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Thursday, October 31, 2013
What is the word?
So Parney got fired for being a people person and Bret Knapp took his as hatchet man. What's the word on layoff and how soon are we going to start shit-canning people. Christmas is coming soon or are we going to wait until after Thanksgiving?
46 comments:
Anonymous
said...
Why do you publish drivel like this? Even under sequestration, there's no factual basis for discussing layoffs in the next two months.
Is this kind of stuff just to drive hits? Is it malice? Or simply confusion?
Why do you publish drivel like this? Even under sequestration, there's no factual basis for discussing layoffs in the next two months.
Because as you can see by the additional post it is happening and it is coming unless you are running around LLNL with blinders on or having smoke blown up your auss by management.
Real businesses are always letting small numbers of employees go over time, just as real businesses are always hiring some over time. That may be a shocking concept to the hard-core institutionalized among national labs, but it's neither a big deal nor the end of the world. With, of course, sympathy for those let go, to whom it is always individually a big deal.
That type of normal churn has nothing to do with the big RIF packages you are discussing.
That closes the doors around 2019...we'll see. If you're right I owe you a coke!
November 1, 2013 at 10:37 AM
The doors will never close completely. You'll always have bio-med and global security which are VITAL to national security. NIF on the other hand is just a toy to verify everything we know already works and will continue to do so as long as you do your maintenance and upgrades. No matter what I would expect to see smaller labs as time goes on doing far less than they are now.
I just heard about another one, a flex-term with plenty of GS project funding to support him, who was layed off without the slightest warning last week. To make room for EBA'd career staff? The long knives are coming out.
Poor performers? What about poor performing Division Leaders and horrible Deputy Division Leaders? I know at least one evil DL and one evil-Associated DL, both got promoted and they laughing all the way to the bank with their fat pay paychecks.
Lab plays a lot of politics when it comes to promotion, job assignment, etc... You can be a great performer and if the immediate supervisor does not like you, he can make life miserable for you. In the end, they lay you off either with the excuse that no funding to support you or any make up lame excuses. A good lawyer can fight for you if you believe you are mistreated.
It is a sad environment now as compared to previous years. We have to take one day at a time!
The comment about the long knives is apt. I have seen this at companies that are on the way down. Good honest hard working employees get stabbed by their colleagues and managers exercising power to favor their pets. It is sad to watch, and predictable. It is times like these that separate the mature, honorable individuals from the scum.
Poster November 1 @ 8:57 am Poster November 1 @ 2:04 am
You said you know 3 people were given the "RIF". and poster @ 2:04am said he was laid off last month, do they receive severance pay package from the Lab for laying you off? Please let us know.
Contact the SPSE for referral to top rated employment lawyers. And document well your work related stuffs. RIF or pretexted-RIF , a good lawyer will save your days.
I am so glad I do not care about any of this any more, after 20+ years I quit last week. Nice to beat the rush to the door. The lab is spiraling down, I've never seen anything like it in my career.
I am so glad I do not care about any of this any more, after 20+ years I quit last week. Nice to beat the rush to the door. The lab is spiraling down, I've never seen anything like it in my career.
Other than the general malaise that the lab seems to be suffering from what prompted your departure?
"You said you know 3 people were given the "RIF". and poster @ 2:04am said he was laid off last month, do they receive severance pay package from the Lab for laying you off?"
I'm not the one who posted that but I'm pretty sure that I remember seeing the severance pay package listed in the Lab's official personnel policy and procedures. So receiving severance is standard, not optional.
"Other than the general malaise that the lab seems to be suffering from what prompted your departure?"
1) NIF went bankrupt and could not support me. Fine, the budget was decimated and that meant downsizing scale and scope. 2) But at about the same time, the rest of the lab went almost as bankrupt from "sequester". Nothing going on anywhere, except maybe in GS, there is no money and there is too much uncertainty. 3) It's nearly impossible to get involved with GS projects right now, if you're an outsider, it's an old-boy's network that has closed ranks. 4) Not really interested in spreading fractions of myself among multiple small GS projects anyways, in a PI-driven mix that changes all the time. That's not what the lab does well, and I don't see a long-term future in it. 5) The sort of work I like to do is increasingly not being done at the lab, and I don't see anything that will stop that inertia in the future. 6) All signs point to things getting worse, not better. There is no strategy or vision, and management is in reaction mode and seems unable to plan a path forward. 7) Morale is horrible, and it became a depressing place to work. 8) The furlough fiasco pushed me over the top, especially since I was not part of TCP1. I was cleaning my office by the time Parney announced he was leaving.
