Lay Me Down

First check this out if you have been living in a cave for the last couple of years and don't know what's going on at Sun Microsystems:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/05/31/78807_HNsunlayoffs_1.html

I have been working with the channel marketing group (or whatever they call themselves) over at Sun for the last couple of weeks trying to get them to release channel partner marketing money for a lead generation program we want to implement.

This morning, after a ridiculously large amount of time arguing, rediscussing in committee, hemming and hawing, and generally driving me up the wall, I received an email telling me that our request was denied.

Whatever.

Did I mention the program was for lead generation? As in: it will help us sell their product for them?

Anyway, I called the sales guy for this program immediately and let him know that we won't have the funding, etc. He said of course he understood and that we could work something else out with another partner. Blah blah blah, pleasantries, okay you take care now.

About an hour later he called me with a story about a friend of a friend who works for Sun- apparently tomorrow first thing is when the axe is going to fall, and NOBODY knows who is getting it. Everyone is sitting on their hands because they don't know if they will have a job at 8:05 tomorrow morning.

Now this got me to thinking, and I told the guy exactly what was on my mind: If you knew your company has been in trouble for the last, oh I don't know- five years or so, (ever since the dot-com bust, really) and they were engaging in virtually annual layoffs, and the CEO recently told Snoopy and the gang "Sayonara!!", AND they announced more layoffs (5,000!) this year , isn't there really two logical courses of action?

The first one being, of course, get the hell out of Dodge and work somewhere else; and the second one being to start being the best damn employee anyone's ever seen so as to make yourself indispensible?

Or maybe that's just me...