#leadership

but we don’t// apparently we work at the Oracle show. Every executive is just porting their team over here

Hope all are ok out in El Segundo and that if there was a human error that leadership is actually held accountable.

Oh, and don’t hold this against all of us for CIP…

7 years late with engine
No exploration success
Broken organization and failure to meaningfully centralize
Demotivated workforce
Unbalanced portfolio
CNE failed
Succession problem
Now series of OE incidents

All they have been able to achieve is to return cash from already producing assets back to shareholders. We dont need to pay them 33mm to do that

With RJ taking the COO role, will there be layoffs coming?

I was “fortunate “to land a position. Whole team has been impacted and I have no clarity on my role nor does my boss. No one can tell me when the move to Houston will be. It says if my planning and life doesn’t matter at all. I can find out that I will have to move in a month with no previous notice. I am supposed to give my all to this company which I do because I have a work ethic, but where is their work ethic?

Heard there are very limited promotions this year and that HR is making the decisions based on data. No input from supervisors.

It is any wonder why TD is struggling to sell when it likens to famous personalities. It lacks the creativity of TV designer Linda even when trying to dress up the truth. Lacks the elegance and humbleness of Sue on a tennis court. It's more likened to the selling skills of Albert Arkwright (Ronnie) in Open All Hours and determined to bag it's own drums like drummers Jay and Nicholas. Just barking up the wrong tree!

The whole problem with this company is the lack of visibility beyond line managers. I have no idea who my manager’s manager is, I’ve never met them, and I’ve never received a single message from them. Above that, there are another four layers of management who nobody ever hears from ever! And then we have the top brass who take all the profits and issue orders. No wonder the company is such a mess. By the time any direction filters down the message has changed completely, or just totally lost and forgotten.

Between ALL the many incidents this year, especially the two in just this week alone, was MW's enormous salary hike worth it for you Board Members? Did you feel good in deciding the rest of us are just peasants to point and laugh at as you buy your fourth vacation home in Aspen and prepare our company to be sold for parts in the next decade? Hope your family is treated with the same respect when the working class finally decides to no longer lick the boots that are stepping on us.

Why is the board so complacent. This leadership team seems to keep fumbling the ball…over and over and over. Purple this and purple that will not impress investors.

Dont worry he will take care of us

Curious if anyone has ever heard a higher ups candid opinion on this. Surely they're not in meeting rooms pretending it's actually necessary and don't notice how upset it makes people. Or are they really all some kind of NPCs just going with the larp to cover their own assets

An all-cash deal to buy an OMS nobody’s even heard of. Most of their marquee clients have already walked. The president of LB was quietly shown the door, and there’s still no real leadership in place. How on earth did none of these red flags come up during what was supposed to be “extensive” due diligence before the acquisition? At what point do RR, SK, and FF get held accountable for these missteps? How is this not shaping up to be Cymba 2.0? And when does Sanoke finally break up the boy band and bring in leaders who actually know what they’re doing?

I didn’t get laid off. That’s my crime.

I’m still here in Bangalore — bleary-eyed at 2 a.m., staring into the blue glow of another Zoom call. The Americans on mute, the managers on script, the executives smiling from Spring, Texas, while delivering the latest sermon: “This is not a layoff. This is transformation.”

And I nod along. Because nodding is safer than questioning. Survival in this machine doesn’t mean performing well, or collaborating, or innovating. It means parroting the story exactly as it’s handed down. No edits. No hesitation. Clap when they clap. Smile when they smile. Pretend the slogans mean something when we all know they don’t.

On the anonymous forums, I read the curses: “Damn Indians.” “They took our jobs.” “Outsourcing ki-led us.”
And in that moment, I become the villain. Not an engineer, not a human, not a man with a family. Just a placeholder: cheap labor, offshore body, the thief in someone else’s story.

But here’s the punchline: I didn’t ki-l anyone’s job. Neither did the guy three floors above me or the coder across town pulling a night shift with chai and instant noodles. The true executioners sit higher up. Senior management writes the script. Middle management enforces it.

Middle managers — ah, the great priests of ExxonMobil. They don’t believe in the gospel, but they chant it anyway. They gather us in Zoom town halls and deliver the holy lines:
• “This is about efficiency.”
• “This is how we stay competitive.”
• “We must all align with leadership messaging.”

Then they turn off their cameras, go back to their spreadsheets, and quietly decide which “asset” is expendable.

And the rest of us clap. Because clapping is mandatory.

The truth is uglier than the curses: Americans blame Indians. Indians blame themselves. But the real game is higher. We are not colleagues anymore, just chess pieces moved to satisfy a curve, a cost target, a shareholder’s smile.

