Thread regarding Comcast layoffs

@h3 Tony was badass

@cx Comcast hasn't had any good technical leadership since Tony Werner left. Since then the CTO and CNOs have created a trainwreck of their own self serving interests. Nobody is surprised at where the company is today. We all saw it coming.

Agreed, T&P needs a new executive leader and it has to be an external hire. Criteria should not be how large of an organization did this person run previously but how effective that leader was ? Given the "Fatal Incompetent Management Syndrome" and those leaders responsible from that is still around, why would a capable external leader even come in, unless given the authority to do serious clean up at the leadership level ? If not, any external hire would question that taking that challenge is agreeing to be setup for failure. Good leaders have many opportunities elsewhere and very few, if any, will be interested in taking over a train wreck.

The previous CNO left Comcast once covid subsided, joined AWS as VP of EC2 - by far the largest compute platform on Earth, spent good 5 years there, and is now joining Deutsche Telekom (parent company of T Mobile) as a Board of Director and CTO. Thats the kind of growth one would aspire from a company like us, but I dont think any of the current executives have this acumen due to the deeply intertwined politics and blame game which they play here.

@cp ai slop response

@cg No one in the corporate world is your “bro,” and the workplace is not your extended family. Stop trying to build personal alliances, favoritism, or inner circles based on regional, linguistic, or cultural connections.

Corporate relationships should be built on professionalism, competence, accountability, and mutual respect—not personal loyalty or group politics.

Focus on getting the work done, delivering results, and treating everyone equally. Your performance should speak louder than your connections. Keep it professional in every way.

Just by your choice of words, I can get a pretty clear idea of what you’re working on and whom you’re trying to defend. Your response reveals more about your priorities and loyalties than you might realize.

@ck this sounds like what happened. Our large market share allowed massive investments in business that wasnt sustainable when the competition arrived. We went too deep into technology spending cable money, but not enough results to keep us competitive when our real competition arrived

@a4 I agree with everything you said and it's a great summary of how the Tech Leadership is disjointed, but I also believe there is a deeper explanation for what happened to Comcast's technology organization. I've watched much of it firsthand.

Comcast has been an extremely successful cable company, expanding into phone, broadband, and business services. But around 2010, as technology companies gained enormous market value, Comcast wanted to become one too. Under Tony Werner, the technology organization expanded dramatically, investing in new platforms, applications, and architectures. But Comcast never changed its fundamental business model. A better set-top box or moving software into the cloud doesn't make you a technology company. Comcast was still selling services primarily within its own network footprint. Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon built entirely different businesses, with products, technology, and organizations designed to serve customers globally.

The result at Comcast was a massive expansion of the technology organization, growing silos, competing architectures, and an explosion of platforms and applications. Everyone was building something newer and more sophisticated. As long as the cable business generated strong profits, nobody questioned the growing complexity. Comcast had become a cable company with an enormous technology organization, not a technology company.

Then AI arrived around 2023, and history began repeating itself. Leadership wanted Comcast to become an AI company. Elad explored putting AI in data centers and cable modems, Rick pushed AI into development and applications, and Fraser focused on improving the voice remote. Each initiative had potential value, but there was no obvious unified business strategy. Worse, the fragmented systems and data created during the previous transformation made AI adoption even harder.

The fundamental problem is that Comcast's DNA is still that of a cable company, and there is nothing wrong with that. The company needs a lean, disciplined technology organization focused on winning broadband customers, improving service, simplifying operations, and reducing costs. Technology and AI should support those goals, not become goals themselves.

If Comcast wants to build a true technology or AI company, it should create a separate business with its own products, strategy, and financial accountability.

Comcast doesn't need to become a technology company. It needs to become a better broadband company. The changes that Croney announced today are actually good ones, it brings the company back to the core business and less focus on technology. I'm not sure if the individuals are the right ones, but the structure is back to the core DNA.

@cg you'd be surprised by how many teams are in meeting %80+ of the day. How is anyone supposed to get anything done? We're talking too much, and not having time to work.

@cb bro, many TPX people are away from their desks because they are in meetings all day. Ask me how I know (I'm one of them). My day is so meetings heavy that I have to schedule time on my own calendar to get non-meetings work done. And because my job is collaborative, we're working in conference rooms together.

Just because you're at your desk doesn't mean you're doing anything except sitting at your desk.

This is a bad take that reflects poorly on you and only you.

@cc uh no. There is no such thing.

I once heard there are some TPX teams where Engineers have access to free lunch in office and get a per diem for lunch when working remotely of from home. Think about that when they cut your team headcount.

T&P has a serious accountability problem, and what I have personally observed in some teams raises legitimate questions about productivity, staffing, and management effectiveness.

I have observed teams of approximately 10–20 people where employees appear to spend less than 10–20% of their office time at their desks. During my observations, much of their time has involved personal conversations and socializing rather than visible work-related activities.

