LLNS may have excluded the wrong people in last VSSOP? The exclusions were based on outdated job categories and related skills. ULM are now thinking that in the future, job categories and functional areas will have to be re-defined. The next VSSOP/ISP will be based on the new categories and functional areas. The questions I have are: 1) Why didnt they think of that before the transition. It seems like their style is “change things as you go”. Planning is out the window! 2) Who will give input on the new changes? The next RIF apparently is going to be more lucrative than the VSSOP. Depending on the length of employment, a RIFed person, not only gets their 1 week pay per year of service but also from 30 to 120 days notice, essentially 30 to 120 days pay. Please feel free to comment on the rumors or add new ones you actually heard.
Comments
Could you care to elaborate on what you mean? Did this come out of some recent management brain storming session? Something like this, " hey we tried blaming scientists and engineers since 2000, the well has run dry, any ideas...how about a lazy culture of non-scientists?, it is bit of stretch but it was better than saying it was due to a cult vampire culture, and hell we gotta do something".
A few other points.
(1) Blaming scientists will always get you more traction.
(2) Lazy does not sound as good as arrogant cowboy.
(3) Even if this was true what are you going to do? How do you punish lazy people. A stand down or stop work is just fine with them. Hell even firing them is not that big of deal since they will just have more free time. Increase the amount of work...that would lead to more accidents and incidents.
(4) How does one define lazy? I am just saying how does one say a culture is lazy, is there some metric for this?
(5) Well everyone is to some extent lazy, after all if you had a choice to work or not work and no money problems how many people would work? Also if you are so arrogant that you would come to work no matter since you think what you do matters or that you can make a real contribution than you are a cowboy.
(6) You start off with the problem of culture. A culture needs to be almost everyone not just a subset. LANL is a science lab so everyone at LANL must be a scientist or at least that is the common perception. Have you ever played the video game Half-Life? it is set in the secret Black Mesa Facility in New Mexico, and you will notice everyone in the game is a scientist or a monster created by scientists so the common perception is that everyone at LANL is a scientist. When you say a cowboy science culture that makes total sense and fits with common expectation of the lab. If you say a lazy culture of the non-science workforce it will just confuse the heck out of people.
In the final sum, saying there is a "lazy" whatever that means, culture in the non-science part of the labs is just just not going to fly with congress or anyone else for that manner so you are going to need someone else to blame.