Initially it sounded like he threw her under the bus, but he later clarifies it indirectly. If you're not well-versed in what went on at Catalyst, though ... it's easy to miss, I think.

Companies usually don't make it a habit of badmouthing former employees even if they were tossed out on their ear. It's just complicated and messy. If they're in a situation where they're being pointedly asked about someone for a job interview, damning with faint praise is usually what happens, "Yes, I can confirm that he worked here." Being sort of non-specific skirts some issues, but has its own problems if you have two people who had that position and left in short order.

Someone who doesn't know much about the story would just get that it's a former book keeper.

Someone who's following the story a little would probably know that the last book keeper to leave was Jen, and possibly think that's who he was talking about.

Someone who's followed the story closely would know that Jen wasn't there long enough for all this to happen under and replaced the person he was probably talking about.

But unless he gives a name, which would be really bad form, we really don't know who exactly he had in mind. It's a case where being less open and saying less really probably would have been better.

They are really trying hard to convince me not to buy anything from CGL anymore... The level of unprofessional behavior is amazing. A better response would have not to say anything or say that there were errors but we are correcting those errors and not single out anyone. Now where is that Eclipse Phase book

I really didn't find anything reprehensible in the podcast, and I listened to the entire interview.

I was told those photos were destroyed....

There are ALWAYS Backups though...

Keep the Faith

The Resonance never forgets.

-M&P

Aff, as did I. Thing is, one of the big questions on how the co-mingling happened has been
"Why did no-one catch it sooner?" The answer is "The first book-keeper was not up to how
big we got so fast." It is not even throwing the first book-keeper under the bus. It is pretty
much stating that they got much bigger much faster then they expected, and, pretty much,
no-one was prepared for it.

Good news! they are fixing things! They have a "controller" for their new book keeper,
Randall is riding everyone about paper trail on everything!(One of the issues, I gathered
simply from them having to check on the contracts of all the freelancers, that they were
not doing before.) They are even consulting with people Topps is letting them use with
big business experience to help fix everything. Of course, with Topps giving this "help,"
I am guessing they are also seeing how things are being done at CGL, and seeing if their
advice is being followed.Who here really thinks that Topps' business people are not also
the ones who are giving Topps the final verdict on if CGL is going to continue to be good
for the license? Who here thinks that there was not someone from Topps at the CGL booth
at Origins, and that there will not be someone from Topps there at GenCon, to help make
the booth more efficient?

Minor corrections (hey, it's what I do):

@ Doc Chase:
Cash Basis vs. Accrual Basis has nothing to do with the size of the company. Cash counts income as monies are received and expenses as they are paid. Accrual counts income as it is invoiced and expenses as they are accrued. Most large companies use accrual based accounting. Some small companies (mine included) use both cash and accrual basis: cash for internal bookkeeping and accrual for tax reporting.

@ Lurker:
I think you may be confusing margin and income. Margin is the difference between the sales price and cost of goods sold. Income is the difference between revenue and the sum of cost of sales, operating expenses, and taxes over a set period of time.

@ augementin:
You fool! You sword you'd never post in a speculation thread again. Why did you even look? What's wrong with you. What sort of strange mental defect makes you keep coming back even when you're probably done buying CGL product for several months. Stop it. Now. I'm serious. Quit typing and never come back here.

I listened to the entire thing to... Its just another straw on the camels back. This particular one just added because I've been with companies who increased revenue at 300% a year. I've done the 1 million, 3 million, 9 million, 27 million game already. Yes people are over worked and yes mistakes are made but thats why you hire experienced staff. You don't expect your 1 million dollar controller to be able to handle a 27 million company. Thats just poor management from the top on down. But this is a pet peeve of mine as growing small companies is one of my favorite things to do because the work is so fast paced and every decision matters.

Until the Crash of '29 hits, destroying not only all electronic data on- and offline, but also burning books and wiping the minds of scientists and engineers...

SCNR

AS has been said already though, the Resonance never forgets...

And besides... the Crash of '29 is long in the past, and so is the the Crash of 64...

Keep the Faith

I fail to see what you are so pissed about. Some companies do handle the growth, but a lot of companies don't. CGL falls into the latter category. Despite what some other posters have said, RB didn't single out one person for the blame, and definitely not JH. In fact, he put a great deal of the blame on himself.

I'm not so pissed, its another straw. If you have 345,753 straws already on your back and you add another one... you get one more step closer to the breaking point. Specifically I am upset in this case at the excuse we didn't have a capable bookeeper for the digits involved which is another sign of bad management because as management you should be able to realize that you need at leased a consultant when your in over your head. And their are a ton of agencies out there to help your business understand what you need and how to plan. From my perspective bad managers are getting off the hook because the investors don't care about making money and would rather pull shinanigans. This is just more evidence of bad behavior from the top down.

