From: Strata Rose Chalup (strata@virtual.net)
Date: Fri Dec 22 2000 - 17:48:35 PST
Well, I'm not going to claim some kind of moral high ground here. If
I'm asked to get involved as an employee with something, it needs to at
least be able to sustain itself, as well as not being something I
consider personally reprehensible. As part of a group, I'm using up
other people's time, money, and life energy as well as my own, and if it
didn't work out to be a good trade for everybody, I'd feel damn
embarrassed. That's sheer enlightened self-interest, no more and no
less.
Damn if I'll spend a year or two of my life helping some ship of fools
build out some kind of .pyramid thing where the capstone and his/her
buds all get out with full pockets and the troops trudge off to their
next assignments. A manager's responsibility is not only to his/her
employer, but also to the employees. There isn't an amount of money out
there that justifies treating anybody as just another expendable
headcount. They're all PEOPLE.
I will sign on for projects as a consultant that I wouldn't consider
tackling as an employee. As long as I'm on hourly, I'm willing to trade
time for money in a nice neat package. Even if someone paid me the same
salary as an employee that I'd make consulting, there are things I'd
walk away from-- it's the intangibles that complicate things. Being able
to say no. Being able to tell someone you're going to be on vacation,
instead of asking someone. Knowing that you're not responsible for
leading other folks implicitly down a garden path by "signing onto the
team".
If I were better able to fool myself about the longterm prospects of
some of the things that have been going by over the last 3 - 4 years, I
might be comfortably retired now. Nobody ever claimed that intelligence
was a survival trait for the individual, just for the species. Ditto
for ethics.
Then again, maybe I'm just a coward. Who knows?
_SRC
"Adam L. Beberg" wrote:
>
> *gasp* Oh my god, you're one of us. I haven't heard anyone else use the
> words "sustainable business" in... a very long time...
>
> You have to be careful about saying that in mixed company these days or
> people will think you're a freak that cares about their reputation or
> something other then the american mantra GET RICH QUICK. Definately never
> mention those words to a VC, anyone in a startup, or anything dot-com.
>
> - Adam L. "Duncan" Beberg
> http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
> beberg@mithral.com
-- ======================================================================== Strata Rose Chalup [KF6NBZ] strata "@" virtual.net VirtualNet Consulting http://www.virtual.net/ ** Project Management & Architecture for ISP/ASP Systems Integration ** =========================================================================
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