#engineering

Vivek's purview to say with confidence that the most important applications at Verizon outside of network operations. POS, point-of-sale, intakes some 70+% of ALL of Verizon’s revenue. ACSS is a superset of that software. This software is utter garbage. I mean it’s just layers on layers of undocumented spaghetti code written by contractors that were seemingly plucked from the streets, paid 50,000/yr, and whose agency was billing Verizon 120,000/yr for their time here. At a company with Verizon's profits a full stack developer should reasonably expect to start here and be able to search a UI for any service or data they need to build pretty much anything you could conceive. Yet you won’t find a single shred of such documentation. GTS leadership has passively allowed layers and layers of teams to be stood up where each team only works on one segment of one leg of any end to end business process. No one engineer is empowered to build a single feature holistically end to end without pulling people from 2-3+ teams to get the job done. Often the job is just chaining some API calls and making a UI to display the results. Something a decent college CS graduate could build independently if there was proper documentation. Instead engineers are tasked with endless non-funded pet projects in some obscene race to be the team that shows the shiniest little half functional proof of concept to the nearest VP. All the while our most integral systems are held together with popsicle sticks, glue, and chewed up bubblegum. Everything is expected to be done yesterday. No one cares about code quality thus software/product quality. Most of the leaders within GTS could not solve a LeetCode medium if their families lives depended on it, assuming they even knew what LeetCode was. The sad part is the same is true for most of the Principle Engineers, Distinguished, and associate fellows and fellows as well. All these guys do is sit in calls so they can steal each others ideas. Then go implement them in some shoddy fashion so they can say they did it. Who cares if it works in production or provides any tangible return on investment for the time expenditure. The engineering culture at Verizon is utter garbage and it is perpetuated by the leadership within GTS. It is beyond simple incompetence, the leadership in GTS does not even have an idea of what competent software delivery is. It’s not incompetence because that would imply some intent to do things correctly. It’s simple ignorance. I have seen a VP of Site Reliability Engineering shoot down a Distinguished Engineers suggestion that engineers should be able to run the code that they are working in locally to validate results. The VP thought that was an absurd request. To put that in layman's terms the guy was just saying that when I paint a picture I should be able to see the canvas as I paint. That was dismissed. That’s the level of ignorance we’re dealing with. To reverse this level of cancerous spread you would need to inundate GTS with so much chemotherapy and radiation it likely would die out before any recovery was ever observed. I really do believe that the only way back is just terminating all of GTS leadership. Stop all software delivery. Bring in VP’s from actual tech companies who have actual software engineering experience within the past decade. Allow them to document ALL of the inner workings of the existing systems. Publish that documentation to OneConfluence or some adjacent documentation platform. Grant access to this documentation to ALL VZ Software Engineers. Release all of our Fellows, and Associate Fellows. Replace them with real engineers from real tech companies. THEN you can START redesigning the systems that collect all of VZ’s money. So regardless of Vivek's character do you really think he is prepared to make this level of systemic change to how Verizon delivers software? Or do you think he will just perpetuate slop delivery ad nauseam until Verizon crumbles or someone does the needful that I have laid out here?

I retired from Nielsen 5+ years ago. A former coworker pointed me to this site, so I'm out of the loop. I only ended up on the careers page because my son just graduated with an engineering degree, and I thought the Oldsmar facility would be a great place for him to start. Instead, I'm perplexed; are all the engineering jobs in India now? What actually happened to Nielsen? The engineering culture and work at Oldsmar used to be great, but now it seems like a ghost town. Catch me up on what I missed (and yes, I realize now I should probably steer my son elsewhere!)

I opened a ticket on late Wed, as of now, still no support engineer to chat me, the guy I chatted with said someone would be with me in 10-15min, but no one even after 5h, fu-k him, I am working for a company who probably pay $500M to Oracle per year, this is really sh-t!

One of the BU had a huge reorg, do we know what the reason is, lots of engineers got shuffled around

Any chance I may get surplused? I am Engineering Assistant in Southeast.

Is it engineers, pms, analysts, or both?

FanDuel recently laid off several hundred employees. This move impacts a few hundred people from its 5,000 total workforce. The company stated these changes strengthen its long-term strategy. Affected departments include business development, operations, and engineering. These layoffs follow previous workforce reductions and industry trends.

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/fanduel-lays-off-several-hundred-220007878.html

I recently started seeing few posts on LinkedIn about some people posted about being laid off.. like L3 L4 L5s in engineering, data science etc. anyone noticing anything? I think mgnt figured out a way of staying out of news this year breaking habit of yearly mass layoffs.

I understand that we have to go through a RIF with Engineering and Products.

However, why do we have so many people in HR and Finance? Not to mention the recruitment department where we currently have no hiring to do, yet there are around 50 people in that team. We also have over 90 people in L&D and 100 in marketing, yet we have had to cut roles in Engineering.

