#layoffs

Enjoy your weekend everyone and come Monday may the odds be ever in your favor! For the survivors make sure you add on at least 2 peoples work load to your overstuffed plate to help your work life balance! Toxic wasteland!!

the cuts were too deep and haphazard, with not enough precision or thought given to the reality of the situation.
Now the back-peddling and re-hiring will soon begin in order to get things back on track.

So I went to my morning meeting. We all joined. Some were still waking up (west coast) and others had already consumed multiple cups of coffee.
"good morning!" said the scrum master.
"mmmmm" said we all.
"OK so we are going to go through the tickets now and start with you, Bob"
Ummm...OK so I'm not Bob, but I have to say, I started multitasking right away. Why you say? Well because what Bob does has nothing to do with what I do. In fact, all members of the team work on different things that really don't overlap.
But wait! We need Agile! Agile will improve lead time, cycle time, WIP, and other things (unmentionables)
In this team, nope. No one cares. Each is in their own world. Step back say 5 years, and everyone was trying to help. We all crossed lines. Now? Nope, all I care about is my tickets and their due dates.
So now we have a scrum master, a product owner, a manager, and then.....the rest of us. So we went from our manager (one person) to now 3 people all trying to manage the rest of us. And, did I mention, 4 of 7 got laid off? So now 3 of us are being managed by 3 new bosses to get more done with less.

This is the WF implementation of Agile. Read it and weep.......

just love seeing all the Linkedin posting of the various groups getting together for "end of year" celebrations , congratulating each other on such a great year, in the midst of continual layoffs. Still see Kate talking about "shaking" up industry..... hard to do that when you continue to lose money. Also good to see KJ, Stansbury, Tzetiel and some of the other higher ups reflect on a "job well done" and talking about all in, while the "no more" Lumen humans that were cut loose wonder how they will get through the holidays .... only real winner in all this is Brene' Brown, who continues to get rich off the company.

Will there be more execs to leave in engineering and ops?

Are there layoffs next week ? If so what geo and groups

After being with the company for 10plus years State Farm decided to find an “issue” with a coverage we offer and then say we weren’t offering it correctly but still have to offer it. Got a whole team cut right before thanksgiving. The company is going downhill 1000%. All of our long time customers receiving NO notice or anything about this change. Just left in the dark with no clue what is going on.

Head of the asset protection department let go?

https://www.phonearena.com/news/verizon-layoffs-not-enough-to-turn-things-around_id176364

Dan telling jokes and stxpid stories - in the ALL hands - while we are all freaking out of the future and so many lives being impacted. This is so unwelcomed.

Dude - you as a board were s failure - VZ leaders are just clowns - following the board and now you keep a while company to do a seinfeld sequel clown show 🤬

Dan wants Ai displace Verizon employees within 1000 days per his comments on his all hands call. Time to jump off the sinking ship before then.

Reposting this comment someone posed it. Right on! Such a clown that hatchet man

I’ve heard rumors that more layoffs are coming this month. Has anyone else heard this?

Is this guy living in La-la land? Satisfying customers? For years customers have been complaining thar VZ is super expensive. While TM proivded a flat rate bill, VZ’s bills are never the same. The arrogance of VZ leadership and the board bite us all.

So their best solutions was: Fire 13k of our peers. This is all BS

We heard January, or March, even June.
Seems that countries where the work council is strong are not so easy to get rid of.
Any submarine infos?

Global sales leader has given mid level management orders to clean house before the new year. As much as 70% of the sales force could be in danger. Hug your loved ones and brace yourself!

Isn't the Accenture contract cancellation date fast approaching? Does anyone know how many current Accenture contractors will be brought on by the new vendor and how many will be let go?
Someone I know who is still there tells me they have been setting up access for new the new vendor like crazy.

Verizon’s version of the Big Short. Layoffs for short term stock gains.

https://youtu.be/Ihs2r2O-b5s?si=cCIxaxPOkfkSIOOr

HD Supply’s distribution center in Middle Tennessee will permanently close next year, with layoffs announced ahead of the holiday season.

https://www.wsmv.com/2025/10/28/tennessee-supply-plant-closing-laying-off-more-than-100-workers/

Got word that consumer services in E&I is next told they are “very overstaffed”.

Just when all thought waves 1 and 2 are done, and we are told to get on with it, it is not done. MK & big consultants are waving their magic wands to move more jobs to Engine. More announcements coming soon

This is my warning to everybody. Through insider information, there will be layoffs in February. Possibly hardest hit will be collab. Managers will be made aware right around Christmas time, everybody else notified weeks after the new year.

Company is finished with the layoffs. Company is done with mistreating its employees. Although your manager or director still might be an a-s.

Once there was a bank that made record profits because their employees worked to lift the asset cap. Then one day Scrooge decided force rank employees so at least one from each team got cut no matter how good they were. That year the families that lost jobs had a miserable Christmas and worried about affording their mortgages and healthcare. Some families couldn’t let their kid go back to college in January because they lost their job. Then one day the ghost of Christmas future paid a visit to the leaders in charge and….(continue the story below)

Why didn’t VH have Q&A at her townhall. Seems like something is brewing. Surely she knew people would ask about the VSP and layoffs.

To my Spain and US colleagues how are we feeling after the recent Spain reduction? Gartner always thinking about their people especially before the holidays ha

Departments across the University may soon need to downsize or lay off employees to meet reduced budget targets as Yale cuts costs in preparation for the endowment tax hike set to take effect in July, administrators announced in a Wednesday message addressed to faculty and staff.

https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2025/12/04/layoffs-may-come-as-yale-seeks-to-shrink-staff-amid-budget-cuts/

Those in management circles what are you hearing about the quiet layoffs going on? Management seems intent on making things so bad for employees with the wirthless 4 days in office, benefits cuts and sheer arrogance from leaders. This American company doesn't care about America anymore. Can we outsource our CEO?