So yes, blame me if you must. Curse me for still having a job. But know this: tomorrow it might be some place else. Or an algorithm. The villain will always be whoever management points to, as long as the real architects stay untouched.

ExxonMobil says: Energy Lives Here.
But after this round of
sermons, we all know the translation:
Truth does not. Empathy does not. Only messaging does.

what does everyone think of this guy?
will he be able to get bP off its deathbed?

By Mattias Bergstrom, Former Forbes Councils Member.

As software technology leaders, we face the same challenges as leaders in other engineering industries, but there are differences.

One of our biggest challenges is employee churn. This is where software companies suffer more than others, especially when losing engineers—because it is not just a resource being lost but training, insight and morale that will take time to replace and can disrupt production. The cost of employee churn is higher than we think. Studies have shown that the average cost to replace a highly skilled employee is 213% of their annual salary.

PayScale found that in 2018, companies like Google and Amazon with above-normal salaries and desirable employee perks still suffered from a median employee tenure of just about 1 year.

We need to start looking to cause and effect analysis and stop looking at statistics. As Mark Twain is often credited with saying, “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

After trying to use statistics to work out what is going wrong, we have to accept that the statistics used are not helping. So, what is really going wrong? Well, when we look at software engineering versus other types of engineering, we quickly notice differences in management. In other engineering fields, most managers are engineers themselves. So, the processes and deliverables systems have been developed by engineers, for engineers, for a long time, even since the pyramids were built.

The need for software engineering became huge in the 1980s and '90s. The value of an engineer was too high to have them in management, so leads, project managers and department heads were recruited from the business sector to keep projects “on track.” As business-educated leaders typically have no education in engineering processes, they needed ways to “measure” and manage the engineers without a full understanding of what they do or how they do them.

So, all kinds of ridiculous KPI measurements were invented. The most famous in software engineering is probably the “lines of code,” in which the performance of an engineer is measured by the amount of code they write. Ways to game this include simply extending the comments in your code, having the team agree on a fixed amount of code or, as I have personally seen, checking in garbage lines of code at the end of the day and deleting them the next.

There are a bunch of examples of KPI systems still used today that all engineers know how to game—to mention a few: story point projections, change coupling, commit count and Google DORA. They can all be gamed and are so obviously developed by business-focused non-engineers who have no clue how engineering works. What is most funny is how these KPI systems all see the engineers as measurable menial workers, not as the highly educated, valuable assets that companies need to function and generate profits.

Around these business-developed and managed KPI measurement systems, development methodologies have been created, mostly to keep up with fictional business goals and for the engineers to keep up with the KPIs. Kanban, Scrum and Agile do nothing to optimize the engineering work happening; they only provide an arbitrary way for managers to feel in control.

Question for the folks that are in the factories. Are you guys leadership team dysfunctional or is it just ours. Seems the left hand don’t or won’t talk to the right hand. Nobody knows what’s going on. Always running out of things. Just curious if it’s isolated or wide spread.

Obviously leaving is the best course of action (working on that lol), but how do folks deal with incompetence with their management? I can’t think of one thing my manager does to protect the team, and we are the last people to learn about anything. I feel like it’s having a larger impact on our team/project but what should I do? 🙏🏻

AI strategy incoming. He just needs to talk about it a little while longer.

First AI CTO, next an even bigger and better role as Head of Neuromorphic Computing at Intel.

SK swings thru life with the ease of Tarzan.

They need to show their hourly tracking records if they're going to demand 8 hours in the office, otherwise how are people to know where they stand. Like how are people going to take 3 hours of calls in the morning in the office with India, some of those are like 6am when people are typically dead asleep. I guess we need to demand the meetings start at 9am for our time zone. I hope they enjoy staying around crazy late for that. Does the board approve of this? Do they know there's a real risk of seriously stressed out people making big fat finger errors making these demands. Also keep in mind most locations have people with no co workers at that location. This is in large part because WF is so undesirable as a employer that they have to look around the whole country to put a team together for X cost. Our leadership seems so out of touch with the line and staff employees,

