#teams

Who was laid off today? Which teams? Sales, warehouse closures, or corporate teams? I heard S&T is still afloat.

What about us lowly folks? Any idea which teams are at risk?
If you’ve heard anything, please share.

I’ve been hearing all kinds of rumors, some of them pretty outlandish. I can’t figure out what, if anything, might be true.

I know it's way above my pay grade but this treatise on teams provides the bottom up view of how Fidelity Teams can be organized. In an ironic power/knowledge asymmetry, I, a low low developer on the front line who has no voice, posses the knowledge that the higher-ups would never know. For example, when it comes to which middle managers to cut, I know exactly who's coasting, who's contributing, who's busy kissing the as--s and who's envisioning... A "who in your report chain you would cut?" secret ballot offered to the frontline associates would work if the anonynimity is guranteed and the trust of the upper management is there.

So I can't be specific, instead I provide general principles here which the higher-ups may consider in the up-coming squad to team mass restructing. Please chime in as your feedback will be incorporated and the whole thing will be provided as my comments for the next Pulse Survey. For our voices to be heard, Please be thoughful and constructive and refain from whining or hate.

(1) Team Nature

Fidelity (actually any enterprise) teams can be categorized along two dimensions:

• What does the team offer (product vs service). Product teams build (dev), service teams operate (ops).
• The context in which the team functions (general purpose vs domain specific). Data extraction load and transformation (ETL) is general purpose, automatic understanding of scanned PDFs is domain specific. Phone reps in the call center is general purpose, relationship management with institutional clients is domain specific...

Some example teams in each of the four resulting quadrants are provided below:

• General purpose product team. The team which builds FidCentral or MyAccess. The team which builds the Snowflake data uploading tool...
• Domain specific product team. The team which builds automated tools to deploy AI Models. The team which builds automatic tools to extract information out of scanned user submitted PDF documents...
• General purpose service team. Phone reps who answer generic customer questions. Vendor database administrators.
• Domain specific service team. The team who provisions load balanced top level URL with vendor products such as AVI or F5. The team who manages digital certificates lifecycle with vendor product such as Venafi(?).

(2) Team Leadership

• Product Team leaders must be technical with engineering qualification and experiences. This in essence is the "engineering driven culture" in Meta and google. MBA's and humanitiy majors with only project management experiences aren't qualified (this is why AWS su-ks innovation and culture-wise).
• Domain Specific Product Team leaders must further posses the domain specific qualifications and experiences.
• Service Team leaders can be less technical and more manegerial, such as MBA's and project managers. In many areas, these managerial kind of leaders are needed more than technical ones.

(3) Team Compensation

• Product team should be compensated more than service team
• Domain specific teams should be compensated more than general purpose teams

(4) Team Assessement

• All teams must be assessed with clearly defined metrics. Both service and product have industry standard metrics: Daily Active Users (DAU), Monthly Active Users (MAU), Net Promotion Scores (NPC)...
• Apply process improvement methodology such as Six Sigma's DMAIC to improve service team metrics

(5) Team Diversity

While MAGA's h1b hate can be extreme, Fidelity Tech's widespread 100% single identity teams are inexcuseably extreme. It's only fair to recall "diversity" in current anti-DEI environment to counteract the extreme over-representation:

• No single enthinity represents more than 75% of any (tech) team.

What do I missed? What do I get it wrong? Thanks.

If this forum is a reflection of layoffs, it almost appears IT have been decimated by layoffs much more than other teams. Can I ask which IT teams have definitively been outsourced? Also, which other teams have had meaningful layoffs? Doesn’t seem to be that many outside Operations.

I heard the “pu”s are safe: cpu/gpu/npu

Which teams are going then? Please be bangalore!

Anyone worked with teams in Kraków - any experiences?

Hey RTO folks - Anyone noticing their location being tracked via Teams now?

Please which teams are being impacted and any details you can share

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/10/22/microsoft-teams-starts-telling-your-company-if-youre-not-at-work/

Any tea on what may happen with some of the duplicate teams that are being merged (SD & insert legacy paramount brand here)? Marketing everywhere, MTV/Skydance TV, animation, legal, etc.). Do you think they will finally be merged properly with some grand plan explained to the company?

Does md answer on teams ? Like if we can give him some good ideas or share with him some suggestions ?

Heard there were some layoffs today? Does anyone know how many or which teams got affected?

If it was not for this site, I would have no idea that such a RIF was taking place and I know of no one who had been ‘let go’.
Has the organisation shown in Teams been updated? Some higher up folk have not been on line since 9/4.

Many of the impacted employees are rehired as contractors and silently offering them to full-time.
Many teams have no projects no work they were enjoying the paychecks with no revenue coming from those teams. Heavy favoritism and lobbying going on which teams to retain and teams to be notified to retire. No place for High performers. Junk and people who dont know basics are driving projects they will eventually fail

Lots of projects are in limbo. This is just first round. Teams and Projects will be aligned to new initiatives. If there is no fit, there is plan to layoff more.

Layoffs are something that happens everywhere, we're not special in that regard. And I still think this is a decent job if you're lucky to have a good team and a good manager. Just my 2 cents.

Layoffs are coming to the back office. Mangers have been told to hit a number effectively by whatever means necessary and to submit a list of names by mid September. This will hit already lean teams. Prepare yourselves.