It is true Optum is laying people off, and there are still more to come (historically, it's done the week before Christmas - nice, huh?), but yet at the same time UHG has a hiring freeze. That means nothing you apply for on the UHC side or the Optum side will end up in a hiring. There's a budget which needs to be spent in order to get the same HR budget (and more) next year. So, while they can't hire people, they can still spend the money to advertise and post jobs.
There's a big push for teams to 'transition' (AKA assimilate or get swallowed up) into other teams that just don't work the same way or even provide the same kind of output (one might be a product while the other is a service). Customers will notice this. Customers will complain. Customers will leave. I know of one team (an agile methodology team) who was recently moved into a waterfall methodology team and it has been a struggle. Leadership has reported up the chain that the transition went perfectly and "everyone is thrilled" when the truth is the team which was swallowed up is now struggling, and the team that swallowed them up is also struggling because they now don't understand the new team's functionality. I heard this reference this analogy the other day: It's like trying to force a triangle into a circle - it may fit, but then you have 3 semi-circle gaps that have no function.
I had also heard that UHC plans to quadruple in size by 2024. Quite possibly this will be another checkbook shift for UHG - remember when IT moved from UHC to Optum? They're probably going to shift that again from Optum back to UHC in order to redistribute the UHG checkbook again.
OGS seems to be taking so many jobs. The problem with OGS is that they're primarily contractors and once they're contract run is up, someone else steps in who has to start from scratch. Whatever happened to rewarding people for loyalty, and dare I say it: Living the values!?
Tread lightly everyone, but keep your eyes and ears open for other positions both in and out of the enterprise. It doesn't look pretty.