#culture

I do not understand why this company would choose to send every department into a tailspin of nerves and anxiety for the next 2 months. Morale is completely gone and employees are paralyzed with fear. Who is actually working at this point? No one cares because we all know we may be next. Not to mention earning back the trust of employees after a stunt like this! Are YOU working or are you sitting in front of your computer shell shocked and unable to put one foot in front of the other? I feel that's like the spot most employees are in. Has anyone heard of any departments at this point that just might be ok? Are your people leaders saying anything?

There are too many posts on this board expressing animosity between the wireless and wireline sides of the business. If you’re contributing to this animosity, you should stop! It’s silly! I’ll explain why below.

One recurring theme is that wireless couldn’t survive without wireline. Way back when, all wireless operators used T-1s and DS-3s and that generated quite a bit of revenue for the LECs. As capacity needs increased, they shifted to fiber about 20 years ago. There are a lot of fiber providers so wireless is no longer dependent on wireline but getting fiber from your own company is better for the balance sheet. Would you rather we paid AT&T for fiber?

It’s also true that wireless was initially financed by wireline but so what? Wireline saw an opportunity and they took it. T-Mobile was financed by investors outside of wireline and they’re doing just fine.

In short, wireless would do just fine without wireline and wireline would do fine without wireless but they are better together because there are significant synergies including bundling services. So stop this silliness! There’s enough drama and nonsense in the company and you don’t need to add to that.

Belk is the only department store to still be operating like it’s Covid 2020. Stores have not improved since the pandemic in terms of staffing levels and services for customers. We are stuck in Covid business model.

It’s a sad state of affairs at all levels unless you’re on the EC, then it’s all working out amazingly. In the past 60 days we’ve lost talent that dedicated multi decades of hard work to the firm. Strong minded, intelligent people that really contributed to shared goals every day. Up to the time when shared goals became a blur of corporate kool aid, McKinsey projects, revolving door of leadership. Never did I think it would come to this but I’m at the end of my pain tolerance. Very sad. Is Wealth growing or shrinking? Can margins grow out of the bottom gutter? Is Jose doing anything to make change besides firing,hiring, cashing checks, selling shares? So sad. The range of firings has been like a sn---r attack in a classroom. Best to dress like the plebes or be targeted. Last thought - does RV look unhealthy to any of you??

We can’t wait to get outta here….behind this trapped door

Looney "brings deep experience in global energy, capital markets, major project delivery, and international partnerships to the company", the Knoxville, Tennessee-based developer of nuclear fusion electricity

Keep a chastity belt on all the pretty female employees!

They can't keep people it is such a terrible company to work for and ever since the Rentokill mess, it's worse. The techs can't do their jobs efficiently since their planners clearly don't understand a map or distance. They schedule 6 8-10 stops that are 20 miles apart and mandate the amount of time you have to spend at each stop. The leadership are all the latest failures from unrelated industries like Burger King or some other cr-p job. The after hours work of calling customers and fixing the scheduling the planners can't get right reduce your hourly pay to min wage or worse all to work in cramped spaces in extreme heat and cold. Seriously, layoffs are not the issue, retaining people is their big problem.

