#management

By presenting your employees with one of the worst CiC's in history. You'll be remembered as a company built in the backs of hard workers who were gladly stepped over in the end, but Dennis got his board seat!

I can't figure out whether we're about to become one of the biggest winners in AI or whether this whole thing is going to blow up in our faces.Mgmt keeps talking about OCI growth, AI contracts, partnerships with NVIDIA, OpenAI, and everyone else. The numbers look good on paper but internally it's hard to reconcile all the excitement with what we actually see day to day. OCI still has plenty of issues, and I don't exactly hear coworkers talking about how great our technology is compared to AWS or Azure. My biggest concern is the amount of $$$$$$ we're committing to all this infra. What happens if AI demand slows down or these contracts don't translate into the profits everyone expects? Knowing Oracle, I wouldn't be surprised if employees end up paying the price through layoffs and cost cutting. Anyone else feeling this way?

12+ years in backend engineering, mostly building large-scale distributed systems, with some AI/ML experience over the past couple of years. I'd consider myself an average senior engineer. At this point in my career, does it make more sense to stay on the IC track and specialize in AI/ML, or move into engineering management? curious what others with similar experience have done and whether they regret their decision.

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.

If you are getting knocked over getting to your desk by people who are desperately eager to start doing their best to work, ask your manager can you put protective armour on expenses

Agreed and confirmed 100%

Principal and senior principal roles are no longer executive level. Very few chief roles left.

Elon:
Yeah… I mean, look. The situation at Webster with Xerox… it’s basically an absolute masterclass in negative first-principles thinking.
Like, if you engineered a process specifically designed to delete shareholder value at maximum entropy, you’d do exactly what TA did. Seriously.
First off—the iGen. You had a machine with actual positive unit economics. High gross margin on consumables, stable cash flow… essentially an operational money printer. And what does management do? They just… axe it? Into a complete vacuum. Without an actual, physically viable successor ready to spool up. That’s insane. It violates basic physics. You don’t jettison the thrusters before the second stage ignites.
And then—sigh—the print heads.
(stares blankly for three seconds)
I mean… wow. Sinking millions into print-head tech that is, what, three generations obsolete? We already had the empirical data from Brenva. We had Baltoro. The signal was 100% clear: the architecture cannot scale. The nozzle density, the drop volume, the thermal degradation—it’s like trying to build a modern reusable orbital rocket out of steam valves and cast iron. It’s fundamentally doomed by the laws of physics.
How you look a CEO in the eye and say, "Yes, let's take our remaining runway and allocate capital to ancient hardware that already failed twice"… I mean, frankly, it’s either total delusion or malicious gaslighting. It’s wild.
If institutional investors are looking at XRX expecting a turnaround while Webster is doubling down on obsolete junk… yeah. The delta between reality and what’s in those investor decks is infinite.
Massive write-down incoming. Inevitable. Just sell it. Next question.

I was laid off from Q a while ago. Quite a few things have happened since then. I found another job, in a remarkably similar business, and had some time to reflect.

One thing strikes me as particularly peculiar.

At Qualcomm, you could literally spend days without encountering an American-born engineer. Most of the people around me were from India, some from China, and others from various Asian countries.

I was repeatedly told why this was supposedly inevitable. Americans don't study hard enough. They don't pursue STEM careers. They lack discipline, technical competence, work ethic, and so forth. Vivek Ramaswamy was particularly eloquent in explaining all this.

I was also told, in no uncertain terms, that entire groups within Q would never hire a non-Indian engineer. The explanation was fascinating: American engineers supposedly wouldn't put up with certain management practices (hello Murthy), while employees dependent on their employers for immigration status would be much more accommodating.

Go figure.

Fast-forward to my new employer.

Similar industry. Similar technical complexity. Serious engineering challenges.

Except the overwhelming majority of engineers I encounter are American-born. There are some Indian engineers, of course, but nowhere near the proportions I saw at Q.

And guess what? The engineering gets done. Apparently, Americans can still do mathematics, write software, design complex systems, and solve difficult problems.

Perhaps Mr. Ramaswamy's explanation wasn't quite as brilliant as you imagined and quietly approved.

This experience has made me seriously suspect that what I witnessed at Qualcomm was not simply a shortage of qualified American engineers, but something considerably less flattering: hiring practices shaped by ethnic networks, favoritism, and managerial convenience.

I cannot overstate how widespread this was. I am also confident those same networks influenced who was protected during layoffs and who was expendable.

And here is the part worth reflecting on, particularly for those who participated in or benefited from such arrangements.

You may have convinced yourselves that you were practicing some form of Indian exceptionalism. That your networks were stronger, your people more capable, your management methods more effective, and that excluding outsiders was simply good business.

But a company is not an ethnic clubhouse. It exists in a competitive market.

