#knowledgetransfer

What is currently happening at 3M in Poland looks very much like a mass layoff carried out without formally calling it a mass layoff.

Employees are being transferred to Genpact, where, in practice, their primary role is to transfer knowledge to teams in India. Once that knowledge transfer is completed, people are being let go one by one as their responsibilities disappear. The entire process feels very similar to what happened during the Solventum transition, but on a much larger scale and in a far more explicit way.

What is most disappointing is how people were treated today. Long-term employees who helped build these processes and contributed to the company's success were treated with very little respect or empathy. For many, it was a humiliating and deeply upsetting experience.

It is difficult to watch dedicated and experienced employees become disposable once their knowledge has been transferred. A very sad day for many people in Poland.

Just got an email from our glorious IT overlords, telling us that we're going to shift to the managed services model in the next few months.

We can help by being available to ensure knowledge transfer and making sure to update documentation! (And quietly going away when they lay us off in Q4)

Lots of Scrum masters and Architects let go. Flushing years of knowledge down the drain.

this goes out to the US or other high-cost geos - is anyone else hearing about a new team that was secretly created and "want to learn" about your project/product?

i've heard from 2 different groups that this has happened outside of my coterie.

Meta management was so professional in reducing workforce.

Direct RIFs. No Cognizant kind of gimmicks.

Immediate termination. No KT required.

FIS management is playing games with employees.. some given severance, some transferred to Cognizant to be eventually riffed.

Hi all, I am still pretty early in my career (4 yrs of experience) but I am on some major projects within my team and I am the only person who knows how to do certain things or navigate certain systems. I asked for plan on a pay raise mid last year since I am on 6-8 projects at a time and deliver quality every time plus efficiency gains, and it’s been crickets whenever I follow up. They only gave me a 5/5 on the review and 3% raise with a sh---y bonus. I know I’m worth more than that.

I am interviewing for different roles externally that will pay me 30-40% more and have a good feeling that I will receive an offer soon. Only problem for me is that I am not sure what to do when it comes to giving my 2 weeks notice. I really enjoy my colleagues and don’t want to put them in a rough spot because we are already stretched thin as a team. I want to prep in advance but find little time to document everything I do in its entirety to help with the transition for my teammates.

How would you navigate this situation? I am definitely taking a new job offer externally and not staying here since it’s left a bad taste in my mouth.

I plan to be completely uncooperative. What are they going to do? Fire me? LOL. I'll rather use the time to look out for myself and find a decent job somewhere decent.

We spend decades learning how to do this work. Layoffs can erase all of that in a day. That's going to hurt us eventually.

Experienced folks are leaving the company! Lots of retirements. We better hang on to these folks so we can leverage the learnings built up over time. Mentoring new employees is another reason. AI is NOT a substitute!!

It's happening to more and more people on my team. I have no idea what I'd do in that position, but it just feels so cruel and demeaning.

I assume most posters here are from the commercial side. Does anyone have insights into how things are going on the FEPOC side? Morale? VSP impacts? The organization became very top-heavy over the years, and I know a lot of VSP electees were MLT/SLT/ELT. However, there were also some seasoned "regular" employees with tons of technical and/or business knowledge who departed.

Verizon is about to find that out the hard way, when outages become the norm.

Has anyone else noticed there are hardly any senior people left on the teams? Now most people have ten years of experience at most. I think the last round of layoffs and restructuring pushed a lot of the veteran employees out. Without them, there's no one left who knows why things are done a certain way.

To those impacted, are you done today or do you have to knowledge transfer? I had to do KT throughout my entire 2 month stay.

I was laid off a recently despite many years of service.

I know of one other co-worker, also long term employee, that was laid off the same day, but there may have been more.

We have been instructed not to talk to our co-workers.

There are lay offs last year and the year before.

But that may have been because of the 175 million dollar SEC lawsuit.

Basically they have us train a foreign workforce to do our jobs and once they are trained, they get rid of us.

So if you are training people from overseas to "be part of your team", start looking for work.

Bumped from: Post ID: @q6+1k7qg7waq

ExxonMobil is trying to reduce OpEx by reducing number of engineers in North America (USA and Canada) and offshoring the jobs to cheaper countries like India.

But is it really working? I see BTC folks come here, work for some time in North America, and then go back to India and quit. They go to a competing company at a higher salary. All the time spent training them in North America is wasted.

How does that make sense from cost reduction perspective? And how will all the technical knowledge be retained??

It feels like every few months someone else is being shown the door, and it’s taking a real toll on what’s left of the team. We lose skilled people faster than we can train new ones, and the work keeps getting shuffled around until no one really owns anything. Morale is at rock bottom because nobody knows if they’ll be next, and that kind of fear makes it impossible to do your best work. What’s worse is watching all that experience walk out the door straight into our competitors. If leadership doesn’t stop treating layoffs like a fix-all, there won’t be much of a company left to rebuild.

It’s ChatGPT compiled summary, but a good refresher and reminder we can adopt.

1. Knowledge Control & Asymmetry
   • Document selectively: Provide training and documentation, but keep it high-level. Leave out context, dependencies, or nuances only you know.
   • Use tacit knowledge: Emphasize things that require “experience” (judgment calls, historical context, relationships with regulators/vendors). GCC hires can’t easily replicate this.
   • Avoid “one-click transfer”: Break down processes into multiple steps when explaining, making them look more complex.

