#culture

I got picked! I am actually thrilled. Since Allstate bought out NatGen, it’s been a sh-t show.

It's bittersweet. I've seen the company change a lot over the years, and not for the better. And yet, I see so many young people joining who are energetic, smart, and hungry to succeed. I hope they get to experience at least some of the joy I had at IBM, and a lot less of the stress I had to deal with along the way. Good luck to you all, and keep pushing things forward.

Allstate is an awful company. I don't have many regrets in life, but working here is one of them. Every single person working here can do so much better.

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/cisco-chief-terminate-meeting-certain-080300861.html

Can you believe it? He doesn't like niche acronyms...so kewl

--

Lastly, this sort of goofy article, while sprinkling in the factually incorrect terms 'Chief' and 'CEO' with G2 and using examples of other quirky CEOs, suggests he's being artificially pumped up for something.

USAA 3.2
Travelers 4.2
Progressive 3.8
Nationwide 3.8
Amica 3.8
Liberty Mutual 3.7
State Farm 3.4
Allstate 3.5
Chubb 3.5

Don’t take care of your employees and the result will show up in member experience. Check out the article on mysantonio website.

This company no longer operates like a professional organization. The most capable leaders have left, and the remaining management is looking inward to hire their own consulting services. Gainwell is a complete mess

I’ve noticed that during some layoff cycles, the women on the teams are laid off but the men get options to stay. I’ve also experienced weird treatment from the men, particularly in sales, and some customers who are women have admitted the same. I’m already had it with the leadership here so I’m looking for new work but has anyone else experienced this as well, or maybe dealt with a “boys club” vibe at CDW? Especially with all of the layoffs going on?

I just wanted to say, there is nothing wrong with you. We are all talented, and we will figure out something better. We just need to remember lifelong who actually mentored us, and who stayed engaged and supportive at work. Today is your turn, yesterday was someone else's, and tomorrow it will be someone else's. Stay motivated and collaborative in life.
To the folks remaining at work: you aren't "over-smart"—it's just that your manager preferred you. Don't let the culture here spoil. Many of us will return for sure, or associate with you again in the future. Be nice and stay humble.

Seriously, “Decision Intelligence Director”??
It seems like for every one blue collar job posting there are 12 bs office postings.

Really? Another one?

Working at the hubs is way better than Bloomington. fewer execs to su-k up to, nobody cares if you leave early. People are just way more laid back in general. hundreds of other employers in the area in case SF doesn't work out.

The fact that people choose to live and work in Bloomington blows my mind. What happens if you get laid off? Where else can you work?

does anyone else feel is all fake happy? i do not trust anyone anymore

I was let go Jan 2025. How is the GCO now? Is it a lot better than it was before??

For those who started as 3Mers (corporate) and are now Solventumers(?!) and maybe now 3Mers again... what are the pros and cons of working for each company??

For those who started as 3Mers (in corporate) and are now Solventumers(?!) and maybe now 3Mers again... what are the pros and cons of working for each company??

but instead of removing nepotism and cronyism, he has amplified it because the leaders who got pushed out were the least "protected".

Just look at who's in the calibration room when it's promotion time for this performance cycle. This company is rotten.

My team was shown out CES results… I guess. It’s laughable, and totally on brand, that they only show very very select portions of the results now. I have it from very good sources that this is all an exercise in gaslighting, to make it appear the issues are at the team level, not the actual complete systemic dysfunction the aggregate results actually show. Yet another demonstration the emperor has no clothes and we’re lead by a group of sociopaths.

I wonder how much he was aware of how much things had slid under.

I want to hear some honest feedback opinions, not from anyone in a leadership role but only anyone below a leader role to please share here honestly if you think Humana is now getting better or worse?

I know things can change. I am not fishing for one way or the other. I just want to know the state of things, at least from the perception with the non-leadership employees. Thanks in advance!

