#culture

I don’t even care if I give myself away on here, because I need to say this.

Over time, I’ve noticed a consistent pattern in how several senior directors operate, I’ve seen certain leaders target employees outside their own unit through gossip, and finger pointing.
When issues arise, the focus rarely lands on the behaviors or decisions of the senior directors that contributed to the problem. Instead, pressure is redirected onto others.

This is especially prevalent from GP&T Product and Sales senior directors.

I try to be transparent about what I know and what I don’t. When I ask questions for example, whether a specific person is the right contact for client obligations or duties, the response is often disproportionately hostile.

Today was a straw that broke the camel’s back situation. I tried being helpful and instead was responded to as if I was a schmuk (and maybe I am) but to the Sales guy, you could have used a little more tact especially at your level.
“Period!” (your own word)

I took it personally and it ruined my mood going into the weekend. I’m not ashamed to admit that I teared up.

If anyone has gotten both an AI written review but also gotten more than an “achieving”. Like yeah, you’re great, but still not great enough for me to put thought into my own words.

They want our business as customers but treated us like piece of sh-t this performance review period. My middle finger never been this strong.

We're stretched thin, underpaid, and drowning in work, but they keep organizing these mandatory happy events. Last month our manager brought snacks while pretending our 60-hour weeks don't exist. Is this just us? If not, does anyone actually feel better after these things? What would real acknowledgment even look like?

Anyone else think the current COA metrics and stipulations are a joke? From my perspective, the expectations feel misaligned with the operational realities many recruiters are facing.
I genuinely appreciate the hard work and dedication of our top performers. However, I think it’s important to acknowledge that some of those team members have access to additional resources—such as administrative support—that significantly reduce their non-recruiting workload. Other recruiters are expected to meet similar performance standards while also managing administrative responsibilities independently. This creates a perception of inequity across the team.
Historically, many tenured recruiters managed large principal headcounts—often 60–80 coa—without additional support and while serving as the sole point of contact. Those titles were earned through sustained performance under challenging conditions. While compensation structures and business models have evolved, the current expectations combined with reduced support and compensation pressures are contributing to morale concerns.
There also appears to be inconsistency in how resources are allocated. Concentrating support around select individuals may drive strong results for a few, but it can unintentionally limit broader team growth and development. A more balanced distribution of resources could potentially create stronger, more sustainable performance across the organization.
Additionally, low level recruiters continue to absorb responsibilities outside of traditional recruiting scope—particularly in areas where ownership of process and payroll has shifted. When placement teams are not fully owning those processes, recruiters are often required to fill the gap. This increases workload without a corresponding adjustment in expectations or compensation.
Finally, I believe leadership alignment and transparency are critical during times of change. There are individuals within recruitment who bring deep institutional knowledge and strong operational leadership. Ensuring that the right leaders are empowered to guide strategy and execution will be important for long-term success. There needs to be advocating for equity, clarity in expectations, and a structure that supports both high performance and team-wide growth. The recruitment team deserves a win not more unrealistic goals thrown up against the wall hoping it sticks.

See this review in LinkedIn
Full details from post in the comments
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7427118095061819392-rD0R?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAAdeT6sBq6HR8cmvn-Ypy8_0uJhVxf9JjF4

EVERY DAY

The idea that a fiber technician can properly maintain a hybrid fiber coaxial plant with limited hours and frequent outages while also disparaging the expertise of outside plant technicians , and vice versa referring to us as maintenance technicians, is completely ridiculous always trying to reinvent the wheel when you know this Altice Optimum experiment will always be nothing but a ponzi scheme

So it’s going to the dogs. That’s for sure. DXC is busted but when it finally folds are there any DXC execs you would back or follow into something new or are they all just hopeless cases in it for themselves?

Thinking about the past few years and how our Board, C-Suite and Executive "leaders" have thoroughly missed the boat on so many potential opportunities while hitting on every landmine possible has made me conclude these are no visionaries or even leaders. They are just empty suits getting overpaid. Such a shame that good employees with a solid work ethic are taking the brunt of the fall. If nothing changes I do not think this bank will survive in to the 2030s.

Gen X female here…
The “old boys network” doesn’t refer to us all being se-----y as--ulted or discriminated against.
It was a time where the focus was sports and the athlete and grit.
It was before we offshored everything to folks that know nothing about our company and want to su-k us dry. You get what you pay for.
It was before we had to hire the coddled generations where everyone gets a trophy and is addicted to the slack alt pages and cries over not having a succession plan.
It was where we made money hand over fist.
Not sure we can get back to that with the leaders and employees we have now. Bunch of soft bi--hes. Come at me…..

