Thread regarding Verizon Communications Inc. layoffs

@1jy Dot Heads scam like normal people breath. It's instinct. They don't even think about it.

All questions are answered when you understand Izzat. Look it up.
Black Pigeon Speaks posted on YT a few days ago about it.

@sb spot on. So is infosis and those cronies working with the Indian mafia. Hopefully current admin is looking into it

@rn I also think Mksy PmC and KMGP must be thrown out with the bath water. they are part of the huge problem and are involved in kick backs

@r8 Well that's good....will the mafia culture of only "made" (by back end deals) SI's/vendors still guide their approach or will Dan/Alfonso blow up this toxic and wasteful approach in support of a New Verizon?

@r5 Shankar definitely leaving. Keeping that toxic man will be absolute atrocity.

Question is, what about the rest of the South Indian mafia?!?!?

Still no news yet whether Shankar will be leaving or if he is moving to another part of the organization ???

@dv : Hi, sharing the link for USCIS.
One can report anonymously. I doubt it will help alot but its better than nothing.
https://www.uscis.gov/report-fraud/uscis-tip-form

@ma this is a very unsophisticated example, yes. This guy sounds like a complete id--t for just opening a US based company in his own name then outsourcing projects to India. But it also proves a point. Our stateside vendors get the equivalent of a colonoscopy of audits that look into every detail of their company and are under constant monitoring.

The reality is the stuff that goes on with India outsourcing at Verizon will never be uncovered because it’s done with huge international vendors and webs of syndication. The big firms are just trusted that they are following the rules. I know the processes for both. If a small vendor did something bad, they would easily be caught and we would see an article on the indictment in a matter of weeks. The stuff that is almost never uncovered is done in the big firm relationships. If you don’t believe that… just remember there is this company called Accenture that makes billions off Verizon every year that was called Arthur Andersen… Verizon was called WorldCom… then two major scandals broke out. Accenture (was Arthur Andersen) did Enron and WorldCom… now WorldCom is Verizon and Arthur Andersen is Accenture. They should be barred from ever working together again… wouldn’t you think?

A scandal involving our executives getting payoffs happening in India would be small potatoes and isn’t really traceable for firms this size and having history of frauds at that scale.

Having vendors is a requirement for all companies. Our policies should be limited to local (smaller) US based companies that need to abide by US laws. We don’t need any big companies with history of fraud running things for Verizon outside our legal system where they can be watched and held accountable.

Example of abusing power and committing fraud by an Indian Global CIO and his gangs in India. Creating fake projects in India.

ATLANTA, Ga. – Jana Kanyadan, the former Global Chief Information Officer of Mohawk Industries, Inc. (“Mohawk”), has been sentenced to more than seven years in federal prison for defrauding Mohawk.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndga/pr/former-mohawk-executive-sentenced-prison

@dv haha the one downvote on these posts. That guy going to get held accountable for this scam.

@dd I have seen massive fraud get uncovered at organizations over my 3 decades in this industry, it always involved Ireland based sourcing and India offshore firms. At my last company someone got caught paying a sourcing guy in Ireland who was running a “vendor consolidation” initiative… it was all consolidated away from US vendors that did good work to India vendors that couldn’t do anything of value.

They found the Indian born CTO, the Indian born sourcing VP and a cubby corrupt IT Director (non-Indian), plus the sourcing guy were stealing billions from the company and had cut a bunch of people into the scam. I am pretty sure it might have run even higher than that up the chain, but we went from spending nearly $2b on the footprint they had to using a under $100m with one US-based vendor and added maybe 30 people stateside and the systems looked better, worked better and what was a major problem for the business was a organizational strength within a few years. Also note, once we took the work back we found out the offshore team had stolen our customer data and sold it to scammers. US customer data shouldn’t be allowed anywhere but stateside because our laws can be enforced and law enforcement has jurisdiction here. This is also why it needs to be international to work. It’s hard (almost impossible) to investigate when it’s spanning so many countries.

@bg Yes, in India you don’t need to have any schooling or skills. They will sell you a degree and you don’t even need to go to school at all.

I’ve managed huge India teams, and we found through our investigations of low performance, multiple times, that the people working on the India teams were hiring tons of friends and family with no skills. They would often even be hiring their (unpaid) household servants, you know what we call those in the US, to work jobs and funneling the money back into their own household bank accounts.

