Thread regarding Verizon Communications Inc. layoffs

Culture..Verizon Credo was written as a text book and Lowell summarized "Sell the bananas you got"

The Lowell & Shammo mocked TM CEO Ledger wearing pink shirts while he tagged Vz & AT&T as D-mb and D-mber.

Vz Board was to busy protecting their own.

Adds up to failed leadership.

@38z we were treated poorly...at first. Those of us who had no interest into being rebadged were originally going to be terminated without any severance. Imagine that. 30+ years with the company and just summarily fired for refusing to be rebadged. However, the company made a mistake in that they did this at the same time as the first VSP was announced. We fought for, and got, the enhanced severance.

@gc that is good know that rumor was false. (I am the O.P.)

I worked in one of the same buildings that some of the I.T. folks worked in. I knew a few in passing. I remember the day they found out. They were in shock, as well as the rest of us.

And I'll be honest, I wouldnt blame any of them if it were true. I.T. was treated poorly.

@k8 @gc clarification on what I'm agreeing to. There was no sabotage. The IT folks who were outsourced were the utmost professionals who spent a good deal of time documenting their systems and training their replacements. It wasn't our fault most of those people couldn't program their way out of a paper bag. Every time they introduced new features or tried to fix a bug, they broke something. They'd fix that and break something else. Unit testing, nah. Systems testing, nada. Integration or user acceptance testing, you get the drift. You know the old adage, you get what you pay for. So glad I was able to retire. I come back here from time to time as I still have friends that work for the company. I don't recognize it anymore.

@gc this is the absolute truth. I lived it.

As many have stated, it began with Mr. McAdam. He was the death star come to life, with a beam, not aimed at other carriers, but inward unfortunately. Not to repeat all the ill-fated stratergizing others mentioned; my personal favorite is that the collective brain trust put Marni a step away from the CEO chair - WT actual F.

When we were in VA in training for the 2016 strike - and in the wake of the 10 king ransoms for the VZW purchase - everyone was asking the same question. What is the big audacious plan to ensure continued success in the marketplace...and nobody could venture a reasonable guess. And then Lowell double-downed saying he wished he would arrived sooner as he would have pulled the proverbial plug on the FiOS buildout. Considering the recent Frontier purchase, one can appreciate this Kafkaesque moment.

Yes, It started with Lowell shedding wireline profit centers to fund his experiments with Go90, Aol, Yahoo, etc. Then paid a premium to Vodaphone to secure 100% of Vz wireless and the huge debt load. That set the stage for Hans, who with Shankar, decided to outsource wireline to Infosys and cut ties with a large contingent of IT staff both onshore and VZI. It was and still is a trainwreck.

Then add to that epic disaster trying to market VZ as a premium service justifying the high plan prices.... all while shedding lines. The math did not work, never worked, but Hans stuck to it month/month, year/year.

Dan has a chance to right the ship, but so far, he has only cut the rank and file, and few execs. He really needs to take a hard look at the execs still around, cut through the BS overselling, and start cutting those ranks where we all know have failed time and time.

I was with Verizon since the early 2000's in Network Engineering Roles, I did not leave by my choice. I won't have the order exactly right, but here goes:
MCI acquisition Verizon, bought them and did nothing to grow the assets, at least in the South. 18 years later, Verizon wrote down 5.8 billion. Some of the environment changed, a lot of it was Verizon. Verizon kept the MCI and Wireless engineering teams separate, they did not mix for 10 years it seems. One Fiber project was supposed to fix that, but too little too late.
iPhone, Verizon let ATT negotiate an exclusive deal on the iPhone. ATT had massive capacity issues after the iPhone launched, but customers left Verizon in droves to get the iPhone. Verizon lost out because of a Verizon splash screen on the phone!? Along with that was the LG Chocolate and Blackberry Storm. Verizon lied to us all saying these were iPhone killers, not even a flesh wound.
ATT FirstNet deal, whatever the terms of that was, ATT has a superior First Responder network because of it. This is consistent monthly revenue and loyalty. They got money and used it to upgrade the towers.
Sprint. Verizon should have bought them. While TMobile was launching sprint's 2.5ghz WiMax spectrum as quickly as they could, Verizon was trying to catch TMobile by overbidding on C-band because Millimeter wave spectrum was all but worthless.
Marnie Walden - in her desire to be the most powerful woman in wireless, she sc--wed Verizon Royally. She was the force behind "Go90", "Oath", and the AOL and Yahoo acquisitions. She bailed when they named Vestberg, but the damage was done.
Verizon bought companies for a tiny bit of IP, then shut them down.
Verizon bought Vessel (YouTube competitor) Intel OnCue, Edge Cast Networks, Yahoo Answered and either shut them or shut them down in 2 years. Verizon also partnered with RedBox for a streaming service that lasted 1.5 years. 26 million for 18-19 months. Brilliant.
More recently, Verizon threw away Nokia gear and went to Samsung in roughly 46% of the country. Additionally the C-band Rollout was salt and pepper. TMobile was building 2.5ghz 5G sites before the ink was dry, Verizon started AFTER the deal was closed, they did little to no prep work.
Long term, Verizon underestimated TMobile. We used to laugh at them, their bare-bones cell sites, their lack of engineers in the field, their pre-paid customer base. Look where they are now.
One more thing, Verizon su-ks at negotiating and writing contracts and brokering deals. iPhone, FirstNet, Fiber Franchises, you name it. Verizon tends to su-k at it.
Two stiff points of competition working against Verizon: ATT's fiber right-of-way and knowledge around that process helped them build sites plus they had more mature processes around Turf vendors that spilled over to tower and small cell leases and procedures.
TMobile was supposed to be acquired by ATT, but when that failed they had a roughly 4-6 billion penalty to be paid by ATT if the deal failed for any reason. ATT paid them 3 billion in cash. This skyrocketed TMO's network build. They put that money straight into Network engineering and it showed.
I thought I was done, but Verizon decimated the NOC, the NOC engineers were sharp women and men that needed a stepping stone and were eager and hungry to learn and do better. Now they barely answer the phone or call out on an outage.
Then there is just the waste. I saw on more than one occasion massive equipment was decommissioned without ever being powered or integrated. As good as engineers were at Verizon, there were some that had no reason to be there, a front-line engineer III was going to the gym with the director of network?! Was he there to be a personal trainer or an engineer? But wait, there's more, but I wont go into that.
I don't wish anything bad for Verizon, but they have been self-effacing their own business and profits for a long, long time.

