unlawful termination, workman's comp, and the investigators that find them. I am now going to stop using the word "investigators." It was also around this time that two of the detectives and a lab tech who worked with these detectives and me had a meeting with the head of our HR department. The detectives said that they would rather quit than work for someone who was corrupt. The HR guy's response? "We will figure something out. We have your records from the other departments." I told him that I'd been there six years and that I wanted to stay. That was when he said, "Give me six months. If you are still around in six months, you will be one of us." Well, I did end up staying and I did remain an honest, and good, worker. The only way I can even try to forgive my former employer is to think of them as a kid on Christmas Day. They had every opportunity to do something "right." But we all know that no one is really honest, nor good, all the time, even if they try to act that way. ~~~ hugh3 Interesting story! I don't know what the moral of the story is, I just find it curious. A bunch of people in the police service who aren't crooks try to clean things up and end up _better off_ than when they started. Why? The cops who aren't crooks aren't motivated by self-interest, so they make better decisions than the cops who are crooks. Then again, the crooked cops who don't switch their career path into something else may be out of work, so there are no longer any crooked cops around. Actually, it sounds like they got a lot of other new jobs out of it. ~~~ gaius The police service itself was better off in the end - it was never clear to me that the dirty cops made the police service more efficient or made their jobs more interesting. It was certainly not more profitable. ~~~ jbooth I know how it feels to make no money. Especially from non-corporate professions. It's a bit like when an entire department starts looking for dirty cops in the public record, and that's when the department starts to die. ~~~ Tycho It could have been that the cops that remained had integrity and the ones who left for private work were basically the bad eggs. If they're crooked enough to be in the police force in the first place, it's possible that they have no integrity outside of work. ------ edw519 _In the end, most people just figure out where they want to be and want to be there._ I'm glad I don't work for Zynga. _A while back, I worked for a major, publicly-traded bank. It was one of the last jobs I had before I retired. Even though we made a great profit last year and were doing great, the board of directors made the executives, including me, a very nice “Christmas bonus”. It was almost 30% of our annual compensation and our total bonuses that year exceeded $2 million. (This would be less than $300,000 for me.) I thought this was pretty excessive, especially for a company that posted a $5.3 billion dollar loss. So, I raised my concerns with the CFO of the company. He told me that the board was “over budget”. He explained that it was normal for them to offer bonuses to top-performing executives and they were doing it on an accelerated basis so they could be in compliance with regulations. They told me that I had to accept their decision or I could take the money and go elsewhere. I told them I would not do that and I was the only person that had that offer. It wasn’t really a decision I had to make, but I was already planning to retire in a year and a half. The year before, I worked for a company that was doing well. All of a sudden, the CEO was put under pressure to sell the company because “the economy was down” and he was “underperforming.” Apparently they were not doing well enough to sell the company so they instead fired the CEO and put the CFO in charge. The first thing he did was cancel all of our vacation and sick time. The following year we did not make our yearly profit target. Then the CFO cut our base pay by 10%. I was one of only a few senior people who continued working because I liked the job and the people I worked with. When I pointed out the decrease in my base pay, the CFO called me into his office, closed the door, and said, “Don’t you understand? This company is in _crisis_. We have to make cost reductions across the board.” We had to wait another year to make our target bonus. My point is this. It can happen to anyone. I don’t necessarily mean to instruct people about their job or their income, but I do want people to know that if you are working for a company like that, that is when you will be rewarded. If your company gets into trouble, then you will be one of the ones that gets hit, even though you may not have done anything wrong. The CFOs and CEOs of these companies don’t care if you understand this or not. They will keep cutting and cutting your bonuses in order to make more money and to get more money from a bigger company or private equity firm. So if you start feeling “used,” “taken advantage of,” “like you don’t get enough,” or otherwise left out of your bonus, that’s when you should look for another job. If it is that bad for you, then the reason is not the company’s. It’s a sign that the employees don’t get that they are being used by management._ And here is a comment in reply to this thread: Is anyone still laughing? ~~~ jrockway I don't know about your experiences, but when I hear someone complaining about pay cuts, I always think about: _If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything new._ _What you may be able to do is make a career out of being consistently wrong._ ~~~ yummyfajitas In this case, the CFO actually was _wrong_ about the cause of the problem: the company wasn't doing as badly as it seemed. ~~~ jrockway A CFO that isn't going to tell management when they're wrong is probably wasting everyone's time, even if they happen to be right. ~~~ yummyfajitas Actually, I think he's right. It's a case of "the emperor's got no clothes", where he honestly believes the company isn't doing as badly as it seems. I'm not even saying they were doing worse - they may simply have been less worried about profits than the CEO (who is often more worried about profits than the CFO). ~~~ jrockway _actually is right_ This is a pretty common situation, I've had to deal with it a lot. The best thing to do is to do nothing and wait for things to settle down. Otherwise you get into the game and lose. _I'm not even saying they were doing worse - they may simply have been less worried about profits than the CEO (who is often more worried about profits than the CFO)._ Not everyone knows the CFO is right. For example, even I don't know how much the company is actually losing. There are people who do make that decision, and they are the people who get sacked for being wrong. ~~~ yummyfajitas _The best thing to do is to do nothing and wait for things to settle down. Otherwise you get into the game and lose._ Exactly. This was a case of something being in trouble and the CEO using it to justify cuts. _Not everyone knows the CFO is right. For example, even I don't know how much the company is actually losing._ Neither do I. That's what scares me about it, we don't know how badly we've sunk until we start losing people. ~~~ jrockway _Neither do I. That's what scares me about it, we don't know how badly we've sunk until we start losing people._ That's how you get fired.