Thread regarding AT&T layoffs

It’s so the lower level managers can go back to a building for their conference calls that tell them they didn’t make HPC again. The outside technicians take as long as it takes to complete a job, that’s the way it is. They can get rid of everyone and do the jobs themselves and still get the same conference call saying they didn’t make HPC. Stupid

I am curious now with mandatory #WFH and mass layoffs happening, I am wondering what companies are now thinking about the #notelecommuting push outlined in the posts dating back to last year. Are the companies getting ready to push for a huge surge in onboarding digital employees (eg. #Amelia)?

@3jgmg, to find you’re a “manager” was troubling, and sad to hear......those who rely on you for even, unbiased decision making must see you as seriously flawed, that’s something that a manager just kind hide. It’s a good possibility that well qualified WFH candidates made their requests through you and were blocked, either by you directly, or your failure to pass it on upstairs and that’s simply malpractice.....Careful now, your ego is showing!

Is it really to make employees come back in and collaborate? Or is it it to make those quit that don’t want to come back in the office? Or is it a scheme to fill up buildings to market them as “full” to sell them for lease-back. And in the midst of enormous debt this year they are building out floors, or partial floors of buildings, with 2020 workspace. This new workspace doesn’t seem suitable for full-time employees that are on conference calls all day. Doesn’t make sense.

Typical management games. Make you go back in the office so you're miserable. Then threaten layoffs so you become so paranoid about losing your job you forget about the misery of commuting. Works like a charm.

@3jwgh, my appreciation to putting the WFH employee into a proper light. The post before you has made it obvious that he is a single lad, no wife, no children with an anger of his job...so why not take it out on someone one else.

All my contacts over the years, except for a few, have been in countries like Japan, Germany, Brazil, India....I could go on. So while our detractors are asleep, comfortably in their beds, many of the WFH’s are on calls at 9pm to 2am getting it done and then on the job at 8am. For those with families, an extra $100+ saved on gas each month, is a huge help.

We were allowed to WFH for one obvious reason, our managers thought our work performance merited such allowances. They were always free to revoke that benefit, at any time and for any reason should our work performance fall behind. I believe the immediate detractor wasn’t given that opportunity and has a beef with those that did. The company pulled us back to CZ, but for nothing to do with our work performances, and we all know this.

Those that WFH do so for a myriad of reasons, caring for children, a chronically ill spouse or parent, their own physical concerns, a loss of income through divorce or death of a spouse and so on.....most are just trying to hold it together while performing at peak company expectations....how about giving them a break!

I got tired of trying to figure out this irrational, non-sensical change in policy, and left the company just over a month ago.

Telecommuting was a huge benefit to me, and one I valued just under my salary and the health insurance. For someone with kids, being able to WFH was a tremendous contributor to work/life balance.

Because of all the various company reorgs over the years, I hadn't worked with my boss or coworkers for a decade or more. Given that, I made no sense for me to come into an office, though I did 2 days a week. The company gave us admittedly excellent tools to work remotely (Skype, Q, WebEx, etc.) Then they tell us we have to come into an office every day to "collaborate" with...no one physically in the office...but use the same remote connection tools to work with the same distant coworkers? My mind still can't wrap around the logic there.

I WFH 3 days a week for over 5 years and had excellent performance reviews. Now I was also aware of people "unofficially" WFH full time that were goofing off and/or had clear distractions at home that were affecting their work performance. Why not punish those people, instead of punishing all of us?

Honestly, I think this "collaboration" BS is meant to sour the milk and run employees off, to reduce payroll, etc. That's the only thing I've been able to come up with. That and/or they're trying to come up with a reason to force people outside the "collaboration zone" cites to move or leave the company. It's 100% irrational. I couldn't handle it anymore, on top of my other concerns with ATT at the time. I'm in a far better place now. There is life outside ATT.

You all have become comfortable working from home and now feel you deserve it. While all the call center and multiple other office personnel have to report to a office while they can also do the same from home. Griping that you have to do the same as 1m plus other jobs that could be done from home also is a shame. We all have to change along with the company as long as you have a job right now just deal with it. If you had other problems like no work and just sitting collecting a paycheck then maybe you have a different problem. As for driving to work, everyone else has to do it why not you also? I’m also a manager and I could occasionally work from home but not all the time. Maybe once a month if I really needed to. Driving to work everyday is such a pitiful complaint. We all have to do it. They don’t work for us, we work for them. Time in exchange for money.