Many tech companies cutting the size of their HR departments - even Uber has done so recently. META and Salesforce too.

This feels like a very targeted and poorly thought through process. Arguably, AI is capable of replacing far more roles in these functions than it is in Engineering and Products.

They’re pulling folks straight out of sales teams in India and dropping them into maintenance and engineering gigs on site?
Latest one: Girl with 7 years in BTC sales just landed an electrical engineer role in BMT. And the announcements are full of these examples.
I’m genuinely disgusted and disappointed. When did “fit the role” stop mattering for jobs that keep operations safe and running?

This is pure abuse of L1/L2 visa. Someone should report this

Packages coming. 2months max severance. Goal is 90% of engineering at LCC's by 2029

Sounds like another round of layoffs. Couple hundred from engineering side. Feel for those affected. I guess the strategy remains you can fix leadership problems by laying off experienced engineers.

So how is it working for the robotics team? I see they are trying to staff up? I'm a electromechanical engineer....place for me there?

Fidelity Investments reduced staff at its Covington facility. The company is realigning its technology and delivery teams. This aims to better match skills with high-priority customer work. Roughly one percent of the workforce was impacted by these changes. Fidelity plans to hire many new engineering roles and thousands of other critical positions.

Covington, Kentucky

https://local12.com/news/local/fidelity-investments-layoffs-hit-covington-campus-employment-unemployment-jobs

ton let it slip that the company is exploring the idea of squeezing engineering teams down to 4, with the rest of the team being suplimented with ai

if you are in a team of size 5 or more, your head is likely on the block

global engineering and operations all hands tomorrow

Wonder what we can expect to hear

or at least, not directly.

it’s about 100s of billions in capital investment,.. foundries, process tech, supply chains, equipment, capacity, political leverage, u name it - all of it. intel obvously cannot run without good engineers. that part is true. but the reason the market value has exploded is that everything around the engineers suddenly became much more valuable because of the tech cycle and geopolitics.

think of it this way imagine somene from the outside could take over everything the company owns except the people then hire a new workforce from scratch. it would probably take them ten years to make it work. hmmm.... maybe longer. but once they got there, they would be sitting on a money-printing machine.

i’m an engineer too, and i have a pretty high opinion of what we do. no false modesty there.

but at this valuation, i don’t think they’re looking at you and me. they’re looking at the machine.

Ford advertising during the Tigers game: “American values for American value.”

But as for jobs at Ford, American citizen engineers need not apply.

Due to AI, expect up to 30% cut in Engineering.

Got invite for May 15 @8.15am

They cut me in 2002 one month before my daughter was due. As an RF Engineer I tried to explain to them that the carriers have their own engineers and that marketing the towers to them wouldn't work. They already knew where they needed towers. I emphasized that our efforts would be best spent by getting towers, (often disguised as flagpoles, church steeples, palm trees, etc.) through the zoning process before anyone else did. Deaf ears.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but from my understanding, Fidelity is hiring junior engineers to replace high paid high ranking individual contributors.

So if that’s the case, what’s going to happen to Fidelity’s leap program? are they hiring these junior software engineers exclusively through leap? If not, what will come of the Leap program?

Elon eliminates non‑producing technical authority
He doesn’t keep:
Chief Engineers who don’t engineer
Scientists who don’t build
Fellows who don’t ship
Architects who don’t design
Highly paid engineers that do nothing, should be let go.

How is it compared to other BUs in Cisco...

Not much highlighted here, but there was a series of layoffs among engineers and product owners in Atlanta in mid-April

“The machines are coming! We need security! We need quality!”

Amazing, right? For years, engineers were just “resources,” completely interchangeable, no need to listen to them. Now, overnight, they’re supposed to save the company from the big scary algorithms.

So now we get meetings, policies and buzzwords. Security this, quality that. Very impressive words, everybody’s saying them.

But here’s the problem, and it’s a big one: you can’t slap some shiny new technology on top of a rotten, inhumane culture and expect miracles. Doesn’t work. Never has. If you treat people like disposable parts, don’t be shocked when the whole machine starts rattling - AI or no AI.

It’s odd seeing the stock shoot to the moon while Intel is still bleeding out engineers and techs. While work life balance dwindles for those who make the wafers, the exs keep hiring their buddies. I guess everyone will keep their mouths shut as long as the stock keeps going to the moon.

No one that works hard and in good faith deserves to lose their job.
It’s an awful predicament to be placed in and I think these companies need to learn how to do business without massive financial success if fellow citizens are collateral damage.
I knew someone that worked at IBM and they were told years ago before the 80’s IBM would never lay off. They’d have engineers painting garages anything to keep from laying anyone off. I think it’s time for companies to bring back good faith and humanity.
It’s inhumane especially since there’s no real safety nets and life is more complicated and complex.
Do unto others…rather than the bottom line.