Vivek's purview to say with confidence that the most important applications at Verizon outside of network operations. POS, point-of-sale, intakes some 70+% of ALL of Verizon’s revenue. ACSS is a superset of that software. This software is utter garbage. I mean it’s just layers on layers of undocumented spaghetti code written by contractors that were seemingly plucked from the streets, paid 50,000/yr, and whose agency was billing Verizon 120,000/yr for their time here. At a company with Verizon's profits a full stack developer should reasonably expect to start here and be able to search a UI for any service or data they need to build pretty much anything you could conceive. Yet you won’t find a single shred of such documentation. GTS leadership has passively allowed layers and layers of teams to be stood up where each team only works on one segment of one leg of any end to end business process. No one engineer is empowered to build a single feature holistically end to end without pulling people from 2-3+ teams to get the job done. Often the job is just chaining some API calls and making a UI to display the results. Something a decent college CS graduate could build independently if there was proper documentation. Instead engineers are tasked with endless non-funded pet projects in some obscene race to be the team that shows the shiniest little half functional proof of concept to the nearest VP. All the while our most integral systems are held together with popsicle sticks, glue, and chewed up bubblegum. Everything is expected to be done yesterday. No one cares about code quality thus software/product quality. Most of the leaders within GTS could not solve a LeetCode medium if their families lives depended on it, assuming they even knew what LeetCode was. The sad part is the same is true for most of the Principle Engineers, Distinguished, and associate fellows and fellows as well. All these guys do is sit in calls so they can steal each others ideas. Then go implement them in some shoddy fashion so they can say they did it. Who cares if it works in production or provides any tangible return on investment for the time expenditure. The engineering culture at Verizon is utter garbage and it is perpetuated by the leadership within GTS. It is beyond simple incompetence, the leadership in GTS does not even have an idea of what competent software delivery is. It’s not incompetence because that would imply some intent to do things correctly. It’s simple ignorance. I have seen a VP of Site Reliability Engineering shoot down a Distinguished Engineers suggestion that engineers should be able to run the code that they are working in locally to validate results. The VP thought that was an absurd request. To put that in layman's terms the guy was just saying that when I paint a picture I should be able to see the canvas as I paint. That was dismissed. That’s the level of ignorance we’re dealing with. To reverse this level of cancerous spread you would need to inundate GTS with so much chemotherapy and radiation it likely would die out before any recovery was ever observed. I really do believe that the only way back is just terminating all of GTS leadership. Stop all software delivery. Bring in VP’s from actual tech companies who have actual software engineering experience within the past decade. Allow them to document ALL of the inner workings of the existing systems. Publish that documentation to OneConfluence or some adjacent documentation platform. Grant access to this documentation to ALL VZ Software Engineers. Release all of our Fellows, and Associate Fellows. Replace them with real engineers from real tech companies. THEN you can START redesigning the systems that collect all of VZ’s money. So regardless of Vivek's character do you really think he is prepared to make this level of systemic change to how Verizon delivers software? Or do you think he will just perpetuate slop delivery ad nauseam until Verizon crumbles or someone does the needful that I have laid out here?

Lyons need to start by rewriting the mission and vision statement, and permanently ban trigger words like "meaningful" and" "purpose-driven." The only purpose and mission Bill had was to run the company into the ground and take a meaningful amount of cash with him.

Is leadership checked out in other markets like the PNW or is this a local problem? The last year we took a nose dive..

What happened to sales? Not a single person could speak without reading a script. Can any of them be authentic like SV? Just speak naturally instead of something you clearly know nothing about.

One of the regional heads in the USA spoke for 10mins about a deal when she seemed to have NO understanding of either the deal or the client. It was brutal. And the head of DSS for gods sake just kept going nonstop.

It was refreshing to see the head of client solutions speak from the heart and provide real facts instead of reading from script.

Please Change this org. They cut engineering but not this? Shame!

How you’ve found value by just restructuring the company is amazing. But how you will continue to post growth at this circling the drain is beyond even the most experienced insiders when we know this growth is financially engineered. This is a slow motion train wreck and if you don’t take the GE people out of this picture, you will also lose value. It takes consistent incompetence and grifting to destroy something with this much history and momentum and you guys have showed up late to the party.

So why does John Stankey drive a Range Rover? Shouldn't he be driving a Ford, GM, or Buick? Disgraceful

I'm asking because I honestly can't remember what it's like to not dread Monday morning. If you actually love what you do, what's your job and what makes it worth it for you?

Cringeworthy LinkedIn profiles for regional vp’s.

Staged store photos of everyone holding bogus awards or giving the camera the number “one” sign. (((Cringe)))

Describing jobs and management positions as “amazing opportunities “. Using words like “golden store”. “Winning team”. It makes my skin crawl. (Cringe)

It’s so misleading it’s actually very sad

Yet some poor soul will believe this and apply for one of these jobs

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say this: I do not give a fu-k about my 9-to-5 job. I don’t care about your KPIs, the company’s goals, or the team’s goals. I don’t give a fu-k about my coworkers, and I don’t give a sh-t about my boss. I don’t care how some director or VP feels about themselves, the team, or the company. I couldn’t care less about any of that.