I have a technical position, will leave it at that. Was speaking to another manager about something in a collaboration zone where we're sitting like chickens in cages, and had a mo–nic salesperson sitting two seats down from me chime in with his two cents of idiocracy. We just looked at each other nonverbally asking ourselves WTF..... Waste of Time. Not to mention I talked to my peer every day by phone or Q or email just fine WFH. Leadership is clueless. We're now paying for AT&T's decade of fast tracking VP's kids and butt buddies up the chain as fast as they can without spending enough time in any department to actually learn anything, and now we're seeing it all come to fruition.

This was asked in our town hall after the IBM announcement and we were told our reporting locations have not changed, we are still supposed to come into the office but the people going to IBM can switch to working remote full time as long as their manager approves it.

It’s been months now. Anyone heard anything new or changed regarding telecommuting, since all the layoffs and outsourcing?

Manager of offshore contractors. My next line is in St. Louis, his in Alpharetta. No collaboratione at all, just sitting miserable & cold in a noisy, dirty open space dragging my laptop around. Horrible way to work & worst idea ever.

How sad that there are some employees so terrified to WFH, what has this company come to? Shame on management for all of this.

Major snow/ice storm hitting the NE area. Guess that layoff list will get larger tomorrow when the smart people WFH, rather than risking their lives to drive in bad weather just so your a$$ is in a seat in an office.

A good article that upper management should read.

https://remote.co/10-stats-about-remote-work/

A Supreme Court Justice can work from home. Let that sink in.

Fear based management is the new style.

I'm of the opinion it is to get people to quit so they don't have to pay severance. Not allowing WFH is by the far the most mo--nic idea.

Has anyone who was WFH and now in an office actually had 1 in person meeting since they've been back? Not me. Just scrambling every day to find a place to sit (and using lots of Clorox wipes). The gas and tolls are adding up & I'm stressed from driving. Not a good way to work.

@4mpu highly doubt it has anything to do with laptops. The reason given was to collaborate which is a load of horse manure as not one soul I know has done a minute of work collaborating. It's either make people so despondent they quit, or track your every move so they have an excuse to fire you. Either way, all I see is miserable faces staring blankly as they trudge through their lives on the road to nowhere.

This almost sounds like a knee jerk reaction. Could be nothing more than security. Someone left their laptop open & a non employee accessed something (or so the story goes). Possibly they cannot track your key logs as readily on a laptop/tablet. Also laptops/tablets are stolen. Proprietary info is a big deal.

Or they are just being mean.

Looking around that this fabulous idea of "collaboration" (which is horse $hit), all I see is:

miserable faces

long lines for coffee

people camped out in odd places in various spots throughout the building

poor air circulation and repugnant smells

Here's an idea, instead of cramming everyone in at once, why not schedule various days to go in the office based on AVP or some other way of slimming down the groups. It's obvious this is an exercise in futility, a waste of time & money for most folks and not a very productive or enthusiastic way to work.

Why bother doing this at all when talk is 10K people will be let go over the course of this year?

Wait until the first snow in NJ, you think people will drive in bad weather into an office? NOT ME.

So if all these people are called back into the office & now a huge layoff comes along, what has this accomplished? Since collaboration is BS, why not let everyone go back to WFH so the company came cut costs. Less electricity, less office maintenance (not that's it clean now), overall it's a cost saver. No wonder why this place is a mess. Bad decisions from the top down.

@2afx - “Troubleshooting is a term from the old days”. Haha, word shaming now? I am not from the ‘old days’, and shows the exact attitude we don’t need. Assuming you also then are also not from the old days , sounds like you have little respect for those who are. I am DevSecOps and still want my space.

Wake up and smell the curry, you will have to learn to deal with the Bangladesh accents. No need to convert to Hinduism though.

@2afx who "in the office" is going to teach someone new skills, the India folks? No one is giving up what they know these days in order to attempt to hang onto their current position.

Troubleshooting is a term from the old days. In DevSecOps, the developers will be doing the support, so jobs like yours will eventually go away. You should be in the office to learn some dev skills so you can be retained.

@1she how many projects actually started & finished under SAFe since it has JUST been implemented in ATO? You've definitely been force fed that kool aide, projects slipping have nothing to do with collocation and all to do with the quality of work which we know is mostly done overseas! In addition, morale is so low no one cares about their work anymore. VPs pushing SAFe are a few years too late in the game, as always this company is 3 steps behind on everything.

@2kyl - “If you are the kind of employee that reserves the same desk every day in a 2020 office, you are not much better at transforming than the telecommuters.”

Doesn't require spending 10 minutes in the morning disinfecting it from the last germ ridden person who was there.

@2kyl - “If you are the kind of employee that reserves the same desk every day in a 2020 office, you are not much better at transforming than the telecommuters.”

