This treatment of depression staff has happened under Ryan's watch, and Rajat Taneja is complicit. It was never like this with Al... remember the lockdown tears and family-vibe he instilled? Now a climate of fear.
Question is, is it purely down to Ryan (being a salesman, not CEO material), the shareholders, Rajat... or would this have happened under Al but he saw it coming?
@107 100%, absolutely nailed on.
The company should be leading on innovation and modernizing its platform. Instead it's engaged in short-termism by cutting people, which really just papers over the cracks.
Honestly don't know how Rajat still has his job. His entire legacy is making a name for himself by ki-ling projects rather than building anything. Zero meaningful investment in infrastructure or innovation, and now Visa is stuck with 30-year-old data centers that can't even rack modern GPUs — locked out of serious AI despite sitting on one of the richest transaction datasets in the world. He spent a decade crusading to shut down physical data centers and move to cloud. Result? Neither fully on cloud nor equipped for on-premise AI compute. Worst of both worlds. For an electrical engineer, that's a stunning shortsighted.
Ryan is a different problem. Classic McKinsey guy — great at slide decks and buzzwords, less great at actually running things. To his credit, he did 9 years at Visa before becoming CEO, which probably makes him excellent C-suite or board material. Just not CEO. His whole strategy has been endless layoffs, constant restructuring, and a revolving door at the SVP/VP level which he masquerading as "agility and efficiency". The people who actually know how the systems work keeps being pushed out or gets laid off.
It was just a matter of time. Look at even more aggressive cuts across other big tech firms. The world we live in is a different place today, it's best to get used to it instead of hoping it doesn't happen to you.