Thread regarding VISA Inc. layoffs

Thank god that you are saved, if you are laid off

I am writing this detailed information because i had to hire people for my team, and i was very selfish. I spoiled their life, by hiring them and making them work on ancient technologies and hence they cant survive now in real world after they are laid off.

The below facts are applicable only for tech org all the way from CTO below.

  • This company is filled with full of people in the higher roles with absolutely no technical knowledge rather the only knowledge they have is how to lick other's a-s. Its filled with useless people, which automatically makes younger generations below them think how the fu-k these people are getting paid so much and survive here.
  • If you compare people in other technical organizations, Directors, Sr. Directors and above, write research paper or at least write few blogs or articles related to technology. The same level people here doesn't even how to write an email or internal newsletter properly.

e.g.: There was a newsletter titled GenAI Platform Newsletter - Week of Oct 21. In that its written they don't have enough GPU memory to even host Llama 3.1 70b. This is a 500 billion dollar company who don't even have the capacity to run a model, which a bootstrapped startup can do. Moreover it is said that they have tested deploying a 4-bit version and did not see any "significant practical precision loss". For non tech people, this is equivalent of running the model in your MacBook pro with at least 48 gb RAM, and these guys are running the same capacity in servers. Totally useless people running the show, telling 4-bit quantization doesn't have any practical loss, and they don't have shame to even verify what they have written in the newsletter is right or wrong before sending it to larger audience. BTW, its just a tip of the iceberg.

  • There was one stupid GenAI hackathon, organized by people who doesn't even know spelling of GenAI. It was a competition to find who can fool who. It was one of the worst competition ever, where experts are being judged by dummies. Worst of all, they have built a stupid platform called GenAI model service, which acts as a gateway to azure models. It was designed with no basic common sense, that it did not support any libraries, and have to write from scratch everything. A five line RAG code, had to be written with five hundred lines using these stupid APIs. You don't need big architects to design it, just use common sense.
  • "Security is Number one". This is utter bullsh-t. You guys still use python3.6 for god sake in 2024. Security is last, and its the least secure company i have even seen. Luckily they did say, you cant go to restroom in office, because its a critical security violation. This company if full of stupid , non sense rules, which if questions they say its security. But most of the time its non sense and the person who is telling you these rules are also stupid only in most cases. Best of all these rules are not documented anywhere, it just you can create rules anytime anywhere and you can force people to follow too.

    Example 1: They say to raise security assessment for everything and they tell to you scan your code in a tool called checkmark. They don't even have common sense to check whether the tool supports a particular programming language or framework. I have pushed many code to production where checkmark doesn't even support that framework, and best thing about checkmarx is, it skips the files and tells everything is good and these d-mb a-s guys say its secure and passed :D.

    Example 2: These guys don't even check what code you submit for assessment is the same one that is getting deployed. Submit one for assessment, and deploy something else :D. No control to stop it. The whole process is flawed and stupid.

Example 3: These guys have some stupid tool called tech governance which checks for compliance. But again they don't check if you have submitted it for approval before using it. I know many tools which are against licensing used there, simply because they don't check anything.

Example 4: You can literally copy all of the files from you workstation to your personal device without being monitored in multiple different ways, then why the heck you guys want to try and run so many scanners in the laptop which heats up significantly for nothing.

Example 5: These guys have the most stupid 2FA system ever. you simple open a webpage and open another webpage immediately it still asks for 2FA. For god sake how many OTP i need to type. This all stupidity is only for developers. For hackers it easy, the API for all these applications use basic auth like jira, bitbucket, jenkins, etc... are not 2FA secured, meaning 2FA does'nt stop hackers, its just making your life harder.

This is just a tip of iceberg, and i know security issues to the extent where these guys are doing mistakes which will cause them billion dollar law suits, including copying of india domestic transaction data to global data center (I personally know hadoop jobs which runs everyday doing this), unauthorized access to non visa data like chase net, etc ...

  • This company is structured to work not globally, rather than just US. Most requests (more than 90%) that you raise in Asknow will go for approval to people in US. People in Singapore and other offices have to wait 24 hours for a round trip communication. Good go for equality.
  • This company is at least 10 years literally behind in terms of technology. They have TLT like DAP, Cybersecurity just wasting money, and no innovation can happen in this company because, they will say security issue for everything. I am openly challenging i can prove this company has not cyber security not even equal to a small startup.
  • This company tech stack is stupid too. For starters, they use bitbucket for scm, jenkins for CI/CD, sonarqube for quality, jfrog for artifactory. So stupid that, they have mixed and matched things making even a CI/CD setup so hard that you give up before even trying it.

