"Expecting a Lump-Sum Pension? Read This" in the November 5, 2007 issue of BusinessWeek contains this little bit of news:
Starting next year, companies won't be able to make lump-sum distributions if their pension plans are more than 40% underfunded.
Congress is understandably concerned that the growing wave of baby boomers nearing retirement coupled with underfunded pension plans will put the plans underwater if many retirees take a lump-sum distribution (as most do). It would be like a run on the bank. Prohibiting lump-sum distributions from underfunded plans gives the company time to fix the pension fund.
This is probably only of interest to folks young enough to still be working, but old enough to have a pension plan and thinking of taking the money and running. Many high-tech companies either never had a pension plan, or quietly froze their plan some years ago.
Still, when I cashed out of a company that I had been with for a decade, the lump-sum distribution I got from their frozen pension plan was nothing to sneeze at. It is now earning interest in an Individual Retirement Account that I control.
If you're thinking of retiring, or just thinking of leaving and cashing out like I did, the article suggests ways you might be able to determine the health of your company's pension fund.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
The Return on Investment in People
Starting in 1974, I spent about fifteen years at a university that was next to a major military base. To no one's surprise, many of my classmates, students, and co-workers were at that time currently or formerly in the military. While I was working at the campus computer center, I had three such co-workers who had two things in common: they were all former nuclear weapons technicians, and they were all going to college on the GI Bill.
This morning, National Public Radio's Morning Edition featured a story by John McChesney titled GI Bill's Impact Slipping in Recent Years. It's worth a listen. Some interesting facts from the story:
At the close of World War II, only 5% of Americans had college degrees.
Only 40% of the veterans of WW II had high school diplomas.
The GI Bill paid for full tuition and books and provided a modest living stipend.
Ten million WWII vets went to college on the GI Bill.
That number included fourteen who would go on to win the Nobel Prize.
Twenty-four who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize.
The GI Bill would educate 91,000 scientists.
And 67,000 physicians.
As well as several presidents, senators, and Supreme Court justices.
How much did it cost? Educating the WWII veterans cost about $50 billion in 2007 adjusted dollars, and some estimates place the return to the U. S. economy at a equally adjusted $350 billion, a seven-fold ROI. The increase in tax dollars alone just from the boost in earning power for the newly minted college graduates more than paid for the GI Bill.
The story is part of a continuing series on the reduced effectiveness of the GI Bill. Given the statistics cited above, it would be hard not to be in favor cranking up the investment in education for current veterans.
But surely there's a more general lesson to be learned here regarding the ROI on investing in education for your employees. I've personally witnessed a large technology company reduce its educational subsidy from "your entire degree" to "just the classes we think are pertinent to your current project", and downsizing its employee training program from a rich set of intense forty-hour in-house classes to generic introductory web-based presentations. As both an employee, and as a former educator, it broke my heart to see how little interest the company had in investing in its people, beyond reminding them at every six-month review that "continuous learning" was critical to their continued employment. How they accomplished that continuous learning was left as an exercise for the employee.
Do we really think the ROI for those WW II vets is that substantially greater from the ROI we get from investing in the education of our employees? And as an employee, doesn't it suggest to you that education is virtually free, given the likely increase in your earning power?
Employees should aggressively seek training and education, whether that means choosing to work for companies that provide and subsidize it, or paying for it themselves.
I'd be interested in comments from any veterans on their experiences, good and bad, with the GI Bill, and its impact on their lives. And comments and suggestions from readers in general on their experience with training and education provided or subsidized by their employer.
This morning, National Public Radio's Morning Edition featured a story by John McChesney titled GI Bill's Impact Slipping in Recent Years. It's worth a listen. Some interesting facts from the story:
At the close of World War II, only 5% of Americans had college degrees.
Only 40% of the veterans of WW II had high school diplomas.
The GI Bill paid for full tuition and books and provided a modest living stipend.
Ten million WWII vets went to college on the GI Bill.
That number included fourteen who would go on to win the Nobel Prize.
Twenty-four who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize.
The GI Bill would educate 91,000 scientists.
And 67,000 physicians.
As well as several presidents, senators, and Supreme Court justices.
How much did it cost? Educating the WWII veterans cost about $50 billion in 2007 adjusted dollars, and some estimates place the return to the U. S. economy at a equally adjusted $350 billion, a seven-fold ROI. The increase in tax dollars alone just from the boost in earning power for the newly minted college graduates more than paid for the GI Bill.
The story is part of a continuing series on the reduced effectiveness of the GI Bill. Given the statistics cited above, it would be hard not to be in favor cranking up the investment in education for current veterans.
