What would turn this place around? New leadership? New strategy? Something else?
26 replies (most recent on top)
@14z It's a thing in Hyderabad, apparently.
They ain't worth a pedicab, but OT runs busses for those do-nothings.
The question is whether we’re going to go forward to tomorrow or past to the back.
- Dan Quayle
https://youtu.be/b31BwYA5-Zo?si=hfGmoGbyJ1MfyK6e
https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/dan-quayle-quotes
https://youtu.be/aYJVfd5WRhE?si=Ybvl9yeJC3FTIlfG
Get rid of Sandy who is still su-king up to Mark with her Memory Book. We are trying to overcome the mistake of Mark and move on. Not to be reminded of the person whose ego is more important than employees career and welfare.
@x2 , thanks for the info. Never knew the Indian region gets free travel compensation as part of job remuneration. In my region, most perks has been slowly removed. Only ones left are the health care and well being rebate.
Not only Sandy has Stockholm syndrome. #memorybook
Is the Memory Book perforated and on a cardboard roll?
@yh someone needs to teach Sandy how to read the room!
What kind of id--t sends a company-wide memo about a "Memory Book" for MB?
The sycophant just can't stop sycophanting.
Get rid of all the director's. The most useless position in this org.
@wb Transportation is often provided as part of the terms of employment in India. OT can afford to do it because the pay is in the gutter. It's all about looking good over there and taking jobs away from North America.
New leader has to show conviction of the heart and drop all development in India. Support can stay their, but that's about it.
Most big companies are doing the same. India doesn't give you innovation at all.
I've seen it with 3 companies I've been a part of. They are given products that are in maintenance mode and the teams there can barely do bug fixes, but new features, forget about it. There QA and support basically want you to give them all the answers because they are gumshoes with very little understanding and have no interest in learning anything for the long run. Because they aren't going to be there for the long run. OT is just a stepping stone in their desire to get paid more.
I prefer working with Americans who put their skin in the game.
@jr where's the free food and free cab?
OT business model is to acquire, then reduce cost. That's where the profit comes from. The entire org exists for this singular purpose - processes, internal tools, the ELT - everything is about optimizing on cost.
You want organic growth? You need to optimize on innovation.
No one on the ELT is willing to do this. It's far easier to have an all hands and say we need to focus on innovation, it's another thing to actually invest in it. This might mean paying more for talent; it might mean, preferring to use industry leading tools, not just the tools we get from MS (or worse, dogfooding the terrible tools we've acquired over the years); it might mean giving teams more autonomy (and their own budgets). It definitely requires taking risks - which is a totally different mindset from what has been entrenched at every level inside OT.
Maybe you start small and experiment with making startups inside the org. Now give these teams fresh, properly paid talent (clearly, new ideas are not coming from inside the org) - and permission to pick their own tools. Be willing to accept that maybe only 1 out of 5 of these teams might succeed.
What will likely happen instead: they will rank all products by revenue generation. They will cut/sell off the poorest performing products, they will try to squeeze more profit out of the highest rank products by further reducing running costs.
Close down India. It's no benefit giving knowledge to people that cycle out of the company within a year or two.
They can't retain employees and you can't have newbies trying to learn complex code.
To answer your question - So retain engineers, fire managers, cut down facilities!!!!
May be stop visionless layoffs. There has be a logic and strong reasoning around simply firing a big bunch of people in name of ramp down, WFR, downsize, performance etc. Instead if you really want to turn around losses into profits, start saving unnecessities first, for example - free food, free cabs, office interior changes, no need to replace the coffee mugs, there was no need to replace old office chairs with these highly expensive new chairs, also stop allocating a complete replacement laptops for simple issues like 1 key not working (repair it, or change just the keyboard man). Like this there would be many more facilities that can be cut.
It is better to retain all these mindful tech resources whom we have already trained, and paying far less salaries. After firing them OT will have to respend in the entire hiring process, joining drop-outs, satisfy high salary demands, and the training of new joiners.
Incompetent management who lack knowledge of the product lifecycle. Innovation is stifled by process and CYA compliance. Cleaning house will be hard because these managers say all the right things. Need a ground up peer review from engineering on up. No one believes these surveys are anonymous, purposeful to squash honest feedback.
Get ta fook out all toxic sh-t first. And there’s a ton of a shithole of them.
Get rid of the bloated bureaucracy middle managers.
To the newly crowned OT Executive Leaders & Advisers who may be 'monitoring' this site:
IMHO, (and respectfully) all of OT needs to be broken up and sold off in parts to Industry specific PE Firms. They are the most qualified to turn around non-performing assets.
We know the DD for some non-core assets is already well underway.
That's the best scenario to pay off all (or most) of your debt and provide a final ROI to your long suffering shareholders. Take it private.
