#corporateculture

Thiight the town hall was filled with energy and engagement. Wonderful to see. It’s obvious how much the executive team prioritizes us employees. The town halls are always so engaging. I commend them. Love our benefits too.

Anyone else see the #Do Better Chevron post it notes on the broken glass in the Houston Sky Ring? Classic.

thats when you know your company is run by id--ts and cares jack about the v-teamer

S.S. said:
Layoffs are a symptom of a system that has lost its heart, not a strategy, and great bosses don't lay people off.

No great bosses here. Just overpaid C-suite listening to consulting firms who use spreadsheets to chop people and perks.

I am a biomedical engineer with multiple master's degrees and 25+ years of experience in the field. I even studied FDA regulations at a law school. I have written thousands of engineering documents for FDA compliance many times at different medical device companies. But Medtronic sent my job to India.

Since I do have 25+ years of experience, when a company in a regulated industry sends its work to India, the quality of compliance engineering usually drops. I worked at one firm where the medical device company sent its requirements documentation to India to save money. After about a year, it wasn't working out at all. So, an American-based team in Miami with principal-level engineers had to rewrite it from scratch. I predict this is happening right now for Medtronic. But those VPs overrule it. I know there were mid-level directors who foresaw that as a big risk. Some of them left or just got laid off.

So, why does that happen - the drop in quality of engineering compliance? Usually, it's a variety of factors like time zone difference, culture gap, extreme distance, challenges for English as a 2nd language, and lack of experience. Given the "woke" culture, if an engineer brings up the issue of "English as a 2nd language" then someone usually pulls the race card rather than deal with it. I've seen that happen multiple times with offshore teams. Rather than admit their writing su-ks, they'll just yell racism in a variety of ways. BTW - I am a bilingual speaker of English and another language as a minority engineer. So, I know when someone struggles with English as a 2nd language. It's common with offshore teams. Are there exceptions? Sure. But it would be naive to assume the cluster doesn't exist.

But I'm having great fun doing research on AI for medical imaging. I work with a group affiliated with the Mayo Clinic over in Rochester. I gave up on the medical device industry and work in finance now. But I still do academic research outside of work with medical imaging and AI. It's very rewarding - no ugly corporate politics and no offshoring. I had a meeting with two principal scientists today to discuss fMRI and DTI data processing. The research of AI and medical imaging is fascinating. One can still enjoy such research without dealing with the corporate nightmares of the medical device industry.

BTW - be sure to lookout for that FDA Audit Inspector when that offshore team has to show its documentation for compliance engineering. I doubt they can make the cut. I've seen it fail multiple times.

“My grandfather was a union organizer in the garment district in New York City. My mother took me to a civil rights demonstration in Washington in my stroller”

What a fu--ing charlatan. Everyone around this a--hole is su-king up to him to keep their jobs. This was some low level account executive without a comp sci background just a month ago telling us the wonders of AI he’s exposed to cause he sees pre-release models. What would this fool be able to discern? Charlatans of Silicon Valley jingling keys in front of a boomer toddler. Ask grandpa if he can convert to PDF or if he needs perplexity to do that for him. Funniest thing about this farce is him talking about being scrappy and then going in hiring his buddy from Columbia who did a sh-t job there against the Trump admin.

My heart goes out to all who’ve been affected so far. Synopsys employee here, and it seems like Ansys folks have been hit especially hard, at least based on what we’d heard before this round. That’s really unfair, since I know quite a few people from that side who were skilled, dedicated, and genuinely great at what they did. I can only assume performance and experience weren’t major factors. Remember, these are corporate cost-cutting decisions. They almost never reflect our true professional value or potential.

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/11/12/oracle-and-coreweave-represent-bad-behavior-in-the-ai-buildout-says-da-davidsons-gil-luria.html

One of the things I really miss about corporate life is playing the “which, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is where you go to meetings with the express intent of taking zero actions whatsoever. And if you’re thinking, what is this corporate lingo, then an action is something that you actually have to do. And you might think, “Well, isn’t that the whole point of work, that you actually get stuff done?” To which I would say, “No, foolishness!” You’re too busy attending meetings at which you’re avoiding actions to actually have time to do anything.

