"First they had swallowed us, now they're digesting us."

As many of you know, things have not been going well at work lately. Vague message suggesting a quickly deteriorating status have apparently become the norm. For the last three weeks I've worried that I would soon become unemployed.

First, a little background: My little company of ~150 people were acquired by a very much larger company based out of the opposite end of the country. We all had hoped that this would mark the end of the nightmare that began in February 2009 when our pay was cut and staff was slowly and painfully reduced. And for the most part, it was the end of the nightmare.

But not for my department. Let me explain; our new corporate masters are divided into two business units. The first unit is the We-make-stuff division. They write the code, test it, and push out GAs. It's a good place to be in a company that is predominately concerned with the production and sales of software. The other unit is the We-help-you-with-stuff division. Consulting and business services are it's primary concern. This is where my department ended up.

On the surface, it seemed like the perfect place for us. We're all trainers and software consultants, it only seems reasonable to put us with the rest of them. As time went on, however, things became much more frustrating and complex. The corporation doesn't have trainer/consultants, but trainers and consultants. You're either one or the other -- there is no overlap. As a result, we were all priced as trainers, and not the more high paying consultants. The paycut we were forced to take had just become permanent. 

And that's where things got especially painful for me. Just before the acquisition completed, I was promoted to a senior consultant. I was also given a 36% raise over what I was making before the initial paycut at the beginning of 2009. This means that the pay I was offered by my new corporate masters was not a 20% cut -- but a 43% cut. To add insult to injury, the promotion to senior level -- a title that would have cost them nothing to uphold -- disappeared.

I bit down on my anger, my frustration, and the creeping implication of worthlessness. I endured. I used what I was given to ride a plane into Trinidad. 

It was about a week after surgery that my department held a phone conference about our present status. Most of our educational cirriculum involved IBM products. We were allowed by IBM to continue teaching in this manner because we were a small shop, and no where big enough to compete with IBM Global Services. When our new corporate masters came along, they assumed that we could continue as we were.

Yeah, IBM didn't like that. Didn't like it at all...

Now that we were part of a much bigger company, IBM no longer allowed us the "gentleman's agreement" we had before. We negotiated, we tried to track down who agreed, all to no avail. In the end, IBM told us to pay up, or shut down. The only way we could continue is if we purchased full licenses for the products on which we teach.

Now, if you know anything about enterprise software, you'll know it's not cheap. A queue manager will run you $4000 on Windows or Linux x86 at the time of this writing. A message broker -- the biggest seller in services and education for us historically -- would run you $80,000. And not the full version of Broker, oh no; you only get one crippled installation. IBM decided to play hardball.

When it was our company's turn at bat, they shrugged, discarded their investment, and walked away. Translation: We weren't getting the licenses. Corporate didn't want to play that game. Personal investment aside, I can't say I blame them either. Corporate doesn't make most of its money from educating on competitor's products. It makes money by selling and educating on its own.

When I first started this job, I made it a point to dig into the products that it produced and sold. My thinking is that while IBM training may come or go, the company would always need resources knowledgeable in the software they produced. Right now, that strategy is paying off for me. Unfortunately, I'm somewhat unique in the department. Many others specialized in IBM products while I remained tacitly entrenched in company property.

My boss, being the clever and crafty woman she is, refused to let this story end with the unemployment line. She worked to get those with product skills moved into other positions in corporate. I am number two on that list, and will be having a meeting with my new boss tomorrow morning.