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Suicide Rate at France Telecom

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

According to an article in Fierce Telecom, FT has seen its 24th employee suicide recently. The brief says:

Employee morale at France Telecom took another hit yesterday as a 51-year-old worker committed suicide by jumping off a highway overpass during peak morning traffic. [...] This is the twenty-fourth suicide to happen at France Telecom in the past 18 months. [...] “It’s shameful. He worked in a service long known to be unbearable,” Diochet told Agence France-Press. “There was a real indifference, no humanity, all they talked about was numbers and workers were treated like sausage meat. We thought management would have learned a lesson.”

According to my quick math (with assistance from Wolfram Alpha) it would seem that the rate of suicide at FT is an order of magnitude greater than the average–roughly 10 times the normal rate. That’s an attention-grabbing statistic. It makes me surprised that nobody has gone postal yet, or just run away (for the less-violent). I certainly hope that something can be done to bring humanity back into the corporate equation at FT.

UPDATE – CORRECTION – 24-OCT-2009

Thanks to the semi-anonymous comment from “dfb”, I stand corrected. FT’s suicide rate is not an order of magnitude greater than the national average. Rather, my “quick math” was off by an order of magnitude. If I recall correctly, I believe this was due to the use of an incorrect value–the number of layed-off employees rather than the actual employee count. I apologize for this large mistake.

According to public data, the probability of suicide as a cause of death in France is approximately 1.6% to 1.9%. Meanwhile, if FT has experienced ~24 suicides recently and has an employee base of between 160,000 and 180,000 (depending on how layoffs have affected the company–I don’t have that data at this time), then FT does in fact have a rate that is similar to the national average. In fact their rate would appear to be lower than than the national average, being around 1.3% to 1.5%.

A brief search for data on the demographics of suicide was not particularly useful. For instance I would be interested to know how the FT rates stand up against other corporate environments of similar size and population. Setting this unknown comparison aside, it would appear that the FT suicide story is not actually an interesting correlation. Sorry for encouraging an un-scientific story. I’ll be more careful next time.

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Back From Vacation

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

I’m back in the office today after taking a 10-day vacation driving around Michigan. This was my first visit to the state and I was surprised by the natural beauty of the place.

I’ll probably post more about the trip later, but in the meantime I have to share this very appropriate PhD Comics strip:

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Road Trip/Business Travel

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

I’m spending this week in Research Triangle Park (in North Carolina) working at one of Cisco‘s labs here. This is an important stage of the project that I’ve been working on for the past year, finally coming to fruition. Things are going well so far and I’m looking forward to the next steps.

Even putting business aside, the trip has been nice. Instead of flying, I decided to travel here by driving over the past weekend. Normally a flight would be the default option, perhaps arriving on Sunday evening and flying home on Friday evening. That’s what my colleagues have done. However I’ve spent the past handful of years with “platinum” frequent-flyer status and I’m outright tired of airports, airplanes, the TSA, and the whole mess of flying. Besides, and perhaps most importantly, I find driving by myself to be cathartic. And in that respect this trip has not let me down.

I started driving from St. Louis late on Friday afternoon with the goal of reaching Paducah, Kentucky early enough to have dinner there. My wife was in Paducah with her mother and two sisters for the AQS Annual Quilt Show & Contest and I arrived just as their day was ending. Saturday I walked around the quilt show with them, which wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be. There were some beautiful quilts, and even some neat technology in the form of quilting machines. (I might even try to build one… as if I had free-time.) Saturday evening I left Paducah and drove to Lake Junaluska, NC, arriving around 2AM with my Out-of-Fuel warning light flashing, while listening to Phil Hartnoll’s Unsteady Waltz. Then, after spending a couple hours trouble-shooting the DSL Internet connectivity at the house there, I finished my trip on Sunday with a casual drive down into the piedmont and over to Durham.

The entire drive was done with the windows-down, enjoying the comfortable temperatures and lovely smells of springtime. In Tennessee the smell was of light flowers; North Carolina introduced the smell of pine. Both smells were enjoyable thanks to antihistamines. I listened to music through earphones (sound-isolating to overcome the roar of the wind). My soundtrack was all over the place, including Bill Laswell, Santigold, Muse, NERD, Hybrid, Orbital, Thom Yorke, Speedy J, Jamiroquai, Elliott Smith, Townes Van Zandt, and others. Even the timing was perfect with music, landscape, and the smell of the air working together. Pretty awesome.

Now in addition to looking forward to coming home to Emily, I’m also excited about the drive itself. Springtime is usually my favorite time of year, but this springtime is feeling especially good so far.

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Jerk, Slacker, or Depressive Pessimist

Thursday, February 19th, 2009

Just as I’m way behind on my book and journal reading, my Podcast collection has grown out of control. So in an effort to catch up I’ve resisted the urge to start playing Hendrix. Instead I put on This American Life (support them!!) episode #370 Ruining It for the Rest of Us and I’m quickly recalling why I enjoy the show as much as I do.

The prologue features Professor Will Felps talking about research he’s done on group dynamics in which he describes three personality types, Jerk, Slacker, and Depressive Pessimist, any of which can ruin the performance of a group. He summarizes the impact by suggesting that the performance of a group is dictated by the weakest performer. And his data seems to support this claim.

It has me thinking about myself and my own behaviors. Honestly, I suppose I’ve been all of these characters at one time or another. And reflecting on colleagues I’ve had over the years I can pick out plenty of others that have, too. But, with a small number of exceptions, I think that people just go through phases. Some days are just bad days (or weeks or months or years…) even for good people that don’t normally fit these stereotypes.

So how does one identify when they’re in a bad phase and how can it be managed? When other colleagues are in a bad phase how do you manage them? I’m sure there are smart people that have thought this through. And given the awful year (or 3) that I’ve experienced, along with accompanying depression and exhaustion, I’m sure that I could use the advice. Drugs can only go so far, after all.

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