#team

A healthy team isn't where everyone
agrees - it's where everyone feels safe enough to disagree.

Does anybody remember being a member of the team that brought your university up on the ARPANET in the early 70s?

I do. I was asked as an.undergraduate to be a part of the university team. It was a great honor and we did great work. By 1976 there were about 60 nodes. Anybody remember Digital's PDPs? Great computing platforms at the time.

Does anyone remember being a member of the team of a company that was in the list of the first 100 domain names to be issued?

I do. It was 1986. i was in an engineering group that developed software of excellence.

I'm likely one of the few that is a part of both groups.

At that time those were proud moments/achievements in my career.

As time marched on, what were proud moments were dulled and replaced with becoming disillusioned with what the internet was becoming as more and more nodes were added. Software excellence became virtually non existent.

I thought I could regain those proud moments when I started at F5.

I was wrong. Too many releases with known critical errors.

Please be a part of the solution and not the problem.

Some of the employees laid off in the last round were the ones everyone turned to when things needed to get done. How does a team lose its strongest contributors and call that a sensible decision?

Anyone else excited for this years home for the holidays round? I’m looking forward to it like the Super Bowl. Hopefully we get rid of some of these clueless and lazy engineers and leaders that do nothing!

I can’t believe all the buzzwords. Do the MDs and ASMs even realize most of the team is still at the bar AT Midnight? I’m at 50% savvy on my route and beating our location by 25 points. You think I’m going to give any more? My pay hasn’t increased since COVID, after you rerouted me and set me back to target pay. Hey Johnny, sell more so we can recalibrate your route to 65k. Hey, GFY!

How can an organization expect growth, innovation, and improvement in other areas when its core Engineering Research and Development team is filled with underperforming individuals who contribute very little but continue to enjoy job security because of favoritism from senior leadership?

Unfortunately, this appears to be the reality within the team. Some senior employees seem more focused on protecting their positions than taking ownership of their responsibilities or contributing meaningfully to the organization’s success.

I have chosen to remain silent because one of my former colleagues were laid off after raising concerns about these very same issues. This has created an environment where employees feel that speaking up could put their jobs at risk.

From what I have observed, the safest approach seems to be to ignore these problems, avoid questioning management, and simply collect your paycheck at the end of each month. Those who remain silent appear to enjoy greater job security than those who genuinely care about improving the organization.

Meanwhile, several senior team members seem to contribute very little while placing most of the workload and pressure on contractors. Contractors are expected to handle significant responsibilities, while some permanent employees appear to enjoy a much more comfortable work environment with limited accountability.

This is particularly noticeable in the New Jersey office. I would encourage senior leadership to visit the office, observe the team’s day-to-day activities, and evaluate how responsibilities are actually distributed. A firsthand assessment might reveal a significant difference between those who carry the workload and those who receive recognition and job security.

One simple way to expose the lack of accountability would be to require every team member, including senior engineers, to create and maintain Jira tickets documenting their daily tasks, responsibilities, progress, and actual contributions. If everyone were held accountable for the work they perform, I strongly believe that nearly 60% of the team would struggle to demonstrate meaningful contributions. This would reveal how much of the actual workload is being handled by a small group of hardworking individuals, particularly contractors, while others continue to enjoy job security without delivering measurable results.Comcast will save millions of dollars in the future. I see some people taking more than 200k just for this?

Anonymous?
Lol.

Is it like a "Buy One, Get One Free" thing?
Another waste of time and money that surely could be put to better use?

Same with People Managing stuff...it's not the field teams who need this, it's the people at OTC who just don't get it.

The number of people managing the work compared with the number actually doing it makes no sense. Early on, someone told me that a small fraction of the staff would end up carrying almost everything. I thought they were exaggerating, but I've watched it happen. The same people get relied on again and again while the organization keeps adding layers above them.

There are capable people here who could solve problems if management would let them. Instead, decisions keep getting pulled away from the people who understand the work.

Everything seems to come back to reducing costs rather than improving the business. As a result, the many, many cuts are making it harder for teams to communicate and get anything done. It's all a big joke.

2 years out from my LR, and honestly, looking back, the place made Microsoft seem non-political. The backstabbings and inter-team fights were constant.

I've been in product design (UX) for a long time, and I've never seen a company that knew less about what to do with design than Cisco. Everyone complained about UX. But the product designers would never get a chance because an exec saw a shiny thing and we're all doing that. And then do 10% of it and ship it incomplete before the new shiny thing caught the exec's eye.

Half the designers were trying to fix things. The other half were making nice slides for execs to sound cool at Cisco Live. Guess which set of designers have been axed over the last three years.

And a special shoutout to Fletcher's design team leaders for being arrogant AND useless. What did you actually do? Because you clearly didn't. Enjoy being replaced by AI. At least the tokens will actually do work.

Does Shannon Bell have any product or technology experience?

If my backfill doesn’t get approved I am only at six — please inform me of the risk I am facing

I've noticed a pattern on our DRB calls where there are only 1 or 2 deals up for review out of a team of 35+ salespeople. Why such low numbers?

Are government organizations simply not going to market or has the sales team QUIET QUIT?

No one can blame you did. I'm just super curious.

How are such low numbers possible? Educate me on the reality on the ground.