Another pep talk from JR!🤢🤮

After quarter over quarter of underwhelming performance for the last couple of years (often spun internally as positive performance or intentional, i.e., "pausing to propel" or "slowing down to speed up"... insert corny cliche here) and stalled hiring demands, Gartner execs made the decision to lower their prized TA capacity. Mind you, this is a function they always yammered on about keeping well above the demand as their competitive edge -- clearly, that's no longer the case.
Like others have posted, the layoffs impacted roughly 10% of the current TA team globally - from talent sourcers and recruiters to some in middle management. I believe more are coming if performance doesn't drastically improve in the quarters ahead.
The round one layoff selection criteria are arbitrary at best from the names of individuals I know who were impacted. I speculate they used the talent "9 box" (google it - lots of employers use this tool) that leaders were asked to complete earlier in the year to identity who got the axe, but that's purely my speculation. In the future, if additional mass layoff rounds need to happen, I believe they will eliminate those outside location strategy (don't worry I'm sure exceptions will be made for Obert and his directs).
Favoritism runs rampant across HR and the TA space. Have you seen the movie "Mean Girls"? Then you know what Gartner HR is like at the top -- Robin's executive leadership team doesn't get along at all. Same goes for Obert's direct reports -- all backstab each other and talk sh-t any chance they get. Hand to God.
What concerns me for the remaining TA team is the company's future outlook. For anyone still there, you know how difficult it is to get anything innovative done -- hoops to jump through, politics, etc. Like others have shared on this platform, there are MANY senior leaders who have been in role for YEARS that need to be able to innovate and quickly pivot. At this point with AI and other resources available for free or at a fraction of the cost of Gartner, it's like turning around the Titanic. They need a quick, effective reinvention and ability to differentiate themselves on the market. It's going to be tough to do -- not impossible, but tough -- and will take time which is not on their side.
For those able to do so, here's an exercise: check out how many across the company are showing as "open to work." It's staggering.
All the best to those in TA impacted as well as current survivors. Godspeed.

Leadership week is a joke. Norlin speaking to us about being a leader when he doesn’t do anything but monitor dashboards and fail at executing a go to market strategy is pure comedy. He needs to be the first one fired if this company has a chance.

Let's say, in last 40 years - Has there ever been a decision that benefited the employees?

It’s time for our illustrious CEO, Ste Ve Pru Sak, to actually lead. He’s losing his biggest asset – the people who keep this place running – and he doesn’t even see it. When you lose the experience and talent that make your company function, you’re sc--wed.

The town hall was an absolute disaster. You put your CIO, with an accounting degree from Stephen F. Austin, in charge of a billion-dollar tech group and front and center at the meeting? That’s embarrassing. Then there’s your SVP of HR with a University of Phoenix degree, and a GM of supply chain who’s never run supply chain before. These people aren’t qualified, yet they’re making decisions that drag the company down.

Meanwhile, the folks doing the actual work – the ones generating revenue – are getting laid off because of leadership’s bad decisions. Optics matter, and right now the optics are terrible. Employees don’t trust leadership at all.

Ste Ve, if your team su-ks, you replace your OC and DC – that’s how it works in football and in business. You’re smart enough to know this. Pay for real experts, bring in leadership that knows what they’re doing, and stop cutting the people who keep this company alive. Otherwise, the “parents” (shareholders, board, whoever’s really in charge) won’t keep you around much longer.

Do the right thing, before you end up on the street with the people you just laid off.

It’s disheartening to now know that leadership’s idea of the ideal org size is always smaller. It’s also disheartening to hear many people on this board say similar things - “we could use less of x or y groups.” Makes me wonder if anyone actually knows how to properly operate a company of this size and complexity.

Who is on who is out, AI in and common sense is out. Facelift done, clean up ongoing. Sales getting sla-ghtered with more excitement in the air with sales leaders from 1980s. I mean it took some efforts find those legends and pull them out retirement village and golf. Surely Tim got them on some massive discounts as that’s a su----e mission.
Let’s get a counter live for February….

Why are Principal Engineers taking on reportees and performing managerial duties? Isn’t this a fundamental misuse of the role? A Principal Engineer is supposed to be a senior technical authority, driving architecture, innovation, and solving the most complex problems—not acting as a people manager. When they start collecting reportees, it raises a red flag: are they trying to shield themselves behind a team to inflate visibility and give the illusion of doing ‘more’ work than they actually are? This not only dilutes the technical bar but also creates confusion in accountability. Instead of leading by technical depth, they start operating as pseudo-managers, which neither serves engineering excellence nor respects the purpose of the role. In reality, it looks more like a strategy to hide from real technical challenges, while showcasing headcount as a false measure of impact.

Could this finally be the straw that breaks Cartwrights back?

Way to destroy shareholder value over 5 years, Chris!

It seems corporate for UHG/Optum frequent these pages and nudges the website to get things deleted/ removed. Which further proves how bad this company is. However, screen shots of the replies that reflect how upper level management and normal employees feel can always be taken. Maybe start to treat your state side employees better. Have middle, upper and executive management take compassion and empathy courses and remind the shareholders you are a healthcare company and need to stop offshoring overseas. Trying to hide the truth won’t make those survey scores go up. We will see what unfolds in October. The dates I keep hearing are the 13th and 30th. The 13th is on a Monday so maybe they’re trying to deviate from the normal Thursday schedule.

