I've Had Enough

wow dan, that would have to be pretty tempting to a man with a daily hangover ... am i getting warmer?

 

Dunno, Tom. Maybe. You know the guy?

 

It's not you, is it Tomas?

 

oh shit friend. nobody busts my balls on this board quite like you.

<back to cleaning diet dp off screen.>

 

Had an exit interview a while back and they asked, "what I would change?"
I told them it would have been nice to know exactly how much work gets me a higher raise. Because one year I worked my ass off and got a 3 percent raise. Then, another time, I glided through the year, and also got a 3 percent raise.
"So, I asked, why can't our performance somehow be tied into our raises?"
The response, which made me glad I was leaving........"That just wouldn't work out. It wouldn't be practical."

 

Dan:
I left one job early in my career without anything lined up and out of the blue was offered one with literally twice the pay and more reasonable hours.
You never know what the result of a gutsy decision will be.
Good luck.

 

Gee, maybe you could go in there and talk to him once in a while, you know? I'm not trying to harsh your exit vibe, but I've always found that being pro-active usually got better results than sulking or wishing I was somewhere else.

 

Exit interviews usually only look for trends. You can tell who will blast everyone on the way out, and when they do, it's commonly ignored or brushed off as comments from a bitter person.
I've been part of several of these. You want to try to make an impact on an exit review, you pick one or two things to hit, if necessary, but be kind the rest of the time. HR, at least ours, has a tendency to listen then.
Bitching about pay in the exit interview is expected. They laugh as soon as you're out the door.
Now this comes from experience in the last 14 years. At last job, was asked in exit interview with HR, publisher and EE: "What would you do if you were publisher for a day?"
Response: "Fire you, fire you and fire you."
Needless to say, interview ended and I exited. Those good ol' days in Gannett tend to bring a tear to my eye.

 

Dan:

I thought about this overnight.

Not talking to your supervisor for several months is very strange. It makes things understandable.

I can also understand your frustration and wanting to run from the situation.

However, I have to wonder if you acted in your own best interests. You seem to do this without much of an exit strategy. And hearing that you have more than a quarter century in the business makes me ask, "What have you learned?" People who are younger that you faced the same situation, and they have some idea about what to do; teach, pr, law school, whatever. Sometimes people are inside of a situation and you lose track of the bigger picture. From what you have posted (and maybe this isn't the complete story), it sounds like you have absolutely no idea what you are going to do next.

Generally, newspapers are one of the worst managed businesses in the US. Think about it. Most have no competition, profit margins envied by other industries, and they still screw things up. It seems they think more of how they can hold salaries down to keep their proud tradition of underpaying people rather than ideas which can raise revenues.

I make that point in the last paragraph because this has been the case for the last 20 years at a lot of places - there are exceptions like where spnited works but this is the trend and you could figure that out by reading this board with any regularity.

I don't say this with the intention of being cruel or mean, but you asked for reaction and that is mine.

 

Gold, that's a large part of why I'm happy to go do something else.

 

Well, in most markets there is only so much revenue to be found. It sounds great to create niche products, and the immediate reaction is look at all these ads, until the day comes when you realize that these are mostly advertisers you already had, only now they are advertising in your niche product instead of paying the higher rate in your main product. A day of reckoning comes when you realize that you have not raised revenues, you have merely moved revenues and some cases actually hurt yourself by giving your advertisers a cheaper way to do business with you. And you have cannibalized your main product.

At some point well-run companies understand that some markets have matured, there is no growth to be had. It stunned me that McClatchy was selling San Jose and Contra Costa because they seemed to be great fits with their stronghold in Sacramento-Modesto-Fresno, but McClatchy said all along that its strategy was to focus on growth markets and obviously they decided that the Bay Area pie was not going to grow, all you could do was slice that pie into smaller pieces. Through decades of nearly continuous revenue growth we have become arrogant to believe we always could get more. Well, it's not going to happen that way. We are seeing retail markets contract as stores merge. The old battle cry of "create new revenue" will have us spinning our wheels. We are just going to have to make do with less, there is no getting around that.

 

Good luck, but if you had been my friend for a while (not that I don't like you), I would hit my head and say "Great, but what are you going to do?"