Since we did a full RTO the energy amongst team members had become truly incredible

I've never seen such eagerness to get to work as there is at the moment, people just dripping cars outside the door and leaving them running so they can get to their desks to start working

Meeting rooms are booked out for the next 2 years

The markets love us and our stock is strong

Venky is fostering a bunch of non-qualified leaders and rotating through the VP roles across his organization. Look at the team he has, and all the different roles they have taken in the last 6 years. It's not normal to have VPs rotating through different countries, marketplace, sourcing, manufacturing, planning - no expertise just su-king on Venky's teet.

They are moving the inpatient UM teams to national this month. They dont want to lay people off but will have too many bodies for FTEs so they are going to promote people who are not qualified to do the job. They are going to put people into not desirable roles to make them quit so they don’t have to lay anyone off and the central team is a disorganized mess with leaders with no experience

Amazing quarter and results - keep up the great work Sanoke and Josh!

Juan is a narcissist at the core. You hear each meeting he glorifies his accomplishments. Even on connect, there are articles about members thanking him personally. Even if members did have a good experience, it was a team effort. He should have thanked the MSRs not glorifying himself.

Dell software is a joke customers who buy servers won't even use the Dell software because it's junk. How are the teams surviving layoffs.

I absolutely hate large group zoom workshops. Especially when the “key” people travel and are in the room and everyone else can’t get a word in edgewise. The raise hand feature is totally ignored and people just talk over the remote attendees. Meanwhile the loudest know it alls who actually know nothing dominate the discussion and don’t let anyone else speak.. What a waste of my time.

Get ready for departure :)

BP is now a second follower and is in the process of divesting Nakika…share your insights on this asset? There are great people working on the platform yet this asset takes away from bp’s future state.

Will the team blend into new operator? Is there pi----g contests for who migrates and remains with bp?

How big is that team? How solid are those guys?

Lots of hypes but not sure real substance.

Source: C. Simpson

These 4 KPIs matter more.

The way most people measure their leadership doesn't tell them much.
Years in the role, size of the team, how many people report to you...

None of these tells you whether anyone would follow you if they didn't have to.

So here's a better set of KPIs to measure your leadership against. Not Key Performance Indicators, but:

✅ Keep People Included
✅ Keep People Intentional
✅ Keep People Invested
✅ Keep People Inspired

Managing people is obvious when it's happening to you.
You can feel when someone is directing you vs when someone is developing you.

And you can feel the difference between a team that's compliant and a team that's committed.

So instead of asking "how many people report to me?", try asking these instead:

👥 Keep People Included
↳ Are they part of the conversation before decisions are made?
↳ Do they have a genuine standing in the room, or just a seat in it?

📝 Keep People Intentional
↳ Do they know what matters most right now, or are they guessing?
↳ Are their daily choices aligned with the bigger goal, or scattered across too many priorities?

📈 Keep People Invested
↳ Do they understand how their work connects to the bigger picture?
↳ Do they have a stake in where this is going?

💭 Keep People Inspired
↳ Do they leave conversations with you feeling more capable, or less?
↳ Do they bring you their best work, or just enough to get by?

These questions will tell you far more than a title or a headcount ever will.

Leadership has to be a habit you build, not a position you hold.

Has anyone noticed tech being more glitchy than normal? Wondered if that was a sign of backend work for a layoff or just lack of a team to update tech. Has this been seen before a layoff?

Let’s get back to this HP! We are on the ropes but we have amazing people and ideas!

The eleven rules are:

Believe you can change the world.

Work quickly, keep the tools unlocked, work whenever.

Know when to work alone and when to work together.

Share — tools, ideas. Trust your colleagues.

No Politics. No bureaucracy. (These are ridiculous in a garage.)

The customer defines a job well done.

Radical ideas are not bad ideas.

Invent different ways of working.

Make a contribution every day. If it doesn’t contribute, it doesn’t leave the garage.

Believe that together we can do anything.

Invent.

What will the layoffs look like in Nov? The recurring theme in Product seems to be on smaller teams.

Share with the world how wells is performing? What’s going really well and what’s challenging?

How’s Kaskida development coming along? Everyone optimistic?

Wondering if I ask for a raise what is the likelihood of it getting approved and what factors typically get considered in the process? (Cost of living, performance review, performance in general, work load, team size etc). Wondering if it is even worth asking

did ur project stop? Did deadlines slip... roles move sites, responsibilities consolidate, or did ur team absorb the reduction w/out (major) disruption? I think it's a sh-tshow but it may be just me - we are fairly large and given the messages on this board it looks like there is quite a bit of variety.

We lost two people who were integral to our team. Their work has to be done. The rest of us are already overworked, so if they expect us to be the ones to do it, they're in for a rude awakening. I don't think somebody really thought things through when making the latest layoff list.

Recently hired in a new market hub, that's a huge step-up from some of the older stores around here! Team synergy is tops too, that sure helps.
If any of you is looking for positions, look for market hubs, you won't be disappointed. I can see why they want to open more of these. We have so much parts stocked as well, I didn't have to shoo away customers yet, such a great feeling

3 here. Seriously concerned.

We can’t staff the projects that management wants to go fast yet there is pressure to reduce headcount in Houston! The Horizon challenge will only get worse. Even the teams that are staffed are full of people who don’t know how to get things done.

I just noticed that locations of associates are no longer displaying next to their names in Teams.

Why does every empty position sit around for four to six months before anyone fills it? Why do the rest of us on the team have to pick up the slack during that time?