My husband did, right before Christmas (thanks, Mr. Scrooge). He'd been telling them for months that they needed to buy new equipment so it wasn't constantly breaking down. It wasn't his job to fix it, but he constantly had to or they could never have finished anything. He spent hours every day messing around with things that didn't work correctly.

Because of overall reduced productivity, his company let most of the managers go at the same time. Unfortunately in laying him off, they deprived themselves of the one person who knew how to make that equipment work at least half the time. According to friends who still work there, they've lost clients since because they keep missing deadlines, and they've had another round of layoffs because of the reduced revenues.

Last summer, when they had more business than they could keep up with, they should have replaced the faulty equipment. They would have been able to keep up with business then and retained their clients.

I don't blame the economy. I blame their bone-brainedness.

He's a graphic designer. He's now learning web development/programming to broaden his skill set. He's designed for web pages before (and a slew of other things, like packaging, publications, logos) but he's wanting to get into the functionality of it. He was always being asked to freelance web development before, but his job's demands were so time-consuming because of always having to fix the breaking equipment that he was never able to pursue picking up those skills. Now he can.

So he's going to build on his expertise by going into a related field where he can use his extensive experience while picking up new skills.

Asker's Rating:

Permalink | Report