#performance

No more RIF for next 8 months from Oracle but expect some performance based layoffs in mid-year. Here are the things you should note

1. Keep minimum 2 projects in your portfolio
2. Ensure you work with your customers. (don't rely on your lead or manager for inputs)
3. Maintain good relationship with your manager peers
4. Talk less. Don't share your stuff with anyone.

5. If project is not viable or repetitive, just move on

   AI is helpful for you to deliver things quickly but makes you d-mb in outside market. You get into a loop always without reason because AI does the reasoning for you.
   Use AI to remain competitive to deliver in project but don't rely on it for ever. Remember management will push AI usage to automate your work completely and stabilize it.
   Once project is stabilized you are out of game.

It's always about the bottom line and nothing else. That's exactly how they keep bleeding skilled, competent, and experienced people. It solves immediate problems and protects leadership bonuses, sure, but long term it's a disaster. If they put any real strategy into layoffs, they could cut costs and keep talent, but that would require effort. Too much work, I suppose.

Today my manager held a my 1:1 and told me he needs to me to start tracking my “activities” with how much time each takes. He claims upper leadership is wanting to get a better idea of the teams activities. We have about 8 people on our team.
Anyone else having this happen and what would you do if you did?
I’ll comply but I am trying to understand it because I get my work done in a timely manner, even with the additional items I have taken on and been asked to perform.

What the title says.73

Heard a rumor it is higher for some teams versus others this year? e.g. EMTECH?

Can only imagine the BOD/Vz C-Level circlej--kgoing on before Q1 reporting!

CFO has to be using AI to put lipstick on this Pig!

Once upon a time an employee
In management hogged his or her seat for almost decades.
In times like these , where the stock price is not moving and hovering around at a standstill, why is management still hogging their seats with over 3 years
. There should be a constant annual churn if you are not producing just like our top
Employees were let go in RIF. There has to be a specific management level RIF as well
.

I'm dreading the coming week. Losing the literal backbone of our team has made it impossible to keep up, and everyone around me is struggling too. Work was stressful before, now it's three times worse. And you know what happens if we don't perform? That becomes the excuse to cut us next. If results actually mattered, maybe they'd have thought harder about who they let walk.

I’ve been in R&D long enough to think I’d seen every organizational oddity, but lately I look at my reporting chain and just… sigh. I’m a Principal Engineer, the most technical person on my team, and yet there are seven layers of management between me and the top. Seven. At this point it feels like performance art.

And the part that blows my mind? We’re a software company. We really only need three groups to function: developers who ship code, sales/AEs who bring in revenue, and top leadership who set direction. Everything else should be supporting those three — not ballooning into a management ecosystem that needs its own food chain.

Would anyone that has been though it like to share what the PIP process is like? Im wondering if it might just be a blessing in disguise, because right now I get dozens of random, vague requests coming from all directions. And it’s always up to me to figure it out. If I do get chosen to be the “lucky one” to go on a PIP, does that mean I will be receiving clear, defined expectations? Will I have one focused agenda and that’s it? Is it confidential or can I openly tell my coworkers to leave me alone so I can focus on my PIP? Will my success, my ability to complete the goal be dependent on others cooperating, or will I be able to work independently on this so-called objective?
Will the supervisor somehow be allowed or prohibited from making the usual vague, random requests, changing the goalposts, and assigning work that depends on a bunch of other people who may or may not cooperate. Just curious how this really works and if anyone can shed some light or give some examples from their experience with PIPs.

Is it legal to suddenly change this RTO performance policy metrics and make people noncompliant? Previously, under 11 day RTO attendance, I was at 100% compliance. However, now that they changed their metrics calculation method, I am noncompliant. By them retroactively changing my compliant reports to noncompliant reports from Nov 2025 to March 2026, wouldn’t that be considered data manipulation by the company, which is illegal? They also failed to disclose IP usage to monitor which is also illegal.

https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1kjtpebnk

March it was $215

Now it is $179.49

Does anyone have any good experience with contractors at this company? I feel like in my 7 years here they have all been grossly incompetent. They interview well so I'm assuming they're cramming tech stack info before the interview (or are using AI to help answer questions).

Resumes are all over the place (and often more than one page and have seen 3+ pages more often than not), certifications for miles, but when it comes time to be a contributor to our workflow, they make some of the silliest mistakes or can't do more than a basic function. One contractor a few years back on our team was decent, but even they were not up to snuff. It's mostly been about a 90-95% negative experience in my tenure here. Otherwise I've run into some pretty bad issues like them not knowing about a tech stack item that we literally interviewed them for and asked them technical questions on.

So please, someone let me know I'm not crazy or tell me about a good one so I can imagine good quality contract work on my team.

We've hit the point where cutting your way to a higher stock price no longer works. The cracks are showing, reality is finally catching up.

