Thread regarding Verizon Communications Inc. layoffs

@a9 $2 a month? You probably live under a rock

@b1
I'm not in tech but use some systems that are terrible, even after years of use (Aptus for example)
Now it makes sense why improvements don't occur and we're told to "live with it"

Infosys is absolutely draining the life out of Verizon while delivering nothing. It will be the leech that ki-ls us all

@b1 Yes, we invest in an app or web experience, release it, and it works well. Then we hand it over to India and contractors so they can break it in a couple of weeks. Smart way to invest our money… we just keep doing it and keep doubling down after it doesn’t work. “Just spend more on that contractor/offshoring thing that doesn’t work! It has to work eventually!” :p

Pretty sure I know the small vendor you’re referencing that does great work stateside. They’re even pretty cheap from what I’ve heard. They’ve done projects we’ve paid offshore/big firms to do at like 20% of the cost and do a better job. I was hoping they would get the mobile app last year but weren’t given the chance.

I saw their team just got a bunch of their budget cut this year and lost some contracts to the big outsourcing/contracting firms in the name of “offshoring and insourcing cost-savings” nonsense. Now we aren’t even going to have things work at release after spending millions on them. We’ll just release them broken like years ago when that vendor wasn’t leading most of the new design and development project work.

Sad… now we can watch our experiences deteriorate faster, while we still spend tens and hundreds of millions of dollars on people who cannot do the work—to save hundreds of thousands or a couple million per year by not paying the people who’ve done the best work we’ve had for the last decade. Good luck everyone. Hope I’m still here in a few weeks; if not, I’m sure you can message my replacement in Bengaluru.

@b1 this is the most intelligent thing I’ve read on this site. Hope you’re close to Dan.

@a8 i understand your point but it's kinda moot.....in less than 10 seconds I opened a new tab, went to chatgpt, told it to write a simple python program for that and got:

# Simple program to add 2 + 2
result = 2 + 2
print("The sum of 2 + 2 is:", result)

Sorry I closed your ticket because it made my SLA look bad…

@a9 You said " It’s not our fault the cost of living in India is $2 a month" Your comment only shows how little you understand and how ignorant that view truly is.

Any product that works well and looks good at Verizon is built stateside with a small mix of US-based designers and software engineers (Verizon employees) and smaller US-based software design and development vendors (not GTS vendors. Either CX or Marketing Vendors). Typically small companies with elite teams in the US.

Once a product is completed or has a major update, we bring on a bunch of low-skill US or nearshore contractors from companies like Insights Global, Publicis Sapient, or Accenture, and then onboard large offshore teams in Verizon’s overseas offices to maintain and make small updates to our systems. This is when the quality falls off. Things stop working and start to look horrible. The contractors and India teams don’t have access to the top designers or engineers who built the system, and the focus shifts from quality to cost control. The work becomes maintenance-only with poorly planned, poorly design and poorly built extensions. We’ve tried to create models that let our best product teams (mostly small elite vendors) train others or build reusable design and development components that set a higher bar, but eventually those efforts get moved into the same low-cost delivery structure and lose their impact. That program too was recently moved to a mix of India and low-skill contractors who have no idea what is going on. In practice, it ends up replacing talent with headcount. Then the headcount ends up watching TheLayoff.com for news about layoffs. Rinse and repeat the crazy cycle, and only about 10–20% of anything at the company works because we don’t invest enough in the things that are working. We like to invest in things because we like the unit economics of it.

Directors and VPs know this, but they don’t like the politics of it. They need to show that their outsourcing efforts are working and that their teams of contractors are helping the “insourcing of the work,” meanwhile customers can’t even purchase a phone or plan because they saved a couple hundred thousand dollars this year. It doesn’t matter who builds the software or where, but if India can’t build it, contractors can’t build it, and most internal employees can’t build it, then we need to just let the small elite vendors and our best employees build everything and then gate-keep it from the people who are destroying it. Our stock price, and ultimately our jobs, depend on it.

And yes, layoffs are happening, and they will be impacting a lot of the enablers of this madness.

Outsourcing field ops too, no just Cx service. Jobs we were doing in house for 3-6k a night, now they turn around and cut a check for 60-70k to a contractor.. no exaggeration here. But no one cares cause “it’s a different budget”. But at the end of the year it’s one big Verizon budget. Doesn’t make sense to me but I’m just a peon

@a8 nah it doesn’t matter how good we are, how are we supposed to compete with people who are undercutting our salary by 80%. It’s not our fault the cost of living in India is $2 a month

People love to complain about outsourcing, yet many cannot even write a simple program to add 2 + 2. If you were truly efficient and worth your paycheck, outsourcing wouldn’t exist in the first place.

@a6 leeching

Indians should focus on fixing their own economy instead of Lee bing off of ours.

IT disaster reciprocates to every thing in the company.. call agents, sale, product every one will be in trouble because of bad IT.. Stop outsourcing to india