Protecting Your People

How far will you go to help your staff? Zed Shaw, a technology VP at Bear Stearns, is doing his best to find his soon-to-be-out-of-work developers new jobs, using the power of—what else?—online communities.

Every IT worker likes to believe that the boss will go to bat for them. Sometimes, it even happens.

Zed Shaw, who incidentally wrote You Used Ruby to Write What? for us recently, is also a vice-president at Bear Stearns. What with the upcoming merger and all, the employment future for many of his staff is… “uncertain” sounds like a good term for it.

Now, Zed also writes a very popular blog (to which the squeamish should not apply; Zed’s free with his attitude and language). Rather than pound the desk about the situation or go off and get depressed, he posted a blog entry, “My Bear Stearns Employees Need A Job”:

Meanwhile, I have a few employees who work for me that will potentially need new jobs. I’m probably going to need one too, but I’ve gotta look out for my people first.

So far, he’s received about 20 job offers for his people.

Would you look for jobs for your staff before you looked for one for yourself? Would you really?