Really bad math

07 December 2014

The whole situation at Carl's employer hasn't made sense, and I've always had the feeling I was missing a piece of the puzzle. Now of course I only get insight into the situation by way of Carl's viewpoint, but still, it didn't make sense: why would they go from telling him his performance is great except he's too indispensable to promote to telling him they're shunting him off into a corner and promoting the guy behind him? And then telling him they're going to continue to try to fill the position he's now in, when what are they going to do if they do, demote the other guy back to give Carl his old job back? And when he calls them on it, act totally surprised and like they don't understand why he thinks any of this is a bad thing?

And then right in the middle of talking to someone about it on Twitter this morning (after I ran across a new ad for his job while looking for a dev job for me), everything became crystal-clear:

Me: Last week Carl's boss changed his job. This week they put an ad in the paper... for his new job: Software Developer

Her: Um.... that's.... I'm speechless.

Me: Did I mention they immediately made his old position a management position? Yeah.

Her: Crazy.

Me: Thing is, they know Carl can't quit because we have a potential $3k/month medical expense coming up... and oh shit, you know what?

Me: They self-insure. Suddenly not so crazy. Shit shit shit. Of course.

Me: (Pardon my French.)

Her: And there it is. Damn. So sorry!

So there it is. Sad part? The insurance company almost certainly isn't going to cover that $72k anyway, self-funded health care or not. Which is why I'm looking for a dev job, and why I ran across that ad.

I guess the good news is, Carl can quit trying to analyze his every move over the last few months looking for what he did wrong. Now we know.

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