But surely there's a more general lesson to be learned here regarding the ROI on investing in education for your employees. I've personally witnessed a large technology company reduce its educational subsidy from "your entire degree" to "just the classes we think are pertinent to your current project", and downsizing its employee training program from a rich set of intense forty-hour in-house classes to generic introductory web-based presentations. As both an employee, and as a former educator, it broke my heart to see how little interest the company had in investing in its people, beyond reminding them at every six-month review that "continuous learning" was critical to their continued employment. How they accomplished that continuous learning was left as an exercise for the employee.
Do we really think the ROI for those WW II vets is that substantially greater from the ROI we get from investing in the education of our employees? And as an employee, doesn't it suggest to you that education is virtually free, given the likely increase in your earning power?
Employees should aggressively seek training and education, whether that means choosing to work for companies that provide and subsidize it, or paying for it themselves.
I'd be interested in comments from any veterans on their experiences, good and bad, with the GI Bill, and its impact on their lives. And comments and suggestions from readers in general on their experience with training and education provided or subsidized by their employer.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Pocket Web Service
In A Future Without Keyboards and Asterisk, WiFi, and a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, I mentioned how I was playing with the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, a pocket-sized, Linux-based, WiFi-capable, internet appliance. I also mentoned that I had installed a C Virtual Machine (CVM) on it, a version of the JVM configured for the Java Connected Device Configuration (CDC).
After just a few hours of futzing around, I can now serve the entire Digital Aggregates Corporation web site off the N800 using some Java code I slung together based on the prior work of Jon Berg of turtlemeat.com. Sure, it's not the fastest or even the smallest web server on the planet. I'm not about to expose it outside the company firewall. And of course I'm sure I'm not the first to do this. But I can sit at my laptop and browse pages on a web server that I'm carrying around in my shirt pocket.
Here is the source zip and the jar file (served off the production web server) if you want to have this kind of joy yourself. I dropped the jar file into the Foundation directory that comes with the CVM distribution, placed a copy of the entire web site in a www directory, then fired the server up with this shell script.
#!/bin/sh
cd Foundation*
./bin/cvm -cp chapparal-0.3.jar \
com.diag.chapparal.http.Server \
/home/user/www 300000 8080
I then pointed my laptop's web browser at http://192.168.1.106/index.html and watched wackiness ensue! (The IP address is DHCP served from behind my NAT firewall, so your mileage will vary.) The three arguments to the Server main are the root path prefixed to every file request, the number of milliseconds the server stays up, and the HTTP listen port to use.
I developed the whole thing on my laptop using Eclipse, tested it using junit, built it for the target with ant using the 1.6 compiler in 1.4 source and target mode, and then downloaded the jar to the N800 via its own web browser.
Wicked mad fun!
Update (2008-01-03)
Sun Microsystems offers a Java SE 5.0 implementation for Linux on an embedded PowerPC that you can use for a ninety-day free trial. (If you want to ship it as a product, you have to pay a royalty.) As an experiment I recently installed this JVM on such a system, and as a demo ran my Java-based pocket web server on it. Took almost no effort, worked like a charm. It makes a nice proof of concept.
After just a few hours of futzing around, I can now serve the entire Digital Aggregates Corporation web site off the N800 using some Java code I slung together based on the prior work of Jon Berg of turtlemeat.com. Sure, it's not the fastest or even the smallest web server on the planet. I'm not about to expose it outside the company firewall. And of course I'm sure I'm not the first to do this. But I can sit at my laptop and browse pages on a web server that I'm carrying around in my shirt pocket.
Here is the source zip and the jar file (served off the production web server) if you want to have this kind of joy yourself. I dropped the jar file into the Foundation directory that comes with the CVM distribution, placed a copy of the entire web site in a www directory, then fired the server up with this shell script.
#!/bin/sh
cd Foundation*
./bin/cvm -cp chapparal-0.3.jar \
com.diag.chapparal.http.Server \
/home/user/www 300000 8080
I then pointed my laptop's web browser at http://192.168.1.106/index.html and watched wackiness ensue! (The IP address is DHCP served from behind my NAT firewall, so your mileage will vary.) The three arguments to the Server main are the root path prefixed to every file request, the number of milliseconds the server stays up, and the HTTP listen port to use.
I developed the whole thing on my laptop using Eclipse, tested it using junit, built it for the target with ant using the 1.6 compiler in 1.4 source and target mode, and then downloaded the jar to the N800 via its own web browser.
Wicked mad fun!
Update (2008-01-03)
Sun Microsystems offers a Java SE 5.0 implementation for Linux on an embedded PowerPC that you can use for a ninety-day free trial. (If you want to ship it as a product, you have to pay a royalty.) As an experiment I recently installed this JVM on such a system, and as a demo ran my Java-based pocket web server on it. Took almost no effort, worked like a charm. It makes a nice proof of concept.
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