Trilogy flees Austin
Sep. 6th, 2004 10:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
threeplusfireI read the Austin American Statesman maybe twice a week, just because it's a pain to fin the local news. It's never been a great paper and recent years have seen most all Texas papers under the shadow of Cox media sliding into the same bland format. The decline of newspapers hurts me, but that's not what I want to talk about.
The article below is about the company I used to work for, in the days of the dotcom boom. Rather, folks from Trilogy created the spinoff that became my company. It was working for PcOrder that taught me dedication to a job can be so frustrating, so painful and in the end meaningless. There are things briefly mentioned in this article that knock me vividly back into those years - memories of the late nights, the constant IM sessions with the Pune office, the software crashes, the guy who bet his car on the outcome of sports game, doing my homework in my office, the people I worked with, the times I cried at my desk, the stress, the week I took off work on doctor's orders, screaming at the valets in the parking lot, Marcus sleeping in his office when he knew he was on the way down, that horrid Stephanie woman, the time I stuffed the question box with a number of nasty and aggressive questions about layoffs and poor decision making, my screaming rage when they fired the most productive people on my team, how they isolated me out of fear I would cause a scene when they fired Steven, the receptionist desk up front that was never ever used by anyone, the time I threatened to hit our boss in the head with a coffee pot in front of the entire research staff, the way we traded urls for mail-order brides that inevitably popped up when searching for SKUs, the guy who spent a solid week looking at hardcore porn instead of working, Heather & Scott as the weirdest couple ever, the French accented systems guy who went through all our hard drives looking for evidence to fire us and getting Fernie, Monday night dinners at LaMo, the airconditioning that didn't work when we moved into Amherst and how Steven & I had to buy giant fans at Walmart so we wouldn't die while working in the dark...
I worked so hard at that job and for what? Just thinking about it makes me so angry.
Trilogy has eliminated more than a thousand jobs in the Austin area over the past few years, but they certainly have the resources to give them all to India. I'm all for the economic development of the world, but not at the expense of other people's lives.
Mirror on the future?
Trilogy's aggressive move into Bangalore may offer Austin tech workers a glimpse of what their future could hold.
By Lori Hawkins
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, September 06, 2004
BANGALORE, India : Three years ago, every line of Trilogy Inc. software code was written from the company's headquarters overlooking Lake Austin.
Now, it all happens here, in a shiny new glass and granite office building with leather sofas in the lobby and conference rooms named after cartoon characters.
By the end of next year, the Bangalore office will have 400 employees, double the Austin work force. Every job that doesn't involve dealing with customers will be in India.
Indian employees will create new products for the company's Fortune 500 customers; Trilogy Bangalore will replace Trilogy Austin as the company's center of innovation.
It's a radical shift for a 15-year-old company that helped define Austin's entrepreneurial spirit and put the city on the map as a software center.
Trilogy is at the leading edge of a job shift that could have a profound effect on the thousands of people who design software in Central Texas and other tech workers down the road, as more companies send work overseas.
Trilogy's programmers, once Austin's high-tech superheroes, now are facing the unnerving new choices that offshoring has created.
In recent weeks, 15 Trilogy workers have left, not all of them voluntarily. The futures of another 30 or more are up in the air. In face-to-face meetings with managers, they're weighing their options: give up writing software and take on new roles as marketers or consultants, or give up Trilogy.
"We're going through a tidal wave," says Deborah Ingram, vice president of professional services. "What people did best has been moved offshore. This is fundamentally a different place, and they need a new skill set."
Some employees are wrestling with the new reality, says Jim Abolt, vice president of human resources.
"There are still those who don't want to move into a new role, but they don't want to leave Trilogy," he says. "But we're so extreme in our strategy that there is nowhere to hide."
Trilogy recruited Alex Devine out of the University of Virginia in 2000 with the promise of working on cutting-edge technology and taking on big responsibilities.
Devine, now 27, enjoyed both as he wrote code at Trilogy and its spinoff, Internet company pcOrder.com.
But earlier this year, Trilogy moved Devine's job to Bangalore. And last month, Devine left to work for Troux Technologies Inc., another software company in Austin a couple miles north.
Although Devine says he's convinced that there will always be work for software developers who have the right mix of skills and understand customers' needs, his friends and colleagues aren't so sure.
"A lot of people, especially very hard-core programmer types, are wondering if in 10 years there are going to be any jobs left," Devine says. "Everybody is trying to figure out what the future will look like."
