#management

Anyone else noticing how many contractors in Brand are acting like leaders or even hiring managers? Some seem to be leading parts of the business and directing creative work within the agency structure. It’s confusing when contractors appear to be overseeing other contractors, and it’s often unclear who is actually working for who. The dynamic can feel pretty toxic.

When a contractor in the agency positions themselves as a department or team lead, or even a creative lead over others, it raises questions about who actually has a seat at the table and how those decisions are being made.

Curious how this became the model.

We've replaced a human being with a capitalist cutthroat.
Culture going down the pan
Ranks of useless middle management
Gorman would be saddened by what is happening

Noelle never led IT and Katya/Gina did not lead digital?

Really nostalgic for what the company once was before these two/three

lots of eye rolling w/the promotions. Some real weak people getting the nod. Real headscratchers. Many who most definitely deserved a bump did not get one. Time to focus on lower level staff. Many in call center, wpc, ops derserve nods but were passed over. No rhyme. No reasons. More cap management get disproportional amount of the big ones. Time to get nix a bunch of executives and rob Peter to pay Paul to give the little man a raise. I'm stuck at $67,000 for now. 2% bump. Suc#ks.

Too much bloat with no added value and big checks

Do you really think the AD/D/SD having only 2 to 3 direct reports should be gone? There are tons of them.

Anyone have the total number for today?

The legacy EMC group is the only group making any money in ISG.

The Dell side couldn't put two spoons together in a drawer. Anything they develop has more bugs in it than an outhouse.

Heard Director's, Managers and Senior Managers will be affected greatly. Specially management positions in India will be removed drastically.

Siemens Industry faces a massive downsizing eliminating multiple layers of management while consolidating forces with vendor channels to eliminate branch and regional office structures. Siemens longtime US reputation in Building Technologies continues to struggle through tariff negotiations and industry competition forcing leadership to implement significant cost reductions mobilizing Siemens toward a new sustainable model for 2026

How serious are they about this return to office? I’ve been coming in one or two days a week and my manager has never said anything to me about it.

I received a 2.5 performance rating that my manager told me “had to round down to a 2 due to a new policy”. Has anyone else been told about this “round down” policy? And then I was told I will not receive anything for a bonus payout because of my rating. I’ve been here for years and this is my first time ever getting a 2, so want to see if any of this sounds normal or if I should be taking to HR

There were so many ways to do this so much better. Instead, we got this mess. No wonder we're not doing better.

My manager took away some of my duties and reassigned them to himself. Is this a sign that middle management knows their time is up? I think they are padding their duties so they can appear to have work to do and avoid layoffs, but it's time to pay the piper! Sneaky little rascals!

We have so many useless managers, and levels of managers at that. Let's clean that up and see what happens.

Companies keep sinking money into people who spend their entire day bouncing between Teams calls, producing nothing but politics and noise. Meanwhile, the product decays, and sales has to compensate for problems that shouldn’t exist.

The real drain isn’t the technical staff—it’s the layers of middle management whose output is meetings, decks, and vague directives. They enable the steady flow of outsourced slop by approving it, defending it, and pushing it onto engineers to salvage.

It’s no surprise that products decline the moment they enter certain corporate ecosystems. When decision‑making is dominated by people who don’t build anything, quality becomes optional.

If companies want better outcomes, they should stop funding the Teams‑call industrial complex and redirect those resources to the people actually delivering value.

It’s disheartening to witness the transformation of this company over the years. Perhaps it reflects the current management generation. I don’t mean to criticize, but I recall a time when Store Managers actively engaged with the team on the floor, and department managers were hands-on with markdowns and sales alongside the associates. We even wrote clearance prices in red pen and diligently marked them on sheets to document our work. Inventory was a collective effort, where we counted items ourselves and recorded everything on paper.

While I appreciate the advancements in technology that streamline inventory and markdown processes, the management style has shifted significantly. It’s unfortunate to see long-time Store Managers and their Assistants, some with over 25 or 30 years of service, leaving the company. Now, it often takes ten people to handle the workload that one person used to manage effectively.

Today, the focus seems more on avoiding night shifts rather than ensuring the safety of staff during closing hours, especially when there’s a key holder who isn’t proactive, along with just two other employees. There’s little concern for the store’s appearance, and management often remains in the office until the regional visits. After many years of dedication to a company I once loved, I’m relieved to be retiring.

Finance is now a complete joke. Management does not know the inefficiency of these endless forecasts, scorecards, and endless requests on a daily basis. This new op model is half baked at best. They know not, nor care about the chaos they created and how much work it will take us to unravel and produce these on a regular basis. F it. F them. F this new op model. Whether or not this sh-t show is by design to make us quit is irrelevant. It is completely unsustainable and we will be forced to quit for our own sanity. Most of our time is spent trying to get clarity and not on value added work. What a waste of time. People at the top should be held accountable.

Most of the posts here are from people who were let go or did not like the company policies like RTO. Would like to hear from folks who left the firm as you couldn't deal with your immediate manager or one above them - basically management who knows who you are and what you do. What was the red line for your decision? Have you found another job? Which part of the firm you were in - Ops, TSG, Engineering, etc.

Supported you? Managed thoughtfully? Tried to understand people's strengths and assign work accordingly? Do they even fully understand what your team does?

Mine might as well be from another planet. Great at office politics, useless at the actual work, and convinced that passive-aggressive behavior equals authority. I don't think anyone would notice, or work would suffer, if they were gone tomorrow.

I've worked here five years (it feels much longer, though) and I'm still surprised by the decisions leadership makes. It's like common sense goes out the window once you reach a certain level. They roll out policies that actively make our jobs harder. They invest in technology that doesn't work. They promote people who have no idea how to manage. I don't know if it's always been this way or if it's getting worse, but the overall stupidity is hard to ignore.