In an extraordinary show of competence Jennifer Ragone the new Head of HR wows employees with just how great she is at coming up with HR policy on the fly.
In a show of how dynamic she is at pulling ideas out of thin air she has given her first message to the devoted DXC faithful.
Now given the commitment last year to a pay cycle that would be completed by 1 Oct you might surprised to hear it wasn't that
Jennifer wanted to demonstrate her dynamic ideas led thought leadership by announcing to all employees that as of the 1st of Oct they will need to find 6 days of annual leave in order to cover a company wide shutdown over Christmas.

That's the way Jen likes to roll.

Great having you Jen at the head of HUMAN Resources

Ps any news on the promised pay cycle

Maybe it’s my internet connection but I haven’t caught all this ‘excitedness” and the more severe strain of “super excitedness” that all the execs on town halls seem to be experiencing right now.
Should I be worried, should I see my network engineer as I don’t want to miss out?

long time reader, first time poster

i simply must know ~~

how is life in ABU IT after the layoffs? it was pretty bad before the event. what is it like now? did they keep some good leaders and people?

Nothing will change with layoffs and outsourcing to low cost/low skill sites unless…

1. Stock price suffers
2. Government intervention
3. Major incident, eg. Valdez, Texas City ….

Don’t expect anything more from our selfish, self gratifying leadership.

There is no reason to have so many layers of management in the US for the supply chain group and I'm sure the same applies to other groups like polaris, gbs, emtec.
A prime example of bloat is the COE group in materials management full of people who aren't experts of anything but are the ones making over complex processes that fail and promoting made up savings figures to justify their jobs in houston. Why close our offices in sg and in canada when we have this bloat in likely every organization within XOM. Shame on SG and the VPs with their lies when EMSC was introduced.

Today’s kickoff call is blatant reminder that our leader (PK) is simply out of touch with his sales staff. More than once, he referenced a female sales professional as a male. This female sales professional struct a deal that resulted in over $800k of revenue. He had one job and failed. He couldn’t even read the slide correctly. As a female sales representative in this organization, it was so disrespectful to this female. It just shows he doesn’t care.

Even more upsetting was that PK’s colleagues, mainly DV, didn’t correct the mistake. Everyone knew it. Can you be anymore out of touch with your employees?

Today’s call showed the company has no interest in selling equipment. “Hey sell what you could at our inflated price. We love you guys!” Thanks for the extra 1% DV. The extra $350 on a $35,000 sale will make a huge difference in my salary when I used to make $2k-$3k on those deals just 5 years ago. The 30% in price increases we have taken over the past 2 years won’t affect business. Hey our competition did it so we should do it, right?

I have begun the search to leave this company. I am tired of the overall panic from my manager and director to hit a number that is unattainable. More than 50% of the company is under 50% YTD. The company is paying less compensation which is why they are now giving you the extra 1%. Majority of deals are written using the industry low 2% override. If you think making 2% plus the extra 1% on deals is good, you my friend are exactly who they want working here.

I have lost all respect for PK after today. He doesn’t care about us. DV is also not a leader. Talk about a guy who made it because of who they know. The Japanese better wake up fast because these leaders have lost their sales organization.

The intel middle mgmt needs to be humble n get off ur high horses

I was with a vendor company and came to the Hillsboro site for a technical review meeting , we were all properly dressed in smart business wear and hold n behold , the snr mgr who was hosting us appeared in his gym wear and slides … we were all applauded and talk among our selves at the airport commenting how unprofessionally that was.

I hope this gets to LipBu’s ears

I love how fake the PGL's are these days. They look at you with a fake blank look on their faces knowing what is about to happen. Everyday when I arrive at work, I have the feeling that it is my last day. Someone in security let out that they have an assignment in a couple weeks at the JRC. Gee, what could that be. Why are layoffs so taboo, what not prepare the employees now, so they can look for a job. Instead of dumping them on the spot without notice.

My challenge to the leadership at JRC, stop hiding behind your tailored suits. Stop giving us your fake smile and hand shake. Go to your employees within your group and tell them what's to come.

Who in the world is next up for CEO? Seems like there is a big crop of senior leaders up for forced retirement at the same time (MW, MN, CN, BN) that are going to cause a massive daisy chain. No one super promising in the 50-55 year old range.

We have a gasilian CEO's waiting in the wings. We have left enough old people go, why not one more?