From product I see, adidas is about to pull the ki-l shot and eliminate Nike from performance running.

Not to mention legit running brands with top innovation ASICS, Brooks, Saucony with Hoka, New Balance and ON taking casual running.

In the past 5 days FIS is down 5% and the Nasdaq is up 4.5%.

Leadership needs to get their act together.

Shouting, pressure, and creating a climate of fear in engineering won’t fix anything: in fact, it only makes things worse. Right now, people are acting out of fear instead of making rational decisions aligned with actual goals.

That’s how you end up with poor outcomes, short-term thinking, and teams that stop taking ownership.

If the goal is better performance, this approach is doing the opposite.

Manager put me on documented coaching out of the blue.
Last quarter review was good. This quarter was slow with no high-impact projects and zero vision from the Tech Lead.
No feedback on what I did wrong and no forward-looking plan. I’m not getting any actual coaching, just told to "do my work" and document.
Questions:

1. Is this just a paper trail to prep for an LR?
2. Should I just tell them I’m happy to leave if they want me out, or will I lose my severance/leverage?
3. Anyone actually survive this?

Where is NIke's destination eventurally, that is the question that has been floating around a lot in this platform.

As long as EH and upper management maintains this death march to the Death Valley, it will be in the teens.

Quite frankly, I was extremely disappointed that EH was not able to come out with new, clear direction after 18 months in the throne. Yeah, JD left sh-t load cr-p around but with EH's pay scale that is task that is included.

Measure employee performance/success by a metric of number of hours they are seated in the chair at office and report this monthly in the "Talent and Performance"?

A Joke at a Fortune 500 Company.

Remember when you could read the Company's Annual Report and know exactly how much the Company earned in the prior year?

What changed over the last month or so? We were at $50! I was optimistic that Dan was turning around our firm post layoff and new strategy. Our net add and cash flow numbers were impressive and further OpEx reductions + stock buy backs + dividends was meant to turbo charge our stock to ~$72. What happened? What changed? Does the street know something that we don't?

Looking through posts on here and by mine and my coworkers’ numbers, it seems the new dashboards are wildly inaccurate. I’ve seen my days count where I’ve had multiple half days in office due to appointments, my coworker who works in office 4x a week well beyond 6 hours everyday and they’re below 60% compliance, coworkers saying the dashboard has said they used PTO/ sick days when they hadn’t. The data is obviously not accurate across all employees for many reasons.

“Over 60% of time in office” is not clear and can be interpreted multiple ways. Is it 24 out of 40 hours? In that case then could you just choose to go in everyday for an avg of 4.8 hours to get the 24 or does it have to be 3 days for 8 hours? Like others mentioned too, what about if someone is working more than 40 hours. How would that factor into the final calc? Right now they claim they’re not using time to track in the FAQ but I bet they’re gonna pull some bs I’m a few months saying “in office days only count if you spent X amount of continuous hours connected to company IP”.

Is it the amount of days that gets over 60%, so for April there are 22 working days if no PTO/ sick then 22 x .6 is 13.2 so you need to come in 14 days to meet “over 60”? It also mentions “rolling average of three months” so if there are, hypothetically, 60 working days through April - June then you have to go 36 days in that window but then can you front load and just go 36 days in a row and then WFH the rest 24 days?

This is ridiculous for employees to have to meet a moving target that the company clearly can and will just change at any moment. The backtracking claiming “it was well known that it’s 3+ days a week” is d-mb. Everybody knew 11 days got you your 100% and the old dashboard reflected that. Most people are going to go the 11 and not a day more. Even for my coworker who goes 4 days a week is showing as non compliant when their metrics should be above 60% for every month.

Finance, IT and HR have 40-50% headcount reduction targets by 2030. Expect 5-10% "performance" cuts each year, very few backfills and a ROM 2028-2029.

Looks like adjustments will come much easier than expected…2 MLRP strikes within 5 years and you are to be separated…welcome to the jungle…

I posted my thoughts in a comment awhile back, here's my peon take on the state of things:

MGMT isn't held accountable; escape is just a re-org away.

There's zero vision at the top. JP/BH/GD are not the right guys by any metric. Our sales incentives are aligned such that sales will pressure RnD to continue hunting the same 20 banks with the same multi-year projects. That pressure will force RnD to acquiesce.

CIS continues to be a useless rube goldberg SaaS for ticket generation under their current leader.

All while leadership continues to say that we're looking to get leaner, and deliver at a higher volume etc. etc.

Within RnD we have principal developers who don't know how computers work. When I say this I mean the basics of networking, filesystems, algorithms.

I had Sr Principal dev ask me what DFS was.... this by itself is not the issue, but it certainly points to the issue: people are not held accountable for performance, nor are they expected to improve their technical acumen, and inversely, they are rewarded simply for staying.