The only thing I care about is how much money you’re paying me and how much bullsh-t I have to deal with to earn it. I don’t want drama. I don’t want politics. I don’t want unnecessary headaches. I want to do my job, get paid, and go home.

Over the years, I’ve had bosses and executives come to me talking about KPIs, metrics, performance targets, and company objectives. They act like it’s the most important thing in the world. Meanwhile, in my head, I’m just thinking, “Yeah, sure. I don’t give a fu-k.”

If we hit our KPIs, what does that actually mean for me? Am I getting a significant raise? Am I getting a bonus? Is my life improving in any meaningful way? If not, then why should I care? I don’t give a sh-t about what it means for management or what it means for the company. I care about what it means for me.

Unfortunately, when we’re at work, most of us have to pretend we care about those things. We nod along, smile, and act engaged because that’s part of the game. But the reality is that for most people, work is a transaction. We exchange our time and effort for a paycheck.

I think for 95% of employees, that’s the truth. They’re not there because they’re deeply passionate about quarterly targets or corporate strategy. They’re there to make a living. Everything else is just background noise.

A major problem in today’s economy is that many companies focus more on extracting value than creating it. A truly great company should make useful products, serve its customers well, treat employees fairly, and maintain healthy relationships with suppliers. However, modern business culture often rewards companies even when they fail to do these things. When a company becomes highly valued despite offering less value to the people who depend on it, that reflects a deeper problem in society.

Business leaders should measure success by the value they provide to customers, not only by the money they return to shareholders. A successful business should constantly ask whether it is giving customers more value than it did before. The danger comes when companies decide to take value away from customers in order to increase profits. This may help the company in the short term, but it damages trust and weakens the purpose of the business.

This problem is especially visible in technology. Many services begin by offering something genuinely useful, but once they attract a large user base, they often shift toward extracting more profit from those users. Platforms may make useful features harder to find, increase prices, show more advertising, or push content that benefits the company more than the customer. This is the process Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification.” The original purpose of the product becomes weaker, while the company captures more value for itself.

The rise of artificial intelligence raises similar concerns. AI may make businesses more productive, but the benefits of that productivity do not have to belong only to shareholders or owners of capital. Greater productivity could lead to higher wages, shorter working hours, better services, or lower prices for consumers. However, if companies treat shareholder profit as the only important goal, AI could deepen inequality and reduce the role of ordinary people in the economy.

A society where only a small group of capital owners benefits from automation would be unstable and inhuman. Prosperous economies require the circulation of money and value, because businesses still need customers, workers, and communities to survive. If AI replaces human labor without creating new ways for people to participate, then the economy could become more concentrated and less inclusive. The challenge of the twenty-first century is to decide what role humans will have as more tasks become automated.

The future of the AI economy is therefore a choice. Society can allow AI to become another tool for monopoly, lock-in, and extraction, or it can design systems that allow more people to participate and benefit. The web and open source software succeeded in part because they created an “architecture of participation,” where many people could contribute and share in value creation. A humane economy should follow that model by using markets to support human flourishing rather than concentrating wealth among a few people.

Tim O'Reilly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrQu3MRSQgc

Pretty bad company and their hiring process. Guess if you show any success they do not want to hire you. They want mindless drones.

I just do enough in log in the hours and collect a paycheck. The place is the walking dead. Nobody cares. Stankey just doesn't remotely come close to having that It factor that you would get behind and do battle for. Most would give him a giant shove into the line of fire.

Just floating around with the tide and no destination. They could have been something if they bought up companies and simply just left them alone. The hubris of strategy, synergies, and merger integration....SBC RBOC boys from Texas. They were block head hammers and everything was a nail. Saw it first hand with the Cingular tie up. SBC heads for the most part were belligerent bulldozers.

Can anyone tell us what these vague expectations are? A fancy way of 5 days a week for leaders?

