In the past few months I have been witnessing contradictory behavior from one of the largest players in the industry. Several people I know and highly respect have left this company very recently. These are people that no matter how complex the environment, how angry the customer, or how broken the product would find a way to have everything working and the customer happy by the time they finished. That is a hard skill to put a dollar value on but a very important one if you care about happy or repeat customers. I think over and over how Windmill can uses these people, they are too valuable to let drift away.
This same large company is working on entering into the Smart Grid market. This may be the hottest market today. The combination of being green, massive investment, and the potential of very high sales counts are drawing many moths. I am a network guy, not a power guy. I took the classes in school but that is not how I have spent the last 20 years working. I am close to several people that are very knowledgeable about modern power research and hear their stories often. Many of the current players are having problems because they may understand power very well but they do not understand the nuts and bolts of moving information about power in a stable and scalable way. This requires solid, old school, network operations knowledge.
The large unnamed company is claiming that they have both the research smarts and the network ops smarts to solve all of the problems at the same time. They are implying network ops is a critical component to a successful smart grid solution. So why have they been shedding the best people at doing this? I expect the reason is that they believe that they can always find the talent they need or create the talent they need.
Anyone that feels this way has never had to find someone to solve a problem quickly. Resumes, experience, certifications are useful but never tell you if someone will match well to both a problem and an organization. I expect that replacing each quality person lost, will require at least 3 hires that should have had the same quality but either don’t really or just take too long to meld into the organization. To me, this makes the people you already have on staff, that already fit with the group, and have proven skills so much more valuable than nameless bodies with pretty resumes.
This increased value of current staff is part of what Windmill is trying to leverage. Instead of the hit or miss and expensive nature of seeking additional staff, get more out of the people you have. Automate everywhere you can, tools are cheap in the long run compared to head count. Make them happier by removing the drudge work. I think engineers are not just widgets to be shuffled in and out as needed. Good ones are too hard to find and bad ones are very expensive.
Comments