Making a move
Trilogy always has been unconventional, and its India strategy is no exception.
Three years ago, before "offshoring" became part of the American lexicon, the company began testing the waters, sending small projects to Bangalore.
Now Trilogy is going much farther than other companies, which have limited offshoring to lower-level programming and testing jobs.
"We're moving the center of gravity for Trilogy to India," says CEO Joe Liemandt.
Already, the company has exported Trilogy University, its celebrated college recruiting program, to Bangalore. The Indian work force of 182 includes 71 recent graduates from some of India's top universities.
Some of Liemandt's Austin peers wonder whether India is a desperation move by a company that has eliminated 1,000 Austin jobs over the last three years in response to a slowdown in technology spending.
Liemandt says he's just getting in step with a global economy in which work that once was high end such as writing and testing software code has become a commodity.
"We don't get to pick what's high value. The marketplace does," says Leimandt, 36. "If you're a software developer, do you want to fight the marketplace, or move to the place that the market says is valuable?"
Some Trilogy workers have made the move. When Andy Price joined Trilogy eight years ago fresh out of Rice University with degrees in computer science and electrical engineering, he knew exactly what he wanted to do.
"I was sure I wanted to write code all day for the rest of my life," says Price, 30. "For four years, that's what I did. I never once thought about business or customers."
But as Trilogy began looking at India, Price started to reconsider his career path.
"I was watching the type of job I did every day start to go away, and I realized that even though I really enjoy solving tough technical problems, I'd better start thinking ahead."
Today he is director of product management for Trilogy's automotive group. He works with a sales staff to create and sell software packages to carmakers and consults with developers about new products his clients want.
"Now I know the business. I've presented to senior vice presidents at Ford and Nissan stuff I never thought I'd know how to do," says Price, who once wore jeans and T-shirts to work and now dons oxford shirts and trousers.
In the new Trilogy, of course, there won't be marketing jobs for everyone. And not every employee has found a new career path. Devine, the programmer, tried consulting for Trilogy for several months, but decided that spending Monday through Thursday with a customer in Ohio wasn't for him.
"I just bought a house and got engaged, and I love living in Austin," he says. "I didn't want to spend 10 hours a week on a plane. I wanted to be a software developer."
Style and substance
When Liemandt and his four co-founders moved Trilogy from Silicon Valley to Austin in 1992, they brought with them a new brand of entrepreneurship. Trilogy's young, mostly single employees moved in a pack, renting movie theaters for premieres and running up $10,000 happy-hour bills on the company tab.
But behind its brash personality, there was substance. Trilogy had built software to help companies configure complex orders, and large corporations were willing to pay for it.
Its first sale was to Hewlett-Packard Corp. Its roster of Fortune 500 customers now includes the Ford Motor Co., Boeing Co. and IBM Corp.
Trilogy doesn't disclose revenues, but business information companies estimated that sales had topped $100 million by 2001. Liemandt is the principal owner. In 2002, the most recent public estimate, Forbes magazine put his wealth at $250 million.
In 1995, the company launched Trilogy University, a three-month boot camp that helped Trilogy lure top graduates from the country's most prestigious schools and groom them for leadership roles. Liemandt fired them up with talks about entrepreneurship, then gave them the freedom to execute their ideas.
The "kids," as Liemandt called them, created the company's cornerstone software, which handles a sale from the initial customer call to the order and manufacture of the product.
They also created a few flops, including companies that tried to sell cars and home appliances over the Internet.
In 2000, as U.S. economic growth slammed to a halt, Trilogy had more than 1,200 workers, most of them rookies with little real-world experience. In 2001, battered by the falloff in corporate spending, Trilogy fired nearly 500 employees and brought in more seasoned executives to restructure the company.
It was also in 2001 that Trilogy began its move to India. Lie- mandt says the idea arose from conversations with some Indian employees and wasn't connected to the company's financial troubles at the time. There was no grand plan, he says.
"We didn't envision any of this stuff," Liemandt says. "It all unfolded."
He says the company already is seeing a payoff. In June, Trilogy bought a small company that makes software for auto designers. Bangalore employees will use the software as a platform for new products for other industries, such as aerospace.
The company expects to add marketing jobs in the United States to sell the new products.
Boom in Bangalore
In Austin, Trilogy is planning to move to smaller offices. In Bangalore, work is nearly done on the 32,000-square-foot development center, with a cafeteria and a gym with workout equipment.