So how do you avoid taking any actions? Well, you might think, maybe just don’t show up to the meeting, which would be a terrible strategy, because then the people at the meeting will give you all of the actions, and you hear about it later. So that’s a rookie mistake. There are a variety of strategies for avoiding taking actions, one of which is to just remain perfectly still. This is the Jurassic Park approach. You hope that if you just don’t move, the dinosaur won’t see you, like this. But sadly, the dinosaurs often do spot you, so it’s not a good strategy.

A much better strategy is to constantly be positive in meetings and compliment people, saying things like, “That’s a really great idea!”, “I just wanted to double down on that point…”, “I completely agree!” or “Let me just build on that…”, because that gives people the impression that you’re contributing to the meeting without actually contributing anything.

There is a risk, though, that at some point an action will start to come your way. You need to spot that and head it off quite quickly. You do that by saying things like, “We’re just so busy right now,” or “My team just don’t have the bandwidth,” or even a kind of inferred threat where you say, “We’d have to deprioritize some of our strategically aligned work.” That usually stops them.

You might think that leaders of these meetings would get very frustrated with everybody avoiding taking actions, but they don’t, generally, because that’s how they got where they are, by being very good at giving the impression that they’re doing something whilst at the same time not actually doing anything whatsoever. And I know you’ve got this lingering suspicion: in that case, how does any work actually get done? Well, good question.

The answer is, you give it to somebody else to do. If you have budget, you lodge that with a third party, a vendor, who can actually do the doing, and then you take the credit for the doing. But if you don’t have budget, then you just kind of moan incessantly about not having sufficient budget. “My team doesn’t have enough budget.” “We just don’t have the budget to get anything done this year.” That ensures that you can continue attending meetings where you avoid taking any actions but nevertheless give the impression that you’re actually doing work.

It is late fall in the United States. The leaves are changing, and the air has turned crisp. We begin to prepare for the holidays with family and friends. Christmas decorations come down from the shelves in the attic or garage. We make our homes—and sometimes our yards—festive, and we start our lists of gifts for loved ones. It is a magical time.

Oh… and Solventum begins its annual restructuring. It seems people are receiving their Christmas their pink slips from the water boy and his cronies today.

In ten minutes, we’ll get to hear how—with a little courage and some visionary leadership—we’re making the changes that will guarantee we stagger forward until the next layoff, which is in no way reassuring.

Looking at the feedback and followups from the flaccid ‘fireside chat’ meetings, you will see that Eliza was used to collate responses and determine what the outcomes were. There are bullets that spouted off management groomed responses. All you see is that all BNY working people are excited and thrilled with the direction of the company. Then Eliza somehow determined that people agree with the direction of management and our mission. Lastly, people felt the top level communication was very informative and appropriate.
Let that sink in and ask yourself, does anyone believe this speaks for the majority of people working here? Anyone?
It’s now official. Eliza is a lying BS tool that truly is artificial ‘intelligentsia’ at BNY’s elite management level. Not intelligence at all.

The disaster that most everyone realized was coming is directly related to the hiring of executives, for lack of a better term, from Sweden, Ireland, India, and Canada. At least two have been under investigation of wrongdoing while being the head of other companies. The next part of the disaster is allowing HR to run the business with its innate stupidity. Another part of the mix is increasing prices and forcing someone within finance to manipulate the numbers by showing increased subscribers rather than terminations based upon the increase. Forcing out the knowledge base within the company. Offshoring customer service and everything else they could get their hands on. This CEO will do no better and the price increases will continue along with layoffs. When something this large is turned into such a mess, it will take a very long time to correct. One common theme that has existed for at least ten years is the executives do not want to hear the truth. Every negative is twisted, turned, and shined so the executives can continue to believe that they are the greatest.

This is from Wireless, but still very much true. OP is @f7+1k9q3zzfe.