The majority of the SME's (ie: boots on the ground) should be retained.. Individual Contributers, Sr Managers and some Directors.
Lastly the current (legacy OT) Leadership including the ELT, SLT, and most Sr. Directors could be given retention bonuses- to help with the initial transition (hand off and KT) only, with their knowledge/acceptance none of them be retained permanently. They along with the Board of Directors enabled this toxic abusive and fiscally irresponsible train wreck to continue for well over 10 years. It would be foolish to allow that toxicity to sneak back into the business the PE firms ultimately intend to IPO.
depends what the goal ultimately is. "turn around" means different things to different people. probably want to figure out a growth plan first, and care about making money.
There are thousands of people here whose only purpose is to create processes and some in triplicate. Engineering is bogged down in busy work and not innovating.
Also, the over dependence on India engineering is ki-ling us.
Getting bought by SAP
Dead Mess Walking!
@a2 I'm not in either department - but the AEs are FAR from saints either. Thesis time.
Some of their customer needs are at versions that need extended support without actually checking that they need it. ie The literal moment something goes wrong you then have to upsell the customer on extended support due to someone else's lack of check, if not tell them their order wont actually help em. Some wont even bother to check what variant of some products you need. Since some products are carved out - if you get an AE like that who wont fix the wrong variant - literally all you can do is ask for a refund. Sorry. And I think that su-ks too.
Renewals isn't safe either - extended support commission is one thing - but some of yall literally do not know what's on your own RC. As respectfully as I can - why do we have folks like that?? If you're sending broken RCs or approving things you 100% shouldn't you aren't exactly maximizing 'ShArEhOlDeR vAlUe'. You can be losing as much if not more money than Compliance being too scared to lose a single customer. If you're not being the human getting the data checked - you're automating yourself out of your work. And giving easy PIP/fire reasons if they want to look into that. Meanwhile the 2 other customer support teams have their own arbitrary and sometimes random _ss rules. That on occasion mess with both AEs and Renewals' work. Also their quality varies, like to a comical extent.
The release issues I see - those folks I give grace to. Yall really just need more help - we 100% sell releases that are not ready. And that's a pretty simple fix for most dev/engineering teams. Either Athena aint helping or maybe the RE team just needs more boots. Not my department idk.
The marketing - baffling. We're trying to appeal to million dollar deals with gen z humor? This isn't Wendy's Twitter - most of Gen Z can't even get a job now; no place to start. Much less run those places to chuckle.
I dont know all the departments, never will. But most decent folks probably know issues of those they interact with. Tldr - shi_'s _ucked. Fundamentally every dept I see has at least one major issue. If that's not addressed, it's not actually getting fixed.
For tha major fixes (some of these I will not like either, imagine some are unpopular and that's okay) - I agree with cutting down on product. It's going to help nearly every team (but you better NOT use that to cut folks, OT.)
AI - if you're not putting that into the new ticketing system OT needs to go through the depts and see WHICH ACTUALLY WILL USE THEM OVER SHOEHORNING. The AIs we can use are side products, assistants. You're just proving AI and upskilling are buzzwords to us. If we can't put it front and center we don't actually want AI, we want to look like we do. Our customers though - they benefit from the agentic AI. But not us. Side thing - do any automation (AI or bot) carefully. Your data is a mess - you're going to need humans to fix it or do one massive push prior. If not you'll lose customers, overcorrect back to people, and the new folks you hired won't really know solutions. I trust my dead pet over OT to do it responsibly. I don't like it but being realistic yes there are ways to safely automate/AI away people. If you actually implemented it right - you have a chance.
The teams selling anything - product support, products themselves - yall need to sort yourselves. At one point or another you step on each other. And either way, you folks are building up a case of not maximizing shareholder value/revenue. That's AEs, Complaince, Renewals and (technical support with Extended Support.) All of yall are at risk on that - even if Licensing provided too much they [REALLY SHOULD] have accountability for that. Why not yall? One employee with enough emails is ALL it takes to potentially nuke 3 major revenue departments. That's not a good, stable company - that's a piñata.
Services folks - PLEASE get resources to know your products prior to a project and have support/product checks implemented as a prerequisite. It may end projects early, but it's better than the customer experience I've seen some of you all in the middle of.
But - I don't know who'd actually, meaningfully push changes like that. ELT are too hidden away and the directors/ VPs don't care. If the depts themselves aren't already fixing these, maybe that's a sign we're too far gone. Able to survive, but never truly thrive again. I wont pretend I have a solution to it.
Completely change marketing completely change it. Recognise there is competitors, simplfy the product catalogue. Encourage AE to work alongisde renewals and compensate them accordingly. There is a nasty team of renewal reps that will sneak in extra product decieve the customer sell them stuff they don't need.