Tarkblog

We went to lunch today with a potential hire for some work we have coming up. None of us knew him and he didn’t know any of us, but we’ve used some software he’s written and he is pretty highly regarded at where he currently works. He’s also very underutilized, and is bored to tears, it seems.

Anyway, we asked him to come by our facility to take a tour and he agreed to do so. Upon asking him if he knew where we were located, he told us “yes - Gladstone Avenue, right?”

Us: “Yeah, that’s right. Are you familiar with the area.”

Him: “Well, we pick up trash out there for our PMS”.

That’s a very interesting statement. It turns out, PMS stands for Performance Measurement System, which is how employees basically fill out forms telling what they did that was important within the company and allows it to rank them, so that they can fire the bottom 10-20% every so often.

An important part of this is apparently community service, so as a group this cadre of engineers and programmers have to get together and go pick up garbage along a road here in town every once in a while. Failure to do so means that they could possibly be considered as “not team players” and get canned.

I find this completely obliterating. I’m all for giving back to the community, but this sure seems the wrong way to do it.

But hey, at least our road is nice and clean thanks to these guys!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.