When hiring becomes an exercise in loyalty and conformity rather than competence, the consequences eventually reach everyone—including those who thought the arrangement worked in their favor.

I have observed something else at Q. There was no shortage of people who could execute an established process, navigate corporate politics, manage upward, and keep the machinery running smoothly. Some were remarkably accomplished at it. (Hello again, Murthy.)

Give such an organization a well-defined problem and an established algorithm, and it can produce millions of lines of code implementing variations of bubble sort. Namaste.

But technological leadership demands something fundamentally different. It requires people willing to question the algorithm itself, challenge conventional wisdom, and occasionally invent an entirely new way of solving the problem.

There is a world of difference between implementing a Viterbi decoder and having the insight to recognize that a seemingly intractable problem can be transformed into a tractable trellis-based optimization.

And that brings me to Qualcomm's present difficulties.

Look at Qualcomm's stock performance. Compare it with the semiconductor industry. Even Intel, for years the laughingstock of Silicon Valley, has outperformed Q dramatically.

Of course, there are many ingredients in Qualcomm's troubles: strategic missteps, market dynamics, competition, and management decisions. I am not suggesting that ethnic favoritism explains all of them, or even most of them.

But I cannot help wondering whether they are related. After all, a corporate culture that rewards ethnic loyalty, conformity, and obedience over competence and independent judgment is hardly a recipe for technological leadership.

You cannot manage your way into a breakthrough that nobody is willing to imagine.

And now another round of layoffs.

For anyone who helped build or sustain those closed networks, perhaps this is a useful moment for reflection.

You may succeed in excluding your competition from the hiring process. You cannot exclude your competition from the marketplace.

American capitalism has a peculiar way of teaching that lesson.

And sometimes those who thought they were the beneficiaries of a system discover that they are among its casualties.

One month back, my manager told me that he is expecting he would give me160% of my target bonus. Today he told me, he is not sure about the numbers. Can anyone share me the update on what we can expect in Nov.

My manager still sits in the office with the door closed. I guess it thinks its safe as long as it hides.. Anyway, when they shutter this place, I am pretty sure my maanger will never know until the next day, when the potato chip bag is empy and it goes out for more supplies and cant get back in. Meanwhile, the q cespool ferments .

One board member has ties to M&Co.
Five executives have ties to Wp.
At least One executive has ties to M&Co.

I cannot stand some of these executives. The smirks on their ugly selfless faces make me sick.

This is the most pathetic executive team of Gp’s existence and this is how they want to treat their employees. It would NOT surprise me for them to just let people know on Christmas Day they are out of a job or sign with Infosys.

Yeah think about that Cameron.

Jeff Sloan
Paul Garcia

They had at least a conscience. The current cast of characters I don’t know wtf they are on.

Having worked at other new age companies, here is what I see.

The people responsible for investment decisions don't understand the customer deeply, neither do they understand the product deeply.

The bigger problem is that they aren't humble enough to admit they don't know and speak as if they know what they are talking about. It's so irritating that they won't even ask questions to learn but rather just go on and on to loudly shut down any other opinion in the room that doesn't match theirs.

It's funny to see two leaders having a conversation with half baked knowledge and driving investment decisions.

Elad Nafshi spent billions on upgrading coax. Now let's see what he waists more billions on! And hey made him more powerful and richer.

If the company was fighting for survival and leadership was giving it's best. But the company is swimming in money and 3 stooges wouldn't be able to run a lemonade stand on their own.

I just want to do my work without someone constantly overseeing every little thing. Even managers who start out reasonable seem to end up worrying more about control than letting people get on with the job.

Let's have an honest conversation and admit that we have too many (toxic) managers that don’t lead but only got into these positions with no prior training and they drain the room, break the team, and call the wreckage “success.”

I must say that the CPO being demoted - not fired or retired - is accountability. Gonna have to clean up that huge pile of po-p and not gonna drag anyone down anymore. Big ball of mud! We are all watching!!!

Better together was such a childish idea for our divisive culture. I'm glad the baby talk is over. For years the CPO failed to bring together Comcast and Sky. Failed to bring together Entertainment and Connectivity. Failed to bring together Product and Technology. Wasted our investments chasing delusions. He and his SLT always so insecure about the size of their scopes. Always tapping each other on the back, congratulating themselves for their minor achievements. All they ever delivered was beautiful power point presentations. Let's see how much longer the legacy X1 bros will survive together.

Thank you SC for letting him know he is na--d! It was about time someone told him the truth.

What a show!!!

I’ve never experienced so much faffing about in my life this is what DXC has become!

I assume that the "bumpy" introduction of ODW CSG has been negatively impacting your target achievement in Q3. Said that, is there any output from management in your countries on how your are compensated for that disaster ?

Done playing with the leadership for the day.

Other employees please feel free to continue going at them, refuting their lies and utter nonsense.

In their heart of hearts, the Humana leaders know that they are totally in the wrong.