A colleague of mine was fired yesterday. 6 months to retirement, but they fired him paying a severance package.
How does this make sense?

He was let go by a new manager appointed recently (6 promotions in 5 years - yeah, its possible) who doesn’t even know what my colleague does and how complex&important is his work.
No replacement, no time for handover.

And we got motivational speeches from a new manager.
I can’t believe its happenning, feels like being inside of ‘The Office’ sitcom, only its not funny.

It is astonishing that Belk expects professional loyalty while their stores literally rot around them.

From water-stained ceilings to predatory workloads, the 'Belk experience' is one of pure misery.

They don't care about your department; they only care about how much labor they can squeeze out of you before you break.

I quit without notice because they earned that lack of courtesy. It’s a dying brand for a dying generation, and the day they finally close their doors will be a mercy to the retail industry. Just go away Belk.

What is going on with job titles? I see people with titles as senior teamlead and manager, however Noone reports to them.

Id--t Hill inherited Nike when the stock price was $85 and in a span of 1.5 years revenues have declined, margin down by 27%, stock in the dumps. He could have achieved this even without the layoffs.

What exactly have layoffs achieved? He didn't even have the ba--s to add Nike to tariff suit.

The pattern is repeating now, at the rest of the company braces for next round of layoffs with even a reduced severance.

Is it just me, or does every day feel like you’re bracing for something? Meetings have gotten tense, and the only time you hear feedback is when something went wrong. God forbid you get commended for a job well done. In the end, I just keep my head down and try not to get noticed too much, either way.

Why is a man leading this call? All you can see is his face on the screen. He is controlling the dialogue and trying to relate to women’s experiences. So sad UHC and Optum. But typical of this company.

I didn’t realize how sick Wells Fargo made me until I left last May. I’d gained weight, couldn’t sleep, and lived with constant anxiety. It took at least six months before my body started feeling like it belonged to me again. Sadly, the mental part takes even longer. I’m still recovering.

Part of it was dealing with a horrible bully of a manager for so long, but the overall culture played a role too. I genuinely hope more people decide to leave. It can be life changing.

The performative posts from people who still have jobs are getting exhausting. All that humble bragging and inspirational garbage while so many of us are struggling to find work. It feels like a highlight reel from people who either got lucky or won't admit how bad things really are. Hard to scroll through it without rolling my eyes these days.

Anyone have details on what this new model is? It was mentioned in the All Leader Town Hall yesterday and said details will be released in March. Just trying to mentally prepare for another round of someone's great idea creating chaos and change for the rest of us.

So many people getting bent out of shape, and for what? No layoffs. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

The level of chaos and misery that I am seeing in Irving is off the charts. I've been in corporate America for decades and I've never seen anything approaching this level of cruelty-- unfortunately I think that's the point.

There are now even more SEC filings showing our leaders are dumping even more stock. They keep telling us that we're one team and that we need to sacrifice while at the same time they are selling millions of dollars worth of stock. A huge Fu-k You to the employees.

Pretty amusing that dozens of posts that mention this organization, people’s horrid experiences, and its horrendous leadership have been deleted from this anonymous “safe space”.

Its the worst. They have nothing to show and all they do is take years for decisions.
Thought Katie would be better but no progress. We are so behind on data tooling and no strategy to move forward. The move to Dennis wont help as he is out of depth.

Nobody wants to hear your sniffling coughing sneezing all day and worse yet become a victim of your super spreading. You can tell when one is around even when they are silent - the air smells funny. FWF for forcing these sickly people to show up and sit in an already crowded space to meet the 8 hours a day, 3 days a week in-office mandate so that the rest of us could benefit from their presence.

@b2+1kjbbze82 Makes a great point. These creeps are putting our pictures in Gemini, putting in our personal and work information and god knows what else. This needs to stop!!

Has the Quality of Employees gone up, down or not changed?

Just FYI, heard a customer service rep there sent a mass email to upper management accusing two managers of abusing their power - from being disrespectful in meetings to falsely accusing and writing them up to protect themselves.
It seems the rep asked to be transferred out of fear of retaliation, but nothing happened, so they escalated it and said they’ll keep emailing until someone responds.

(no names, please, mods could nuke the whole thread)

The abuse, pressure and threats of layoffs are intended to keep you locked into a victim mentality.

