RE: Aging out was RE: job-hunt weirdness

["Combs, Richard" <richard -dot- combs -at- Polycom -dot- com>]

Gene Kim-Eng wrote: 
 
> The Peter Principle seems most applicable to business management,
> especially at the director and higher level.  The flaw with trying to
> apply it to lower ranking staff is its assumption that once someone
> rises to the level of his or her incompetence he or she will be left
> there and never fired, and while there certainly must be some
companies
> that are reluctant to fire people at lower staff levels, I've not
> encountered one myself.

Firing people for incompetence is difficult, if not impossible, at any
number of organizations -- mostly they're unionized, bureaucracies, and
especially unionized bureacracies. A particularly striking example is
the New York City public school system. It spends $20 million a year
paying incompetent and dangerous teachers to do nothing because firing
them is too expensive and time-consuming. 

See: http://www.reason.com/news/show/36802.html 

And be sure to check out the illustrated step-by-step guide to firing a
teacher (PDF) that's linked at the end. It's an interesting example of
how to document a complex procedure -- and there's your tech writing
tie-in. ;-) 

Richard


Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
------
rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-777-0436
------






^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help  
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices.
http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/

Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/

---
You are currently subscribed to TECHWR-L as archive -at- web -dot- techwr-l -dot- com -dot- 

To unsubscribe send a blank email to 
techwr-l-unsubscribe -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
or visit http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/options/techwr-l/archive%40web.techwr-l.com


To subscribe, send a blank email to techwr-l-join -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com

Send administrative questions to admin -at- techwr-l -dot- com -dot-  Visit
http://www.techwr-l.com/ for more resources and info. 

Please move off-topic discussions to the Chat list, at:
http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/listinfo/techwr-l-chat