Cisco is sending panic to its partners. Every few days, the company's management sends out an email to partners with new policies regarding prices, deals, and price protections. There is great frustration among Cisco partners regarding the company's policies, panic, and indecision. Decisions are made on the spur of the moment without giving enough time to evaluate the new situation.

At first I thought the posts here about BTC were exaggerated or just people being salty. But after working with a few of their devs, I get it now. And I’ve been hearing the same thing from multiple other teams.

A lot of them just don’t seem to know how to code. Things that should take a week end up taking months. Constant blockers, missed messages, excuses, and everything needs tons of guidance. But they’re good at talking in meetings and making it sound like progress is happening...

I noticed they started using chatgpt. It would be great if that actually sped things up, but they don’t really understand the code they generated. It just helps them pretend they are working. It's really a scam.

crazy thing to me is that managers don’t want to acknowledge it. Is it even worth bringing it up?

Management at mondelez do absolutely nothing. Maybe forward an email or 2 but that's about it. So useless

Dear Citi,
Trust is very costly feeling it’s difficult to gain and easy to loose. You and Managers are loosing that,No employee trust manager here.

Another day on a bridge call, where you have twice as many managers than what is needed. And they're all trying to outdue the others when it comes to being overly obnoxious and throwing their weight around.

The best way to cool their heels is to ask a question in regard to something a manager who has real experience managing technical resources would have done, knowing they didn't do it or have a clue. I did that today and the bridge went silent for about 15 seconds before the redirection started.

I miss the day of having managers that had real world experience in the areas that they managed. Which is not the case at Gainwell.

This week, management informed over 200 people including managers, supervisors and leads that they are planning to offshore all of our home mortgage loan roles to India. Not sure how you can call yourself U.S. Bank when more and more employees are not located in the U.S. scary to think everyone’s personal data will be available to non-US residents. I’m sure our lenders and borrowers will be ecstatic to hear this (they clearly don’t want this to be brought to their attention since we were told multiple times what to do if media encounters us). It’s very sad to see so many employees and leaders all being kept in the dark. Thank you to our fearless ceo Gunjan and shareholders 🙄

If BCG has been in already, Mgmt knows where they are cutting. Its if it when...

If BCG, was in . Mgmt already knows where it’s cutting …

QA, DevOps, Internal projects are going to be affected massively. In India, there will be heavy layoff at management level (VP, Director)

My manager isn't engaging with the team at present, I pinged the other day and not even an acknowledgement

Not joining daily calls etc

Are there changes coming ?

One of the most fascinating management models I’ve seen recently is the “mutual admiration club.”

A small leadership circle hires each other, promotes each other, and then gives each other outstanding performance ratings. Meanwhile, the people actually running operations and supporting customers suddenly become “underperformers.”

It’s a brilliant system if the goal is to protect the club and shift accountability elsewhere.

Unfortunately, it’s not a great system if the goal is to run a serious business.

In the long run, organizations usually discover that echo chambers are very good at protecting leadership, but not very good at running businesses.

ST and Q parterning up.
While NXP is becoming a « Management Company » instead of « Engineering Company »
Be prepared to see an acquisition of NXP soon by Q or someone else in 1-2 years

Leadership and management do the same for you, stop going above and beyond. Those that do are not rewarded, you'll get the same results if you work hard vs skate by. Don't let them take your life outside work away from you. No more on call, no more late nights weekends, holidays. Sc--w them

• Fundamentally broken and needs a full reset.
• There is no clear or credible technology roadmap.
• Leadership and hiring appear driven by internal relationships and favoritism.
• Vendor decisions often look questionable and raise concerns about incentives.
• Systems from acquisitions remain fragmented and poorly integrated.
• Deployments and upgrades move far too slowly for a modern IT organization.
• Overall execution is weak and the group is widely seen as ineffective.

Help me understand this. We buy companies. Some of them are good, some su-k, so quality varies. What's constant is what we do after the acquisition. We always run them into the ground, destroy any value that exists, they stop innovating or developing technology, and the whole thing turns out to be a dud. Why does this always happen?

Medicare UM has been hobbling along, with not enough work, since early January. Upper management says that a "strategic decision" was made to pull out of some "overly costly markets", with an expected 22% reduction in membership. It does not take rocket science to understand that if you reduce membership by 22%, you will need 22% less staff, not including cuts for automation.
We all know the RIFs are coming. What are they waiting on? Just put us out of our misery so we can figure out what we are doing with our lives.

The asset management industry is changing rapidly, and staying ahead requires more than incremental adjustments.

One area that deserves close attention is the layer of middle management. Many of the managers responsible for executing strategy appear increasingly detached from the company’s long-term mission. When leadership positions become primarily about protecting paychecks rather than building lasting value, organizations inevitably lose talented people who want to contribute meaningfully.

Over the past years, a number of highly capable individuals have left because they wanted to deliver impact and build something meaningful. When those voices disappear, it is often a signal that something deeper in the culture needs attention.

The competitive landscape is also evolving. Firms like BlackRock have significantly expanded their position in areas such as ETFs and are investing heavily in AI and data-driven investment capabilities. Competing in this environment requires not only technology and capital, but authentic leadership and a culture that empowers people to act with conviction.

Strengthening leadership culture should start with divisions such as Strategic Advisers (SAI), where the connection between research, portfolio management, and long-term client outcomes is critical. This kind of review requires diligence and honesty, not narratives that avoid uncomfortable realities.

Organizations that are willing to examine themselves critically tend to emerge stronger. Those that ignore early signals often find themselves losing relevance over time.

The opportunity to reinforce a culture of accountability, integrity, and genuine leadership is still there—but it requires deliberate action.