The entire thing is a scam. If India had good engineering talent, their country would look like Japan with futuristic stuff everywhere. They have more “engineers” than Japan has people… however, the place is an outdated mess.

No wonder 2 main team were moved out of this org : AI and Sourcing and that’s where money was.

Someone call the compliance line.

Amount of money that has been funneled to India by the American companies is nothing short of criminal. Shankar and his thugs are part of this scheme.

@bx due to my role I have some insight into this. I thought about blowing the whistle a few times but instead had colleagues as high as SVP level file complaints. Some of them were very politically connected and very long tenures at Verizon. I figured they would have the credibility and power to fight and maybe end this. However, this must run very very deep. Maybe board of directors or who knows. My hope is Dan was brought in to clean it out, but this layoff didn’t give me a ton of hope on that.

What I do know for certain. We have someone in Ireland Sourcing who requires we spend with the following vendors only: HCL, InfoSys, Tech Mahindra, WIPRO, Cognizant and TCS. When they push those vendors they treat them as if they are the only vendors. They aren’t the only ones and of the systems that actually work at the Verizon, approximately 0% have been built or managed by these firms. These firms probably combine for approximately 99% of our total external software/cloud/IT spend. This would imply that less than 1% is spent with firms that do almost everything that works.

This was the basis for complaint for these SDs, VPs and SVPs that I worked with. They went directly to Shankar and his team, but they wouldn’t correct course and spend their money in an effective way with better firms. We are all aware of the mass incompetence of VZ India, but those offices are in place… so at the very least… let's spend our money on the correct external companies who are effective and returning value. Very reasonable request, this fell on def ears with Shankar and team. Where this gets scary.

These executives raised this with finance, sourcing, legal and ethics. They went every route. Only one of them is left at the company just one SD. I’m referencing over 15 total executives over the last 5-6 years have been pushed out over this fight and Shankar and his team remained.

I also know sourcing is practically willing to do anything, no matter how shady, to run out vendors not on that list.

My view is someone or a group of corrupt people at Verizon wants everything to be international. A huge web that is impossible to track. My guess is this is some type of huge corrupt scheme that has a lot of people benefiting. Sourcing is the enforcement arm to make sure this bad spending continues to go to the “correct people”. Shankar and team are the useful id--ts that are happy to send the money to places like India and bad Indian vendors who likely funnel it to whoever the beneficiaries are. Verizon spends billions and gets no real value. Someone or a lot of people are getting very rich.

If Dan wants to cut anything, he should start by cutting the entire (Ireland) sourcing team that has anything to do with pushing these vendors. He should take that money and ask executives which vendors have done the best work over the last say 15 years… none of these would make the list if he wasn’t asking Shankar organization or sourcing. It would be a very small list of companies maybe even one. Who’ve done the majority of the work for less than a 0.1% of the overall spend. I can think of one myself that accounts for about 90%+ of our software that works on tiny fractions of our budgets.

He would probably save about 90% of our external spending by doing this. It would be billions of dollars. My estimate is he would save between $1-3 billion per year. But if that means that money is funneling into a deeply entrenched scheme I don’t think just unseating Shankar is enough to end it. It would need to be massive and very targeted changes. Let’s hope someone stops it and these people get held accountable.

@c5 Create a new email address (may be) and share the screenshot along with a link of this thread

Shankar and his buddies must not be in Verizon. How possibly he became an EVP, I don't know. I just wonder about integrity of Verizon upper management.

He tried to create an "Indian empire" within Verizon, and he was sucessful. It was disgusting.

Someone mentioned in the reply that he was backstabbed by Shankar. In my previous job (in a different company), I had similar experience by some Indian. An Indian director created an "Indian empire" inside the company. The guy was nice to me when needed, and then later he backstabbed me. In any case, for some reason, my previous company got rid of the whole group of 40 people (moslty Indians); most people were laid off and the other people were transferred to different groups. It was good to see the final outcome. I leanred a lot from this incidence.

Keeping this thread active

@c5 Advice… take screenshots before it’s taken down from here. This thread is gold.

I want to share this thread to Dan.. how can do it anonymously?

Wow!

