Reply to: how to save the UK economy

[darrenb]

Hence the trend for making decisions on cost alone. It's the only thing an ignoramus can understand.

This can also be based on cost. The higher my day rate, the better I am

When accountants are doing the hiring, it's always best to be reassuringly expensive.

[bobspud]

That is part of the problem. The management classes have a different set of criteria to the rest of the work force and are also normally at a level where company decisions are made. The single driving factor in the UK for many years has been short term profit. A manager can propose saving millions by outsourcing (not necessarily overseas) a department or a work package. They justify this as the firm they outsource to is cheaper and their own companies exposure to employment law is much reduced. The manager gets a pat on the back and the company saves money. Nobody stops to think that next year when a client is looking for a supplier of those services they will go straight to the outsourced company, or the managers company no longer has the in house expertise to win any work.

**Phew, sorry, went off on one there.

This is what cost my last ever permie company one of their biggest clients. We had dozens of top end £1500 a day guys in there until some idiot though it would be a great idea to sell them additional offshore resources. Six months on they were bob only and we were all out on our ears...

On a separate thought. I had to go to Wales for a meeting yesterday because a client wants to start looking at BPO. Driving down the M4 looking at all the place names made famous by the Miners strikes and the anger as Maggie destroyed the industry because it could be done cheaper elsewhere. I cannot understand the mentality of any Welsh person that would actively seek to offshore a local job knowing what happened to their communities the last time we took the jobs away...

[doodab]

And the managers are hired and fired by... managers.

The higher up the chain you go, the more out of touch they are with the work that produces the value. If you have a 19th century factory with thousands of grunts, a work product that is easy to understand, and a relatively educated elite of managers then (conceivably) this kind of system could work. But how could it ever work when the people at the lowest level in the hierarchy need to have a high level of intelligence to produce anything useful, higher than that of the managers?

Hence the trend for making decisions on cost alone. It's the only thing an ignoramus can understand.

How can the value-producers be judged and selected?

This can also be based on cost. The higher my day rate, the better I am

[darrenb]

Sounds like they need to hire and fire better managers.

And the managers are hired and fired by... managers.

The higher up the chain you go, the more out of touch they are with the work that produces the value. If you have a 19th century factory with thousands of grunts, a work product that is easy to understand, and a relatively educated elite of managers then (conceivably) this kind of system could work. But how could it ever work when the people at the lowest level in the hierarchy need to have a high level of intelligence to produce anything useful, higher than that of the managers? How can the value-producers be judged and selected?

Ah well there's always HR...

[Arturo Bassick]

Sounds like they need to hire and fire better managers.

That is part of the problem. The management classes have a different set of criteria to the rest of the work force and are also normally at a level where company decisions are made. The single driving factor in the UK for many years has been short term profit. A manager can propose saving millions by outsourcing (not necessarily overseas) a department or a work package. They justify this as the firm they outsource to is cheaper and their own companies exposure to employment law is much reduced. The manager gets a pat on the back and the company saves money. Nobody stops to think that next year when a client is looking for a supplier of those services they will go straight to the outsourced company, or the managers company no longer has the in house expertise to win any work.

**Phew, sorry, went off on one there.

[bobspud]

Dodgy FOAD you are just a twisted dogmatic Tory idiot who doesn't argue any of the points made but bases his entire discourse not on what I say but what you imagine I might have said. I am very far from a leftie apologist as you would know if you read anything I wrote instead of pasting in your dogmatic knee-jerk reaction to anything I post.

In this country you can fire people who are no use. You can fire people if you have no work for them. That is the law - already. The fact that so many managers are so crap at it isn't my fault. Nor is the fact that so many people set up businesses then spend all their time whining about how awful it is instead of getting on with it.

I actually don't much care if we have protection or not - my point (as if you'd ever actually bother to listen) was that it's an uttter irrelevance and is kicked about by party dogma (of both main parties) as a sop to weak-minded pillock one-party supporters who think their party is "doing something" when in fact they are fiddling while Rome burns.

Thatcher took away some (but not all) protections. Labour put some (but not all) back. Now they are making some very minor reforms - it's all chatter for fools in the Conservative Club Bar or the Labour Club Bar. No party is doing anything substantive because they are all too weak.

