Sometimes it's better to be at the bottom

We got a surprise last week at Symbol. Without any warning, our CIO and one of the VP's reporting to him were let go. As our CEO told us the next day, this was purely a performance issue. It had to do with SOX compliance issues. Apparently one-third of our SOX check points were inadequate (compared to about 3% last year). This is going to cost the company a couple of million to cover. Fortunately, our CEO had been smart enough to put some money on the side "just in case" but he would have preferred to use that money for developing new systems. The end result is that the top guys were told that their services were no longer needed, unlike so many other companies where the "little guy" is blamed for all the failures.