Sharing some of my observations and experiences in the Carelon care navigation and BH divisions. Seems to be almost weekly changes in leadership, monthly shifts in priority initiatives. The actual goals and objectives are obvious: Find ways to create numbers out of thin air to demonstrate any kind of value (nonexistent), systematically eliminate whole depts and and cut teams back to skeleton crew numbers, while at the same time increasing metrics. Create useless campaigns and programs to be managed by nonclinical associates to reduce FTE costs. Pretend that all is well and automation is the cure for past failures (while existing automation is a joke). Push their bs technology and blame frontline associates rather than admit that these systems are absolute trash.

Boots on the ground sentiments are grounded in constant fear of the next layoffs and surviving the wrath of sociopathic leadership. Morale is at an all time low.

On the other hand, if you lack any type of integrity, enjoy doing a job that only supports fluff for SLT bonuses, throw people under the bus, lack humility and do not ask any questions or voice concerns...you will THRIVE in Carelon. Anxiously waiting for any opportunity to get out of this joke of an organization. Maybe its not purgatory, maybe it is actual he-l.

Do you think these Transforming Out Culture email announcements are a little tone deaf as they just riffed a bunch of people yesterday? It’s like stay consistent while we constantly riff. They talk about integrity when they have none

It's the last several years that have ruined this place. If we could go back to the way things were, I'd be the happiest person in the world. Sadly, with this leadership, I doubt anything good is in our future.

Diwali is a major religious holiday. It is celebrated as a primary religious and cultural festival in India. So why then is the Plano Campus spending all sorts of money to have an outdoor festival during the work day for a religious holiday?

Quite clear the head nodders and associated expats with multiple passports of dubious origin are on the kool aid. This isn’t a drill Abdul, this is real! Get with it man.

Head in sand isn’t a policy.

Now, back to the serious business of destroying this company with sh---y social engineering! Get to work, Chr***r!

Hello All,

I keep wondering how the company culture gets worse and worse by the day but the unfiltered scores keep getting better every quarter. Are the people that are worried about SAP's future and upcoming layoffs really in the minority? Every LoB is now spewing propaganda that the executive board turned the ship around and that SAP is one of the best places to work and all that. I can see this propaganda leading up to the eventual hikes in executive bonuses and then the usual excuses that there is no money to pay a 100% employee bonus or decent salary increments.

What prompted so many employees to vote such high scores in unfiltered?

I have been employed for over 20 years at VZ. The culture has changed and they don’t care about you. If you are worried about losing your job look outside. There are lots of jobs out there you just have to look! Or if you don’t care stay with Vz and spin the bottle and hope it doesn’t land on you. All the talent will leave and Vz will be left with the bottom of the barrel…..serve them right

I actually have to stop myself from getting too enthusiastic about projects here. What's the point when the company has made it so clear how little employees matter? People give their best and still get treated as expendable whenever it suits management. CDW can have the effort it pays for, nothing more.

I managed to escape NetApp circus five months ago and haven't missed a single day of it. Let the executives and managers play their little games without me.

I'm tired of seeing employees blame each other based on age while the executives keep getting away with everything. We're not the problem here, the people running this company are.

All the red flags with this company. Big layoffs every other month for many years. Many bad stories reported here.

The email arrived at 7:03 AM. No subject line. Just a calendar invite titled "Organizational Update."

You click it. The meeting starts in twelve minutes. Your hands are already cold.

The voice on the call is calm. Too calm. "As part of our commitment to making care more affordable," it says, "we are reviewing staffing to meet changing market dynamics." The words sound human, but they aren't. They're a spell. A lullaby sung before the lights go out.

Someone in the chat types: Is this a layoff? The message vanishes. You're not sure if it was deleted or if you imagined it.

The slides advance. A map of New Jersey appears. Then California. Then Illinois. Little red dots bloom like wounds. Five hundred and seventy-two in one state . Ninety-two in another . Ninety-eight in a pharmacy that used to fill prescriptions for the chronically ill . The dots spread. The map bleeds.

You look at your coworkers on the screen. Their cameras are off. They are already ghosts.

