Perhaps the silver lining here is in your quoted statement.

Where are the performance reviews? Where are their failures to improve their poor performance? If they are changing their job title or job description (from Windows techs to Linux/MAC), what notification were they given? What training was offered? Did they refuse?

You say EEOC's are easy to get around? That all depends on the environment; were there other job description changes in IT? What about the organization? How were those handled? Are there company policies about forced job change on an employee? Were those followed? Was there a precedent set prior to these two employees? All actionable items in a lawsuit. Is this an At-Will Employment State?

Yes, there are some bad old timers out there, but your comment makes a lot of assumptions without background on these two nor the local labor laws. If there is a new IT Manager in town one has to ask the question what happened to the old IT Managers? What was their approach?

Firstly the new IT Manager has to get clear the following:

1) Build a list of skills their jobs require and checkbox the skills they have.

2) Identify priority skills they do not have based on the current needs of the IT Department (i.e. fires not being put out or SLA's slipping due to not enough qualified people).

3) Identify if a training budget / time that is available. Target training on these skills. Whether it is simple web based training programs (pluralsight, udemy etc), internal training sessions hosted by an experienced employee.

4) Working with their HR department (if there is one) and higher-end IT management, work out the legal approach that needs to be taken to inform these employees they need to retrain with new skills. If they refuse? What options does the manager have?

From personal experience: We had a lot of layoffs in our IT department during the last two years. As a developer I picked up a lot of additional sysadmin duties. Fortunately I was a former sysadmin for eight years of my career before I spent the last 12 working as a developer so I still had an idea of how to ask "what have I forgotten or do not know?" in an informed manner. We analyzed our ticket system to determine what work was the prior employees performing (this system contained support and project based changes)? Where were my short-comings and was this something I could easily learn in a hurry or was a more formalized training required in order to avoid "learning curve mistakes"? (turns out both were useful).

Squeaky wheel approach (i.e. put out the fires) is an immediate training option, but you still need to determine long term support needs and what are the projects that are upcoming and what skills do these two need (if they are being selected for them) to progress during these projects.

As I said in #4 you need to work with your HR / Management, but having a logical list for skills and timelines these need learned by is a great approach.

The hard on we have for NK does not work unless China goes full ex-mistress on them. Everything Trump is doing so far is just about ego masturbating.

I beg to differ. You add a tub of ranch to that...

So continue with the sanctions then?

Case in point: working on a current project where the project manager thinks he can dictate the solution such as the business requirements, functional requirements and technical specifications. I have told him more than once to stop defining a solution to a problem, stop offering technical advice and STOP talking to the business about the tech.

This dudes project plan was illogical, it was not consistent with any kind of BA, requirements building, development or testing. The build task consisted of a single entry with no drill down to the high-level tasks (ten high-level development tasks, where four had pre-req's of the others being complete). The Project Plan should not cover the implementation of these tasks, but being able to track the development at the project level was pretty important.

The project team except for the PM agreed with everything I said; the QA team's constant complaint was that there was no way to plan for their testing because there was no break down, no ability to plan testing around build task completion. No time built in for testing scenario review between BA, Developer and QA. Somehow magically QA was supposed to get it perfect first try with no other input.

The issue with this guy is he looks at the "manager" part and thinks we all work for him and that he is some kind of God of everything which is the exact opposite to what he is. He is a coordinator, he is there to help make sure the different teams work effectively together and based on our needs to put together a project plan facilitates planning and tracking of the different teams responsibilities.

Exactly! Open Source is only as good as the company that wants to keep up with patching and devote resources for regression testing. These days that is very few (unfortunately).

Apparently I am a stereotype - almost 39 here and I am looking to farming. I am starting to slowly put the business plan together and exit strategy from my current career. My wife knows what I want to do, she is mostly on board - she understand it is not simply going to be quit and become a farmer and it is going to be a process.

I just started looking at getting in to farming (real farming) with the eventual departure from software engineering... holy crap.

Bannon... is that you?!?!

*dismissed en masse

Could it be that "young" men just saw the prior generation(s) go through massive lay off's, lost their houses, their life savings and decided, "screw this, if the reward can be taken away like that, why the F should I work so hard?"

Really IMHO American corporations have themselves to blame for this. They have done a very good job of removing any kind of job security, chased profits for the sake of chasing profits, off-shored, out-sourced, missed en masse why claiming it was "necessary". Yeah I get it.

And I am not sure I would hire you as a manager with a statement like that. While I value education, I have hired developers with no degree or college experience that can run circles around experienced college grads with the same workplace experience. How do we filter them out? The same way we filter out college grads during the interview process. You are measuring ability and intellect. Code proficiency is easily demonstrated during the interview process, their ability to answer questions about data structures, how to use them in a real world scenario.

Revenge? That is ridiculous! He WAS protecting himself, which is why he stated during his testimony he met with the FBI leadership to discuss the situation.

Because people do not like admitting they made a mistake?