Originally Posted by
Dan Druff
BTW I've got a personal story about a defense contractor wasting money.
In 1998, I was working for a defense contractor and they had an essential project which needed to be completed by a hard deadline, at which point they would be moving the entire project to Alabama.
So basically the California group had to finish a lot of work in a relatively short time, and I was part of that group. I also wasn't making very much money, with it being my first job out of college.
The really frustrating thing for me, however, was watching new hires out of college get a higher starting salary than my then-current one, despite my two years at the company and Master's Degree.
How did this happen?
It was a phenomenon called "compression". The dot-com boom of the late '90s was forcing programmer salaries way up, so they had to hire at rapidly increased salaries in order to get anyone new, even recent college grads. However, this greatly outpaced the yearly raise budget they had for existing employees, so it fucked existing employees like me who had only been there a few years. This problem plagued many companies, and the more flexible, nimble ones fixed it for those who spoke up.
I was working for a company full of bureaucracy, and there simply wasn't an easy way to do it. The only way they could manage it was to take the money out of the "raise" pool, which would have limited flexibility to give other people raises in my department. They really didn't want to deal with it.
Regardless, I went to HR and told them that I needed this rectified, or I was walking.
Well, they went into a panic because they realized if I walked, that important project wasn't going to get done. At the same time, they really didn't want to give me that big raise and throw off their raise pool.
So what did they do? They lied to me. They told me it was "processing", and as soon as I was done with the essential project and they closed our department down, they broke the news to me that it was "denied".
At that point, they didn't give a shit if I left, because my department was closing, and while I wasn't being laid off (I was being moved elsewhere), I was no longer essential, and in some ways extraneous.
Dirty. I was too naive at the time to have demanded a signed agreement. I just took their word for it, and I got fucked up the ass.
Anyway, I didn't quit right away because it's a disadvantage in the job market to have no job while looking for a new one.
I started looking elsewhere, and they moved me to a new department.
Here's where the waste comes in.
This new department was HUGE and bloated. Basically they dropped people there if they had nowhere else to go.
My new boss gave me the first assignment, and I completed it in like 45 minutes.
I came back to him and said, "Okay, what now?"
He responded, "What? You're done? Oh I didn't expect that. I thought this would take like 4 days. Okay, I'll get back to you soon."
He didn't get back to me. He was content to let me sit around doing nothing.
This was actually great for me because I got to spend the time on the internet looking for new jobs and basically fucking around, while getting paid for it. I could also disappear for hours at a time to go on job interviews and nobody even noticed or cared. I wasn't even working in the same room as my boss, nor did he come look for me.
I had some small lol task to complete each week, I'd knock it out in an hour, and then I'd have 39 hours left to fuck around.
I remember thinking to myself, "If I wasn't 26 years old and looking for challenges in my career, this would be the perfect situation. If I were like 55 and just looking for a paycheck, this would be heaven."
But I wasn't 55 and looking for a paycheck. I wanted something challenging, interesting, and with a future.
Finally I found something which looked good, accepted it, and gave my 2 weeks notice. In my official letter giving the notice, I blamed the situation from a few months back where they screwed me out of the pay raise.
"Oh wow, I had no idea they did that to you," said my boss. "Well, you've done a good job in the few months you've worked for me, so let me know if you need a recommendation."
And with that, I was on my way.
But I couldn't help think of how bloated the whole thing was, and how much taxpayer money was being wasted to do very little.