The voice says "redeploy our talent" and "support affected team members." You've heard this incantation before. It means nothing. The last person who believed it was walked out by security before lunch.

The meeting ends. Your calendar refreshes. There's a new event: "1:1 with your manager." Fifteen minutes. No agenda.

You stare at the screen. The cursor blinks. Somewhere, offshore, a replacement is already learning your job. The reorg doesn't ki-l you all at once. It just keeps taking pieces until there's nothing left to cut.

The invite sits there. You don't click accept. You don't have to. It's already happening.

Think twice.

Summer: You are going to be the ones leading us through this transformation.
Fall: Almost entire team laid off, including the manager.

Criteria for the ones left: "low cost location".

:D

It is easy to be a good company when the business is growing. The real colors come out when times are tough. Comcast was good. Enter competition and management denial finally over. Hatchet job and dump employees as fast as you can. Who would rank it good now?

After more than 27 years with the company, and after seeing similar stories from thousands of loyal and dedicated Comcasters, I experienced something on Monday, 10/26, that I never thought I would feel during my career: I felt like a number.
After decades of commitment, sacrifice, and dedication, it was difficult not to feel as though everything I had given could be set aside so quickly through what felt like an effortless decision. 27 plus years of service should mean something, and in that moment, it simply didn’t. Good luck to all of us impacted and those who remain.

Service anniversaries use to be a big deal. Now making it to the next month is. What’s next in the PepsiCo world? Odds on making it to December.

The last Dell engineering cheerleader ran away with his tail between his legs. He still hasn't figured out that it's not about fast ingestion times or legacy on-prem dedup ratios. Those days are long gone. It's about - and always has been about - instantaneous recovery.

Anyone else want to try to defend his ignorant, legacy claims? This is why Dell fails at software development - unskilled, uneducated, inexperienced engineers.

==============

​1. Flash-Optimized Storage vs. Hydration Bottlenecks

​Claim: "Modern Dell PowerProtect DD appliances are fully flash-optimized..."

​The Reality: Slapping NVMe SSDs into a legacy architecture as a cache tier or storage layer does not turn a deduplication engine into a high-performance distributed file system.

​The "Dehydration/Hydration" Problem: DD Boost achieves its high compression ratios by fragmenting data into tiny, variable-length chunks. While this is effective for inline ingestion, when you attempt to restore or live-mount workloads, the CPU must reassemble (hydrate) millions of non-contiguous chunks on the fly.
​NVMe storage speeds cannot overcome a sequential reconstruction pipeline. Flash-native architectures (like Rubrik or Cohesity) don't just put flash in front of a legacy algorithm; their underlying file systems (e.g., Iris, Spacetime) maintain metadata structures explicitly designed to expose uncompressed/hydrated blocks instantly without CPU reconstruction stalls.

​2. The Concurrent Stream & Mass Restore Fallacy

​Claim: "Our latest Data Domain supports 1,850 concurrent streams... PPDM and DD can restore 200 VMs simultaneously."

​The Reality: High stream counts on paper do not equal high restore throughput. Data Domain’s internal specs confirm that while write streams are high, read stream capacity is drastically lower (often a fraction of write streams) because reading deduplicated data requires massive IOPS overhead to resolve chunk pointers.

​Concurrently booting 200 VMs directly off a Data Domain target introduces severe I/O degradation because every VM read request triggers metadata pointer lookups across a single target controller. Modern distributed platforms scale compute and IOPS linearly across a cluster of nodes, eliminating single-controller metadata bottlenecks during mass-restore operations.

​3. Deduplication Ratios vs. Cloud Economics (DDVE)

​Claim: "DDVE reduces cloud storage consumption by up to 90%+... writing raw data forces massive cloud bills."

​The Reality: High deduplication ratios on object storage come with a hidden operational tax: excessive metadata disk overhead and API costs.

