Thread regarding Sabre Holdings layoffs

@16s those "ROI never" efforts are great. I especially like when we spend development budget to do something that results in a reduction in revenue and and an increase in costs. I wonder if the plan all along is to cancel the project and then claim cost savings by stopping work on something that work should never have started on. Probably not, but I helps me with peace of mind in the midst of the incompetence.

Challenging an assignment gets you on the layoff list. They like cheap BLR yes-men who are always 90% done and positive it'll be complete in two weeks. Which means never.

I was assigned to a project that was going to add functionality on TPF. Immediate tech debt. Why? To save $10k per year. Cost of project? 6 devs * 3 months + pm + mgmt overhead = about $1 million. ROI never. I was new to the team. Once I understood, I "challenged" heartily. My boss reprimanded me for it. Next layoff, I was gone. Sabre in a nutshell.

@r4 From your response, it seems that you are an individual Software Engineer, and not a developer. As a software engineer, have you ever checked with the higher management, the ROI on the work that has been handed over to you. Have you reached out to the EA behind the design and asked about how the solution will improve market share or reduce cost. Or you just accepted like an offshore developer, what is sent your way and did the work?. If every software engineer had challenged the feasibility, market value, ROI, Sabre would have not reached this situation. But if the culture all of us enabled is silent acceptance of what ever the EA team provided and never challenged, we are a part of the problem too. Especially since the comments here indicates no one got any thing of any value from the enterprise architects, but kept on building on their direction!.

What exactly is the candid conversation you want to have? All the decisions you are describing are made by high management. What is an individual contributor engineer supposed to do other than the work they are being paid to do? These billions of dollars invested in architecture that yielded no returns are no one's fault but the ones who made the decision.

@m6 speaking from first hand experience, I have no idea what the enterprise architects do because they have not had anything to do with my systems migrating from Tulsa through various other locations briefly untill finally reaching the Google cloud. Whenever I have seeked their assistance they have been worse than useless, so I just handled it as best I could and eventually got it done. It was incredibly frustrating and probably took at least 10x longer than it should have taken.

They could all be laid off and that would impact nothing. It would be better if they did their jobs though.

@fn This is the most accurate explanation of why Sabre spent quarter of a billion dollars every year till 2020 as capital expenditure and then buried this cost as expensed Technology cost from 2020 onwards. But here is the real concern: whenever a migration plan (DC, VM, or Cloud) is initiated, the first step is sizing—volumes, growth, and compute and then the costing.

Are we to believe that Enterprise Architects with 25+ years of tenure failed to do basic homework on sizing and costing before green-lighting these migrations? These EAs often act as the "sole guardians" of the solution, yet they seemingly missed the fundamentals of fiscal planning??.

If the EA team is a hurdle to innovation and has failed to manage the P&L of their own solutions, why is there a lack of accountability? While many have survived recent rounds of layoffs, the question remains: How does the company justify these heavy paychecks for "archaic knowledge" that led us here? Until the EA team is held accountable for the financial outcomes of their technical roadmaps, Sabre’s path to recovery remains blocked.

Management is so messed up that there is a fantastic opportunity for a new owner to come in to clean house, gut the management layers, and install a new management ethos where they actually manage instead of taking a pay check while doing almost nothing.

Instigate an anonymous survey that everyone does of their manager to determine each manager's competence at doing the job of being a manager.

The new owners could also determine what products customers use, how essential to customers each product is, and determine how difficult each product is to maintain. With that knowledge the products could each be priced, staffed, or sunset appropriately.

It would be a lot of work to clean up the mess but it could be done and the company could be hugely profitable afterwards.

@fq There are NO product P&Ls because the data is so dirty, they cannot create them.

Please, if Sabre is going to offer customers an AI chatbot or agentic AI whatever, please figure out how to make a profit from that BEFORE it's rolled out for customers to use. Please.