2. Strategic Friction in Rollouts
   • Ask clarifying questions: In transition meetings, phrase them as risk concerns:
   • “How will GCC handle regulatory nuances in [X country]?”
   • “What’s the fallback if response times slip due to time zone?”
   This slows decisions without looking obstructive.
   • Introduce dependencies: Link tasks to other teams or tools so that “handoffs” look harder.
   • Highlight local compliance: Bring up data residency, export control, union agreements, or contractual obligations. These almost always slow offshoring.

3. Delay Through “Support”
   • Over-offer help: Volunteer to be the bridge/trainer. This keeps you in the loop and drags timelines (“transition can’t close until full training is done”).
   • Pace knowledge transfer: Train slowly, highlight “complexities,” extend timelines by needing “extra validation.”
   • Audit their output: Position yourself as QC for GCC work. This makes you gatekeeper of quality and creates rework cycles.

1. Expose Hidden Costs (Quietly)
   • Track errors: Maintain a private log of GCC mistakes, delays, and escalations. Present data neutrally, never emotionally.
   • Escalate risk neutrally: Instead of “GCC can’t do this,” say:
   • “We saw 30% rework rate—might suggest a phased approach instead of full shift.”
   • Highlight stakeholder pushback: Collect subtle dissatisfaction from clients/customers, frame as “feedback.”

2. Protect Your Position
   • Brand yourself as irreplaceable: Be the person who knows the workarounds when GCC fails.
   • Shift to cross-functional roles: Move into strategy, supplier relations, or customer-facing projects—roles harder to offshore.
   • Stay visible to leadership: Share concise insights or risk notes with senior managers, so they see you as thoughtful, not resistant.

3. Long-Game Career Hedge
   • Upskill in automation/AI: Many GCCs are execution shops, not innovation hubs. Becoming the automation SME makes you future-proof.
   • Build network outside: Quietly explore trading, analytics, or industrial strategy roles—industries less prone to full-scale offshoring.
   • Stay neutral in tone: Never sound anti-GCC in writing; instead, frame everything as “risk management” or “ensuring smooth transition.”

...it would be if some competitor comes to sn---h folks away from Imperial before they've had a chance to transition the work.

They can send as many jobs as they want to cheaper countries, but they can't escape the low quality they'll be getting with it. They're walking out priceless institutional knowledge with these layoffs, and that decision will come back to bite them in the a-s, I guarantee you.

In some cases, the operational decisions made by Oracle directors are completely baffling. They have this pattern of reassigning projects from their U.S. and European employees to offshore teams, which consistently creates major friction.

Initially, our U.S. teams have the clear advantage, but they're quickly outmaneuvered by the sheer size of the offshore teams. This approach severely erodes the trust and confidence employees have in their leadership and their career path. Their contributions are often viewed as ancillary, and they rarely get the proper credit.

It feels like U.S. staff are being brought on board to train offshore teams, only to be deemed expendable once the knowledge transfer is complete. You can see this pattern in meetings: my contributions are significant at the start of a project, but my input gradually diminishes. As a result, I've started to limit my engagement with offshore teams, providing only high-level outlines of the work instead of detailed technical walkthroughs.

Usually H-1b's and Offshore should aid the U.S employees. But it works like snatching the work and more promotions are given to offshore. U.S employees left in limbo.

Since this Enterprise Reimagine was so bad, who will take responsibility? There are loads of complaint from field and survivors, who should take responsibility?

Also hearing that this is the master plan that Chubak wants Penny to do ER so that he can be managing partner faster. Nobody wants to wait 5 years to see Penny retire and then taking over.

I am sickened to my stomach to see this organization go backwards in all of the values they believe in + the momentum the firm had around new business/technology/products. We lost so many unicorns and institutional knowledge that we will never get back.

What are people's thoughts on how ER will enable the firm to execute with more speed and efficiency? Honestly, I was optimistic when they first announced it because the firm had become so bloated and convoluted that it was difficult to get anything done. But the rollout seemed more focused on short term cost cutting and may seriously backfire on "increasing speed and efficiency" since we lost so much firm knowledge (aka the only people who know how to fix certain systems since they were part of creating them, people who know undocumented processes or work arounds for the many broken systems). I'm worried this will just make things so much worse and make jobs so much harder for those who remain. It's like leadership is operating on an entirely different plane of reality; one where we are a rocket ship instead of bogged down by decades of under investing in tech and poor process design. Over the past 2 years I have experienced them deprecating systems and teams in anticipation of solutions that never seem to materialize. The "running the business" work gets harder and harder with no end in sight.

We’re literally down to bare bones now, without anyone who truly knows all the ropes. Over the past two years, skilled veterans have been disproportionately targeted. I don’t even think it’s about age. More likely, it’s because good work and accumulated experience come with a price. Tomorrow, leadership will have no right to complain when there’s no quality work coming out of their organization. You get what you pay for. What short-sighted a--hats.

I don't understand how it's possible to lay people off when myself and my coworkers are so swamped with work that we are working 12 hour days plus weekends on salary?? So stupid! Reorg! We've lost so many longer timers with so much knowledge..we literally had to hire 3 people to fill one of their positions! Just one! But instead they are hiring more upper management!

Anyone actually work their 2 weeks?