I was on the list of surplus employees last Friday. I am trying to get myself ready for another technical position outside of my current career which spanned 29 years( 23 great and happy years and the last 6 years being pure chaos). The benefits after this job ends is a mess. No one understands When you call. All the benefits support numbers are long wait times to be connected to someone that seems new!!! This is a mess and all benefits personnel should be familiar with this situation but they are not so maybe they were all casualties in the previous surplussing!!! My last comment and question is no one knows what the ‘cut’ formula was?? One of My emails showed me me the entire latest class of employees graduating to unemployment. Of those peers I was aware of on the list they were very good, technically competent and what I assumed was a solid performer. I still see many that are not so productive still pushing paper. So I am too young to retire and just hope I can hook up with another company to use my skills! Good luck to all of my peers in this surplus class of July 2020!
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You have no idea...The few times I have called HR or Benefits with an inquiry I found out I had more answers then the person on the other end of the line.....
I had 37 YoS. I was good employee! I gets good rating. I was in the army. I am handicap. I went into office every day. Not sure why I was laid off? I am looking for another top notch tech job. Do you have any leads?
Unfortunately time was your enemy in this lay-off. You had 29 years which means you were on a pension plan and that was most likely what put you over the top. I was hit OCT’18 had 18 years not MR75 eligible but had a pension. Life is so much better outside AT&T, take your severance, and look around jobs are out there just have to look. Redo your resume, the format has changed a lot in the last 5-7 years. Sounds crazy but LinkedIn is a vital part of your resume now. Good luck and happy hunting.
The HR department is a joke. I left in October after the National Business Las Vegas Award trip. We stayed at the Wynn, and it was great. Came back and put in my resignation. My Supervisor for 7 years never even called me the entire day, then decides to call me after 5PM, with fake HR on the phone, and they proceed to berate me "Are you going to a competitor?" Over and over, I had not decided at the time because I had 3 offers, and wasn't sure which option I was going to take. ( BTW, I never been to vegas, so I was not missing that event that I earned). Regardless, I was perplexed, that this was their only concern. Where am I going? Not why are you leaving, how can we keep you. You gave us 7 outstanding years, etc etc. Nope. They terminated me without my knowing, and didn't honor my 2 weeks notice because I didn't have an answer for them as to where I was going. I went back and forth with fake HR, and they never sent me a document stating that I was required to tell them my new role. What company does this? I was not stealing national classified information. AT&T is amatuer hour. They need to decide what they want to be when they grow up.
I will be honest. I was surplused a few years ago. Even though the economy was good, it is still not pretty out there for older workers. A large majority of the work in the tech fields is contract. What that means is no paid holiday/vacation/sick time, decrease in pay, no 401k vesting, terrible health insurance and the work last around 8 months. I still had young kids and a mortgage when I was surplused so doing temp work and trying to support a family has been fun. Everybody is complaining about living in uncertainty right now. My poor kids have been living that way for awhile! So pay off everything and be prepared for a very bumpy future.
LOL that poster who said u get points if you r in a protected class is BS. I am black ,i am the only black person in my level under my manager. I got mostly meets and exceed on my last two reviewers. I got canned. In fact i am the only black person in my group. I personally think it is money. The only other minority is a guy who is not black as normally expected but is from another group which i wont say to avoid being identified.
Sounds like people here attest how it’s really done, good people get let go because random percent or high salary. Last week my group had open mic and the question was asked, “how are people chosen for surplus?” And the answer was “performance, leadership, skills, and experience”. To those that have been involved with laying people off, can you say whether these qualities are considered?
They have been using software for years. You get points if you are in a protected class but your pay is one of the biggest factors. To the person that got downgraded, that happened to me and it zoomed me into a overpaid situation. I was voted off the island in the next round. Good luck all...anyone can be next.
It seems like a lot of these decisions are being made by people who have no idea what the people they're laying off do. Every time they come through and knock off someone, I hear a lot of "I didn't know they did this - who else can do it?" (It's usually nobody, so that task just doesn't get done anymore.)