If we make a loss on it, then we don't make that back on higher volume. If we make a loss on every transaction, the higher volume makes it an even bigger loss. This seems obvious but Sabre management obviously does not understand this.

@dm agreed 100%. If my manager wants me to train my replacement, I am under no illusion about the result. I will become replaceable. Hopefully I will be valuable enough to transition to something even better, but realistically Sabre probably just wants to replace me with someone cheaper. Fine. I am under no illusion about that. But my manager better wake up to the reality that it takes a long time to train my replacement and you only learn the things I have learned by doing those things for several years. I cannot just hand you a convenient notebook of the complete contents of my brain.

Successful succession planning involves a constant cycle of rotating new junior people into teams who can spend the next few years gaining the skills and knowledge that allow them to become senior, ready and prepared to take over all of the responsibilities of the senior people who are constantly rotating out of the team. Sometimes, inevitably, someone leaves the team before reaching senior level skills and knowledge, and that's why junior people must be constantly rotated in, to reduce the risk that a senior person leaves without anyone ready to take over their responsibilities.

We have gone far too long with with cycle broken. Now senior people are laid off with nobody assuming their responsibilities, not even a junior person. It's a disaster waiting to happen and the cause is more incompetent management.

@hn there are also managers that don't know basic Java programming syntax, and some that don't know basic Linux administration commands, and some that don't know basic Terraform syntax, and some that don't know an infinite list of other basic things that are outside the domain of determining what work will get done and ensuring that that work is getting done (which is the same thing a scrum master also does).

It is reasonable to expect a manager to also wear the scrum master hat, but it is unreasonable for a manager to wear the developer or system administrator hat. These are 3 different highly specialized jobs that require 3 different teams of highly specialized people.

Another example of the management incompetency is not understanding the need for specialization of labor roles. If everyone tries to do everything then everything will be done worse than if separate specialists did each separate thing. If you visit an auto manufacturing plant production line, the person who designs the engines doesn't also upholster the seats an write the software for the head unit GUI. That would be ridiculous, but that is what Sabre's incompetent management has their people do.

Even worse, in the Sabre auto manufacturing plant, not only does one person design engines, upholster seats, and write GUI software but the do so in isolation not as a team and without uniform standards or training so the end result has no consistency with any other car that anyone else creates, each car is unique... and each car is low quality because it is impossible for one person to build high levels of expertise that many skills.

@fw I couldn’t agree more. Managers are expected to handle situations like this. I’m sure there are many great managers doing meaningful work — no offense to them — but there are also some who seem to just exist in the role.

I’ve personally seen a manager who has been at Sabre for over a decade and still doesn’t know basic Git commands. Not exaggerating.

@fn Wait until b2c stupid Ai "conversational sales" costs will kick in.
They have absolutely zero clues about LLM usage costs, scaling, almost daily humongous top level security flaws etc.

@fw How can they manage if they do not have ANY decision power?
They can't effectively hire people if they need them. They can't really fire people, best they can is to move them to some garbage projects. They can't promote people. They can't really shift deadlines or cut features out. They can't get more investment because everything is always cut.

They even can't get better hardware for team members or give them one time bonus or something. They don't decide on anything what really matters. They are corporate bureaucracy, nothing more.

Another example of incompetent management are managers who do not manage.

Managers do not need scrum masters to manage the work their team is doing. That's what the manager should be doing.

The manager should be determining what specific work their team members each work together on and ensuring that that work gets done optimally, in a reasonable time, and in a way that ensures that that work can continue even when their team members leave the team for any reason.

This relationship between managers and their teams should be the same no matter if a team member is themselves a manager or is an individual contributor, and no matter if the manager is an EVP, SVP, VP, Director, or Manager.

Sabre has far too many managers who do not actually manage their team members. Incompetent management allows this to happen from the top down as a cascade of incompetent mismanagement. Finding a manager who actually manages their team members is almost impossible above the lowest tier of management. The higher the management tier, the less managing they do.