@dh 100%

I do not think VZ’s top brass understands that the most important features of the company are the network, and the customer engagement personnel, and the underlying software that empowers those aspects. The fact that we outsource out the majority of the labor required to build and maintain these systems pretty much proves this point. Instead of hiring real US based engineers with excellent communication skills and business fundamentals. We hire agencies that staff up with the lowest cost individuals they can find, then sell us that labor for the highest premium they can negotiate. Until this fundamental flaw in thinking and practice is refactored we will not innovate, we will not create excellent customer interactions, and our network will not beat our competitors. I have seen no acknowledgment of this weak link in the company so I’m left concluding that our strategists are unaware of this. Until this is verbally acknowledged and a plan is laid out to address it. We all need to consider this just a paycheck because we can at best tread water. The middle management layers need to be replaced with competent big tech leadership at high wages. Many of which are free agents right now for obvious reasons! Break up the nepotistic hiring networks that have placed incompetent leaders in critical positions managing our network and software. If that does not happen it’s tread water at best, and decline at worst. Meanwhile go look at our internal job board. You will see more “product owner” rolls that are not engineers, than engineering rolls onshore. These product owner rolls do not create value in the engagement software or the network. They simply document and shepherd along the process. This fundamental misunderstanding of what powers the actual product we deliver to our customers is our kryptonite.

Verizon always had the same mistake most American corporations do. They strategize quarter by quarter most of the time of year by year at best. Even when they claim to make five year plans, those don't last a quarter. They look to make those investor calls look good at the expense of what happens 2, 5, or 10 years down the road.

I've also seen first hand how executive leadership only wants yes men around them so they won't take views that challenge what they want.

We made classic “strategy theater” mistakes.

We chased big, flashy acquisitions outside our core, AOL and Yahoo, and burned billions. Worse, it fragmented focus. Instead of doubling down on what we actually did well, we tried to be everything. That never works.

Outsourcing support to Infosys was another self-inflicted wound. Costs looked better on paper, but execution tanked. More errors, more rework, more time wasted. Net negative.

Then we cut our highest-value people because they were “expensive.” There was no regard for institutional knowledge or downstream impact. We didn’t just lose talent, we broke teams and ki-led morale.

None of this was inevitable. It was a series of decisions that prioritized short-term optics over long-term capability.

"He laid off 2500 IT workers, and rumor spread that some of them intentionally created system issues to plague the new outsourced IT."

That's a lie that needs to stop. Infosys was given plenty of training and all documentation on the systems that were handed over to them. Their problem was/is their own turnover rate. Every time we would train someone and they got up to speed, they would leave for a better job. VZ would then have to eat the expense by stopping all we were working on to retrain Infosys on the systems they were supposed to have full control over mind you. Also, 1) The people who were trained weren't qualified. 2) They left and didn't train their replacements, this was repetitive and constant. 3) Their mgmt (who also continually changed) simple neither managed the apps/systems nor the staff. 4) Most did not have clearance to look at data because so much of their staff is offshore.

So many truths about the number of failures. Underlying all of this was arrogance. Another way this arrogance played out was when Apple released the iPhone. "We don't need the iphone, we have the Blackberry Storm!!!"

I started in 1995 and was laid off last year where do I start…

yes it was all lowell mcadams and the wireless part of the company with all their partying and we are the best nickel and diming the customers and the excess spending on the management side of wireless.this was the downfall of the company and their arrogance,now look at verizon ,its a sorry place too work and you all know it.

@b2 yep... how many SVPs do y'all have these days?

@ax You're back! We missed you.

@ay and AT&T only got the iphone after T-Mobile's CEO passed on it (yet inexplicibly kept his job for years). None of the people running any of the carriers has been particularly bright.