One conference room — named after Garfield the Cat — is devoted to videoconferencing, which allows teams in Bangalore and Austin to be in constant communication. The room, which is nearly always booked, has cameras set up to make it look as if everyone is sitting around the same table. Employees use instant messaging to keep in touch throughout the day and night.
The 10 1/2-hour time difference works to the developers' advantage. When the Bangalore developers leave in the evening, their Austin colleagues are getting ready to come to work.
"It's amazing how much you get done when you're on a 24-hour development cycle," says Rashmi Hari, a senior developer in Bangalore. "There really isn't a time when work isn't being done."
Trilogy's transition to India has been challenging. Initially, the Austin developers resisted collaborating with their Indian counterparts.
The company's party-hearty, beer-chugging culture collided with the more conservative style of the Indian recruits who came to Austin for training.
"The engineers said, 'We like to go to Sixth Street. Those guys just sit and read. This is never going to work,' " Abolt, the human resources vice president, says. "There was a lot of resistance."
The issue was debated on the company's internal Web site, and the comments sometimes got nasty.
"It was, 'They're not as smart as us. They're not capable of doing the same quality work,' " Abolt says. "The real question on their minds was, 'Am I losing my job?' No matter how sophisticated you are and how marketable you are, the idea of losing your job is both threatening and embarrassing."
The Web site fights came to a head last fall when an Austin developer posted a particularly venomous attack. An Indian programmer responded.
"He wrote a flawless post about how much they're disparaging people who are really good and who truly care about their work," Abolt says. "That ended the debate. People read that and realized, 'Hey, they're after the same things we are.' "
In Bangalore, Trilogy is trying to transplant its entrepreneurial culture.
"It's a replica of what Trilogy in the U.S. was," says Abhoy Bhaktwatsalam, a development manager in Bangalore. "It's just a different demographic and a different set of people."
Instead of Friday night beer bashes, team-building rituals include cricket matches, bowling expeditions and themed dress-up days.
The challenge is to teach a group of talented but reserved young programmers to be leaders and innovators.
"We want them to start enjoying the responsibility and freedoms the job comes with," says Smitha Kumar, a recruiter. "We expect people to give their opinions in ways beyond coding."
Lining up the recruits
One thing Trilogy has going for it: College students around the world have a lot in common. With a little tweaking, the company's recruiting program worked the same magic on Indian students it once did on Ivy Leaguers.
"Students everywhere want the same thing — great opportunties, big challenges and a cool corporate culture," says Adam Ward, who moved to Bangalore in October to run the recruiting program in Bangalore. "We say, 'We want you to come up with the next big idea. We're giving you the steering wheel.' "
Ward, a lanky 26-year-old, had never even eaten Indian food before moving here. He and four bubbly female recruiters, including a former Miss Bangalore, spent the spring working the country's mostly male, top technical schools.
They took students to dinner and movies and plied them with company T-shirts, a novelty in India. Parents received a fat information package, including a copy of a Harvard Business Review profile of TU.
"I tell the students 'You are the best in the world. You should be demanding the best projects.' " Ward says. "And they're like 'Hey, yeah, I am the best.' You see their faces light up. The other companies don't approach it like that. They're still offering boring testing work on tier-three products."
Liemandt personally visited a dozen campuses, riding buses to reach schools in remote areas.
The wooing paid off. Trilogy's salaries don't hurt, either. The company won't say how much it pays new recruits, but just as in Austin five years ago, other software companies are grousing that Trilogy is driving up rates.
"When I talk to Microsoft recruiters," Ward says, "I tell them, 'We'll always pay more than you.' "
In July, 75 recruits reported, 71 of them Indian, four from the United States and Canada.
The recruits have an idea of what they're getting into. During spring break, Trilogy flew 100 candidates from campuses in Delhi, Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and Chennai (formerly Madras) here for a 36-hour simulation of what they would experience in TU. Candidates stayed up all night solving technical problems.
On arrival for the real deal, they each received a copy of "Built to Last," the bible on corporate culture, and mementos such as picture frames and small cricket bats emblazoned with the Trilogy logo.
Trilogy is already gearing up for next year's recruiting season, when the goal is to double the number of hires.
"Joe is always sending me e-mails that say 'Remember, more is better,' " Ward says.
