#badleadership

CEO Dennis Mathew’s said TWO weeks ago that the Optimum name is more than a name change, it’s who we are and where we are going, and that the organization was deepening its commitment to customers, employees, and the communities it serves. LOL. What a lying sack of 💩. Guy said that knowing this was happening. He can never be trusted again. Management’s word is meaningless. Hapless man, garbage company.

If they are doing layoffs DBO needs to go. A complete bureaucratic nightmare TN has created.

After years of foisting your su-kage onto SH&A, you are taking the golden parachute in a testament to the clear lack of leadership ability and lack of qualifications you brought to a once mighty division, leaving the group wallowing in debt to the tune of almost $800,000,000 to Blackstone, no clear goals and a culture of pettiness and obsequiousness.

Thanks for the memories and the sh---y raises.

I got let go last month and it still feels unreal. All the mistakes are made at the top, but it’s us who always get hit. Meanwhile, senior management keeps doing their thing and takes zero responsibility. Hard work counts for nothing until they need someone else to blame.

I work in new team, we deliver "nothing" because PO talk like he is on dr-gs changing his mind every second week. Moreover he is micromanaging us not to do stuff, it feels like he don`t want us to deliver this and prove idea was ....

I was bored last sprint so I did more than a task which would my high school kid do to experiment. As a result I got to listen to a "talk" for "doing wrong stuff". At same time we have a guy in team which delivers ZERO and its fine.

I am starting to hate software dev as I am not even allowed to do anything any more. Like I wanted to be engineer to build things, have solutions to help some with something, not to sit 50% of my day on meetings and deal with architects which cant even write hello world and their git is totally EMPTY, but they can say AI AI AI... and agentic AI.

I did not receive a single valuable training in the "research" field we are doing, but my training backlog is full of useless trainings about nothing like that AI joke we got inspire shout out recently :D.

I am starting to think to quit without other job, because most I hate in my career is when I can't do work because it make others look bad.

last day 2/20.... i have like 15k vesting 3/1... complete stab in the back.

So systems will never get better check
Executives will not get cut
Bad decision makers will get bonuses
Hard working average employees will get riffed doesnt matter how hard you work. So this pig has got lipstick a dress and makeup & you all still brownnose. Theres no growth here or ever was its the same people holding the same titles and let me guess what religion is dan we always pick the worst times & worse people.p

I feel like the leadership in this company is so confused about how to run a good healthcare company and it starts from the top. Sarah London is not a good leader and she needs to go.

At this point CV is polished, will bide my time. Still putting in work but only until something that looks better comes up. Thankful to be on the ship but this place has given and taken so much, the new lack of leadership is literally ki-ling me. Management pushes down to empty suits, No direction given. When you push you get more problems and politics. When performance suffers they blame the little people and give out sh---y pay and reviews. Can’t change anything at my level. Only way to survive mentally is to stop caring.

I read that when Schwab wants you to quit they start write ups and the compliance team starts questioning your every move even if you are doing nothing wrong.

Eventually Schwab sits you down and asks you to resign or else they mark your licenses.

This feels like blackmail, how should one navigate through this situation and how should one answer probing questions from compliance and management?

Or how to run it. Things have improved a little bit since the 2018 to 2022 fiasco, but it's still more than clear how far out of their depth the leadership is.

How many of you agree that one of the first signs a company's leadership is beginning to fail, from top to bottom, is when feedback is disguised as praise (so you have a chance to keep your job and not be targeted in retailation) and true collaboration is nothing more than an echo- chamber to stoke egos?

Is this the new norm for most American companies? It sure seems so.

They say they are going to change, but dear God in heaven when is one iota of change for the better going to happen?
This is like the worst bad relationship your parents told you about.
They say they are going to communicate more… they don’t. When they do it’s more words, less action.
They have made you lose a lot of good friends aka coworkers, for reasons you still have no idea of. There are still way too many bosses.
So help me if someone tries to say they are going to bring Tar-jay back I am going to scream. It’s over. It’s like Mean Girls and Fetch. Stop trying to make it happen. These are NOT your guests anymore. Why can you not understand this?
And speaking of not understanding your guests, you really had a great idea
with the grab bags, but you failed. Aside from the winners, I cannot even fathom who would be impressed or happy with what was in that bag. There is better and more sh-t presently in my vehicle than what was in that bag. And you hyped it up, to our guests. Who waited for it, thinking it was something great! You couldn’t even load it with snacks? A $5 gift card? Jesus anything? My kids birthday gift bags are better and we are poor.
I feel like you are just sabotaging the company now with these decisions. Trying to tank all of us.
There are so many of us who still and who did bust their a-s for this company, and for what? THIS?!