They don't want you to realize that in most cases, software services you work on can now be vide-coded and released as competition or simply given away. A lot of this stuff just implements well-known standards or is otherwise not protected through IP law or non-competes. You are still locked into a mindset that because this software was hard to produce five years ago, it is hard to produce now. It isn't.

If you were to suggest Codex or Claude vibe-rewriting bitrotted Cisco tech-debt code, most of your coworkers would sneer and ignore you, and management would put you on "a list". But right now, this is actually something that can be done. If it can be done now, what will the world be like in six months, a year?

Cisco wants you to think using AI is only something you can do in service to them, not yourself.

Get ready, other people in this world are not locked in to your victim psychology.

Yes, time is coming and we are about to implode with all the multiple organizational changes that add no value apart from headcount reduction and the downstreamers managing upstream like a refinery and ki-ling it long term. Expect more safety incidents, more process safety events and more blame on the employees for not following procedures (even though nobody knows what they are anymore). The attrition is rising and we are in a downward vicious circle now.

Frankly, the company's vacillating leadership has created nothing short of an entropic mess. Directives are obfuscated, priorities shift without warning, and any semblance of institutional cohesion has quietly dissipated. The trajectory, at its core, is one of compounding incoherence, and without a serious recalibration of its foundational paradigms, disintegration isn't a possibility. It's a foregone conclusion.

Personally, any sense of equilibrium or institutional buoyancy has been wholly eroded over the years, leaving nothing but a pervasive and deeply entrenched malaise.

I’ve never felt this way and I’ve been here a while but I’m feeling so defeated here. The environment is cold, uninviting almost morgue like. We no longer have our own “place”. That has been taken away. We’re expected to be okay with all the changes they have made that benefit them but not us. We’re expected to align and become these cold blooded creatures that are okay being mistreated. I can’t do that. I’m a human being, we all are. We have emotions and we want to feel appreciated. I miss the old U.S. Bank.

VPs and above are not going into the office while others are forced to go in 5x a week. These “leaders” have excuses like they’re at an offsite or their car keeps breaking down. There is even a VP who takes a flight from Florida each week to go into the NY office but does not go in every day. Meanwhile its been sparse at the office with anyone below VP level and people come in for just a few hours. There’s even some talk between senior leaders about only coming in some days. Some teams go in everyday while others on different floors don’t seem to be going in at all. There’s no work, people scrolling on their phones all day, and people on the same floor slacking each other because they don’t want to walk to their meetings. And looks like they’re still hiring remote positions.

This place is a sh-t show, pays like sh-t, and we get treated like sh-t. Meanwhile “leadership” gets paid more than 6 figures, have people cook and clean for them, people to take care of their kids, while we have to slave away in traffic and do nothing at the office. DE said RTO was so successful, but what is even the measurement? The guy talks out of his a-s and the so-called “leadership” covers for each other but not for the people who are actually doing whatever work there is.

Make it make sense!

It's really hard to feel settled at Gainwell anymore. Nobody talks about long term plans like they used to. It's all about how we'll make it to the next month. It's exhausting, to be honest.

Curious how others felt about today’s town hall. Did the messaging resonate with you? I’m trying to process it and would appreciate different perspectives.

If you want, tell me:
• What specifically rubbed you the wrong way?
• What words or moments stood out?
• Was there anything NOT addressed?

Let’s unpack it instead of letting it just sit in your chest.

Key people keep leaving or getting shown the door all the time. Morale is in the gutter and the energy here is completely dead. You can feel it walking in every morning. Nobody trusts that things will be stable from one week to the next, not to mention month or year.

Wah wah Capgemini Group decision
Wah wah wah bad market
Wah wah wah microsoft aws redundancies
A pshpoor implementation od SuccessFactors
More AI slop
Wah wah wah more like they didnt want to make France feel alone in its misery
Mr. Bull... more like Bullsh*t

This witch SM is having her Town Hall and is putting me to sleep. What a waste of company time

Got email that they care so much about us and our employee feedback that they are having a book reading.

They just don't get it.

In the last Employee Survey, many of you emphasized how important it is to feel that AT&T truly cares about your health and wellbeing. We heard you—and we’re taking action.

....blah, blah, blah stuff about your work-life balance being a priority...

We’ll share a bit about our personal wellbeing journeys, preview what’s coming in the program, and introduce a book we’ll read together as an organization.