​The DDVE Metadata Trap: Running DDVE in public cloud requires mounting massive, high-cost block storage volumes (AWS EBS / Azure Managed Disks) solely to hold the DDVE metadata index needed to track millions of micro-chunks. As data grows, the cost of running high-IOPS block storage to host Data Domain's metadata offset the savings on object storage.
​Furthermore, during a Cloud Disaster Recovery event, assembling data out of millions of tiny GET requests to object storage incurs massive cloud API request fees and latency, whereas cloud-native backup engines stream optimized, sequential object chunks.

​4. "Data Lake" Repurposing vs. Storage Utility

​Claim: "Turning your backup repository into a data lake consumes massive IOPS and degrades backup windows."

​The Reality: This claim assumes an architecture that cannot isolate workloads. Distributed software-defined storage (SDS) utilizes QoS (Quality of Service) controls to dynamically prioritize backup/restore ingestion over secondary workloads.

​In legacy Data Domain, running secondary workloads does ki-l performance because the controller is already redlining CPU utilization just to perform inline deduplication. Modern systems separate background indexing tasks, allowing organizations to run automated malware scans, compliance searches, and dev/test validation directly against backup data without degrading backup windows or creating full-copy storage bloat.

​5. Ransomware & Zero Trust: Air-Gaps vs. Logical Immutability

​Claim: "PowerProtect DD is the gold standard via Cyber Recovery Vault... competing storage sits on the same network."

​The Reality: A physical air-gap or dedicated isolated vault is a perimeter defense, but it is a reactive mechanism built to compensate for non-immutable core architectures.

​Layered Defense: Modern platforms do not rely on "network isolation" alone. They implement native WORM (Write Once, Read Many) immutability at the storage kernel level, strictly enforcing Time-Based Retention Locks, Multi-Party Authorization (MPA), and platform RBAC.

​If a compromised domain admin gains access to a modern software-defined backup cluster, the underlying file system kernel physically blocks any API command attempting to modify, truncate, or delete snapshot chunks prior to their expiration date. Dell's vault model treats the symptom (network exposure) rather than building security directly into every layer of the storage fabric.

​Summary

​"Bragging about 1,850 write streams and 90:1 deduplication ratios is like boasting about how tightly you can pack boxes into a warehouse, while completely ignoring how long it takes to find and unpack a specific box when the building is on fire. Data protection is no longer just about cheap ingestion; it is about instant operational recovery, API-driven automation, and cloud flexibility—areas where legacy deduplication appliances continue to struggle."

50% the people around here spend their days sitting in airconditioned offices drinking free coffee, sittn in meetings about other meetings and moving numbers around in excel. all while collecting 6-figure salaries.

yet everyone is miserable because the guy down the hall makes $100k or $500k more. so what?? bob makes $350k doing practically nothing and you make $250k doing practically nothing. you're BOTH doing fine.

meanwhile there are people working outside in 100-degree heat making a fraction of that. i'm not saying dell is perfect (far, far, far from it). but some of you have turned one of the cushiest gigs imaginable into a personal tragedy because someone else got a bigger bonus or a better ranking or some exec has a plane.

maybe, just maybe, the job isn't nearly as bad as you think. maybe you've just gotten so comfortable that you've run out of real problems... and aparently bob getting promoted is now your biggest one.

Different jobs, but same makeup budget.

Only difference is that one received a huge early payday for poor results and the other gets to be on Fox TV 5 nights a week as a paid commentator. I thought there is a prohibition about being significantly employed outside the Bank.

Guess Ford Jr. is working remote and putting in his 40 hours over the weekend.

interesting seeing more nvidia employees (and former employees) nowadays are speaking up online about the culture. long hours, zero work life balance, managers yelling at people are a default - add to that favoritism and a constant atmosphere of fear. the golden handcuffs come with a lot of BS as well. some teams are ok but i think the toxicity is pretty widespread. most of the mgmt responds to burnout by shifting the blame to the worker and 'efficiency' sh-t, use AI, get organized, su-k it up, etc. ok, now we are sitting on trillions, JH is a demi-god, the competition is several light years behind us and they are still acting like pricks - does any of that success actually translate into being a decent/human place to work?? that's the rant for today.