The article below is about the company I used to work for, in the days of the dotcom boom. Rather, folks from Trilogy created the spinoff that became my company. It was working for PcOrder that taught me dedication to a job can be so frustrating, so painful and in the end meaningless. There are things briefly mentioned in this article that knock me vividly back into those years - memories of the late nights, the constant IM sessions with the Pune office, the software crashes, the guy who bet his car on the outcome of sports game, doing my homework in my office, the people I worked with, the times I cried at my desk, the stress, the week I took off work on doctor's orders, screaming at the valets in the parking lot, Marcus sleeping in his office when he knew he was on the way down, that horrid Stephanie woman, the time I stuffed the question box with a number of nasty and aggressive questions about layoffs and poor decision making, my screaming rage when they fired the most productive people on my team, how they isolated me out of fear I would cause a scene when they fired Steven, the receptionist desk up front that was never ever used by anyone, the time I threatened to hit our boss in the head with a coffee pot in front of the entire research staff, the way we traded urls for mail-order brides that inevitably popped up when searching for SKUs, the guy who spent a solid week looking at hardcore porn instead of working, Heather & Scott as the weirdest couple ever, the French accented systems guy who went through all our hard drives looking for evidence to fire us and getting Fernie, Monday night dinners at LaMo, the airconditioning that didn't work when we moved into Amherst and how Steven & I had to buy giant fans at Walmart so we wouldn't die while working in the dark...
I worked so hard at that job and for what? Just thinking about it makes me so angry.
Trilogy has eliminated more than a thousand jobs in the Austin area over the past few years, but they certainly have the resources to give them all to India. I'm all for the economic development of the world, but not at the expense of other people's lives.
Mirror on the future?
Trilogy's aggressive move into Bangalore may offer Austin tech workers a glimpse of what their future could hold.
By Lori Hawkins
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, September 06, 2004
BANGALORE, India : Three years ago, every line of Trilogy Inc. software code was written from the company's headquarters overlooking Lake Austin.
Now, it all happens here, in a shiny new glass and granite office building with leather sofas in the lobby and conference rooms named after cartoon characters.
By the end of next year, the Bangalore office will have 400 employees, double the Austin work force. Every job that doesn't involve dealing with customers will be in India.
Indian employees will create new products for the company's Fortune 500 customers; Trilogy Bangalore will replace Trilogy Austin as the company's center of innovation.
It's a radical shift for a 15-year-old company that helped define Austin's entrepreneurial spirit and put the city on the map as a software center.
Trilogy is at the leading edge of a job shift that could have a profound effect on the thousands of people who design software in Central Texas and other tech workers down the road, as more companies send work overseas.
Trilogy's programmers, once Austin's high-tech superheroes, now are facing the unnerving new choices that offshoring has created.
In recent weeks, 15 Trilogy workers have left, not all of them voluntarily. The futures of another 30 or more are up in the air. In face-to-face meetings with managers, they're weighing their options: give up writing software and take on new roles as marketers or consultants, or give up Trilogy.
"We're going through a tidal wave," says Deborah Ingram, vice president of professional services. "What people did best has been moved offshore. This is fundamentally a different place, and they need a new skill set."
Some employees are wrestling with the new reality, says Jim Abolt, vice president of human resources.
"There are still those who don't want to move into a new role, but they don't want to leave Trilogy," he says. "But we're so extreme in our strategy that there is nowhere to hide."
Trilogy recruited Alex Devine out of the University of Virginia in 2000 with the promise of working on cutting-edge technology and taking on big responsibilities.
Devine, now 27, enjoyed both as he wrote code at Trilogy and its spinoff, Internet company pcOrder.com.
But earlier this year, Trilogy moved Devine's job to Bangalore. And last month, Devine left to work for Troux Technologies Inc., another software company in Austin a couple miles north.
Although Devine says he's convinced that there will always be work for software developers who have the right mix of skills and understand customers' needs, his friends and colleagues aren't so sure.
"A lot of people, especially very hard-core programmer types, are wondering if in 10 years there are going to be any jobs left," Devine says. "Everybody is trying to figure out what the future will look like."
Making a move
Trilogy always has been unconventional, and its India strategy is no exception.
Three years ago, before "offshoring" became part of the American lexicon, the company began testing the waters, sending small projects to Bangalore.
Now Trilogy is going much farther than other companies, which have limited offshoring to lower-level programming and testing jobs.