Please be happy you are laid off, if not please save yourself, since as a technology company this is stupidity to the core and you will always be guided mostly by stupid people only. Let me tell you a simple math below, and i have seen it first hand over years in this company.

lets assume VISA hires 100 people and assume 20% are bad. Assume after year 1, in that 80 good people, 40 would have left because this company su-ks, and then VISA tries to fill back the 40 people. now again in that 10 will be bad and 30 will be good. If you continue this geometric progression for few years, you will understand its filled mostly with bad people, and i have seen it in my org personally. The bad people never leave because this company doesn't fire until recently, and they can't get a job at similar paying scale for their talent.

All the best if you are laid off, you just escaped a prison you never knew you were in. Its basically a sinking ship and you life is just saved by god.

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| 5331 views | | 18 replies (last November 14, 2024) | Reply
Post ID: @OP+1vauSrpV

18 replies (most recent on top)

@ktrp+1vauSrpV I'm impressed that you were able to type out so much while gargling Ryan's ba--s.

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Post ID: @kwuf+1vauSrpV

I don’t deny there is truth to some of the allegations surfaced by the author. I just wish the author would have use same motivation complaining for accomplishments. He would have be still have a job.

Visa is an established business dominating its market. It makes billions. Visa’s business is to defend its market share and not to diversify nor innovate in business. You probably wouldn’t know, many of us did write papers and were awarded patents. You probably spent most of your time cheating cybersecurity controls and complaining, maybe that is why you didn’t notice anyone else’s accomplishments.

I agree with the author that visa is top heavy with many senior directors and directors. Isn’t every company? At least Visa did something about that even when it was not popular. For example, in 2021, Visa mandated that each manager must have more than 7 direct reports, now 9 direct reports. Why do you think he got laid off - To get rid of this author, so his bloated salary can hire several entry level engineers who actually does work instead of complaining.

GenAI - the author somehow forgot Visa’s business and expect Visa to be an expert in GenAI. For a company that has a core business without any need of innovation, Visa’s heavy investment in GenAI and technology is impressive. Was everything perfect? No, but many of us who never done anything in GenAI had a chance to participate with no penalty. Were there great ideas that were voted down? What did you think this was? A talent show?

Security - is it true you can fool security assessors and technology controls? Of course you can! Assessors are humans and controls have loopholes. Should Visa spent more to prevent cheaters like him? That is debatable. Security only works if you believe in it. If you think security is only the job of the assessor and or the pentester, then I am glad we got rid of him. If he felt security findings bared down on him that he couldn’t use the rest room, I would think he did a terrible job securing his codes. It is one thing to say Visa’s cyber security work is not a perfect system, but to say Visa isn’t committed to security is utterly ridiculous. Just look at the investment in security in dollar amounts and how many cyber security jobs Visa employed. Just because Visa made a mistake hiring this joker, doesn’t mean Visa’s security is bullsh_t.

Localize data - I am appalled this guy is lobbing these allegations now. Even if there’s an issue, why didn’t he speak up? Didn’t you take any ethics training that told you to call the ethics hot line? Why tell us after you got laid off? So all these year, you kept it secret until you got laid off? Aren’t you the problem then? This is utterly BS!

Tech governance and 2FA: I agree with him that there’s too much paperwork and OTP. Are these problem created by people like the Author who has not collaborated with anyone to come up with real solution except to whine about everything?

Maybe it’s because:

  1. His Visa salary was too generous
  2. He had too much family time after work
  3. He was never alone facing a technical problem
  4. He was allowed to speak up
  5. He was forgiven for making too many mistakes

He probably enjoyed his visa benefits so much that he got so pi---d being laid off for contributing nothing for years! Nevertheless, this author is the problem Visa is trying to address today. Laying people off is sad and heartbreaking. Don’t make up BS to ruin the reputation of the rest of us who try everyday to make a difference at Visa.

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Post ID: @ktrp+1vauSrpV

Unachievable targets to most of them and yet pay like peanuts. Joe, Charlie and Al Kelly really structured the company well and the new guys are ruining it. The strategy is to show growth by cutting down 15% capacity and how long they are going to do this? Everyone is stressed and not a good company to work with. In another three years I can see the CEO, CFO and CTO getting fired by the board.