I understand that sitting at a desk does not automatically mean someone is productive, and being away from a desk does not mean someone isn’t working. But when these patterns are observed repeatedly, they deserve scrutiny.

What makes this particularly concerning is that I have witnessed this behavior in a team considered one of the most critical and highly valued within T&P. I won’t disclose the team’s name.

If these are the patterns I am observing in one of T&P’s most important teams, leadership needs to examine whether the team’s resources, responsibilities, and actual business outcomes are aligned.

The questions are straightforward: What has this team delivered? What measurable business impact has it created? What engineering problems has it solved? Are its staffing levels justified by its workload and results?

These questions should be answered with documented deliverables, measurable outcomes, and objective performance data — not assumptions.

I cannot generalize these observations to every team in T&P. However, they raise enough concern to justify a broader examination of how engineering resources are allocated and how team performance is evaluated.

T&P leadership talks constantly about efficiency, transformation, and organizational optimization. But where is the evidence that existing teams are being managed effectively?

Leadership should be able to demonstrate that teams are delivering meaningful value relative to the resources invested in them.

Showing up to the office is not a measure of productivity. Delivering measurable results is. And accountability must apply equally to individual contributors, managers, directors, and executives.

@c3 Hiring and promotions have to go through independent evaluations. There's just bias and double standards everywhere. The mindset of "if I need to run my show, I need to have my own people under me" has to be squashed.

@a4 Under this leadership, I have witnessed far too many instances of what I believe to be discrimination, favoritism, and blatant double standards. I have seen people raise legitimate concerns and subsequently lose their jobs, while others who seem to contribute very little continue to hold influential positions.

If I were in charge, I would seriously consider a complete reassessment of the organization, from ENG3 all the way up to Senior Director. I would conduct fresh technical and leadership evaluations and ask one simple question: What have you actually contributed to your team and the company? What measurable value have you delivered?

The situation I have observed in HQ and BG/ML is particularly frustrating. It is exhausting to deal with people who seem more interested in protecting their positions, pushing personal agendas, and playing organizational politics than solving real engineering problems.

What concerns me most is the culture of fear. People feel they cannot challenge decisions, question leadership, or speak openly without risking retaliation. The message seems clear: stay silent, follow the agenda, and don’t upset the wrong people if you want to survive.

That is not leadership. That is an environment where accountability disappears, competent people become discouraged, and organizational politics take priority over engineering excellence.

The real question is not how many people T&P can lay off. It is how many people in positions of authority can actually demonstrate that they deserve to be there.

Before launching another transformation, restructuring another team, or eliminating more engineering positions, perhaps leadership should start by evaluating its own effectiveness.

You cannot build a high-performing engineering organization when people are afraid to speak, technical competence is not consistently rewarded, and accountability appears to depend more on organizational influence than actual contribution.

T&P doesn’t just need a new vision. It needs a culture where competence matters, speaking up is safe, and accountability applies to everyone — especially leadership.

Has a single GTO internal platform or initiative ever launched within a year of its original committed date or come within 1/4 of the results or performance that was promised by it?

@bj said:
"From the outside, Paul seems to have good ideas, but what’s being heard raises questions about his judgment in choosing and keeping his leaders. He appears to have shiny object syndrome, chasing the next engineering idea while giving less attention to the details and daily operations"

You mean shiny AI syndrome, right? Anyone remember the town halls where they told us to imagine a time when we'd each be managing multiple "virtual" workers, aka AI agents? The real engineers here laughed at that, but senior management was too busy listening to Anthropic and OpenAI and Microsoft about how AI was going to save them so much money (by laying off all of us engineers). I wouldn't be surprised if some of them got kickbacks in some fashion.

We told them AI couldn't replace real world knowledge gained through hard work.
We told them AI couldn't handle large codebases without sc--wing things up.
We told them AI was ADDING security issues into our code.
We told them token prices were going to skyrocket once the bubble started to burst.
We told them only hiring prompt jockeys was going to break the path to anyone becoming a senior engineer, which would destroy the company in a decade.

And what did we get back? Being called AI detractors and told in our employee reviews that we had to be team players "or else". I mean, why listen to us? We're only paid high salaries because of our experience, knowledge, and field expertise. ಠ_ಠ

Instead of treating AI as a new and very useful tool, we had it crammed down our throats and then got obliterated with obscenely short deadlines all the while constantly being told it would soon replace us. As if our morale wasn't dead enough already.

And these are the people that are going to lead us into a new Tech Company utopia? Don't make me laugh.

With the Birds playing like they forgot what a first down is, I need analysis like this to get me through the season.

Best thread. Keep it coming. Truth in every post.

Worked in T&P for a long while, and I can attest to how all the team managers and directors did whatever the he-l they wanted regardless of if it stepped on the current direction or on each other's efforts. Watching them was like watching the road runner suddenly split into 8 dust trails, each going in a different direction. And then exploding.

