Maybe this will be the official WARN event giving 60 days notice of site closure. Maybe it will just be the usual layoff. Maybe Boulder (Rally) will be included. Maybe some upper managers will also get the ax. Please reply if you know more than “maybe” at some point. Happy Holidays :/
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New waggl survey
https://app.waggl.com/i/fad99c03
"BTW, does JS still live in the Fort Collins area? "
JS when he retired held a webex to show where he was retiring too. Summers in Hawaii and winters in CO for ski. Seriously? what a POS! I was tired with the arrogant iron fist style he managed by. This culture carried over to the talent-less hacks in his org. How do you fix stupid? Close the office seems like a good choice. Ironically JS closed most of Austin. And just like Austin, FTC wont be missed.
November 30, 2017
Team,
As I look to where we need to be as a company and as a business unit, there are adjustments that must be made for future success. Part of our adjustments for the future include reinvestments and realignment of our engineering that will result in fewer CA sites. As a result, the Fort Collins office will be closing at a future date, to align our team to fewer, larger development centers. In addition, to drive stronger collaboration and improve productivity, the Agile Operations BU will be co-locating teams and reassigning roles. This will impact specific roles across the AOBU in the Fort Collins office and a few other sites. The people whose roles are changing have been informed in accordance with our transition protocol.
The decision to eliminate positions is always a difficult one – and one that is not taken lightly, but we must make these decisions to move our business forward and continue the improvements we have made overall as a team. During these times, demonstrating respect for our people is our top priority – and I appreciate your support for our colleagues.
As part of the site changes, we are ensuring that we have more engineers working on each product and they are co-located together. Our goal is to ensure product market strength and relevance through a reorganization of the teams supporting them.
These adjustments involved our executive leadership to ensure alignment to company goals - across the product and sales orgs to ensure coordination across BU and product goals, and within our BU leadership team to ensure all options have been considered and weighed appropriately. We are balancing our site location strategy with the need for greater cost efficiencies while freeing up capital to reinvest in the people and technology needed to drive innovation.
We understand the importance of working through business issues and maintaining continuity for our products. If there are any product-related questions or escalations – please contact Deependra Singh, Rahul Sharma, and Giridhar Sriramagiri.
I can imagine you have many questions and reactions to what I have shared and, as a senior leadership team, we want to hear from you. I will host a fireside chat on Monday, December 11 and Venkat will host a town hall as well – we will discuss this in more detail and will be answering your questions. In the meantime, feel free to reach out and discuss with your manager – or with me and my leadership team.
Thank you in advance for your support and for the work that you do for our team.
Sincerely,
Ali
UIM used to be an amazing product. poor product management killed it.
I thought UIM was suppose to be the new king of the EM strategy. What is going to replace it? They officially killed NSM of few years ago. Spectrum has been gutted. It seems like they're just giving up on the EM market.
BTW, does JS still live in the Fort Collins area? I would love to give that POS a piece of my mind. I still remember his famous "my way or the highway" speech after he whacked a good chunk of the EM workforce outside of Fort Collins. He was bragging how Fort Collins would be the new epicenter of the BU. Six months later the numbers came in and renewals had crated. Six months after that JS "retired". I'm sure he took a nice fat golden parachute with him.
There are two developers remaining to support the saas product. There are two architects remaining to transition the code to India. There is also one manager and one product owner remaining. Support was not affected. because the India team doesn't even know how to build the product, I would not expect fixes in most of UIM to be available for a very long time. I believe the India team is only there to give the appearance of upholding our contractual support obligations.
What I heard is that it was all development, no one from support, but I do not know for sure.
What is that number 77? That the number of developers or does that include support?
There was talk going around about severance. Watch out if you were ever on a PIP, they left themselves a backdoor.
Is CO an at will state. If so, you can be let go for any reason, without severance as well. So if they are dealing with severance as a tool fort the transition they probably can.
Good Luck All
There are a total of 6 people left in UIM development. The rest is likely going to India. Support is still here (for now).
How many folks affected from layoff?
And what is the current strength? Not sure how they will manage the UIM product.
If FC site is going to close then where they will operate from? Boulder or Centaclara?
Invite for 9am meeting with Ali went out to 77 - if you're on the list, you probably already got the invite.
76 of 79 will be informed at 9:00
So what is going on? Have there been any company wide layoffs? I was axed, not laid off months ago and would really like to follow what develops.
There’s no remedy for bad management. Bad managers hire only bad managers because any good managers will recognize the incompetence and escape the recruitment process. Bad managers blame engineers for management issues. Bad managers point the finger at other managers to deflect criticism. This results in a dysfunctional work environment where even a potentially good manager feels that any assertiveness will be punished. Routinely unchallenged dishonesty is the tipping point from which there is no return. Upper management encourages the infighting at the same time they blame the participants for their OWN failures. The most blame must go to top management who cannot recognize the real problems because of their own laziness and weakness. And then parlay the situation with market-driven reorganizations and shutdowns. They get richer again and carry on.
Rather seems like an eminent layoff given that all the conference rooms are booked for all day on the 29th.
FYI--Another thread on FTC CA site https://www.thelayoff.com/t/PYJo3nd
"We can't transition a code base we no longer understand."
When a product can only be maintained by those that wrote it or those that are left are not smart enough/willing to figure it out. Then its a good time as any to declare it EOL'd. All more reason to send the product off to India. Why pay some high priced FtC who is admitting they don't understand? I'm sure someone in India would be glad to try to understand the code base. For a fraction of the cost too.
As for Ali ... Everyone knows what he is. I read here various words egotist, hatred, contempt. Where I come from there is another word we use. Lets just say he is probably the most disliked GM in CA's history for obvious reasons I wont get into here. He also yells and screams all the time like an unprofessional man child. Nobody likes working with him, but many fear him. Why? Some even practically want to roll out the red carpet for that pos and kiss his a--. People like him deserve little respect, but it seems some would be willing to follow him into the bathroom to offer to wipe his a--.
Agree with previous comments.
Ali and Venkat seem to be more concerned with not being personally criticized than confronting hard truths and doing the right thing.
I have seen good engineers being treated with contempt and not recognized for their achievements, who shortly afterwards left, taking a lot of key knowledge and experience with them. I think the engineers who will be refugees from CA have a lot to look forward to in joining better companies where they are treated with appreciation and respect.
Ali’s contempt for the people in Fort Collins has been clear since he joined. His hatred has become our “DNA” and has seeped into every aspect of the culture. Shame on MG for allowing the corporation be destroyed by one angry egotist.
Something I know that is more than "maybe" - Boulder and Denver are hiring plenty of developers, and at higher pay rates than CA in Fort Collins. While some of us will end up with longer commutes, many of us will end up in better positions. I can also say with more than "maybe" that UIM customers are not going to get acceptable support in the very near future. Even if there were no layoffs in Fort Collins, we've lost too many key people (at least 60 since March), and we no longer have the ability to fix parts of the product. When NFA was cut in March, they replaced competent developers with inexperienced ones that didn't know what a network socket is, who were not able to deliver a release. This new cut will be much worse for the customer base, as the new teams clearly don't understand things like source control, and many of the people required for a transition are gone. We can't transition a code base we no longer understand.