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Post ID: @bzoo+1vauSrpV

@6oyk+1vauSrpV And yet you don't provide a single case of something incorrect they said.

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Post ID: @6rcl+1vauSrpV

This guy was probably laid off and is bitter. Half of what he said is inaccurate.

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Post ID: @6oyk+1vauSrpV

great post! it really explain in detail the main issues at visa at the moment:

  • Releases are a nightmare, outdated slots and meetings, plus all the useless paperwork.
  • Security is a pain in the a-s, but offers no real security, just makes life harder. And its development teams very hard, the proxy, vpn, dev tools setups, yearly token that silencelly expire, etc, that costs hours and sometimes days in productivity.

Unfortunately a delusion Management wants GenAI everywhere, GenAI is like the house roof, sure it is important, but without foundations it is not solving nothing.

Rajat taking a self driving ride on Linkedin was a good representation of the management on tech at visa. Out of touch with reality, in a "visionary mode", with OKR that are around productivity improvements but not touching the old tech, procedures outdated, theatrical security that prevents work of getting done.

middle management just does not care, everyone pretends to be on board so that is not left behind or fire.

if the genAI push continues on this way, it is a year or two from hitting the wall.

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Post ID: @5ckn+1vauSrpV

Lol, everything is spot on and it's just the tip of the iceberg. Also I think you forgot one more point which shows how stupid this company is. These guys force to put genai start and genai end comments for all the code, which are the heights of stupidity. Since these id--ts are tracking this , I wrote a cron job running every day to just randomly commit hello world code in loop and thanks to chatgpt for giving the code for that too. Anyone still want to suffer by staying in the company, use this trick so that atleast you will be in their good books.

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Post ID: @5ssv+1vauSrpV

Bro don't dump all the truth at once. Dem wallst journalist gonna find that Indian data cluster now

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Post ID: @5owr+1vauSrpV

Couldn’t agree more. GenAI stuff has gotten so deep into their head that they think with use of copilot developers can be 10x. Someone needs to tell them that coding is just 20% of the work. Rest all is stupid SAs, thousand types of scans. Opening so called CHGs etc etc etc.

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Post ID: @4whp+1vauSrpV

I work as a developer in Visa and what was described in the first post is spot on.

In so many aspects we are hopelessly behind the technology curve. Instead of focusing on more fundamental issues like our cloud, data, infrastructure strategy, management are instead chasing the latest shiny thing, GenAI.

Instead of creating a climate of fear and mistrust with constant layoffs, the technology leadership team should be far more focused on bringing our tech stack into the modern era.

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Post ID: @3jpe+1vauSrpV

200% correct, visa is way behind in technology usage where capital one, jpmc(some products) are using latest tools and tech to fasten up ci/cd from more than 8 years.

Bullsh-t and sh-t show with GenAI.

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Post ID: @2gsj+1vauSrpV

Which office is this? This was not my experience with VA office

The AI thing is real tho… lol

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Post ID: @1idv+1vauSrpV

How about whistle-blowing the security concerns to the media?

If they are true, it's a good way to forced Visa to act on them.

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Post ID: @1rsn+1vauSrpV

I don’t really care about how well “visa does AI”
AI is an overhyped buzz word there to please shareholders like “big data” was before it.

Is it a useful tool? Definitely.
Is it going to to replace competent engineers any time soon? Not on your life.

But we all have to pretend that it’s the most amazing thing ever and use it for everything or else risk looking out of touch.

“The emperor has no clothes”

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Post ID: @1imk+1vauSrpV

Agreed with much of what you said.
The rot runs from the top down, especially through middle management.
But those guys will be the last to go

Sorry you got laid off man

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Post ID: @1xwg+1vauSrpV

So good.

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Post ID: @1tpc+1vauSrpV

Is this even English? You work at Amex, don’t you?

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Post ID: @neb+1vauSrpV

This person really hates Visa. Which organization are you affiliated with? I agree with the GenAI comments. They recently purchased about 100 GPUs and are acting like a big deal. The top people at Visa are mostly non-technical individuals who are good at talking. I personally know someone who has not even shown up to the office for a year and is still employed.

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Post ID: @nqk+1vauSrpV

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