Match Game

In December, The Mother ship sent out an email to all US employees highlighting a change to the manner in which the employer match on 401(k) tax-deferred contributions would be handled. Previously, the company match was disbursed each pay period (twice a month) with the effect that the interest on the matching funds was thereby accrued by the employee.

With this new change, the company match will be made in a single lump sum disbursement on December 31 (with the company accruing the interest). The IBM match is up to 6% – which is nice – free money. I am thankful that we have the match, but I am not lying when I say I would prefer to have the interest on the match (accrued during the year) deposited in my account. Oh well. As a former manager told me once, “Joe, it’s an imperfect world”.

From reading outside press reports, one would think that this caused all sorts of employee consternation (this WRAL.com report talks about a worker “revolt” – interesting). It is a big company, so maybe my area is an outlier, but outside of the day it was announced, I haven’t heard any of my colleagues talk much about it. If you have been paying the least bit of attention, you’ll see this an just another evolutionary step in a ongoing trend of “You are on your own for your retirement”. Anybody expecting old mechanisms like Defined Benefit Pension Plans, Social Security, and Employee TDSP Matches to be around long term is really fooling themselves. Yes, this is unfortunate.

I am not a company apologist – it just  is what it is. Free market capitalism with the correct portions of regulation constitutes a fine system. We are all free agents and nobody is holding a gun at my head forcing me to work at a particular company. If I think I can get a better all-around compensation package somewhere else, then I will move on. There is really nothing to be gained from bitching and moaning about it anyways.

Not that some of us didn’t have a little bit of fun with this announcement. Right after the email from Corporate made it to our mail clients, I had a project meeting with three other team members. In the spirit of this new December 31 lump sum disbursement, a few of us decided to institute changes to some of our day-to-day working processes:

• Engineers would wait and deliver all of our new functions and stories for the product for the entire year in bulk on December 31.
• Testers would wait and open up all the defects they found in the software  during the year as a single collection of defects on December 31.
• Engineers would integrate all product defect fixes in bulk on December 31.
• All monthly TPS reports for the year would be delivered on December 31 (obligatory Office Space reference).

You get the idea.