Fwd: [Wind] Sun Microsystems lawsuit

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

David Kramer writes:
| http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/077/business/Suit_Sun_fired_US_workers_to_hire_lower_paid_Indians+.shtml

The passage that I find most telling is:

  [Sun]  created  a  performance  evaluation  program  that
  required  managers  to  classify  a certain percentage of
  workers as underperformers, the suit alleges. At the same
  time,  workers  who  had  been at the company for a short
  time were exempted from this evaluation program, ensuring
  that  few H-1B visa holders would be subject to it.  As a
  result, most of those found  to  be  underperfomers  were
  older, American-born workers.

So if you are a manager who has already  let  go  your  nonproductive
employees  and  you  have only a handful of very good people, you are
punished for your good management by being forced to classify some of
them  as  "underperformers".   Meanwhile,  another  manager who has a
stable of incompetents gets to keep most of them.

This is a classical management failure, and does not  bode  well  for
the  future  of  rational  management  at Sun.  Such across-the-board
proportional layoffs are always a sign that  top  management  doesn't
understand  "intellectual  capital", and doesn't understand how their
products are produced.

Not a good sign at all for the quality of Sun's future products.