IMO:

SAS should strive to be (in part) the AWS of data tools. There should have a simple portal such that customers can input their payment info, click on a given tool, and crank it up according to some set of configurable parameters. It should be seamless.

This will require:

CIS and RnD to merge

a real SRE program inside of the company (it's insane and an indictment of the company that no one I've spoken to in CIS has heard of the term SRE).

us to retain top talent, and purge dead weight.

sas would need to spend cycles reducing service footprint/consolidating services/improving big O performance. several gigs of RAM is insane for a login service. Not to mention the fragmentation of said service.

The same model should be followed for solutions, which means prodman will need to actually learn how to do their job. we have some of the most arrogant, yet ignorant, product managers in the business.

know your domain, know the market, and sell to that market. every solution can't do everything. boutique projects are fine, but that's not gonna move the needle.

there should be pre-configured, highly opinionated, solutions that can be delivered and adding value in under a month.

Curious to see the perspective from people around the company

My coworker was called into a meeting. They were informed of a low pega score. Despite meeting productivity and being a good employee, they felt accused of not working. They quit the next day. How does pega show someone not working when they are meeting production goals?

Hello my WF friends — I’m hoping to get some insight from hiring managers or recruiters on here. This may benefit others as well.

After many years of solid meets/exceeds performance, I ended up with an IM rating this past cycle. TLDR: my manager and I didn’t really click.

I’ve found a couple of positions in other areas that would actually be a promotion for me. I also have a positive history with one of the hiring managers, as she’s a former manager of mine.

My question is: would WF policy even allow me to be promoted into another role while in the IM “penalty box”? I don’t believe I’m on a formal PIP, so I don’t think I’m required to disclose last year’s IM when applying.

That said, I assume my IM rating would come up during the interview process. If so, I’m guessing the hiring manager would need to make a strong case to move forward with me, given that context.

Anyway, I’d appreciate any thoughts or experiences on this.

As our company is going through a tough time, I would like to propose the following ideas for saving costs:

• Pay Stephanie to do nothing. She has already proven that she creates negative value, so ensuring she does nothing will immediately increase the company's value.

• Move Bob to Cognizant, ideally to a low-cost location. This will allow him the opportunity to live the idea.

• Fire all the CTOs. Why do we need useless executives who have been unable to modernize our products for years? Replace them with AI bot. Productivity jump.

• Move Kelly to report to Koushik, so that both eventually leave. Huge savings.

Any idea you would propose?

the ai is failing and the sales team is getting the blame. Can’t sell a sh-t product bottom line

During Chambers' time, there was a very clear strategy and vision: to be number one or two in every product line that Cisco sells, combined with a vision to change the way we live, learn, and play. Today, there is no vision or strategy at Cisco. What is important is to maintain profit margins only. Over the past decade, Cisco has lost significant market share in every product line it sells, and in some of them it has long since ceased to be number one or two.

The layoffs keep happening over and over again but somehow the same useless people always remain. You know the type. The ones who've been here two decades, add nothing, and have mastered the art of hiding. They need to go, ASAP. Cut them and bring in people with current skills and actual energy. Fresh talent, not the same old faces doing nothing.

How can there be this many slackers still taking advantage of wfh? I hope the next series of cuts is purely for those that are not following policy. If management is serious about RTO, they should use their data to cleanly broom the folks that are not doing their part at this point and send a message. These cuts are long overdue. All of you real estate agents, photographers, off the books carpenters, and slackers in general could go and Ford would not miss a beat.

Everybody knows the abusers in their area - I personally like the analyst in our area that lives in a multi-million dollar house on the lake and comes into the office 2 days a week - Hey, she has a successful photography business to run!

Qualcomm employs over 52k with little or nothing to show for all that. Why do you guys need so many people to collect license royalties? Companies like Broadcom generate massive revenue/market-cap per employee. You guys are in the same space right?

So what is the problem with Qualcomm being in forever in the toilet?

Will they put you on the list if you don't complete your self evaluation? I don't understand the point of doing one if they plan to cut 10k jobs.

If swampers cannot hold or make any significant contributions to this company, why are they still around?

Has anyone heard any numbers for Q1 yet? I’ve heard they weren’t great, but no details.

Also hearing of a RIF mid April. But I always take that with a grain of salt. Just curious if anyone here has heard any rumblings?

Last quarter we made the numbers due to last minute unexpected deals and currency tailwinds

Looks like currency is now a headwind, anyone know how the numbers are looking ?

We are measured on metrics that don’t fully capture the work being done. You can be doing meaningful work and still look like you’re underperforming on paper. There’s a clear disconnect between effort and evaluation. I've seen people who were among our best get on the list of "underperformers" when nothing could be further from the truth. It’s honestly pretty frustrating.

Watching promotions happen makes you wonder whether performance is really the deciding factor or if knowing the right person is the trump card.