I've been wanting to keep out of this until the August trial, but Dan Harms posted something I think is relevant to the situation at hand.

This is a sign of bad management because it WAS bad management, a fact that Randall seems more than happy to admit. He worked on the creative side of things for most of his entire career. If you are talking about bad behavior, you should probably distinguish between bad behavior that is malicious in nature and general bad behavior as the result of inexperience or unpreparedness. Stealing from a company is an example of the former. Randall's podcast appears, at least to me, to be an example of the latter. Righteous indignation seems less plausible when dealing with mistakes of inexperience.

DOH. Nevermind. M&P beat me to the punchline.

That'll teach me to reply before reading all the way through.

I gotta ask though: where do you draw the line? At what point does making a mistake over and over again stop being not knowing how to do things the right way and start being experience in doing things the wrong way? Because I think it's clear to everybody at this point, this shit has been going on for years. Not keeping books right, comingling of funds, not paying people - at some point you have to think that there is a bit of malicious intent there, because otherwise people wouldn't keep making the same mistakes - but that's what's happened here. Honestly, I think if a big stink wasn't made about it, CGL/IMR would still be doing the same shit just because they think they could get away with it.

I'm not talking righteous indignation... I don't know why its being taken as such. What I'm saying is that Randall should have said nothing or been more generic about it because right now I'm already not buying any new 4e books but continuing to buy PDFs of the old stuff as it is released. So I'm already really high on the pissed scale for a collector of all things Shadowrun. By talking specifically about the finances and their inability to hire the right staff, then not talking specifics about corrections in management you make (so it wont happen again) it sound like there were NO repercussions for anyone at the top. Which sounds a lot like the golden parachutes people are so pissed at the banks about. This just added a little fuel to the fire, not at Randal directly but that it seams management can just ignore the issues with no repercussions. If he had said nothing or been more generic about it or if I wasn't already pissy it probably wouldn't have meant anything to me. Eventually if shinanigans continue I'll just stop buying anything from CGL.

[edit] If your going to say it was too much growth without qualified staff, say who you hired/suspended/fired to correct the problem and make sure it doesn't happen again. Not we are fixing the problem.

Its incorrect to think of CGL/IMR as a single entity with a single hive mind. While I will grant you that it is reasonable to speculate that such as situation might be true in LLC's case, its clearly wrong about the other individuals at CGL/IMR. We know that the problems were being addressed internally as early as November of last year, well before the public stink happened.

CGL/IMR has been trying to address these sort of problems - or so they've claimed - for as long as I've known them (here I mainly talk about freelancer payments, since those are what I'm most aware of, but Randall says co-mingling has been an ongoing issue as well). Some periods were better and some were worse, from a freelancer perspective, but I think it should be very obvious given the falling-outs IMR has had this last year and the timeline of events that IMR's efforts were either too little and too late - or more likely the people involved (and who have since left) weren't aware of the true scope of the problem, and were not able to fix it with the people currently in charge.

My CGL-ness aside, that's never done in the business world. 'John Doe has moved on to a new opportunity, we wish him well.' and 'I can confim that John Doe worked for us from February 29th 2007 until November 31st 2009.', never 'John Doe had XXXX disciplinary action.' HR nightmare there. As for hiring, I believe it has been conveyed that we've hired a new bookkeeper.

A.
As in one.
Singular.
How long will it take that one to make sense of what's left in terms of book keeping?

It will take as long as it takes... You hire what you can afford and no more...

Keep the Faith

It depends on the act. Crimes for example (like assaulting another employee and going to jail for it) tend to be part of public record. Sleeping on the job, well that is something else. In my experience I would have expected someone having a new opportunity or taking some personal time off. Of course hiring a new star is always good news. I just (incorrectly) lumped all three into the same thing




This I see as truth and a major problem. Once your already in financial trouble its too late to fix the problem in any quick and nice manner. If they were not in court and having to watch their pennies. You hire some consultants who get in done in a few weeks. I even know two agencies in the Seattle area who handle this exact stuff. But your looking at $150 per hour per accountant needed aprox at the low end. For a small buisness your probably looking at a team of 5 and a month work. so 150x8x5x30=180k to clean up the mess, and thats on the lower end of the scale. Not exactly pocket change even for a 3 million dollar company.

Doing the latter is actually illegal in most states. At very least opens you up for lots of lawsuits.

Indeed...

Keep the Faith

There's a lot more to it than that. Certain "code" questions are asked, like: "Would you hire this person again?" and others, to subtly indicate if this person was fired. When you're asked what kind of reference you'd give, you can also get away with a lot. Basically, if John Doe was an unmitigated disaster, there's ways of letting a potential employer know. Also, if Bobby Derie or Jennifer Harding had someone call their past employers, I'm sure something negative would be said.

