RE: Aging out was RE: job-hunt weirdness

Subject: RE: Aging out was RE: job-hunt weirdness
From: "Combs, Richard" <richard -dot- combs -at- Polycom -dot- com>
To: "Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>, "TechWr-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:44:45 -0600

Gene Kim-Eng wrote:

> The Peter Principle seems most applicable to business management,
> especially at the director and higher level. The flaw with trying to
> apply it to lower ranking staff is its assumption that once someone
> rises to the level of his or her incompetence he or she will be left
> there and never fired, and while there certainly must be some
companies
> that are reluctant to fire people at lower staff levels, I've not
> encountered one myself.

Firing people for incompetence is difficult, if not impossible, at any
number of organizations -- mostly they're unionized, bureaucracies, and
especially unionized bureacracies. A particularly striking example is
the New York City public school system. It spends $20 million a year
paying incompetent and dangerous teachers to do nothing because firing
them is too expensive and time-consuming.

See: http://www.reason.com/news/show/36802.html

And be sure to check out the illustrated step-by-step guide to firing a
teacher (PDF) that's linked at the end. It's an interesting example of
how to document a complex procedure -- and there's your tech writing
tie-in. ;-)

Richard


Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
------
rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-777-0436
------






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Follow-Ups:

References:
Re: job-hunt weirdness: From: Erik Hare
RE: job-hunt weirdness: From: Dana Worley
Re: job-hunt weirdness: From: Peter Neilson
Re: job-hunt weirdness: From: Dana Worley
RE: job-hunt weirdness: From: McLauchlan, Kevin
Aging out was RE: job-hunt weirdness: From: Sarah Stegall
RE: Aging out was RE: job-hunt weirdness: From: Leonard C. Porrello
Re: Aging out was RE: job-hunt weirdness: From: Gene Kim-Eng
RE: Aging out was RE: job-hunt weirdness: From: Sarah Stegall
RE: Aging out was RE: job-hunt weirdness: From: davec
Re: Aging out was RE: job-hunt weirdness: From: Gene Kim-Eng

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