My company is starting to circle the drain on their nigh-inevitable course toward the bowels of hell - a.k.a. bankruptcy. This is something that I am completely and utterly un-surprised about, following the introduction a couple months back of the "Mandatory Bi-Weekly Happy Employee Best Company Fun Time" meetings... in which they attempt to build within the ranks of the various contractors a real sense of community and team-ness; by making us attend hour long lectures about how awesome the company is (5min), how much fun other people have outside of work (2 speeches of 3min each), how to do some basic component of someone's job (2 speeches of 10min each), and what one specific person does in their job (15min). Doesn't that sound like an awesome team building exercise? Oh, and they provide snacks of some sort.
Turns out that the reason they're doing this is because they want to completely change the course of the company from a consulting/contracting company that focuses on placing high quality contractors in a multitude of roles within a multitude of companies (Microsoft, T-Mobile, Expedia, a lot of others) into a company that provides products and services to those companies, but not employees. They've already started the work on that goal by "merging" with a Business Intelligence company (which existed for all of one month before the merger, and suddenly the head of that company is our company's president and CEO, the name's been changed, the company leadership has changed, etc. - but we weren't bought out, no sirree Bob) and starting to deliver Business Intelligence/Data Analysis support to various companies. That part's going well, so far. But now they want to start writing their own CRM software package and provide it to other companies, and they think they have the experience to pull it off because "some of them have contracted at Microsoft." I've already been down this road once. It didn't end well. The company went bankrupt. Two of the co-founders of this company have already been down that road. It didn't go well for them the first time, so when they found out what the other three co-founders wanted to do with this company, they sold their stakes in the company and got the hell out. Now I find out last weekend that the 5, who were best friends before, during, and after college, who founded the company out of a shared desire to provide the best services to the tech community possible, are no longer on speaking terms. And that every time one of the new company leaders brings up an idea, if the rest of them think that the two who left had anything to do with that idea, or even if it was an idea that one of the two might have shared independently of this member bringing it up, it's immediately shot down as those two attempting to retake control of the company.
This does not bode well for my division of the company, but there's nothing I can do about it aside from look for work elsewhere, and I'm already doing that. Hell, maybe I'll get lucky and whomever buys the Water Technologies branch from Siemens will be a decent company to work for, and I can go work for them. My wife's boss is already trying to recruit me.
