In all departments, we are seeing so many people on eggshells scared that they may be laid off next. Especially in my area which is ASC. Rumors of big cuts coming soon. Is this true? I feel like its true because I see the decline in morale here QUICKLY happening.
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Hate on XP all you want bit at least it's not that SAFe garbage.
The fish stinks from the head. XP programming as being parrotted by Kamak and Zulfie for over a year now does not work when you are faced with cross departmental problems.
Both leaders have zero understanding of technology. Neither one of them has ever debugged a line of code. Kamal pivoted on a call a few months ago away from migrating legacy data into the new ASC architecture as the cost was estimated at 250m+. Questio number one: didn't he know the architecture and cost? He along with the other id--ts like Zulfie and Manish came up with the brilliant idea of having the ASC microservices app tier over legacy systems. There are a lot of smart IT people here. Does anyone see a fundamental problem here? Question number two: if legacy systems don't get retired the ops cost for IT skyrocket. What do you think is happening to the combined ratio?
All the firings are directly related to offsetting IT ASC costs. The ship is taking water rapidly.
Victims of their own management and the culture it produced.
ASC is expensive. They spent millions on a target state architecture that was years in the making. It's not an that it's not a viable concept. But they're years behind other companies.
But they, the management have bonuses based on delivery milestones. They have an additional middle layer or yes people who are also compensated based on hitting those milestones. So they cut corners and pushed a half assed MVP out the door, with mountains of tech debt. Of course the yes people in middle management told them that things were going just wonderfully, exactly as they were supposed to and the picture was absolutely rosy. Get it out to market and it's sh-t, doesn't work well, AND there is still millions more to be spent to get to where they thought they already were. Note the pivot AWAY from ASC and toward the new flavor of the month: product delivery model.
Which is also shaping up to go exactly the same way. Nothing has really changed about the day to day reality of delivery, it's just new labels on old thinking. But there IS a layer of butt kissers, sorry, 'influencers' who are enthusiastically cheerleading and painting a picture for our management of a delivery reality that doesn't exist. For all the talk about product managers being CEOs of their product, management is still laying old fashioned waterfall feature deliver dates. They're already shocked that product model didn't just happen. They'll be shocked-again and for the umpteenth time-when they get to the end of the year and it hasn't produced the results they were told it was already producing. Then they'll just lay some people off to hit numbers. But you can bet it won't be the cheerleader yes people because they'll have scattered like cockroaches.
And they promoted Suren for this nonsense.
The ASC product is a miserable failure due to poor execution and lack of dedicated talent to build it properly. Very few involved with ASC really want it to roll out further due to the effort needed, which is a lot.
It's actually really simple, execs called ASC a success too early when they had only wolved the easy problems. They already got their bonuses and now they are further detached from reality trying to cut expenses when they aren't actually even 50% done because they've left the hardest problems for last. They're too committed to the narrative to get it up but it's going to be a rocky year or 3 while they figure out a new narrative for why things can't go as fast as they thought in their ivory tower.
They’re desperately trying to save ASC but it’s failing left and right. I haven’t heard the numbers for the next round of layoffs, but they’re definitely coming.
Seems Allstate has finally realized that expecting legacy Allstate employees to innovate doesn’t work, but they still haven’t realized the problem isn’t the workers but management. A director that has been with Allstate for 40 years is just not going to be able to do anything but think like an Allstate legacy person. They’re going to think Allstate is doing great when really they’ve fallen decades behind.