Be real. Wells Fargo made money in up years and bad years. It was due to the various lines of business they had. It was a highly conservative and well balanced business plan. Norwest Bank, and then Wells Fargo, was a premier place to work and to put your trust. Until the new management and "new profit" centers were brought in. At that point, the bank, which had been steadily profitable, and a great place to work, began to break down. New managers, who's only thought was the latest FAD, were put in place. Accelerate that to today's situation, and you can see that Wells Fargo has become just another Citi, just another big corporation that is only organized to make money for shareholders. Many long time employees have left. Many have been terminated. Many have been laid off.
You can see where this is going. Fast forward to some unknown economic issue, and the bank is caught flat-footed. Losses. Huge losses. Due to new direction and lack of diversification. All straight line responsibility to the "new management" that have arrived, similar to locusts. Yes, locusts. You see, they bring their fellows. you know, the "yes men" who give good subservience but don't call out the risks. And then, everyone is surprised when the dominoes fall.
What a joke.

Hard to believe some of the latest managers are long term employee and have no clue about the basics of the oil and gas industry. Instead of the old managers from just a few years ago who would be in the field shoulder to shoulder with us, we now have managers that fly in from Houston and go to the field for 30min and brag about it on social media and in the townhalls.

Cuts are about squeezing out extra profit, plus a hefty dose of offshoring. They’ll hand us some clunky AI tool we have to babysit like a toddler, and we’ll spend half our time double-checking hallucinations and bad outputs. Yet they’ll still expect us to deliver the work of five people. It’s a convenient excuse, but it’s hardly convincing.

The toxic and emotionally abusive culture here starts at the very top and just trickles down. You basically have to unlearn everything you know about good business. It's like they have a playbook, and they're deliberately doing the exact opposite of every recognized best practice. It's demoralizing and makes doing good work impossible.

They don't value employees, and some of the tactics they're using to cut costs feel downright deceitful and unethical. If I could give them any advice, it would be to just put us out of our misery. These slow, constant layoffs where they keep cutting our best people are just torturous. If the plan is to ki-l the company, then get on with it instead of this slow, painful death march.

Pay for performance, not even close. The worst management I have ever seen. The worst methods and procedures I’ve ever seen. Horrible, horrible management from top to bottom.

This was posted on SAPs board here on thelayoff but it totally applies to us as well:

We work for a criminal enterprise full of self-righteous, borderline re--rded psychopaths.

Good luck talking to anybody at viabenefits to get healthcare questions answered.

Whenever something goes wrong, there's a mad dash to point the finger at another team. No one in management ever just owns a mistake. It's exhausting. On top of that, we all know we're being paid well below market rate, and the chance of getting promoted is basically zero. They wonder why morale is so low, but it's not exactly a mystery.

Should I worry about more layoffs this year? I'm thinking between Thanksgiving and Christmas, it'd be truly assholish of them to lay people off. Not that I wouldn't put it past them, but it'd come with some unwanted bad publicity. Am I too naive to think they care?

Bad enough after 30 years to get kicked to the curb as a high performer, but now they are starting to remove people from the Slack groups. Just another reminder of you are just a number. Couldn't wait until everyone is off the payroll, just keep ripping off the band aid again and again.