Will be the last straw for most at HP. Good luck everyone. It’s going to be a bloodbath.

Gone. All gone.

I see posts on here all the time lamenting PE ownership, made without any understanding of how we got to this point, and how this goes all the way back to asinine decisions pre-bankruptcy in 2013. I’ve decided to play Cengage historian and lay some of this out for posterity, and so I can yell at the sky

2012–2013: Debt pile gets ugly
• Pre-bankruptcy: Before Chapter 11, Cengage was already doing financial engineering just to push out maturities — e.g., in 2012 it sold $725M of 11.5% senior secured notes due 2020 and amended its credit facilities to extend term loan and revolver maturities.
• July 2, 2013: Cengage files for Chapter 11 with about $5.8B of outstanding debt, announcing a “pre-arranged” restructuring to eliminate more than $4B of that.
Even before bankruptcy, they were in the classic LBO textbook-publisher trap: lots of high-coupon debt, some of it maturing in big lumps, and a business that’s not exactly a rocket ship.

2014: Emerges from Chapter 11… still leveraged
• April 1, 2014: Cengage officially emerges from Chapter 11. The plan cuts ~$4B of funded debt and brings in $1.75B of new Term Loan B financing, plus a $250M asset-based revolver, as exit financing.
• Post-reorg, they’re no longer at $5.8B of debt, but they do still have roughly ~$1.8–2B of funded debt sitting above a business doing around ~$2B of revenue at the time, still pretty leveraged.

That Term Loan B is key. By design, those loans usually have tiny quarterly amortization and then a big “bullet” (lump-sum) repayment at maturity. You drag a big principal balance for years, paying interest the whole time, then face a huge refinancing/repayment cliff at the end.

2014–2019: Term loan era, dividend recaps, and financial engineering
• In the years after emergence, Cengage spends a lot of time tweaking the capital structure: repricing the term loan, issuing additional term debt, and even doing share-repurchase and dividend recap transactions (they literally disclosed a “dividend recapitalization” in FY2015 current reports).
• if you’re still doing buybacks / dividends and refinancing loans rather than aggressively paying them down, you’re implicitly betting that refinancing the big bullet at the end of the term will be doable when you get there.
So by late 2010s you’ve got a company that did cut its original $5.8B anchor, but is still sitting on a large secured term loan and reliant on capital markets to roll that over when maturities and balloon payments come due.

2019–2020: Aborted McGraw-Hill merger, more uncertainty
• In 2019 Cengage announces a planned merger with McGraw-Hill and a related amendment to its senior secured credit facilities, again, capital structure is clearly front-and-center.
• The merger is ultimately called off in 2020 after regulatory issues, which leaves Cengage still independent, still carrying its own debt stack, and now without the scale/merger synergies that were supposed to help.
So by early 2020s, you’ve got: meaningful secured debt, a term-loan structure with big future maturities, and no merger “escape hatch.”

2021–2022: Rising rates + debt drag
• For FY22 (year ended March 31, 2022), Cengage reports adjusted cash revenue of about $1.37B and Adjusted Cash EBITDA less prepub of ~$326M.
• That’s a decent EBITDA number, but on top of a large term loan it still implies a non-trivial leverage ratio. As global rates move up and credit spreads widen (2022–2023), the cost of keeping that debt financed goes up, and the risk of refinancing a big bullet at attractive rates gets worse.
The company itself starts talking more about “financial flexibility” and de-leveraging in investor materials around this time… they know the balance sheet is constraining what they can do.

April 2023: Apollo preferred equity to prevent collapse
• April 17, 2023: Cengage announces that Apollo Funds will invest $500M into a new series of convertible preferred stock
• In the press release, Cengage explicitly says it will use the proceeds to “reduce outstanding debt and lower interest expense,” and to “increase financial flexibility” to invest in growth.
The old LBO-style debt and its balloon risk were getting harder and more expensive to carry in a higher-rate world. Rather than wait for a ugly refinancing fight when the big maturities hit, they sold a chunk of the company to Apollo via preferred equity, then used that cash to pay down loans and push the maturity wall further out.

2023–2025: PE priorities, “efficiency,” and repeated layoffs
Once Apollo is in, the priorities shift to the usual PE playbook:
• Sharpen the focus on EBITDA, cash flow and “portfolio mix
• Cuts, cuts, cuts

A classic pattern of a ZombieCo:

1. Heavy term-loan/balloon-style post-bankruptcy debt +
2. Rising interest rates and a tougher refi environment
3. Need to de-risk the maturity wall with Apollo preferred equity
4. Apollo-style mandate to improve profitability and reallocate capital
5. Repeated restructuring and headcount reductions

Anybody hearing anything about layoffs? We know we had a few hundred cuts to the product teams in August, but February is a weird time too.

Don't get me wrong, there definitely was nepotism and racism with hiring inside orgs, namely IT, but this all started long before any of that. The C-level all across the US, not just Verizon, sold us out. Not the people working to live in other countries. Yet, somehow we want to blame the lower working people. Continue to be lied to, live in ignorance and be exploited. God help the next generation that will have to live through the same lies they spin-doctor with AI (once it's matured to be production ready).

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Any indication January or March will be the next wave ? It seems Tech Layoffs are in .

Genuinely curious, have any Neustar VP’s and above been laid off since joining TU?

If they are doing layoffs DBO needs to go. A complete bureaucratic nightmare TN has created.