Should we all be playing ping pong and sipping smoothies, happily moving our ‘desks’ around place to place? That is hilarious. Who is actually going to do the work? It all sounds great on paper, trendy project ‘pods’ gathering over coffee or pizza and coming up with some breakthrough technology, maybe win an award! Prob a few labs groups where that’s their job, but the rest of us have a company to keep running and need space/quiet and some consistency. Hard to troubleshoot and write code with all the distractions of open space. Oh wait - I don’t need to troubleshoot alone, I can ask whoever is sitting next to me that day.

I cannot picture the older employee base of AT&T enjoying the innovative campus of Apple, Alphabet, and Facebook. If you didn't know, Google reported anand became Alphabet about three years ago. This is the kind of thing we talk about in the office but don't call telecommuters about.

If you are the kind of employee that reserves the same desk every day in a 2020 office, you are not much better at transforming than the telecommuters.

In order to encourage telecommuters back to the office, T should have built a new, state of the art campus like other innovative companies such as Apple, Google and Amazon instead of staying in downtown Dallas and trying to revamp an old building in a bad area. This type of campus would also attract talent from top universities where these innovative companies have full blown cafeterias with chefs, gyms and even daycares. But oh yeh, AT&T is NOT an innovative company by any means. It will remain archaic just like it’s current leaders Randy and the 3 Johns.

As a telecommuter for 10+ years, I enjoyed my job. Being back in an office now I have zero interest or enthusiasm to do anything. I worked hard all of those years & to be told you are "targeted" because of where you live or worked is a complete insult to my work ethic. The office environment is dirty, noisy and filled with people I have no desire to assimilate with, nor do they wish to do the same with me. I see no one & deal with no one. I'll do what I have to do to get by & collect a paycheck. Really tired of being sold a line of BS by management. Collaboration is their new buzzword and it's all BS.

So I guess all the co-located SAFe PIDs that close on time and under budget, compared to the PIDs with slipping releases and cost overruns with remote resources are just a fiction. Maybe your fear of SAFe is that no one will be soon feeding you a list of tasks to complete in isolation anymore. News flash, this archaic punch list mentality is why Netflix, T-mo, Google and Facebook are eating our lunch. Is there any line of business where we lead the competition at this point? Need to try something different if we are ever going to take the lead.

By now we should all realize that forcing folks into an office to "collaborate" is just a crock of BS, as least for ATO. It's a way to clean house, make people so miserable they quit.

@1zww - "What kind of contractors you are working with that don't sign NDAs? Our best dev teams are contractors and guess what, they work on proprietary technology for us. "

First, do you interview the people who are in earshot of you before every call/conversation? There's no assigned seating remember, and anyone with a badge can get in.

Second, ALL contractors and even ALL employees are not supposed to 'be in' on some projects until further development is completed. We are not one 'big 'ole family' who needs to know everyone's business.

Third, I know some contractors who are great people, but it's a bad way to do business when they really have no loyalty to the company.

I agree innovation can happen 'spontaneously', but it is not usually when someone interjects themselves into a conversation they didn't belong in and generally not while people are actually TRYING TO WORK. What they could do is mandate a 2x per week paid 90 minute lunch break where all the kiddies can hang out together in the cafeteria with names badges and mingle. That's where they would get new ideas.

@krn

So essentially you are saying you insert yourself into conversations that you don’t belong in?

Exactly my point of why telecommuters get more work done.

Again, I work in an office 4 days a week and when I’m explaining a project to someone and sh--s like you insert your “collaboration” into my conversation, I have to explain it all again because you only heard bits and pieces, and then tell you why your idea s---s because you based your “game changing innovative collaborative idea” on 2 sentences you overheard.

Piss off with that mess.

What kind of contractors you are working with that don't sign NDAs? Our best dev teams are contractors and guess what, they work on proprietary technology for us. This is the kind of context the WFH resources don't understand.

Private team chats and lack of company context is how we wind up with so many instant message apps. And so many file storages. And a culture that abhors collaboration on Social media like tSpace. Can't wait to see the WFH resources heads explode when the company moves to Slack. They'll probably set up a WebEx, spend 20 minutes griping about how much better they liked Connect, and then beg an in-office millennial to train them.

Or maybe some innovative ideas can pop up when a contractor ‘spontaneously’ overhears confidential/proprietary information being discussed among a group they don’t work with and chimes in. That’s a smart way to do things - I know I would love it if someone jumped into my team discussion like that...smh.

@1rkn, lol - “joining spontaneous conversation”? You mean eavesdropping on the people you don’t know sitting near you having a conference call, talking to their doctor or kids on the phone? Yeah I definitely should have joined in the conversation when someone was discussing their chemotherapy. Could have come up with some innovative there.