There are laws in some states that strictly prohibit what a former boss can say. If they're just listed as an employer, all they can do in many states is confirm dates of employment and that's it. If that person is put as a reference, it's completely different.

For my state the lack of questions hold true. However, every application I fill out has a checkbox
"May we ask your former boss about your performance?" sometimes complete with a line to initial.
And if you have "No" checked, things go south fast. Especially, if you have more than one.

I speculate that its not in CGL's interest to say anything and that the subject of further work is especially pointless for those already placed. Freelancers were never fulltime employees and therefore, things of this nature apply differently or not at all.

BlueMax

I'd be willing to guess that what would be said would vary, depending on who within CGL was spoken to. I'm also not sure how you are so sure that negative responses would be the only ones. There's been a great deal of positive well-wishes and thanks put out to the folks who left, in the official press releases. When you've got an employer asking about a previous employee, a whole lot of companies are going to respond with rather neutral statements, similar to what you'll find in a press release. Anything else is too risky in the rather litigious American (as it would be the relevant one in this case) legal system. Legal risk is certainly something that CGL is very aware of right now, seeing as how they've suffered some problems due to increasing such risks with prior actions and behaviors.

If you'll read the line you quoted carefully, you'll notice that I only stated that something negative would be said. Not that "negative responses would be the only ones." So, I'm calling a Straw Man on that whole argument, and tossing it like yesterday's trash. There are various ways of communicating that an employee is not welcome back that are technically legal, and I'll bet you that some of them would be used.

But then again, maybe they wouldn't...

Keep the faith

Sorry, hadn't even read carefully enough. I honestly had thought there was an only in your original post. My bad.

I'm only going from personal experience here, so it isn't meant to be a one size fits all statement. The various employers I've dealt with have always been extremely leery of offering little more than "He/she worked here from this time to this time. This was their job position and title. These were their responsibilities." Maybe that's because they're larger companies, and it's that lovely HR vibe. No idea. Just not sure why you seem to think negative statements would be put out there (or particularly why, in Jen's case...in Ancient's case, yeah, things seem to have been a bit more less friendly). I'm just guessing there's a lot more likelihood for CGL to be tight lipped and neutral at this time. But that's only opinion, based on my few corporate interactions and their press releases tone. With the already existing court issue, it seems that CGL has gone into skittish and quiet mode lately. I have a feeling we'll disagree on that point though.

"Tight lipped and neutral" is HR code for "We wouldn't rehire this person under any circumstances". I recently had someone call my past employers, and the ones who like me were ebullient and enthusiastic. The ones who didn't were tight-lipped and politely neutral. You can tell a lot from that.

I'm not a mod, but the one-line, no useful addition posts are bothering me. It seems to be just a way of pumping your post count.

And like I said before, I find excessive mentions of faith to be offensive. I asked you once to stop, and you did, for one post. Please stop.

Heh, we just had one of those go out today.



Honestly, what does 'give new impulse to her career' mean? Like most statements about employment these days, its a nothing statement.

Sounds like a codephrase for "She switched industries."

Disregard this, wrong thread/window @.@

Yeah, that would probably qualify as 'she's going in a totally different direction'. A situation where the employer saying "she did a good job for us" wouldn't necessarily mean anything for the new employer.

A former employer also has to be a bit careful that the response they give relates to the sort of work the person did for them. If you work at a receptionist at a design firm, then go someplace else to get a design position, having a former employer say "They were great and the clients loved her!" could give the wrong impression. Mentioning that the person is 'launching' or 'entering a new phase' in their career at least gives a hint that they weren't the same position there as they are at the new place.

Yeah, that is odd phrasing.

At my company, its common to see announcements containing "its with mixed feelings that I announce Jane Doe is moving to...". Usually those are internal job changes which show that they didn't want to lose the person to another department. I don't see announcements for firings or leaving the company below the executive management level.

A former employer of mine once had a director take leave of absence for a "medical procedure".

The "medical procedure" turned out to be alcohol related, and apparently did not work.

They quietly put him in an office elsewhere in the building with no apparent function in the organization when he got back.

This is not always true, though. I'm part of a large company, and our instructions are to NEVER give feedback when representing the company - positive or negative - other than position, general job description, and work hire/release dates. I believe that HR had dealt with too many complaints over the years regarding comments like "For someone of his poor hygiene, he doesn't steal as much as you'd think he would." (Quote shamelessly stolen from Dilbert.)

Yep.

?
i meant that i had realized i was posting in the wrong window/thread only after i had clicked submit O.o

For example, this post that does nothing but make a pointless, complaining post while taking a cheap shot at another poster?



Interesting

Our office (An Internationally represented Company) also holds this particular policy...

Keep the Faith

My fault. Thought you were talking about the the offtopic discussion about the habits of Human Resource departments.

Why don't you move that into your signature, btw?