Protection for the employee is the only reason you have a job as a freelancer. So perhaps you should consider caring about the facts a bit more.

Out of interest, do you lead many staff?

Last year I had to put up with two of the dumbest twat permies I have ever encountered. Dangerously stupid. The client co has no chance of removing them even with a list of complaints as tall as them. Not even with direct complaints from the customer. My personal take on their behaviour was it was done on purpose to avoid staying on projects that they didn't want to be on... Talking to other managers inside the supplier they were also of the same opinion. They were very good at what they did on WFH projects but turned into ****wits as soon as they had to head down south, and had been doing it for years. The company didn't want the ball ache of removing them, so most of the time they sit at home and pick WFH projects that fit in with whatever else they do for the other 5 hours in their day.

IMO booting them out should not take longer than a conversation saying "Sorry we are not happy with your work you have a week to tell us what you can do to improve then a 1 week rolling probation until you are up to the standards we set. 2 failed weeks in a row and you are out. No further warnings..." But as the rules are set today as soon as the company starts the proceedings to remove an employee, the employee can go to the doctor and get signed off for depression and everything has to halt until they come back. There was a chap at my last client that had been playing that game for 2 years.

So for you to say you can get rid of people today is uninformed. But what I do not want to see is the ability for FT100 firms to be able to just hire and fire at random because the vast amount of the freelance industry will just implode.

Employees and good freelancers are a different class of skills.

I go to my clients and talk with them about business matters, cost implications and design constraints. Then produce a solution and see it through to transition and leave.

An employee is promised things like "Its nice to work here", "We are a tight team that look after each other", "You can go far if you work with us". From what I can see most of them are very sheltered from the figures involved and are left to turn up do stuff and go home to have hobbies. It's not fair to expect an employee to care about business change and regeneration when all of the messages fed to them when employing them is about safe stable friendly environments.

[VectraMan]

This is especially true in an opaque area like IT. On over a dozen contracts I have noticed that the managers have no clue of which of their subordinates are being productive and which are not. Anyone with the power to hire and fire will rely on appearances rather than studying code. Since the worse workers will concentrate on appearances and politics, there is actually an inverse relationship between merit and survival.

Sounds like they need to hire and fire better managers.

[darrenb]

Yeah ...hire and fire, bring it on ...

The thinking behind easy hire-and-fire is that organizations will become more and more efficient if they have a free hand to get rid of the bad and recruit the good. But the HUGE assumption here is that hire-and-fire is done on the basis of merit, when in fact it is done on the basis of politics.

This is especially true in an opaque area like IT. On over a dozen contracts I have noticed that the managers have no clue of which of their subordinates are being productive and which are not. Anyone with the power to hire and fire will rely on appearances rather than studying code. Since the worse workers will concentrate on appearances and politics, there is actually an inverse relationship between merit and survival.

This helps explain why organizations tend to decline rather than improve over time.

[DodgyAgent]

Dodgy FOAD you are just a twisted dogmatic Tory idiot who doesn't argue any of the points made but bases his entire discourse not on what I say but what you imagine I might have said. I am very far from a leftie apologist as you would know if you read anything I wrote instead of pasting in your dogmatic knee-jerk reaction to anything I post.

In this country you can fire people who are no use. You can fire people if you have no work for them. That is the law - already. The fact that so many managers are so crap at it isn't my fault. Nor is the fact that so many people set up businesses then spend all their time whining about how awful it is instead of getting on with it.

I actually don't much care if we have protection or not - my point (as if you'd ever actually bother to listen) was that it's an uttter irrelevance and is kicked about by party dogma (of both main parties) as a sop to weak-minded pillock one-party supporters who think their party is "doing something" when in fact they are fiddling while Rome burns.


Thatcher took away some (but not all) protections. Labour put some (but not all) back. Now they are making some very minor reforms - it's all chatter for fools in the Conservative Club Bar or the Labour Club Bar. No party is doing anything substantive because they are all too weak.