I started prior to Vz and a lot of the senior management and chief level officers in the network group were either degreed engineers or people that came up through the ranks and understood the network.

My latest management structure is completely void of engineers and/or people that came up through the ranks. These are intelligent and hard working individuals but they have no concept of the day to day operations of the network.

I think that we got away from what made us good.

IMHO, VZ is still a traditional phone company only focused on generating revenue. Produce excellence? No. Customer service excellence? No. New product innovation…..you get the point.

Terremark was an innovative company before and after VZ. VZ provided zero innovation and raised prices. It’s a wonder it lasted as long as it did. How during Covid were we able to destroy Blue Jeans? The leaders brought over from Blue Jeans had great ideas for adjusting to the market. Yet, they were owned by a phone company who can’t move quickly and squeezed them for what little they could. MCI, what significant innovation has taken place since VZ purchased them? VZB has been spinning the fMCI products and services for decades and not kept up with the competition.

Offshoring is not innovation. Purchasing another company is not innovation. Redrawing the PowerPoint with a different color is not either. With deep pockets, VZ could have reinvented itself many times over. It’s still just a phone company.

I started in late 2000. The first big folly was not following through with the original plan of forming Verizon - to spin off Verizon Wireless into its own company. The IPO was ready to go but got yanked when the market changed and an IPO was not going to be enough to pay for the first of many huge spectrum buys. Employees at the time got "VARs" that were to convert to stock options. That would've let VZ do what they knew how to do, and let VZ Wireless know what they knew how to do.

Instead, that begat visions of VZ leadership drooling over VZ Wireless's profits. BUT - with the Vodafone partnership, VZ couldn't touch VZ Wireless's profits without giving Vodafone their cut. Thus, the buyout of Vodafone. Instead, VZ Wireless leaders were hogtied, having to bow to the whims of those who did not know wireless, and left with budgets that did now allow funding at the level VZ WIreless needed at the time to grow and dominate the industry.

Vestiges of this could be seen in Basking Ridge - hallways with glass doors and card readers that seemed to have no purpose - but whose purpose was to demarcate VZ from VZ Wireless.

Great question….its lack of consistent leadership…..Think about it the leaders who were…(Terramark, Go90, AOL, Yahoo, BlueJeans, VodaPhone, Frontier, 5G MM, MEC…..) , the bozo’s don't have a clue . Never seen an organization with AD’s(Glorified managers), Directors, Sr Directors, VP’s, SVP’s and multiple that between redundant roles between wireless and wireline !

Change doesn’t engergize, it adds FAT ! And there is still a lot of FAT in leadership with 2 / 3 direct reports to directors ….lookup inside.verizon.com intranet with every leader less than 10 direct reports…you know where the FAT is across the board. Lookup all the nepotism hires who were hired for different reasons !

Verizon's decision not to partner with Apple at the launch of iPhone allowed AT&T to capture a significant share of the smartphone market.

Apple launched the iPhone exclusively with AT&T in June 2007.
This exclusivity lasted for five years, allowing AT&T to dominate the iPhone market.

You thought that was bad? You haven’t seen anything yet.

"AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have an agreement in principle to form a joint venture to eliminate wireless dead zones by pooling spectrum and building a unified platform."

Let’s drop the PR spin.

If coverage is now “shared,” if infrastructure is effectively pooled, then what exactly is Verizon selling that justifies a premium over T-Mobile? Brand? Habit? That’s not a strategy—that’s denial.

Dead zones have plagued Verizon for decades. They weren’t solved because they couldn’t be. They weren’t solved because no one in charge cared enough to sacrifice short-term optics for long-term investment. No immediate bonus, no action. Simple as that.

And now, suddenly, collaboration is the answer? No—this is what happens when competition fails and growth stalls. This isn’t leadership. It’s capitulation.

They’re not building something new. They’re carving up what’s left.

Call it a “joint venture” if you want. In reality, it’s the slow dismantling of differentiation. The quiet admission that the model is broken—and no one has a real replacement.

And while this plays out, the inside of the company rots: top talent leaves, resources dry up, and whatever edge once existed gets diluted into irrelevance.

This isn’t the future. It’s the endgame.

I am not a finance guy but buying our shares from Vodafone put the company in a huge debt hole that is still negatively impacting it. Then the ponderous decisions with regards to AOL, Yahoo, Go 90, Terramark, Media Flo and other companies not related to the cellular competencies.

More recently, the mmWave spectrum purchase and subsequent rollout was less than advisable. It has its place but widespread coverage continuity is not it.

Even more recently the construction of data centers adjacent to MTSO offices did not manifest into any large cash opportunities. Private 4g/5g has some promise but so far, it isn't a big money maker.

Outsourcing IT functions has not been successful and moving Customer Service overseas has negatively impacted a once highly thought of department.

The equipment swap from Nokia to Samsung not only hurt network performance but cost a huge amount of money which could have been better spent on improvements.

The constant layoffs and separations have eroded morale to the point of employee dysfunction not to mention the loss of highly skilled employees.

Maybe the question to ask is what decisions were actually good?