Well, 2025 is almost over and Belk has survived another year ! It’s amazing how we can keep cutting, year after year, and everything seems to just function fine. well, ok not fine, but belk is still operating! Soon we will have no employees working at all, we are now thinking of using chimpanzees in place of human beings, what do to all think? I think it’s a winning idea !!!
2026 should be a year of dramatic cuts.. first I would like to have absolutely no visual merchandising standards in stores. I have the brilliant idea of throwing all merchandise inside of large bins and let all customers fight over it. Kind of like a scavenger hunt? What do you think? As far as benefits and pay increases are concerned, I want to cut cut cut cut cut…..let’s offer the standard 2% raise, but then cut paid time off even more! What a brilliant idea! Here I am babbling on and on.. as far as Belk’s top brass is concerned, it’s been a great year!, six and seven figure salaries, top tier benefits, bonuses and lots of perks, I hope everyone will enjoy their store meals on Black Friday! Don’t forget to keep the cost under $9.99 per person!!!! Deli meat, cr--kers, and Kool Aid should be in the menu! gobble gobble, kluck, kluck…

Hugs and Kisses,
Donnie

It’s frustrating to watch the same underperformers stay while anyone competent gets pushed out. If we actually kept our best people, constant cuts wouldn’t even be necessary.

These layoffs made a lot of things clearer for me, but the biggest thing is that I really don't want to stay here any longer than I absolutely have to. I'm already looking and once I find something, even if it means taking a pay cut, I'm gone because this whole process showed exactly how little thought went into how any of us were treated. Verizon handled this in the worst way imaginable and I have no interest in being around when they repeat the same cycle, because we all know it's only a matter of time before it happens again.

Though Verizon was one of the dream company to work for but like many of us I thought the same, worked there for more than 14 years and gave it all. Weekend work and a tons of after hours work to make our customers happy. The company literally took 2 minutes to make me a stranger. On the good side Verizon Underpays you and I realized it more when this VZ bubble broke, I realized how much I am worth of.
In some places very poor decisions were made where poor performers were kept since they were friends with the bosses and good performers were let go just because thier focus to make the best network and $u-k up to the boss or bosses boss.
In the end Im grateful to what I got but excited for the new chapter since it will pay much more than this $hitty company was paying
Request to higher ups to please review certain regions and ask why poor performers were kept when they had multiple HR complaints against them and failed in thier previous roles, friendships/ favouritism?

I have been at Optum for 8 years. I love my team. I had a really great Manager until they brought in a Design guy who was some influencer. This dude was an a-s clown.. The problem was not him, it was leadership above him. They wanted to bring in someone who would “shake things up”.. Well, they did. He was a train wreck. Since then things have gone down hill. Our leadership acts and has the intelligence of a JV squad at a community college. They make cr-p decisions, they tell us to embrace AI and then don't give us money to get tools that use AI. We are led by fools and mo--ns. I have been waiting for this RIF for at least a year. Happy it is finally here. I no longer need to worry if it is gonna happen to me or when. I wish all the employees well, I wish leadership to get a clue. Last person off site.. Make sure to turn off the lights (or get someone from India to do it). After all… Thats where all the work is going.. Bye for now :-)

The way the company is being run is unsustainable and frankly, deeply disappointing. Chris Cartwright has 100% bought into this ba----dized form of capitalism in America where shareholder value is the benchmark of success and nothing more.

There is no concern or respect for the employees, the single concern is profit and profit margin, but only for shareholders.

We continue layoffs despite being highly profitable and overachieving in regard to our forecast. We continue to have our resources and tools stripped away in attempts to save cost. The expectation then falls to the remaining employees to do more with less. The real economy (food prices, healthcare costs, childcare) is in recession due to rapid inflation and heading toward depression, yet employee pay has not even remotely kept up with rising real life costs.

Additionally, we are currently launching a platform for fraud prevention that is embarrassingly underdeveloped due to a lack of resources in software, developers, and engineers. This project is being spearheaded by an Advisor who is so blinded by career ambition that their lazer focus is on getting the product launched, so that they can receive the accolades and career advancement that comes with such success, but this Advisor seems unable to see that they are driving the launch of a product that is simply not ready to face customers. This lack of foresight is common here and I believe it’s because those affected are the boots on the ground employees who’s workloads and expectations continue to rise, but those in managerial or advisor positions do not have to feel the day-to-day impact of this approach.

