When you look at over compensated executives (See “Top 5 over compensated executives” over at CNN Money), and it seems after the banking meltdown and how compensation has become a huge issue that is getting the G-20’s attention, it is refreshing to see senior management being held accountable for anything. Microsoft has done a good deed by setting an example that it is possible to hold senior management accountable for the performance of their company without people running out the doors because they got a few hundred thousand less in overall compensation.

While many of us love to bash Microsoft for everything and anything, this is a great move on the part of the company when the appearances of senior management is more “looting the company” (see this article and this article) rather than fostering long term strategic goals, and then making sure that the company gets there. We have strayed from the idea of long term survival into the realm of month to month or quarter to quarter thinking running a business rather than ensuring that the business is truly viable.

Techflash reports that:

For fiscal year 2009, Mr. Ballmer’s Incentive Plan award was $600,000 which was 90% of his base salary. This amount was recommended by the Compensation Committee to the Board based on his performance appraisal by the independent members of the Board and other information deemed relevant, including Mr. Ballmer’s performance against his individual commitments. Source: Techflash

Business Insider and Paid Content also chime in on the overall effect that taking a pay cut can have on senior management. With all the real issues with the economy right now, and the 9.7% unemployment rate amongst the general population (with a “real” unemployment rate of something over 16% according to the Democratic Underground) seeing someone in the senior management levels taking a pay cut is a feel good measure. It is also brilliant Public Relations, especially if the focus on the number is “Steve Ballmer took a 10% pay cut in 2009” rather than Steve only make 600K in bonuses this year (which is well above the median average income in the USA). In all, it is a good thing to see that at least one company is behaving responsibly when it comes to executive compensation.

With that and Windows 7, maybe Microsoft will have a much better FY 2010. Well that and if they can get Courier going, and windows mobile released, and a few other things that are totally cool, but still vaporware.

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Work life balance is not a way to suck the company dry, be a non-contributing person who is only there sucking air, drinking coffee and not providing anything while you are in your cube. Work life balance is something that all companies should strive to maintain, even in a time of economic recession. There are some key reasons why you do not want to do the following.

7. For now, forget about work-life balance. A major preoccupation when the economy was humming along nicely, “having time for outside interests has to go right out the window now,” says Bright. “You need to concentrate on doing whatever it takes to make yourself indispensable.” Source: CNN, Anne Fisher’s Contributor Page

It is so easy to get burned out if you do everything to make yourself indispensible. You miss important things, you slack off on your health, and in today’s job market there are no guarantees that you will keep your job. It is not so much that you make yourself indispensible by trying to do it all; it is going about being indispensible by doing it smartly. You can still have a work life balance, and make yourself indispensible and there are ways of doing it without burning out.

These are all things you can do in the course of an eight hour day, 40 hour work week that will help you keep your job, and help you keep your work life balance. We all know that things happen, people get sick, kids need this or that, crisis happens. Realistic managers understand this, it is when the crises get abusive that managers start to notice and when problems start to happen. Business as usual is over with for a while, how well you work in your employment environment is the important part now. You can still play an important role, without giving up those things, work life balance, that are important to you.

Take a look at the technology in the company, what is it, where it is going? Are you going to school? Are you learning the new technology? Can your boss ask you questions and you come up with answers, often right to help them out? Are you reading the same magazines or web sites as the CEO, VP’s, Directors? Are they on linked in? Facebook? Are they your “friends” on line? The question here is are you paying attention to senior leadership, then using that knowledge to improve yourself, or show that you are learning the next round of technology today. Even if it is on your own dime, doing this puts you well ahead of the pack.

Take a look at your leadership, are they scared? How are they dealing with fear? Are they being Machiavellian about things (and if they are do you still want them as a boss) or are they trying to work things through and be supportive. If they are being supportive, help them out, find out what they need that they don’t have the time for. The more you help your boss, the more the boss is likely to remember you fondly, and keep you around.