Some of the key draws for working at the lab in the past were job security and a strong sense of mission, and when those are taken away, you realize that there are lots of things going on outside the gates that are at least as interesting if not more interesting, perhaps pay better, and have growing opportunities on an upward track, rather than dimishing opportunities on a downward track.
Bret Knapp will NOT wait for a RIF or otherwise to begin driving people out of LLNL. He will do it the old fashioned way, one-by-one, through his minions (e.g. Craig, Leasure, John Benner, etc.) as he did at LANL.
Knapp will go after the entrenched weapons groups - scientists and engineers who have all of the experience but none of the current funding. Designers and production engineers will be culled, 40% or more will be cut. No one without a current well-funded project will be spared. If you are "looking after" a weapon system that is in decline stockpile-wise, or has no major prospect for an upgrade or replacement, you are toast. If you resist reassignment to environmental cleanup or the like, you will be RIFed. Your expertise and experience will be laughed at and discounted in meetings with those of your peers who will retain their jobs, just to show them where they might go if they fail to follow Der Fuhrer. Also, Der Fuhrer will have identified in advance those who will support him and will replace those who seem to not be so inclined with those who do, no explanation given. Get ready for behind-doors shouting matches, or worse, between upper level managers who find themselves on the wrong side of Der Fuhrer. The ones you respect most will be gone. Good luck LLNL, you'll need it.
You can run on for a long time but sooner or later God gonna cut down What was done in the dark will be brought to the light. It is over!!!!!!!!!!! The tit you sucked on for fifty years is dry. It is now at a menopause state. I hope you are all proud!!! TCP1 HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Have fun collecting that next year.
Knapp will GUT and ELIMINATE the core nuclear engineering weapon expertise such as Surveillance, Weapon System Engineering, Analysis, Military Liaison, Safety, Surety, Production, Testing, Vulnerability, Assembly, etc. We were 2 to 3 deep in each area before Knapp arrived at LANL; expertise was deep. When he's done, 1 individual will cover 2 to 3 areas; some areas will not survive (e.g. weapon vulnerability, hostile environments). Knapp has no use for core weapon engineering expertise, he will leave a skeleton engineering crew with no bones.
You only THINK you dislike most of your current LLNL upper level management and that your laboratory is totally demoralized and can sink no lower. Bret Knapp is coming to finish the job!
You will soon learn what a truly brutal executive looks like. Knapp will be finishing his managerial "education" at LLNL so that he can then move back to LANL as McMillan's replacement in a year or two. It's a sick, sick, sick situation that is destroying what's left of the US nuclear weapon labs.
I hope everyone who comes here realizes that while there are a few legit comments most of what is said is authored by the same person. I have no clue who that is but they clearly have an agenda and they always write in the same style which makes it easy to spot.
Give Knapp a chance? No need to, he has all chances he wants and when he wants. Be sure to yelp when you know a Division leader got canned. Peon workers ain't have a chance to yelp before they are hauled out the gate.
NIF can't support itself because it's way too expensive, but it's way too big to kill, so it's a permanent drain on lab and NNSA resources. You can thank Moses and Miller for that.
Dead fish or better yet, dead "fish(es)." Meaning Knapp, one dead fish. Lousy Associated-Directotors and Absolute-horrible division leaders + fishy-deputy division leaders are dead fish(es).
46 comments:
Why do you publish drivel like this? Even under sequestration, there's no factual basis for discussing layoffs in the next two months.
Is this kind of stuff just to drive hits? Is it malice? Or simply confusion?
People are already being laid off, just in numbers small enough to avoid tripping the need for a full formal RIF - that will come after Jan. 1.
Indeed people are being laid off from LLNL. I was as of last month, but I don't know if there were other let go that day also...
Why do you publish drivel like this? Even under sequestration, there's no factual basis for discussing layoffs in the next two months.
Because as you can see by the additional post it is happening and it is coming unless you are running around LLNL with blinders on or having smoke blown up your auss by management.
I know of three people who were given an "individual RIF" in recent months. It is happening right now.
I'm going to put a number of about 466+ warm bodies to go between now and September of 2014 and a repeat of this each year from now on.
Bret'l git'er done.
I'm going to put a number of about 466+ warm bodies to go between now and September of 2014 and a repeat of this each year from now on.
WOW! Precision down to the "ones" column...you're good.