"We're moving the center of gravity for Trilogy to India," says CEO Joe Liemandt.
Already, the company has exported Trilogy University, its celebrated college recruiting program, to Bangalore. The Indian work force of 182 includes 71 recent graduates from some of India's top universities.
Some of Liemandt's Austin peers wonder whether India is a desperation move by a company that has eliminated 1,000 Austin jobs over the last three years in response to a slowdown in technology spending.
Liemandt says he's just getting in step with a global economy in which work that once was high end such as writing and testing software code has become a commodity.
"We don't get to pick what's high value. The marketplace does," says Leimandt, 36. "If you're a software developer, do you want to fight the marketplace, or move to the place that the market says is valuable?"
Some Trilogy workers have made the move. When Andy Price joined Trilogy eight years ago fresh out of Rice University with degrees in computer science and electrical engineering, he knew exactly what he wanted to do.
"I was sure I wanted to write code all day for the rest of my life," says Price, 30. "For four years, that's what I did. I never once thought about business or customers."
But as Trilogy began looking at India, Price started to reconsider his career path.
"I was watching the type of job I did every day start to go away, and I realized that even though I really enjoy solving tough technical problems, I'd better start thinking ahead."
Today he is director of product management for Trilogy's automotive group. He works with a sales staff to create and sell software packages to carmakers and consults with developers about new products his clients want.
"Now I know the business. I've presented to senior vice presidents at Ford and Nissan stuff I never thought I'd know how to do," says Price, who once wore jeans and T-shirts to work and now dons oxford shirts and trousers.
In the new Trilogy, of course, there won't be marketing jobs for everyone. And not every employee has found a new career path. Devine, the programmer, tried consulting for Trilogy for several months, but decided that spending Monday through Thursday with a customer in Ohio wasn't for him.
"I just bought a house and got engaged, and I love living in Austin," he says. "I didn't want to spend 10 hours a week on a plane. I wanted to be a software developer."
Style and substance
When Liemandt and his four co-founders moved Trilogy from Silicon Valley to Austin in 1992, they brought with them a new brand of entrepreneurship. Trilogy's young, mostly single employees moved in a pack, renting movie theaters for premieres and running up $10,000 happy-hour bills on the company tab.
But behind its brash personality, there was substance. Trilogy had built software to help companies configure complex orders, and large corporations were willing to pay for it.
Its first sale was to Hewlett-Packard Corp. Its roster of Fortune 500 customers now includes the Ford Motor Co., Boeing Co. and IBM Corp.
Trilogy doesn't disclose revenues, but business information companies estimated that sales had topped $100 million by 2001. Liemandt is the principal owner. In 2002, the most recent public estimate, Forbes magazine put his wealth at $250 million.
In 1995, the company launched Trilogy University, a three-month boot camp that helped Trilogy lure top graduates from the country's most prestigious schools and groom them for leadership roles. Liemandt fired them up with talks about entrepreneurship, then gave them the freedom to execute their ideas.
The "kids," as Liemandt called them, created the company's cornerstone software, which handles a sale from the initial customer call to the order and manufacture of the product.
They also created a few flops, including companies that tried to sell cars and home appliances over the Internet.
In 2000, as U.S. economic growth slammed to a halt, Trilogy had more than 1,200 workers, most of them rookies with little real-world experience. In 2001, battered by the falloff in corporate spending, Trilogy fired nearly 500 employees and brought in more seasoned executives to restructure the company.
It was also in 2001 that Trilogy began its move to India. Lie- mandt says the idea arose from conversations with some Indian employees and wasn't connected to the company's financial troubles at the time. There was no grand plan, he says.
"We didn't envision any of this stuff," Liemandt says. "It all unfolded."
He says the company already is seeing a payoff. In June, Trilogy bought a small company that makes software for auto designers. Bangalore employees will use the software as a platform for new products for other industries, such as aerospace.
The company expects to add marketing jobs in the United States to sell the new products.
Boom in Bangalore
In Austin, Trilogy is planning to move to smaller offices. In Bangalore, work is nearly done on the 32,000-square-foot development center, with a cafeteria and a gym with workout equipment.
One conference room — named after Garfield the Cat — is devoted to videoconferencing, which allows teams in Bangalore and Austin to be in constant communication. The room, which is nearly always booked, has cameras set up to make it look as if everyone is sitting around the same table. Employees use instant messaging to keep in touch throughout the day and night.
