I don't remember having to deal with all this uncertainty, constant stress, frustration over no direction, navigating department politics, and so much more as recently as five years ago. How could have things changed so much in such a short period? Or were things always bad and I just didn't notice it by now?
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I noticed a distinct change for the worse after the HR lady joined. Rather than try to figure out what was causing angst among Teradata employees, she immediately started focusing on social justice issues and convinced the ELT to do the same. That may have been OK if Teradata had the market share dominance and deep pockets of a Google or Facebook. But it's not OK when a company is struggling and laying off hundreds of employees every few months. Ask even the most diverse of employees if they would rather have empty platitudes or a stable job environment, and most would choose the second option.
Things went bad based on:
- - NCR acquisition and infusion of overhead/bureaucracy
- - inept Management
- - lack of market/technology understanding by MOST managers
- - worthless Board
- - failure to innovate
- - atrocious marketing
- - mid-management bloat (esp directors, suck-ups, and VP-wannabees)
Things were always bad. It's BEEN bad.
It’s stressful because it’s a one product one market company. All the eggs in one basket. Teradata never diversified like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and others. Now they are late to cloud with few options and are a sitting duck. How stressful would it be if you only had one stock in your financial portfolio? No smart executives will join Teradata now…
For what I can tell, OR gave the company a clear vision, too bad it only turned out to be ambitious in depth and wrong in scope. Then along came (back) VL, whom I would describe as an avuncular, somewhat charismatic caretaker, leaving SB as COO to put things right execution-wise, which seemed to go in the right direction by some amount. Unbeknownst to mere mortals, a CEO selection process brought in a clueless, jargon parroting CEO and a similar ELT whose members, to the outer world, distinguish themselves from the others only through the flavor of their incompetence, and probably among those in the know, by the flavor of nepotism. As a common thread to all of the above, none of them did anything which would show commitment to engineer anything beyond 1-2 years ahead at any point in time, so my conclusion is that the most lenient verdict could be incompetence and the least is - just milk it for what it's worth.