That closes the doors around 2019...we'll see. If you're right I owe you a coke!
Real businesses are always letting small numbers of employees go over time, just as real businesses are always hiring some over time. That may be a shocking concept to the hard-core institutionalized among national labs, but it's neither a big deal nor the end of the world. With, of course, sympathy for those let go, to whom it is always individually a big deal.
That type of normal churn has nothing to do with the big RIF packages you are discussing.
That closes the doors around 2019...we'll see. If you're right I owe you a coke!
November 1, 2013 at 10:37 AM
The doors will never close completely. You'll always have bio-med and global security which are VITAL to national security. NIF on the other hand is just a toy to verify everything we know already works and will continue to do so as long as you do your maintenance and upgrades. No matter what I would expect to see smaller labs as time goes on doing far less than they are now.
I just heard about another one, a flex-term with plenty of GS project funding to support him, who was layed off without the slightest warning last week. To make room for EBA'd career staff? The long knives are coming out.
LLNL is onl letting go of poor performers. Sorry November 1, 2013 at 2:04 AM
Poor performers? What about poor performing Division Leaders and horrible Deputy Division Leaders? I know at least one evil DL and one evil-Associated DL, both got promoted and they laughing all the way to the bank with their fat pay paychecks.
Naive, it is not necessarily about poor performance in this environment. Long knives is right.
Lab plays a lot of politics when it comes to promotion, job assignment, etc... You can be a great performer and if the immediate supervisor does not like you, he can make life miserable for you. In the end, they lay you off either with the excuse that no funding to support you or any make up lame excuses. A good lawyer can fight for you if you believe you are mistreated.
It is a sad environment now as compared to previous years.
We have to take one day at a time!
"A good lawyer can fight for you if you believe you are mistreated."
This above comment is equally true in labs like Sandia in Livermore! Managers without the proper technical backgrounds, beware!
The comment about the long knives is apt. I have seen this at companies that are on the way down. Good honest hard working employees get stabbed by their colleagues and managers exercising power to favor their pets. It is sad to watch, and predictable. It is times like these that separate the mature, honorable individuals from the scum.
Poster November 1 @ 8:57 am
Poster November 1 @ 2:04 am
You said you know 3 people were given the "RIF". and poster @ 2:04am said he was laid off last month, do they receive severance pay package from the Lab for laying you off? Please let us know.
Contact the SPSE for referral to top rated employment lawyers. And document well your work related stuffs. RIF or pretexted-RIF , a good lawyer will save your days.
I am so glad I do not care about any of this any more, after 20+ years I quit last week. Nice to beat the rush to the door. The lab is spiraling down, I've never seen anything like it in my career.
I am so glad I do not care about any of this any more, after 20+ years I quit last week. Nice to beat the rush to the door. The lab is spiraling down, I've never seen anything like it in my career.
Other than the general malaise that the lab seems to be suffering from what prompted your departure?
Morale is bad - in general because we have no mission and no leadership (Engineering). I'm hanging on for 2 more years until retirement (TCP-1)....
"You said you know 3 people were given the "RIF". and poster @ 2:04am said he was laid off last month, do they receive severance pay package from the Lab for laying you off?"
I'm not the one who posted that but I'm pretty sure that I remember seeing the severance pay package listed in the Lab's official personnel policy and procedures. So receiving severance is standard, not optional.
thief said...
"Other than the general malaise that the lab seems to be suffering from what prompted your departure?"
1) NIF went bankrupt and could not support me. Fine, the budget was decimated and that meant downsizing scale and scope.
2) But at about the same time, the rest of the lab went almost as bankrupt from "sequester". Nothing going on anywhere, except maybe in GS, there is no money and there is too much uncertainty.
3) It's nearly impossible to get involved with GS projects right now, if you're an outsider, it's an old-boy's network that has closed ranks.
4) Not really interested in spreading fractions of myself among multiple small GS projects anyways, in a PI-driven mix that changes all the time. That's not what the lab does well, and I don't see a long-term future in it.
5) The sort of work I like to do is increasingly not being done at the lab, and I don't see anything that will stop that inertia in the future.
6) All signs point to things getting worse, not better. There is no strategy or vision, and management is in reaction mode and seems unable to plan a path forward.
7) Morale is horrible, and it became a depressing place to work.
8) The furlough fiasco pushed me over the top, especially since I was not part of TCP1. I was cleaning my office by the time Parney announced he was leaving.