How good a team member are you? Are you participating 100%, offering good sound suggestions or are you in the way, thinking that things cannot be done because of one thing or another. If you are a positive influence, thinking that anything is possible, then you will do well.

How good is your work? How much rework does your work require? If you can keep the errors down, you are saving money. You still need to meet all your deadlines, but if you are doing good quality work that does not require a lot of rewrite, and meeting deadlines, life will be easier.

How good is your attitude? If you have a poor outlook on life things might be bad for you. If you have a positive outlook on life things might be better. People want to work with you when you have a good attitude, positive, and pleasant.

All of these softer skills can help you without having to resort to the 100 hour work week. You do not have to throw work life balance out the window because the economy is going downhill. If you are working for a company that sees this as an opportunity to squeeze every last erg of productivity out of an already fearful workforce, then odds are huge that when things get better these people will simply go find work elsewhere.

Now is the time to stay in touch with your bosses, with your employees, and be supportive. Anything less at this stage of the game will only cause problems later on down the road when things get better. Employees will remember how you treated them forever, if you use the economy as a way to fire “slackers”, and then eventually that will catch up with you. Do your best to stay positive, but work life balance is important, you should find an employer who will understand this. When you do, stay with them for as long as you can.

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1. Must know how to use MySpace, Facebook, Linkedin, Blogging, Twitter, YouTube, Slide share and Podcasting, the candidate should provide examples and links to live content for each example when applying for the job.

Here is why I want those, I want to see how many friends they have, I want to see how many followers they have, and I want to be able to do a Google search LINK:DOMAIN-NAME.COM. I want to know exactly how embedded they are in the internet already, and I want to know how well they use the tools. If they have a lot of followers already, if they blog and guest blog on good high visibility sites, if they have a YouTube or other video channel they use on a regular basis, and if they podcast on a regular basis I know they know how to use the tools, I also get an idea of the quality of work. Is this the kind of quality that I want for my social media manager? It is not enough to pump out tons of content, but I also want to know how popular the person is already. Good quality content that is engaging, debate starting, insightful, and interesting, the candidate already is on their way to job employment.

2. The Candidate must be able to engage with difficult and unhappy people, while remaining respectful of all parties in the process.

This is where Facebook, Linkedin, and MySpace come into play, if they are ragging on people, companies, or otherwise being degrading in tough social situations, I’ll know about it here. Don’t bother removing anything, Google has a cache of everything, eventually I will find out. I’ll also have access to everyone in your contact list; expect me to hit them up on Linked In. If I friend you, and you don’t respond for a week, you didn’t get the job.

3. I am going to ask some very tough questions on the interview, I am going to find the most degrading damaging things that have been said on the internet, and I am going to scenario the whole thing with you. I’ll find things like the 22 confessions of a dell manager, I’ll find things like Kathy Sierra, or even just general hate rant, or I’ll pull stuff from Valleywag (now a column), and I will work out how you would handle a politically and personally tough assignment. Expect this process to last hours.

Here is why I am going to go through cases, and make a process of it. One I want to find out how well you react to people calling you bad names, but even better, I want to grind you down and make you tired, the last three of these cases are going to be the most important, because I’ll know how you will react if you get tired, cranky, and have spent the better part of a day dealing with a person trying to trip you up. If you pass this, you can be my social media manager. At the end of the day is when we make our biggest and most damaging mistakes, we are tired, and just want to go home. If you are unfailingly polite through all this, that is a good thing.

4. Throw a barrage of information at the person and have them prioritize it, see how they organize and think.

The reason for doing this, and it would probably be tied to number 3 as a scenario is to work out what is important first, and what can slide. I want the person to be able to pick out the top rated blogs, links, people and respond directly to them first, and then work their way down the list in order of importance, not leaving anyone off the list. Order of importance is tied to internet fame, if Robert Scoble, RWW, Mashible, Techcrunch, or Louis Gray says that something I did sucked, then many people are going to know about it. I’ll want to engage with them first, and work out what the issues are on their site, with them, and then accept the bad news or work out a compromise. I want to make sure my Community Manager can do the same thing.

