June 29, 2002
Buying silence.
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.
Posted by mjm at
12:09 AM
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Comments (0)
June 27, 2002
Rewards for firing people.
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?
Posted by mjm at
12:07 AM
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Comments (1)
June 24, 2002
Demise of Research at AT&T Labs.
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.
Posted by mjm at
06:13 PM
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Comments (0)
June 22, 2002
Questions for AT&T Management.
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?
Posted by mjm at
09:48 PM
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Comments (2)
June 18, 2002
Introduction.
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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Posted by mjm at
12:07 AM
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Comments (0)