Some of the key draws for working at the lab in the past were job security and a strong sense of mission, and when those are taken away, you realize that there are lots of things going on outside the gates that are at least as interesting if not more interesting, perhaps pay better, and have growing opportunities on an upward track, rather than dimishing opportunities on a downward track.
Thanks for your response! I hope you find what you are looking for on the outside!
Bret Knapp will NOT wait for a RIF or otherwise to begin driving people out of LLNL. He will do it the old fashioned way, one-by-one, through his minions (e.g. Craig, Leasure, John Benner, etc.) as he did at LANL.
Which department will Knapp target first? Will it be PLS? Does Bill Goldstein and his Divisions Leaders need to worry?
Knapp will go after the entrenched weapons groups - scientists and engineers who have all of the experience but none of the current funding. Designers and production engineers will be culled, 40% or more will be cut. No one without a current well-funded project will be spared. If you are "looking after" a weapon system that is in decline stockpile-wise, or has no major prospect for an upgrade or replacement, you are toast. If you resist reassignment to environmental cleanup or the like, you will be RIFed. Your expertise and experience will be laughed at and discounted in meetings with those of your peers who will retain their jobs, just to show them where they might go if they fail to follow Der Fuhrer. Also, Der Fuhrer will have identified in advance those who will support him and will replace those who seem to not be so inclined with those who do, no explanation given. Get ready for behind-doors shouting matches, or worse, between upper level managers who find themselves on the wrong side of Der Fuhrer. The ones you respect most will be gone. Good luck LLNL, you'll need it.
Knapp wll bring a smile to every face.
You can run on for a long time but sooner or later God gonna cut down What was done in the dark will be brought to the light. It is over!!!!!!!!!!! The tit you sucked on for fifty years is dry. It is now at a menopause state. I hope you are all proud!!!
TCP1 HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Have fun collecting that next year.
POS
Knapp will GUT and ELIMINATE the core nuclear engineering weapon expertise such as Surveillance, Weapon System Engineering, Analysis, Military Liaison, Safety, Surety, Production, Testing, Vulnerability, Assembly, etc. We were 2 to 3 deep in each area before Knapp arrived at LANL; expertise was deep. When he's done, 1 individual will cover 2 to 3 areas; some areas will not survive (e.g. weapon vulnerability, hostile environments). Knapp has no use for core weapon engineering expertise, he will leave a skeleton engineering crew with no bones.
You only THINK you dislike most of your current LLNL upper level management and that your laboratory is totally demoralized and can sink no lower. Bret Knapp is coming to finish the job!
You will soon learn what a truly brutal executive looks like. Knapp will be finishing his managerial "education" at LLNL so that he can then move back to LANL as McMillan's replacement in a year or two. It's a sick, sick, sick situation that is destroying what's left of the US nuclear weapon labs.
I hope everyone who comes here realizes that while there are a few legit comments most of what is said is authored by the same person. I have no clue who that is but they clearly have an agenda and they always write in the same style which makes it easy to spot.
Er Kompt ! Er Kompt !
How do you all grade Bret Knapp on his 3rd day bossing at LLNL?
Didn't even know he was here yet! So who got canned today?
Give Knapp a chance. There are a lot of cuts that need to be made at LLNL. Get rid of OSO and reduce NIF to a self-supporting program.
Give Knapp a chance? No need to, he has all chances he wants and when he wants. Be sure to yelp when you know a Division leader got canned. Peon workers ain't have a chance to yelp before they are hauled out the gate.
NIF can't support itself because it's way too expensive, but it's way too big to kill, so it's a permanent drain on lab and NNSA resources. You can thank Moses and Miller for that.
"Give Knapp a chance."
Now that's funny.
"Parney got fired for being a people person," . . . ha ha ha, that's rich, ha ha ha . . . knee slapper, ha ha OMG, tears, help whew.
Anonymous said...
Bret Knapp is like the Marine Corp..
How dare you insult the greatest military organization in the world.
Anonymous said...
Bret Knapp is like the Marine Corp..
How dare you insult the greatest military organization in the world.
November 7, 2013 at 9:36 AM
I think he meant "marine corpse" i.e., dead fish.
Dead fish or better yet, dead "fish(es)." Meaning Knapp, one dead fish. Lousy Associated-Directotors and Absolute-horrible division leaders + fishy-deputy division leaders are dead fish(es).
Come on Knapp, what are you waiting for buddy? Start hacking away you ugly bastard.
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