Confessions of an IT Manager_Phil Factor

210 Fired With Enthusiasm
to be looking through the small-ads in the local paper and came across a phonenumber
that looked curiously familiar. It was for a professional accountant.
Puzzled, he phoned the number and was put through to one of his managers a
few desks away who was running a firm of accountants 'on the side'.
Therefore, I sympathised with Kishor, and helped him to refine his list of
the 'light arms' members of the department. It wasn't hard to do, as the
programmers leaked like sieves on the subject of the 'time-servers'. However, it
seemed to me a bleak and hopeless task to motivate such people, and I knew
immediately how difficult it would be to sack them. I felt that the only way
forward was to try to encourage these people by a mixture of flattery and job
role-change.
As it happened, Kishor never asked for my advice, but I suspected he had a
plan. Kishor always had a plan. For some time before I came to work for him,
I'd heard of his exploits, and his cunning. I once met him in the course of
business, when he first started out in IT; a young serious-minded Systems
Analyst, working for a software house. He'd come a long way since.
Within a few days, the department secretary announced that some of the
'high fliers' in the department were to go on a training course at the company's
expense, to learn C#. Various people were picked to go on this course, and
there were dark mutterings of discontent from some of the excluded technical
die-hards, mainly about how they'd had to learn the language themselves, in the
evenings. Kishor told the few managers who protested to him at the choice of
several 'light arms' candidates that it was a way of inspiring them to change
their attitude to work, giving them a fresh start with a different technology. The
C# course came and went. As I suspected, I didn't need to arrange cover for any
of the participants in my department. Neither did anyone else.
Soon afterwards, the participants started to hand in their notice. The trickle
increased to a rush, and it soon became apparent that they had all been headhunted
by a rival bank, The Imperial Bank (not it's real name).
Kishor conducted a stormy staff meeting soon afterwards. The gossip had
swept the city that the Imperial Bank had scooped up the entire group of highfliers
from our department. Evidently, a list of the participants in the course had
somehow got into the hands of the Imperial Bank. Kishor tearfully railed at the
iniquity of our rivals and we all shook our heads in sorrow at the disloyalty of
our staff, and the chicanery of the person who had leaked the list. We were
particularly incensed that we'd trained them in valuable skills at our company's
expense.