever increasing workload coupled with yearly threats of being fired if you land in the bottom 20% (despite having more work to do).
Having a set "we're firing this percentage every year regardless of how well the staff actually does" is an idiotic concept that was thought up my management who likely exempted themselves from winding up in the bottom 20%.
Re:GE is not the enemy (Score:5, Informative)
IIRC it takes about 150% of the annual salary of a typical white collar worker to train a replacement, plus the actual salary. So you're cutting 20% off the bottom, we presume you're replacing them with a better 20%, and you're paying 50% of the salary cost of the company in new training. That doesn't seem like a good idea unless the bottom 20% are really, really bad at what they do. In which case you should probably have started with firing all the hiring managers and HR department personnel who let those slackers in in the first place!
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And yet almost all companies who blinded followed doing stack ranking are all but abandoning it because it's toxic and is great at destroying morale and breeding infighting. Clearly a sign that it's an excellent system! Oh wait...
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This is all assuming you have some completely fair and objective way to measure performance. In practice it ends up screwing people who get stuck on a failing project, or worse for good projects to fail because people think they might and abandon ship prematurely. You can be screwed by a bad manager, a college who doesn't like you. In fact it encourages people to screw each other over, take claim for other people's work and generally act against the greater good.
As an example, I spend quite a bit of time h
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slap yourself until the stupid falls out.
across the entire company it may approximate a bell curve, but the reviews aren't being done company wide, but at the individual team level. and at that level the entire process breaks down.
it is stupid and you are stupid for defending it.
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Never discount the most worthless employee you have. There is tremendous power there.
We use them as deterrents when other folks around the company become a bit too demanding and don't understand we don't just drop everything we're doing every time they have a project they want done yesterday.
Since telling them " No " would simply cause them to go whine to one of the executives, we deploy one of our special snowflakes and assign them to their project. A project that should take a day or so, ends up taking a
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Horse shit. It's a fucking brain dead system. Using blind statistical numbers like that is a surefire way of ensuring that you have ZERO employee loyalty forever.
I worked for Seagate Software/VERITAS/Symantec through many mergers. Due to my specific skills I was totally safe from layoffs. For a time we had ex-Oracle execs, and such shit-born layoff policies were instituted.
Eventually I got sick of watching long time friends, who had done perfectly great jobs for years, walked out the door to maximize some V
Re:GE is not the enemy (Score:4, Insightful)
> Firing the bottom 20% of your work force every year is no different than YOU, as a consumer, not purchasing another good or service again because it didn't give you what you paid for. It is assigning value via your wallet.
But that's not how that worked under stack ranking. What they did was apply it to groups and teams. Suppose you are running a division and you want to put together - for lack of a better term - an all star team to tackle a bunch of problems. So you get the top 15 people from different teams to work on big problems and you solve a bunch of issues. Great! Now it's a year later and it's review time. According to stack ranking, 20% of those people, who would have been on the top of the stack in their old teams, are now on the chopping block because you have to get rid of 20% because rules. Congrats. You've now sent 3 of your best staff off to the wilderness and infected the other 12 (and probably a lot of others who hear about what happened) with dissatisfaction. Now the other 12 want to be put back on their old teams and most of them are also sending out their resumes.
This kind of shit also happened at Microsoft a lot when they embraced stack ranking. Without the firings though, they just shafted the bottom third of their all star teams on compensation which pissed them off and they left.
Stack ranking is a disaster and any company that still thinks it's a great thing is driving away talent.
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Ha, getting stuff done at GE is a bureaucratic joke. It could take 6 departments in three timezones and 4 continents to provision, build, and build a simple database server. The bureaucracy is legendary and the kingdoms are well defended.
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Instead, let peers reward each other. Promote positive interactive and not crisis management. Incentivize working together as a company and getting things done instead of constant fussing, fighting, and crisis management. Empower the people!
GE had this, at least in in my division (Healthcare IT). I forget the exact name of the program, but any employee could write up a short 1-paragraph commendation for someone who went above and beyond to help them out and they would get a $50, $100, or $200 gift card, depending on the size of the solid. I'm pretty sure the thing went through some sort of managerial oversight to prevent abuse, but overall it was a nice little program. It felt good to be able to say "thanks" to someone in a tangible way, esp
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Are these $50 to $200 "rewards" given as motivation, or as insults? Kinda like giving your waiter a fifty cent tip on a fifty dollar meal.
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I wonder if anyone will notice if we just stop paying them entirely!
and let nature take its course!