Way and his band of merry VPs and directors are leaving us all in peril, one more time.

"The hack job they did during the merger have led to a wave of dissatisfaction among investors, who are now seeking their rightful compensation. It remains to be seen who will ultimately bear the cost of these developments". This is clearly a straightforward decision, and HR is well-equipped to handle the situation effectively.

Happy bean soup Thanksgiving and merry humble pie for Christmas, y'all!

Ultimately it’s probably better to find out now than waste more time. He’s a multi millionaire that is dangling layoffs and leaving everyone in the dark to punk us. What type of leaders makes those types of threats during the holidays? A bad one that is just a hatchet man that was sent to dismantle Verizon and dump on us. That’s the corporate life and the real world. He’s been on the board for multiple years he’s not looking to grow the company. He’s looking to drive shareholder value so he can exit and get a nice payout. If your store doesn’t close this time it will soon. The future is 100% online with AI. Buy a phone anywhere and then activate online. Hopefully you get a nice payout and then move on retail is dead.

Ive worked here long enough to sit thru at least 5 strategic shuffles, and I’ve never seen leadership this tight-lipped... All this while morale sinks sooo fast.

Dan keeps talking about building a leaner company and bold changes, but all we get are buzzwords and MORE SILENCE. It’s the same canned lines on earnings calls & the same trust the process nonsense in internal metings... and meanwhile we’re supposed to act like we dont see the layoffs coming a mile away.

Everyone already knows something big is happening by November 20... the rumors are everywhere, not just this site.

Yet instead of addressing it head-on we get happy emails about embracing agility and AI transformation (what the fu-k is that).

People are anxious, scared, updating resumes on company time, and pretending to care about the future vision while half the teams are quietly being gutted.

If you really believe in being a transparent leader, prove it. Stop hiding behind corporate PR.

Tell people what’s happening so they can prepare. We’re adults indeed and we can handle the truth.

What we can’t handle is another round of fake optimism from execs posting champagne selfies on linkdin while the rest of us are bracing for impact.

If this is your idea of leadership, it’s no different from the Hans era - just with better lighting + fewer vowels in your buzzwords.

Will the Chairman of the Board ever be held responsible for the Clown Circus that FF has built?

So, what's the scoop and how many will be laid off? Who do they target.

This article came out in 2018 after a VSP. It is surprisingly accurate on how things would go at Verizon.

https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/open-letter-to-44000-verizon-employees.html

Who thinks Dell is America's greatest company?

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mdell_newsweek-americas-greatest-companies-2025-activity-7391601479037509632-SWLt?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAABWyZkBBjjl_sgcgalJESE5nRysw80KbVs

I spent over 10 years in vSphere. Now that Broadcom bundled vSphere 9.0 and you can never buy alone, many alternatives are coming up. Proxmox is outdated. These guys are out of their mind.

But I am seeing a few players. Some are ex-vmware employees. It is very very very interesting to see one of them takeover vSphere in a few years.

Of course, the top enterprise customers are stuck but anyone less than 1000 servers should be an immediate target.

I am very looking forward to see vSphere displacement in action.

19,000 employees were kicked out due to greed and destruction.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/03/exxon-funded-thinktanks-to-spread-climate-denial-in-latin-america-documents-reveal

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mohamedamer_retailstrategy-organizationaltransformation-activity-7392217719959396353-hAdx?utm_medium=ios_app&rcm=ACoAAAgtY3sBYDFnclM5iLdHkOCfHOYJbmAQVAQ&utm_source=social_share_send&utm_campaign=copy_link

Does anyone else laugh as hard as I do when SB calls J.E.G., Jag? Dude doesn't know how to pronounce a high ranking member of the EC nor does anyone on EC care to correct him.

Log into LinkedIn and decide which of these apply to your colleagues.
The drum beaters are growing by the day.

A field guide for the modern professional jungle. Bring your coffee and your sense of irony.