The 10 1/2-hour time difference works to the developers' advantage. When the Bangalore developers leave in the evening, their Austin colleagues are getting ready to come to work.
"It's amazing how much you get done when you're on a 24-hour development cycle," says Rashmi Hari, a senior developer in Bangalore. "There really isn't a time when work isn't being done."
Trilogy's transition to India has been challenging. Initially, the Austin developers resisted collaborating with their Indian counterparts.
The company's party-hearty, beer-chugging culture collided with the more conservative style of the Indian recruits who came to Austin for training.
"The engineers said, 'We like to go to Sixth Street. Those guys just sit and read. This is never going to work,' " Abolt, the human resources vice president, says. "There was a lot of resistance."
The issue was debated on the company's internal Web site, and the comments sometimes got nasty.
"It was, 'They're not as smart as us. They're not capable of doing the same quality work,' " Abolt says. "The real question on their minds was, 'Am I losing my job?' No matter how sophisticated you are and how marketable you are, the idea of losing your job is both threatening and embarrassing."
The Web site fights came to a head last fall when an Austin developer posted a particularly venomous attack. An Indian programmer responded.
"He wrote a flawless post about how much they're disparaging people who are really good and who truly care about their work," Abolt says. "That ended the debate. People read that and realized, 'Hey, they're after the same things we are.' "
In Bangalore, Trilogy is trying to transplant its entrepreneurial culture.
"It's a replica of what Trilogy in the U.S. was," says Abhoy Bhaktwatsalam, a development manager in Bangalore. "It's just a different demographic and a different set of people."
Instead of Friday night beer bashes, team-building rituals include cricket matches, bowling expeditions and themed dress-up days.
The challenge is to teach a group of talented but reserved young programmers to be leaders and innovators.
"We want them to start enjoying the responsibility and freedoms the job comes with," says Smitha Kumar, a recruiter. "We expect people to give their opinions in ways beyond coding."
Lining up the recruits
One thing Trilogy has going for it: College students around the world have a lot in common. With a little tweaking, the company's recruiting program worked the same magic on Indian students it once did on Ivy Leaguers.
"Students everywhere want the same thing — great opportunties, big challenges and a cool corporate culture," says Adam Ward, who moved to Bangalore in October to run the recruiting program in Bangalore. "We say, 'We want you to come up with the next big idea. We're giving you the steering wheel.' "
Ward, a lanky 26-year-old, had never even eaten Indian food before moving here. He and four bubbly female recruiters, including a former Miss Bangalore, spent the spring working the country's mostly male, top technical schools.
They took students to dinner and movies and plied them with company T-shirts, a novelty in India. Parents received a fat information package, including a copy of a Harvard Business Review profile of TU.
"I tell the students 'You are the best in the world. You should be demanding the best projects.' " Ward says. "And they're like 'Hey, yeah, I am the best.' You see their faces light up. The other companies don't approach it like that. They're still offering boring testing work on tier-three products."
Liemandt personally visited a dozen campuses, riding buses to reach schools in remote areas.
The wooing paid off. Trilogy's salaries don't hurt, either. The company won't say how much it pays new recruits, but just as in Austin five years ago, other software companies are grousing that Trilogy is driving up rates.
"When I talk to Microsoft recruiters," Ward says, "I tell them, 'We'll always pay more than you.' "
In July, 75 recruits reported, 71 of them Indian, four from the United States and Canada.
The recruits have an idea of what they're getting into. During spring break, Trilogy flew 100 candidates from campuses in Delhi, Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and Chennai (formerly Madras) here for a 36-hour simulation of what they would experience in TU. Candidates stayed up all night solving technical problems.
On arrival for the real deal, they each received a copy of "Built to Last," the bible on corporate culture, and mementos such as picture frames and small cricket bats emblazoned with the Trilogy logo.
Trilogy is already gearing up for next year's recruiting season, when the goal is to double the number of hires.
"Joe is always sending me e-mails that say 'Remember, more is better,' " Ward says.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-09-06 11:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-06 12:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-06 08:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-07 05:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-06 02:10 pm (UTC)I sure don't want to stick around here if my main attraction to companies is an ability to speak English with a native accent so that I can cover for the fact that most of their operations are in a place where even excellent wages are a fraction of acceptable US wages.
It's no fun to hear that your skills are a "commodity."
no subject
Date: 2004-09-06 02:22 pm (UTC)