Vz india will now have Eng starting in small amount on wireless core. No security into consideration, while saving money on US Eng, they choose to sacrifise access to confidential database to be outside USA while Pentagon prohibited this many years ago.Get ready.

When was the last time you delivered anything on time, with fully developed features, that wasn't riddled with bugs?

Can you remember? I can't remember that far back.

When the dusts of current RIF and ReOrg settle, architects and the data scientists are the two most costly and counter-productive roles that needs the closest scrutinies.

The existence of those helicopter architects is the single inhibiting cohorts to an engineering driven culture. If the premise of those tenured architects is to guide the weak engineering teams, it’s not working and will never work (that’ why you don’t see the architect role in big tech such as Google and Meta):

• If you keep the architects away from the engineering team like it is today, their lack of current and hands-on knowledge, and their lack of affinity to the day-to-day work on the one hand, stretches a tension with their assumed authority on the other hand. We find ourselves wasting cycles and energy convincing and compromising with them on a good day and misled/delayed on the bad days. We consider those architects good if they stay away most of the time, reverse engineering by themselves or asking us to produce a few pretty diagrams from our finished products periodically, and don’t try to put their dirty fingerprints on everything we do.

If you pull those architects Gods down from the FAE heaven and embed them into the engineering teams, their unwillingness to do the dirty chores and their proud refusal to assimilate will create tension between themselves and rest of the team like oil and water. Neither party will be happy.

That leaves the only option which is to reduce the architect role dramatically if not demolish it altogether: (1) Keep only a few true architects in FAE who either (a) looks cross-functional for duplication and consolidation opportunities or (b) possesses niche knowledge and skills such as security, internationalization or accessibility. (2) Fire the rest or demote them to principal (or just give them the VP title) level IC and disperse them into individual engineering teams.

With the deadweight architects out of hand, we may start growing the engineering team and culture by trusting engineers with the architectural decisions in a collective fashion among the junior, senior, principle and tech leads of a team.

Now let’s turn our attention to data scientists. WARNING: they’re so much worse than the architects!

The complete AI ignorance of the upper managements makes themselves easy targets to the scammed by Fidelity’s fake data-scientists (compared with those who can build GPT):

• They’re paid at least one level higher than engineers yet what are they doing these days? Developing chatbots by calling vendor APIs or downloading models from HuggingFace. What entails in developing chatbots or the fancier agents? (1) Calling APIs, (2) developing the chat GUI and (3) Crafting LLM prompts. Well, software engineers are better calling APIs and developing GUI, and non-technical business domain experts are better at crafting LLM prompts. Both do a better job significantly cheaper. AI has been demoratized to a point where a high-school drop out may do a better job than an Ph.D. who don’t continuously learn.

Why don’t they train foundational LLMs that utilizes Fidelity’s private data, like Bloomberg, Captital One or Morgan Stanley? They can’t. The whole data scientists community from top to bottom are outdated. They’re stuck in the old traditional machine learning paradigms of regression, decision trees and scikitlearn. They haven’t or can’t learn the new AI paradigm which appeared on in 2017.

That leaves us with three options: (1) Fire majority of them to make room (2) Demote the remaining good data scientists to sort of higher level AI analysts who conduct experiments and compare vendor/HuggingFace models. (3) Hire true data scientist who are either experienced with or educated on the current paradigm of AI, that is those laid off from big techs and those fresh graduates who learned current paradigm of AI at school.

Architects and Data Scientists, the attic where all the dusts collect, need a desperate cleansing. With these two roles straighten up, Fidelity 2.0 may start!

How do you drop the best reservoir engineer in the US like that? Feels like a race to last after that move.

Has anyone returned to Intel after the layoff last year? How intensive is the interview process for engineers?
Consider reapplying to Intel because job market is tough

DXC does not spin up a truly new platform in 12–18 months, especially given their engineering capacity, budget constraints, and the leadership churn you’ve been tracking.

But here’s the real story:

OASIS is built on the same underlying lineage as Platform X — but DXC is deliberately avoiding saying that publicly.

I heard that Accenture doing a "survey" and may takeover GNT / Engineering soon. Anyone heard the same?

So far I’ve only seen directors and lead engineers get the invite. Guessing the Jr engineers are up next today or tomorrow?

ASML announced a reduction of 1,700 staff members. This action targets bureaucratic inefficiencies. The company seeks faster decision-making. It will create 1,400 new technical positions. This emphasizes a focus on core engineering.

https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/us/asml-layoffs-job-cuts-the-king-of-advanced-chip-making-machines-cuts-1700-jobs-in-major-shake-up-but-is-china-ready-to-lure-them-all-and-forge-its-own-asml-empire/amp_articleshow/130441501.cms

Rumors are floating around that more layoffs will be at HQ. Especially in Data, Strategy, PMO and Engineering