⸻

The Drum Beater
“Achievement unlocked: updated my email signature.”
Celebrates everything — from finishing a webinar to surviving Monday. If self-promotion were cardio, this one would be marathon-ready.

⸻

The “Humbled” Achiever
“So humbled to announce that I’m basically amazing.”
Masters the ancient art of bragging while pretending not to. Their posts start with false modesty and end with 1,200 likes.

⸻

The Thought Leader
“Innovation is just passion wearing a tie.”
Part philosopher, part buzzword generator. Communicates exclusively in abstract nouns — synergy, authenticity, disruption — as if they’re paid by the syllable.

⸻

The Motivational Evangelist
“I spilled coffee on myself — and learned a valuable lesson about leadership.”
Turns every life event into an inspirational parable. A broken laptop? A metaphor for resilience. A delayed flight? Proof that patience is a skill set.

⸻

The Corporate Citizen
“Proud to be part of a company that’s making the world slightly better — at least in our press release.”
Their posts are indistinguishable from the HR department’s. They clap for every culture initiative like it’s the Super Bowl halftime show.

⸻

The Sycophant
“Brilliant insight, boss! (Please notice me.)”
The algorithm’s most loyal servant. Likes, comments, and reposts with the precision of a political campaign. Never misses a chance to congratulate management for “inspiring leadership.”

⸻

The Silent Lurker
“Just here for the sociology experiment.”
Never posts. Never likes. Knows everyone’s promotion history and engagement stats by heart. The digital equivalent of the person at a party who stands by the snack table quietly judging everyone.

For many years getting paged out to P1/P2 even P3 warrooms outside of work hours in the evenings, overnights, at movies, at dinner, getting groceries, at the gym, anywhere you go your phone would constantly go off. Not to mention the contanst group chats for work to respond to. All for no extra pay, layed off 1 year ago and no make way more money, work only 40 hours a week M-F. Get out while you can, they don't care about customers, definitely not employees, only the bottom line and the good ol boys at the top. Find a private company to work for.

ESG seems to be the most popular division at Broadcom. I don’t see any other division discussions here.
Quarter after quarter, shameless ESG is always below the line of doom, like a parasite hogging the host.

Mega props to the guy that posted the Jimmy Fallon thumbs down gif to the JW announcement on the Facebookesque IOL homepage.

💥 “Too many layers. Too much overlap.” That’s the official reason Target just gave for cutting 1,800 corporate jobs — right before the holidays.

Let’s call it what it is:
A corporate hangover from years of over-hiring, over-layering, and under-leading.

While executives play musical chairs and consultants whisper “simplify” into boardrooms, real people — talented, loyal humans — are getting blindsided with a “Team Huddle” calendar invite that changes their lives.

Target says this isn’t about cost cutting.
But when you eliminate nearly 8% of your HQ workforce and scrap another 800 vacant roles, it sure looks like an “optimization” deck dressed in empathy fonts.

The saddest part?

They didn’t just lose roles. They lost trust, culture, and identity — piece by piece, meeting by meeting, memo by memo — until “Joy!” became a tagline instead of a truth.

And now, the same leaders who created the layers are holding “listening sessions” about the pain they caused.

Make it make sense.

If you’re still standing in retail or corporate America, take notes.
👉 Bloat is the first step toward bloodletting.
👉 “Simplify” means someone’s about to be sacrificed.
👉 And “we value our team” usually ends with a legal disclaimer.

The real headline isn’t that Target laid off 1,800 people.

It’s that every major company could be one reorg away from calling it “progress.”

I might not have liked all of Dan’s message but at least it was spoken plainly and honestly. What is really annoying and a little disturbing is that a lot of our leaders now seem to operate like politicians. They ignore anything negative or challenging and only look to talk about the positives. This is totally insulting to employees intelligence and emphasises the gulf between senior leaders with what is happening on the front line

I haven’t been here very long, but have had nothing but issues since I started here. The ageism, cronyism, favoritism, nepotism, s-xism is off the charts. Sprinkle in widespread ineffective management who do not give a sh-t about developing out your career if they view you as a challenge…yep, this is corporate he-l. Suggestion for survival is to completely disconnect your identity from what you do here, if you haven’t already. Good luck.