We're getting assigned seating

Of all the items that have been raised about how to make employees' lives easier, THIS is the one the MC has chosen to listen to

Not cleanliness or safety in the hubs.

Not RTO.

Not time tracking.

Not pay or benefits.

Seating.

Why? Because it will give the MC a convenient 'justification' for sending us back to the office full time. They do nothing for our benefit, only their own.

Great job. Hope you're all thrilled. Your butts can now avoid having to deal with that pesky reservation system! Our problems are solved at last!

Recent diktat from India leadership: managers span of control needs to be 25-28 people. All people within a POD to be equally distributed among managers, no new managers will be hired or provided. Managers lives have been he-l: people’s management, operational delivery, sales targets, DNSO targets, support multiple accounts. Mickey M is sleeping at the wheel, globe trotting, staying in hotels, giving talks on Agentic AI - all this when delivery is burning. Kyndryl delivery ia fked. God save this company

What would make you think, hey, this might not have been such a bad thing after all?

Disloyal, sneaky and incompetent. Does the Truist boatd want to tank their stock?

What is the team / work culture in the Audit Analytics group?

Lmao Mike came in, penalized the teams leaving hard workers out of their jobs and sending layoffs. Now he is out in 13 months tell me he didn’t do well in his job. The leadership changes that took place lately and continuous after Frank left clearly tells that the company isn’t doing so good, it’s like having puppets in positions that don’t make sense.

This week must be post self-indulgent posts on LinkedIn on how great I am as a leader week.

Honestly, it’s so cheesy and desperate and why would you want to tell your competition what your doing.

I would ban employees from these self-indulgent posts; customers see right thru it anyhow. Comes across as don’t fire me please or hire me please to outsiders.

They presided over more than $100 BILLION of value destruction and continue to enjoy quarterly catered chicken lunches and nearly $350,000 in annual fees.

Seems very very slowly, some of the useless ones are wising up and leaving. ED, AR, and now the CIO (wdf did she do anyway?). Could it be that BL's interests are being weaned out slowly by Meg.

Are you remaining employees seeing the pattern yet that is happening across the health insurance industry?

Some saw this pattern 2 years ago and tried to speak out on it “team” calls but fell on deaf ears.

But I imagine, based on what I have been reading on Humana’s, Elevance, United Health, Optum, Cigna, Centene that you probably by now see what the overall strategy in personnel reduction and/or replacement.

It is most definitely a strategy and not in employee’s longterm best interest.

I don't understand how newly hired automatically get to stay:/

Walking through the buildings this morning that has become an endless and never ending corn maze of “improvements”, it dawned on me, Chevron is lost. From elevators, escalators, college dorm style offices, orgs that don’t work, consultants ripping us off, workflows in the name of simplicity that accomplish the opposite, lack of accountability, zero clarity and more, we are lost. None of this helps us make more oil, gas and profit and YES, that is what we are supposed to be doing. All this waste and not one thing is improved. Not one. All are worse. No project should be considered without answering the question of how it makes things better for employees so they can help Chevron make more oil, gas and profit.

I retired from Nielsen 5+ years ago. A former coworker pointed me to this site, so I'm out of the loop. I only ended up on the careers page because my son just graduated with an engineering degree, and I thought the Oldsmar facility would be a great place for him to start. Instead, I'm perplexed; are all the engineering jobs in India now? What actually happened to Nielsen? The engineering culture and work at Oldsmar used to be great, but now it seems like a ghost town. Catch me up on what I missed (and yes, I realize now I should probably steer my son elsewhere!)

Hope not, she has ruined FIG and it will be a drag to the financials for a long time because of her inability to lead

It’s evident that a seasoned professional knew he is unable to save this company and the company’s performance is damaging his professional reputation . Changing hands is just delaying the inevitable. The replacement was a necessity and nothing more. Good luck guys.

We could have ended up with somebody who has absolutely no idea what he/she is doing. At least there's that to be grateful for.

A change in leadership changes nothing for us. Rotten culture and corporate greed are the real problem.