Are they using some kind of "data mining" software to pick people to dump? That sounds like something they'd do.
Whatever they're doing, it's pretty clear it doesn't really matter how good you are at what you do, they're going to lay you off. They're just going to neglect and outsource everything not associated with Max, what a friggin' mess.
I volunteered for a surplus & bailed out in 2016 about 18 months before my MR75 kicked in. It was that bad, as you describe. My only regret is that I didn't do it sooner, especially since we're pretty much now on house arrest with the COVID-19. Spend your savings, boys and girls. Uncle Sam is handing out freebies left and right these days. Good Luck!
@gac -
If you had read, the exceeds ratings were for running the team, not surplusing. I ran a team and we consistently were key in closing sales in the billion dollar range. We exceeded our targets every year. Sadly, in the past few years, indeed that all meant nothing as I've had to surplus the people on my team that I worked with every day and made it happen. Just showing the OP that layoffs are not directed at underperformers and never have been; the ax falls wherever. The desired ultimate size of the company is what's driving these decisions, and nothing else.
16 straight years of getting far exceeds to cut people for no reason and collect your bonus ?
I had the same problem in 2017 when I took a MVO. It seemed every time I called something I got different answer. I wrote all the people names down each time and the time I called. It just made me feel good to have documentation. Thank goodness I did not need it.
I'm sorry to hear of your surplus. Don't feel bad about where you ranked or how technically competent you are. As a one-time hiring (and, I guess, firing) manager, I can attest that there's very little central coordination when the layoff ax is ready to fall. I had to lay of very good people. Each time it happened both my team and those of my peers were given the same percentage, because it makes it easier on the L4 and L5 to just dish out layoff numbers equally. They have no discernable skills (or desire) to cut out inefficient parts of the business. Rather, they stand on top of their ever-shrinking hill and hope to ride it out until retirement, serving up their crocodile tears when "the needs of the business" takes away people who could ACTUALLY HELP ADDRESS the needs of the business.
I had received a "Far Exceeds" rating (or whatever the highest rating happened to be as it changed throughout the years) on my yearly summary for 16 straight years. My team gave its direct supervisor (me) the highest eNPS scores of any manager in our organization up to the L6 level. We met and exceeded our targets, got AT&T patents, and never missed a deadline.
This year, I was informed by a PDF document sent by email that I (a) had lost my team, (b) had been put into a salary band with a midpoint $40,000 lower, and (c) am now demoted to an individual contributor. At the same time, I'm watching peers in other organizations who constantly miss deadlines, overspend, and never create a single iota of innovation keep and grow their teams.
I'll be upset, but only for a short time. At some point, you become immune, or at least numb, to how poorly this company is run. While it's probably exceptionally cathartic to reach the age at which you can retire, it's probably nearly as cathartic to basically say "screw it" and understand that whatever happens from here on out is just gravy on top of the 23 years that I have. I'll ride this mess of a ride until my number is up, then move on to find something else.
Good luck to you, and in some weird way, congratulations for having it happen sooner rather than later.
Too many legacy companies and too many dates of hire within those legacy companies when you are entitled to subsidies or not. It is virtually impossible for HR people to be on top of all those rules. Do yourself a favor, and do some clicking around HR Benefits sites for retirement (HR one stop). You should be able to see what you are entitled to depending on company you got hired by and date of hire. Also on your Total Reward document from eLink there is an indicator to tell you whether you are entitled to retirement benefits (A "Y" means you get those retirement subsidies).
Don't hold your breath, most of ATT HR department is handled by outside contracting companies, only a few executives and managers who oversee them are internal ATt folks .
Outside contracting HR companies just hire people cheap give them minimal training and treat them like disposable widgets. So that might explain why any real useful information is impossible to get , because all the customer no service folks in HR are just low level workers with very narrow roles and knowledge.
If I'm not mistaken, "Hr" people are the personnel that are dealing with all this for you. Much of the greater core of HR was outsourced several years ago. So this could be why it's such a mess.