What in the world is a Senior President?

DW making up new titles now?

Our team in Data and AI was recently pushed hard to complete the OHS survey. Initially, only about 45% had responded, but then management started chasing everyone who hadn’t filled it out yet.

At this point, I’m really starting to wonder — is it actually voluntary and anonymous?

Anyone else getting the same pressure or feeling the same way?

https://techrights.org/n/2025/11/04/Corporate_Media_That_Fails_to_Report_Cocaine_at_EPO_is_Totally_.shtml

We’ve reached out to every news station, letting them know what’s really going on with Chevron. It’s only a matter of time before the truth comes out.
Chevron has spent millions on advertising, painting themselves as the heroes of our community. You’ve seen it: the feel-good commercials, the Facebook and Instagram posts, the Nextdoor updates showing their “volunteer work.” They want everyone to believe they’re here to support Northern Colorado.
But behind the scenes, they’ve quietly pushed out the very people who built this industry. They’ve replaced local, hardworking men and women—many with decades of experience—with workers brought in from out of state or out of the country. Families who once had stable, good-paying jobs are now struggling, while Chevron counts record profits.
Call it capitalism if you want. I call it what it really is—a monopoly and absolute bullsh-t.
Another billion-dollar corporation swoops in, buys out smaller companies, and leaves local workers in the dust. It’s not about community. It’s not about sustainability. It’s about control and profit, and it’s time people start seeing it for what it is.
The truth always comes out. And it’s only a matter of time before Chevron’s shiny PR mask starts to crack.

Ready to retire after 30 years at Shell and don't plan to ever look back. Corporate life nearly ki-led me slowly, but at least I’m financially secure. I know many are not as lucky. One thing's for sure, I'm never going back to that grind. The office politics can stay behind me forever.

The real issue isn’t whether the Vawn assets are “material” to Cenovus — it’s whether the special compensation or arrangements Strathcona received from Cenovus are material to other MEG shareholders. That’s the question investors deserve answered.

If certain insiders or counterparties benefited from discounted asset valuations or side-terms, why shouldn’t ordinary shareholders receive an equivalent uplift in share value?

The Board’s defense — that the Vawn assets represent only a small percentage of Cenovus production — completely misses the point. Materiality is judged by what matters to MEG shareholders, not by what’s convenient for Cenovus or its advisors.

The optics here are troubling. The absence of transparent disclosure around valuation assumptions, fairness opinions, and board deliberations raises serious questions about whether all shareholders were treated equally.

Worse, the MEG Board attempts to justify its decision by hiding behind the advice of its financial advisors, BMO and RBC. Outsourcing judgment is not fulfilling fiduciary duty — it’s the opposite. Shareholders rely on the Board to defend their interests, not to delegate accountability.

It’s time for the Alberta Securities Commission and the SEC to take a hard look at whether this process truly met the standards of fairness, independence, and equal treatment that public shareholders are owed.

Do the VPs and directors get those special packages in their contracts, so they don’t have to worry at all after the merger while everyone else feels uncertain?

Just look at the view counts, no other company has so many views and we are much smaller than other banks. I am suspecting they are sending bots to monitor everything that's being said here and they are reporting this up. It's sick just like everything else this exec group does.

Uh-oh!

It's probably the EC figuring out a new time for meetings, but what do any of us learn at these? Rah rah b.s. and lies.

Story by Justin Lahart

Corporate America has ended its firing freeze.

Companies scrambled for years after the pandemic to build back their workforces, learning a simple lesson along the way: Keep the workers you’ve got, because if you lose them you will have a hard time getting them back.

The job market has softened in recent months, however, marking a safer environment for companies to start streamlining their workforces. A host of them have pounced, including Amazon.com, UPS, Target and Meta Platforms, which have announced tens of thousands of layoffs in recent weeks.

