When I was a manager at McDonnell Douglas, working in our Detroit office, one of the people in my group, a female engineer (BS Aerospace from Georgia Tech), was on what they called the 'fast-track'. Instead of doing an annual performance review, for her, I had to do one every six months. Now don't get me wrong, she was the real deal and had very good promise. In fact, just before I transferred back to R&D, taking a staff position to the VP of software development, she got a chance to move to a corporate level job at the company headquarters in St. Louis.
Now it looked like she was finally going to move up into a job she really wanted, when a few years later, she up and quit and moved back home to Atlanta. It turns out that we shared birthdays, only she was exactly 10 years younger than I was, but after she left my group and I went back to SoCal and she moved to St. Louis, we'd always exchange phone calls on our birthday just to see how things were going. The first call after she left the company I found out what happened. She was being sexually preyed upon by a high ranking corporate executive in the company (note that she was a good looking women and had a great personality). Anyway, the guy was married and she said NO WAY, but he kept hounding her and HR refused to get involved as he was a long time employee and an old high school classmate of the company president. Now I had heard rumors because she used to work for me and people would tell me stories, but I wasn't in a position to do much of anything and she never complained to me directly, at least not until after she had left the company.
Now, she ended-up OK, but she never married. Instead she put all her effort into the company she started back in Atlanta. Her father was a general contractor and her brother worked with him, so she started a paint and drywall company, doing subcontracting for them and other builders as well as some repair and restoration work on her own, but that experience in St. Louis really took its toll on her. Note that this all took place back in the late 80's.
John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-'Product Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
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The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
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