Sourcing, legal, ethics etc has not caught this for such a long period is mindboggling. This reflects as a culture of poor oversight, accountability, transparency that is being methodically and creatively being exploited.

Another reminder that the powerful few, get away with so much, while the vast majority work with an ethical, well-grounded mindset in an environment thats stacked against them.

@bt Do you really think there are kick backs and back-end deals by this "mafia" with consulting partners and others??

Yikes....you really think there are kickbacks and back-end deals with consulting players with this "mafia"?

Shankar runs his org like a full-blown mafia syndicate. The whole leadership chain is one giant sambhar-mafia network , the same packed circle of buddies, cousins, “my guy,” “your guy,” and random friends filling every leadership seat. It’s basically a company inside Verizon, and it’s impossible to cut through because every layer protects the next.

Their only real goal seems to be milking Verizon for every dollar they can. Kickbacks, shady consulting hookups, back-door deals , you name it, this crew has figured out how to squeeze it. It’s termites at work: quietly eating the company from the inside, one contract and one “favor” at a time.

This isn’t leadership. This is a cartel disguised as a tech org, bleeding shareholders and destroying the culture while pretending to innovate.

For starters he is narcissist and racist combined.

Secondly he went to school when Windows was the innovation. His head is stuck you know where. He is clueless.

He talks nicely to you and will back stab you. Trust me he did that to me.

@az I saw in youtube that india doesnt have strong engineering schools. some engineering schools were set up in someone's backyard. and there was a video asking engineering students basic questions and they couldnt answer correctly. I think US has been scammed.

@b1 100% spot on. Agreed

@b1 this

Sounds like IT in any mid-large corporation today.

@aw There is another guy named Pranay Bajpay.. He has more GOD complex than Shankar and Vivek.

My limited interactions with him have me impression that he treats people nicely based on their “job title”. It’s typical Indian mentality where they treat people based on their caste or social status.

Pranay, if you are reading this.. start treating everyone with respect. You are an employee like everyone else here.

Unfortunately, Shankar belongs to a region of nepotism, rather than assimilating in the American culture and giving priority to Meritocracy. This is shown in his direct reports.

Offshoring has left the engineering folks crippled.
Moving all development offshore has severe consequences in performance, just because its cheaper does not mean its productive. The efficiency and productivity dropped to below 5%.

The work culture is toxic under him, folks working 10-12 hours.
Working on weekends. Friends getting requests from friends vs following a proper process.

He destroyed the American Working culture, it feelings working in an Indian I.T/Tech company now.

Look at the people under him, the entire chain of command down to the bottom managers is filled with people who have no engineering background. When something goes wrong or doesn’t work as expected, they can’t fall back on engineering to get to the root of the problem; instead, they depend on slides from subordinates.

Shynker should never have been EVP. He and his direct reports need to be replaced with leaders who have strong engineering backgrounds. I’m praying they remove him and all the SVPs under him.

There a few things....

Double speak - 'we use contractors to control expense fluxes', but then cuts employees first.
If you are not from Dallas (even though he is from Tampa), don't expect to get promoted or have a future in leadership.
He promotes his friends to the highest leadership posts, and they promote their friends - no open bidding.
He promotes a hand-off leadership, feast or famine
Offshoring (VZI) is the priority, lets them do whatever they want basically.

Those are just the highlights.

He’s built a culture where he is treated like a living GOD, (In India Fan considers celebrities as GOD) and the evidence is everywhere—LinkedIn cheerleading, over-the-top town halls, and his biannual trips to India that turn into full-blown fanfare.
Ethics and real leadership take a back seat to loyalty. He rewards people who say yes, not people who think and counter. He pushed out the leaders who was any threat and challenged him, and now he’s was surrounded by loyalists who keep swapping titles without adding real substance

His org has most toxic culture

1. There is network of close buddies.
2. Buddies hire other buddie’s friends and family. It doesn’t matter how talented you are.. one of the VPs wife is working as contractor.
3. Buddies promote each other. You can’t get promotion based on your talent.
4. Buddies save each other first when it comes to layoffs.

To become their buddies, you need to do constant bootlicking. These buddies are network of middle aged Indian men.
Shankar is probably aware of it but as a leader, he has not done a thing about it. He is not a leader..