It is a shift that could have major repercussions for U.S. workers. Over the past two years, U.S. businesses have become increasingly reluctant to bring new employees on, especially as more recent uncertainty over the direction of tariffs made it harder to plan ahead. But they have also been hesitant to cut the employees they already have, an example of what economists term “labor hoarding.”

The result has been a low-hire, low-fire environment, in which recent graduates and others trying to break into the job market have struggled, but workers who are already employed have been largely insulated.

Now things are looking a bit more like the 1990s, when many big companies were focused on eliminating workers they felt were no longer needed, according to Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM.

Back then, “we used to reward companies for letting people go,” he said

A number of things could be at play in companies’ increasing comfort with layoffs, including optimism over artificial intelligence, but they all come down to the bottom line. Labor is a major cost, and cutting it is one way to bolster profit margins. Tariffs could be adding to the urgency, especially for companies weighing whether and how to pass through the higher costs they are paying for goods on to consumers.

Some companies also added to their payrolls as they moved to keep up with the surge in demand that came in the pandemic’s wake, and may now feel that they are bloated. Amazon had about 800,000 employees at the end of 2019, and about 1.5 million at the end of last year.

In a memo to staff last week explaining Target’s plan to cut 1,800 corporate roles, incoming chief executive Michael Fiddelke said, “Too many layers and overlapping work have slowed decisions, making it harder to bring ideas to life.”

It probably helps, too, that investors have appeared to welcome job cuts. Target’s stock edged up on the day it announced layoffs. When Amazon on Tuesday said it was laying off 14,000 workers, with more to come, its stock rose 1%. When UPS disclosed it had cut 48,000 management and operations positions when it reported earnings on Tuesday, Wall Street’s focus was on its strong results, and its stock rallied 8%.

Nor are companies any more in an environment where hiring back workers would be anything like the struggle it was after the economy began to reopen from the Covid crisis. Then, workers could largely pick and choose between competing offers.

The unemployment rate, which fell to a multidecade low of 3.4% in April 2023, was 4.3% as of August. Many Americans are operating under the assumption that the jobs picture will get worse: 64% of consumers polled by the University of Michigan this month said they expected higher unemployment over the next 12 months, compared with 32% in October 2024.

One risk for the broader economy: In an environment where employment growth is already low, any increase in layoffs could lead the economy to start shedding jobs. In August—the last month of available data before the government shutdown delayed Labor Department economic releases—the U.S. added just 22,000 jobs.

Whether the recent run of layoff announcements augurs a downturn in the job market isn’t clear, said Jed Kolko, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. While those layoff numbers are eye-catching, they don’t necessarily reflect what is going on in a labor force of over 170 million people, he said.

“You need the whole picture, and that whole picture comes from data that are not being released during the shutdown,” Kolko said.

For companies, enthusiasm over the possibility to automate more work with AI is also playing a role. The Federal Reserve’s latest beige book, which compiles economic anecdotes from the 12 regional Fed banks, reported that more employers were reducing head counts through layoffs and attrition “with contacts citing weaker demand, elevated economic uncertainty, and, in some cases, increased investment in artificial intelligence technologies.”

While there is evidence that AI is cutting into demand for certain jobs, such as software development, the degree to which it is more broadly automating away jobs is difficult to tease out, points out Kolko.

But even if they haven’t been able to widely implement AI yet, a belief that they someday will could increase some employers’ comfort with abandoning labor hoarding. Companies including Walmart, Ford, JPMorgan Chase and Amazon have said that they expect AI will allow them to eliminate jobs.

“Labor hoarding was especially pronounced in higher-wage jobs, where employees are harder to find and therefore more costly to lose,” he said. “Those tended to be tech industries and other professional industries, and those overlap with some of the industries that could be most affected by AI.”

Write to Justin Lahart at Justin.Lahart@wsj.com

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/why-companies-are-no-longer-hanging-on-to-employees/ar-AA1PDQy6?ocid=msedgntp&pc=W230&cvid=9d7c22f078db4c4cad85cabf269b82b1&ei=11