If you had actually made your point like this in the first place then I would not have slagged you. Your point is well made but I disagree that it is easy to fire someone because it is'nt. You can sack someone for being useless only after a long sequence of warnings. Yes you can make people redundant by removing the job, but if you use this just to get rid of someone and then hire someone else you are in trouble. There are also notice periods that you have to comply with and when you hire someone there all sorts of hoops that need to be jumped. You may be an expert in the software and have a thorough understanding of the legalities but I have extensive experience of the day to day practicalities of hiring and firing. I am fortunate because I can ignore some of the red tape but larger companies cannot which is why they need to employ so many useless idiots in HR.

[Peoplesoft bloke]

yep - and make all recruitment agencies and HR departments illegal. You only get a job by showing the manager that you have the skills and can do a good job. None of this "only if you've squatted in the same chair for 10 years, and have 5 years experience of a software update that's only been out 1 year" rubbish...

Ah... I can dream...

Now that's a policy I would vote for. Recruitment "Solutions" outsourcers - solving "problems" that don't exist.

[Peoplesoft bloke]

Exactly, I don't see what easy hire-and-fire (well, the firing part) will do that redundancy doesn't give already.

Nothing at all - it is a sop to the weak-minded. Citing the US is daft too, because although it's hire and fire in theory, they are even more scared of equality lawyers than us.

[Peoplesoft bloke]

Ok I am being extreme in making my point. Yes I accept that a certain level of job security is good for employees. But I do believe that workers should be kept on their toes and never be allowed to feel that their job is an entitlement.
I also see that our lefty apologist seems to think that relationships between boss and worker are an attritional state of conflict between employee (victim exploited) and employer (sadistic bully). It is no wonder that private sector jobs are not being created if that is the lefts attitude to the workplace.

Dodgy FOAD you are just a twisted dogmatic Tory idiot who doesn't argue any of the points made but bases his entire discourse not on what I say but what you imagine I might have said. I am very far from a leftie apologist as you would know if you read anything I wrote instead of pasting in your dogmatic knee-jerk reaction to anything I post.

In this country you can fire people who are no use. You can fire people if you have no work for them. That is the law - already. The fact that so many managers are so crap at it isn't my fault. Nor is the fact that so many people set up businesses then spend all their time whining about how awful it is instead of getting on with it.

I actually don't much care if we have protection or not - my point (as if you'd ever actually bother to listen) was that it's an uttter irrelevance and is kicked about by party dogma (of both main parties) as a sop to weak-minded pillock one-party supporters who think their party is "doing something" when in fact they are fiddling while Rome burns.

Thatcher took away some (but not all) protections. Labour put some (but not all) back. Now they are making some very minor reforms - it's all chatter for fools in the Conservative Club Bar or the Labour Club Bar. No party is doing anything substantive because they are all too weak.

[escapeUK]

WDAS

I've seen quite a bit of that among permies. And back to the point of this thread, you can't shift them.

Yes you can, and very easily. Ive worked for a company that made loads of people redundant. One of them was a woman on maternity leave, another a woman off having cancer treatment. Morally they were both wrong, but if you have balls you can do whatever you like. You just need to follow a "fair" procedure of informing everyone they are at risk, doing a pretend matrix of skills, and oh dear the one you wanted to get rid of just happens to score less. What a surprise.

Ive also seen the same with disciplinary procedure, it just takes longer but costs less.

To the guy that said its the role that is redundant. The sales assistant leaves, the new one is sales executive. Purchase clerk leaves, new role is buyer and so on.

Ive worked for a very ruthless company and they always got their way.

[norrahe]

But but but...what would we do with all the HRM 'graduates'?

I agree with both of you by the way

Line 'em up against a wall and shoot them?

Or is shooting too good?

[Mich the Tester]

Agree entirely!!

Unfortunately when everyone has to run the gauntlet of Human Remains and numpty agents who use "Complaint" and "Compliant" interchangeably in their adverts because they are too stupid sets the barrier far too high.

That and those artificial barriers like can't get a job because you fail a credit check - durrrh - what part of I'm skint because I don't have a job is too difficult for these idiots to understand?

yep - and make all recruitment agencies and HR departments illegal. You only get a job by showing the manager that you have the skills and can do a good job. None of this "only if you've squatted in the same chair for 10 years, and have 5 years experience of a software update that's only been out 1 year" rubbish...

Ah... I can dream...

But but but...what would we do with all the HRM 'graduates'?

I agree with both of you by the way