Lunch at the Labs

I think there should be a law to make it illegal for companies to buy silence from employees that are let go for one reason or another. A low level employee like myself is forced to give up all rights to sue their employer for any wrongdoings in return for receiving severance pay. Bribes like these stand up in court (unlike the case where a ski resort makes you sign a form that you won't sue it if you break your leg) because you are getting something in return for giving up your rights.

But there was nothing in the agreement I signed that forbids me from talking about anything (except proprietary information of course) concerning my employer and I intend to do just that :-). However upper level executives are also paid money to keep silent about non-proprietary things they know concerning their (former) employer. It seems to me this violates the first amendment and it should be against the law to forbid someone from revealing illegal activites or just plain embarrassing information.

I don't understand why executives get paid big bucks to lay people off. Can't just about anyone do that? Shouldn't it be management's job to find new ways to make money and to put the people they have to work. That takes real talent and justifies being paid a bonus IMO. If management can't do that, wouldn't the right thing be for them to say "we tried our best but things didn't work out as planned", and then step aside and see if someone else might have some new business ideas that work? AT&T's current management has failed to successfully implement a single new business idea and their antidote for that is to eliminate jobs, including a large part of AT&T Labs Research. Why do they still have their jobs?

Larry Rabiner the (former) head of Research at AT&T Labs (his last day was the same as mine) was always optimistic about the future of research at AT&T. He had the facts and figures that showed AT&T Labs saved AT&T more more money than it cost to run the Labs. What went wrong?

As I see it, AT&T management got itself into a hole with decisions that cost it billions of dollars (Concert and Excite are just two of the major examples) and the question became not whether AT&T Labs payed for itself but how could they milk the parts that were saving the company lots of money and do away with the rest to make up for mistakes elsewhere and save their undeserving asses.

I was often one of the people who asked questions at "town meetings" with AT&T management and during lunch I would often discuss good questions to ask. Here are a couple of questions still on my mind.

(1) Question for AT&T CEO Mike Armstrong:
AT&T announced losses of over 5 billion dollars on Concert and billions more on Excite. As a result of losses like these hundreds of employees in AT&T Labs were layed off due to no fault of their own. Why do the people responsible for these failures, not only get to keep their jobs, but also continue to make important decisions about the future of the company? For example, don't you think it's a little unfair that Dave Dorman, head of Concert while it was losing billions of dollars is now President of AT&T and others lost their jobs partly because of what he did?

(2) Question for AT&T Labs head Hossein Eslambolchi :
As you are undoubtedly aware, employees who were put "at risk" under the Forced Management Plan have the right to know the age statistics of those let go versus those retained in their "job universe". However I and others were put in separate "universes" of just one and thus (in effect) were given no age statistics at all. Since this makes it look like AT&T is trying to hide something, don't you think it would be better if the age statistics for all those "at risk" versus those "retained" were made available?

After almost 31 years in research at Bell and AT&T Labs I was forced to retire about 3 months ago. Since AT&T (and Lucent) is in big trouble this is not all bad for me. But one of the things I'll miss the most are the lunch time conversations with colleagues about the events of the day, both technical and non-technical. Being around very smart people makes one realize how dumb most of the so-called pundits in the mainstream media (TV, radio, magazines) really are. I intend to use this forum to mouth-off on what I see and hear just like I use to do, so please join me for lunch at the labs.

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