5. Given a list of sites, prioritize in order of internet importance.

The reason for doing this is to see if they really understand the industry that I am hiring them for. If it is education, they had better be putting the Chronicle of Higher Education at the top of the list. If they are in Technology, they had better be putting RWW, Techcrunch, Robert, Louis, and everyone else at the top of the list. It is not about where these people end up on the list, it is how well they understand the industry, who the movers and shakers are, and where they are. They should recognize the URL’s, or start asking questions, or getting on the internet to determine who they are and how important they are.

You can play around with these, but hiring your social manager should not be easy, and you can take these ideas and expand on them. They are generic enough that people can go out and have a good time with them, working out exactly how they fit within the companies needs.

Honestly though, this is what I will be hiring against when it comes down to finding the community manager. Really good, socially aware and responsible people will not necessarily fly through this process, but I will be able to weed out those that don’t really know about the tools, how they work, and how they can be used.

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As more and more companies lay off people, the work load is not going to change at all, if anything the work load is going to increase for those people who are left behind. That can be a real issue when dealing with worker burn out, and worker dissatisfaction with their current employment. While this might not be the best time ever to go find a job, there are still thousands of open positions available, so people do have a choice.

As we try to balance work and life, work is rapidly becoming something that folks just do not want to do, they are working out ways to become more independent, either as a contractor, or self employed. The more interesting part to all this is that as these people leave the work force, they might not come back if they are successful at being independent. That means the pool of available candidates will continue to shrink while the work continues to grow. Hiring standards and practices are changed, and while you might have gotten rid of 30% of your low performers that does not mean that the work went away. They did something for the company, and now you have to scramble to find either a lower cost replacement worker, a contractor, or push the work off onto someone else who is already fully engaged with another project.

Firing always has its downside, not only do you increase the work load on those who stay, but you risk burn out leading to additional attrition. You also lose a lot of valuable information that the person held in their head. While Knowledge Management systems might help, most of us keep corporate information in our heads; we will not willingly let it go. If you have ever tried to comb through someone else’s source code, you understand the problem if it is not fully commented.

Before you go on a company wide purge of low performing employees, it is very important that you take a look at exactly what they are doing, and work out a way to make sure at least some of the corporate knowledge is captured. This can be done by teaming the soon to be fired employee with someone else to help in an under cover transition of the project. There are also other ways that a company can try to capture internal knowledge that is important for the project to be successful.

The worst thing that a company can do is lay off staff without an idea of what they are doing for the company. Most firing processes I have seen only look at the performance evaluations of people, without names or position associated with them. Most of the firing board makes their decisions in the dark, which is good for keeping lawsuits at bay, but at some point in the process this boils down to a person, who is doing work, and reallocation of the work can be a very difficult thing to do for some managers, and some employees.

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This job description for an SDET is fresh from Dice…

This is one of those very confused kind of job descriptions that make someone wonder what kind of job they are really going after, and are exceedingly common, in that they are looking for people do to do many things, and not all of them are going to be compatible with someone’s work experience. It is the rare shop that has both windows and linux as a programmer, windows media player does not work in a linux environment, this job will be near impossible to place a candidate in.

But these kinds of job offerings are all too common, using the keywords I searched on “Windows Linux” there were multiple jobs open with the same confusing and contradictory needs, wants and desires. Realistically this is more like two jobs, or even three, that they want to pay DOE (depending on experience) on.

Under key responsibilities this same job wants:

This really sounds like a SDET job rather than an SDE job, meaning the title is going to be confusing, and you have to ask how many people passed on this based on the job description. They want too much, in too confusing a job description that is unlikely to be filled because of what that company wants.

While it is never a good idea to lie on your resume, having a clear and concise job description also helps, because this kind of job description cries out that they have no clue, and could be subject to people padding their resumes because they want the job.

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