To continue, every idea comes from the top down. The voices of the frontline employees are often ignored. Live training is avoided at all costs, even when it is explicitly requested or the need expressed. In fact, employees are often condescended to with responses like, “we encourage you to be more proactive in your training” and explore other resources such as a wiki page; suggesting that as if it weren’t a grossly false equivalency. In addition, the responsibility is placed on frontline level employees to document and log every single action that that is taken. There seems to have been very minimal effort on the part of management to figure out and implement a way to track employee productivity that is more comprehensive than insisting that their employees take the time and effort to not only do the work, but then log their work so that management doesn’t have to take the time and energy to do so. All of this despite a strong push for increased efficiency. Does no one in leadership or management see how this looks to the average employee? It is so ridiculous that it’s laughable—and believe me, employees are laughing amongst one another because it’s either that or cry.

Moreover, the current climate in this country has not adequately been addressed by TransUnion leadership or HR. There are ICE body snatchers out in this country, the epicenter of which is Chicago at the moment, and the silence from this organization is deafening. Violence is occurring in this company’s front yard, but not one individual in leadership has had the courage to acknowledge it; no emails with resources for what employees should do should they be illegally detained, No support for our colleagues who may be targeted simply for how they look, nothing.

Cartwright and Venkat are displaying for every employee how ethically and morally bankrupt this organization is with the two of them at the helm.

It’s embarrassing and it is despicable.

I’m wondering…

How does he feel about his nickname? Dan the Hatchet Man? I wouldn’t be surprised if he actually likes it.

How does it feel to cause such intense pain and misery to 13,000 individuals, multipled by 3 or 5 when you take into account, the family members of those who have been laid off?

This company is terrible. Would not recommend!

We get rid of a DEI hire and put someone equally as worthless in the spot

For all those that need a reminder, while FB and his merry band of c-suite minions were making money off your backs and fluffing investors , they were demanding you badge swipe 5 days a week or lose your job, do 9 hrs not 8:58 or lose your job, work excessive overtime or lose your job, make sure you are on your computer for 8 hrs or lose your job, move or lose your job, get a jab or lose your job, cut bonuses two years in a row while collecting their fat bonuses, slapped each other on the back for doing so well in Argentina while the people suffered with sky high inflation, do the job of 3 people or lose your job. They use you while they collect millions for doing a horrible job. We were running a company!! No you weren’t it was a smoke and mirrors so they could get richer. The BOD is complicit as well. Useless group. Got it!! Stop caring and live free.

Hi Folks

Thanks for all your hard work and efforts through the year, without you we would be nowhere. I meant even without paying you were still in business.

I know your complaining about the pay, and last minute holiday debacle but the HR women isnt upto it, still we got her an award, we know where to spend the money.

Us execs are doing are last flights and free trips, i meant holidays, around the world for this year. Phew clocked up some points.

Ignore the ten 10 other happy holidays emails your going to get as were spending your money.

Best wishes R & Cam

Good luck, Dan, trying to dazzle customers and grow the customer base—you can’t even take care of your internal customers! I still can’t access the severance portal, even after HR intervention. At this point, it’s laughable. Once again, Verizon fails to execute anything correctly.

Funny how Dan S couldn’t wait to send his email to lay 13k people off. Sent it at 7 am. Well it’s 8 am the next day and we still don’t know which execs, vps, sds and ads got laid off. He laid off all the people that do the actual work but kept all the people who just go to meetings to wag their fingers. Good luck turning this company around with people who don’t want to do a lick of work

What a puppet guy come in just threw people out. Not even understanding of any sentiments who needs to removed . He’s not only a joker but he’s entire circus

You can't help but wonder why a once great company would purposely hire a corrupt and incompetent CEO knowing that he completely destroyed the previous company from which he came. What's worse, is that thanks to his gross ineptitude, well over 30,000 (and counting) good, hardworking, tenured employees got sc--wed over during his reign. Meanwhile, he gets rewarded and gets to walk away with a 40 million dollar golden parachute fot it. It's criminal.

In October the U.S. saw more layoffs in one month than any month in the last 20 years. Now another 13k, there are no companies hiring we are out of a job and right before the holidays and a massive Great Depression hits. This is so much worse than many think, there won’t be enough jobs out there for all of us. I just lost my insurance, I am fu---d
This is heartless and I was laid off on a fu--ing mistake. I was not bottom 5%, I was a top performer I did not deserve this at fu--ing all. This is bullsh-t. The CEO gets 20 million fu--ing dollars and lays us off before the holidays. Fu-k this company.