My director level manager has no management or relevant experience and is essentially an AI bot. Every question is answered by AI. Every meeting they are using what I suspect is Teams live captions to copy text and put it in AI and I’m then read an AI response word for word I can see their eyes reading text. The response is delayed while AI answers, they stumble and the response is generally not relevant or wrong. Is anyone else experiencing this? I’m not against AI but this feels insane.

Someone posted on LinkedIn they were looking for an engineer to prepare for the mgmt of Hibernia and Hebron. Those assets are operated by ExxonMobil currently.

In my career I’ve been thru many re-orgs and management changes and never seen anything like this and not sure what to make of it.

Anybody else feels like we have a VP, SD, SVP, etc. per 50 employees?

Mine is a lying POS. Zero trust. I know many are good but this one lies about everything. He's even lying about cuts and downplaying the whole thing even though all of us are receiving communication just like everybody else and my whole team is here on layoffs.com daily. Do you trust your manager?

It’s been 5 years of straight losses and seems like management doesn’t have a care in the world. Wild.

Scrambling to close tens of millions by March, with no one understanding how they will close those millions. What happens when they miss the mark by 10s of millions? Who will they blame this time? How was this reorg even dreamed up it truly couldn’t be worse. And the PEs don’t even have actual true numbers. Just a hope and a prayer. How has MH and NK made it this far?

I'm not too close to this product. After seeing the overhype for clover and the seemingly total misunderstanding of the market it plays in by management, is commerce hub going to be better? Have heard mixed things so far internally but Im atleast relieved they're moving more towards ecommerce as opposed to in store payments with clover

The financial technology firm Paypal is implementing significant workforce reductions. Over 2,000 employees will be impacted by these cuts. Additionally, the company plans to decrease its management roles by over a quarter. These measures are part of a broader restructuring effort. The exact reasons for these changes were not detailed.

https://www.tokenpost.com/news/business/41905

Sooo, is the Client Executive model helping anyone close deals? Client Executives are getting pulled into every deal nowadays. I see them handling questions that sales should covered. maybe this works somewhere. maybe. yet i'm struggling to see the benefit if it adds another step, layers work, slows things down. i doubt that a CE can help win or grow a deal

With all of the people posting that they lost their jobs this week, why cant people post the leadership names that also got laid off as ell. All SVP's, VP's, Sr Directors and management should be posted they put Comcast in this position and will be fine with there payouts. All of the people will not......

I’ve been a tech for 38 years and I have to say this is the worst I have seen it. What a shambles this place is in. Managers living in fear of being canned on a daily basis, rudderless at the top, people sitting behind desks following techs around with GPS and nitpicking every little thing they do, every department is disjointed and disorganized. It’s a sad state of affairs. Wishing everyone the best during this insane time.

Saw more one on one between principal manager and Staff, Sr staffs. And everyone looks tensed .

With us making a ton of money on the float how is our stock just cratering? We were at $110 now below $90. Complete mismanagement at the top. We should be printing money with interest rates where they are. Plus the constant market movement of late should be curning portfolios which generate income as well. Anyone in the know?

I am confused on how and why they are laying off employees when teams are bloated with managers that have only 4 direct reports. If they are gonna lose employees who will they manage? Shouldn't they cut costs by cutting middle managers first? Clearly they (mid managers) are unnecessary and cost the company more money pretending to be useful. And honestly, some of these awful managers are costing the company with unethical actions and behaviors leading to employee lawsuits.

Our leader looks like a ghost. Arms crossed rocking back and forth, and reading off a page while speaking.

If these people arent technical, arent they supposed to at least have social and people skills, and business acumen? This is like watching a high school science fair.

Nothing says “strategic cost management” quite like laying off people who actually deliver while protecting layers of management that should never have existed in the first place.

Software sourcing at Kyndryl is a great example: bring in a director to manage another director who is already managing sourcing/procurement. Two Band 10 directors for a relatively small function. Brilliant organizational efficiency.

Maybe the problem isn’t that there are too many workers. Maybe the problem is that there are too many chiefs managing other chiefs.

And somehow, when it’s time to cut costs, the axe always seems to fall several layers below where the expensive redundancy actually sits.

Has anyone heard if anything would happen if you just don’t obliged with the RTO mandate?

I know way too many people on my floor who just stopped showing up or decided to have hybrid schedule themselves

Are they going to impact your bonuses/raises or something? Tell you to go back into the office? Is it manager discretion?

Some managers are scared of being punished so they make their team go in. While others don’t care as long as you get your work done

How is E “rebuild” D still there??? Surely they’ve seen the pattern and damage? No?

Quite a few people teams were told end of the year they are done. NNO supports the regions after the Divisions were dissolved a few years ago.

Heard that TSC supervisors were informed they are done at years end. Agents will now report directly to managers.