Thread regarding U.S. Bank layoffs

@g4 Most of the value has been outsourced or riffed, it's gone. It took decades of pass-down knowledge, trial and error, and experience to get to where we were, when we were excellent. You cannot replace that with temps, contractors, vendors, offshoring who are not accountable, who don't give a sh-t.
You cannot cut your way to sustained growth, profits. Forced Needs Improvement reviews rating quotas, no raises for many and remotes too, forever, poor raises during record inflation, devalue hiring, job grades, lower pension plan further, perfect year and still not even 100% bonus. Filthy dirty desks and conference rooms everywhere, sharing desks, rto for false reasons. Worthless hr and legal keep the bad and rif the good, makes no sense. The professionalism and value are gone, replaced by people in jammies and pink hair. Been a steady decline since china flu. We are the dollar store of banks heading towards the 2nd hand store. I've never seen moral this low at any job.

@eh Would you invest as an insider? I've been pulling all my money out. I've never seen less work been getting done and at lower quality. People stopped caring.

@eh The KBWB (large bank index) is up nearly 35% over the last year, so USB being up ~30% over the same period actually demonstrates underperformance relative to its benchmark.

Not sure what media you’re referring to that “loves her.”

Analyst sentiment is fairly evenly split between overweight and hold ratings — hardly unanimous conviction on the growth narrative.

USB has been a chronic underperformer for years, just like the business lines GK previously ran before she got a job she's not qualified for.

Show sustained outperformance versus the benchmark and broad analyst buy-in on the growth story, then there’s something to celebrate.

@OP Poor old Bill can't get past his decade-old USB Derangement System. The fact is:

The stock is up more than 30% since GK took over.

The media loves her.

Wall Street has a dozen buy recommendations.

So I ask: If Bill falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear him, does he make a sound?

@av Thankfully, they waved that requirement for employees hired, "out of footprint," way back. I'd have gone nuts having to deal with paper checks, especially since my primary is and has been USAA, which doesn't have branches in my state.

We hear ya Bill.

@aq First, they changed the geocode for remote workers and capped people’s salary at mid point so they can have skimp on paying well deserved merit increase and bonus to employees.
Now, they tell us to deposit money so they can milk the employees?
Boy, they must think that we are stupid.
No thank you.

@av yep. I had to get paper checks for a long time because I refused to open a bank account with us.

@aq they did require us to be customers for many years. Our direct deposit could only be made into a USB account. That practice only stopped after a lawsuit.

@aq ""How can you be a good employee and speak knowledgeably if you don't use our products?" Wow. That is truly vile. Shocking that any employer would be saying this to its employees. I would never in a million years bank with my employer. There needs to be separation of personal finances from the business I work for.

They're also trying to revive it by guilting/pressuring employees to become customers. The development day segment about using our products was disgusting. "How can you be a good employee and speak knowledgeably if you don't use our products?"

They'd absolutely require us to be customers if they legally could. This place will never get a DIME from me as a customer for very good reasons

AI-augmented comment:

The era of traditional management consulting is structurally declining. The inflection point was the rise of “digital transformation,” which effectively repositioned a significant portion of the industry from strategic advisory into large-scale procurement and vendor orchestration. The operating model shifted from designing differentiated capabilities to recommending the acquisition or outsourcing of pre-packaged technology solutions.

As a result, value creation increasingly became tied to vendor selection, implementation management, and spend allocation rather than deep institutional or domain expertise. In practice, this lowered the barrier to participation: the ability to manage stakeholder relationships and facilitate enterprise purchasing decisions often became more important than technical fluency or operating experience.

The downstream effect has been the proliferation of large platform and product-management organizations responsible for highly complex systems, despite frequently lacking meaningful expertise in the underlying business domain, technology architecture, or operational processes they oversee.

McKinsey is cancer. They have a terrible reputation that continues to get worse.

McKinsey is full of "book smart" people who know how to create fancy powerpoint decks and spin a story (whether the storyline has any truth to it or not), but in general they have no clue how to actually run a business. They hire their consultants typically with very little actual work experience then put them on "engagements" to tell companies how to structure and run their business. One of the biggest shams in history. I have spent 20+ years at various large companies and can tell you from personal experience in having to work with these clown consultants that their playbook on "fixing" a business is remarkably similar regardless of what business they are "advising". They do a "spans and layers" analysis to see how many direct reports each manager has, suggest cutting layers of management (without knowing what anyone actually does and what this will break) to increase the "span", suggest sorting an employee roster by pay grade and/or salary, and cut most of the people near the top of the list, find a few "process improvement" ideas that the bank's management should be able to find on their own if the leadership team is doing its job, and LOOK WE SAVED YOU $10M! Many times they destroy morale and break a bunch of things because they don't actually understand all the inter-dependencies of the things they propose cutting or changing. I don't understand why businesses hire these clowns. If the senior leadership team is competent, they shouldn't need them.