If you're a manager, have some integrity and do your job. Stop stealing your salary from Sabre.

Did we ever look at the P&L of the specific products we built?

Certainly not. That's why we have essential products that customers depend upon but which have nobody to support nor maintain them. How? Because clueless salespeople give away essential products for free and clueless bean counters think all free products should be sunset.

Guess who is to blame... bingo... incompetent management.

THIS... and went on for decades. Do NOT fault the "legacy" employees. "Let's just lay them off/fire them just before retirement" and leaders that do not care anymore since Sam G. left (and when I left). Paint the picture the way you wish - corporate leaders do not care about you... AT ALL. They now just show up and line their own pockets, dissolve talent, and leave. You do not matter anymore. Sad times.

Where did that money go?

Before 2020, we wasted millions getting off VMs in Tulsa to go to Carrolton and Plano, then wasted millions going back to Tulsa, using over specified expensive bare metal servers instead of VMs.

Then we wasted millions going from bare metal servers in Tulsa to VMs in the Amazon cloud.

Then we wasted millions going from Amazon cloud VMs to OpenShift containers on Amazon cloud VMs.

Then we wasted millions going from this assortment to VMs or containers on the Google cloud.

Then we wasted millions going from one Google cloud region to at least two.

Then we wasted millions reducing the number of Google cloud VMs and containers to the absolute bare minimum that are hopefully still enough to provide sufficient resiliency during a disaster.

Every time we had to migrate our software to different servers we all had to independently reinvent to same wheels rather than one single Sabre server administration team handling the moving of the software to new servers, so software developers wasted millions trying to learn how to be server administrators in all of these different environments that we moved the software to.

We also wasted millions training non-technical people on using the Amazon cloud that they would never use, then we wasted millions training the same non-technical people on using the Google cloud that they would never use either, and I almost forgot how we also wasted millions training these non-technical people how to use Terraform that they would never use. They were non-technical people, they would never use any of these technologies, if you don't use knowledge you lose it and they have certainly lost whatever they learned from this training now.

We wasted millions forcing customers off highly profitable products onto inferior alternatives that had huge costs and were not profitable.

And finally the gorilla in the room, we wasted billions migrating software from the mainframe to x86 linux servers and linux containers and we are far far from done. We focused on migrating functionality first instead of data first. We didn't evaluate the cost of anything we migrated. We didn't plan the ordering of when we migrated anything. We sunset functionality that was still needed, so it got recreated in the client application instead of on the server where it belonged with all the other functionality. Just to make this as difficult as possible, we paused this work several times, just long enough to completely lose all the people who worked on it, just to restart the work again with new people who took almost a year to become productive.

The look to book ratio is bad, there has obviously always been more looking than booking, but instead of solving that by adding caching with a cheap reverse proxy rather than incurring mainframe charges and turning looking into revenue instead of cost by charging for looking, we doubled down and tried to make it up on volume by making it even easier for our customers to do even more looking at even higher costs for us, so increasing our costs even more. We could have turned all the looking into profit but we chose to increase our loss instead.

Let's attribute blame to where it belongs. This is all a textbook example of complete incompetence of management. We warned people what was happening but nobody did anything about it, because their management was too incompetent to heed the warning.

Anytime anyone shared information, they were on the next RIF bus, particularly people in the US. This is a consistent feature of Sabre, even in the good times. Silos are built by organizational culture.

Sabre has a culture of denigrating knowledge and experience (barring the select few). This is obvious by the 'expensive first' reductions. As an employee, I have no reason to spread my knowledge around, I wasn't hired to train other people; all it does it make me less valuable. Don't get stockholm syndrome over this, Sabre executives get paid a bundle to make good decisions. For the past six years they've made terrible decisions and here we are.

I'm still here because Sabre already riffed the people I was sharing knowledge with. If they could get rid of me now, I'm certain they would. I'm sure my position is temporary until they figure a way or until I float to the top of the 'most expensive' list and some accountant just dumps me anyway.