And direction was the problem. As noted in the great post previously, there was no single architectural direction. None. Zip. Zilch. NextGen? Every team did their own thing. Some used GraphQL, others used SOAP, and still others created their own REST API spec that only they used. Then there was the move to NoSQL. That stalled out about the time the managers realised what the developers had been screaming at them since the move was announced - you can get relational performance out of key-value or doc databases. Anyone remember project BOB? Neither does anyone else.

It's been one disaster after another for the last 15 years, with no one taking the wheel to get all the development teams and directors to move in the same direction. Good efforts were squashed or ignored because groups didn't like competition or were jealous they didn't come up with the idea themselves. Bad efforts were rewarded with promotions.... somehow. And don't even get me started on all the roadmap nuking by the internal service teams who's migrations and upgrades constantly stepped all over each other, or were so poorly (or not at all) planned out that they constantly had to pause the migration or quickly change to another poorly thought out direction. And never did any of them ask what the effect they had on team's roadmaps.

All these problems have just gotten worse as time went on, with senior management either too incompetent or scared to take any responsibility or set any real direction and enforce it. Then they started "fixing" the eNPS survey results, and that brings us to how Comcast is now being set up to be sold for parts.

This isn't the first company I've worked for that died from fatal Incompetent Management Syndrome. However, it IS the fastest I've seen a company this large and solvent destroy itself. It's quite a feat.

The management that destroyed us is not going anywhere. They're the ones that hired McKinsey, not to fix us, but to put us on a sp-t and season us for venture capital to feast on. It's only going to get worse from here, so get your resumes out there and get the he-l out of dodge before you regret it.

@bj I’m from NBCUniversal side and we worked with Andrew and his team through a TPM group Trisha created to bring people from NBCUniversal and Comcast engineering groups together. It was a program called TPMs that code, we shared ideas and used AI. That team was such a joy to work with and we had so much fun together. Unfortunately, we no longer work with them but that experience remains one of our best memories of working with Comcast.

I’m also sad to hear about the layoffs in TPX. I came to this forum to get a better sense of what’s happening.

@a9 From the outside, Paul seems to have good ideas, but what’s being heard raises questions about his judgment in choosing and keeping his leaders. He appears to have shiny object syndrome, chasing the next engineering idea while giving less attention to the details and daily operations. The picture being described is a scattered leadership team that doesn’t work well together, without enough direction from Paul to bring it together.

There used to be real enthusiasm around joining that organization. TPMs were waiting for positions to open because the previous chief of staff and his team seemed to be building something people wanted to be part of. That included the xplore conferences and efforts that helped morale. I personally saw a demo of an I personally saw a demo of a planning model from one of his female leaders at the time, it was innovative, and had the power to change things. I can't remember her name. Apparently, that team was dismantled after the new chief of staff arrived, and much of the enthusiasm went with it.

That raises questions about Paul’s decisions. Why take apart something that seemed to be working, and why keep leaders whose effectiveness continues to be questioned? He has talented people and a diverse team, but the feedback suggests a gap between what gets promised and what gets delivered.

He also appears to take considerable direction from Rick and Mike Crisafulli. From the outside, it’s fair to wonder whether he’s too willing to say “yes, sir” instead of making his own calls. He’s been there long enough to establish his own direction.

Paul may have potential, but he needs to put as much energy into leading the organization as he puts into new engineering ideas. Better hiring decisions, more attention to operations, and following through on commitments would go a long way.

Never underestimate the power of a foreign accent. Scottish, Israeli, etc., TPD leadership is filled with mo--ns with smart sounding accents.

I challenge anyone to explain to me what Noam is responsible for? He plays a wireless guy on TV. Not even an engineer.

@a4 Appreciate the effort-post. My "hot take" is that these leaders were successful in the 2000-2010s when TV was king, the internet was still growing, and Comcast would've grown no matter who was in charge, but the changing market and increased competition really exposed how average these leaders actually are. In reality, they seem out of touch with the needs of a changing customer base and incapable of imagining better products which can actually move the needle on revenue. Just not the right people for the moment.

TPX is really good at making the rest of the business wade through the mud to meet their expectations if only to have some control. It seems they pride themselves on influencing outside their organization to check boxes only they track for purposes that never materialize. Some of the external influence seems to be to slow the business if only to not overwhelm them with their responsibilities. If the company is streamlining. Surely streamline TPX so they can focus internally on innovation and not exerting influence outside. Then maybe it will be efficient at execution to stay competitive

@a4 Paul?

@a6 hire is external

@a4 i would give almost anything for your post to be read out loud, in front of all of the leaders you mentioned.

@a4 incredibly well said. It feels completely obvious to me that an external hire is needed to survey this mess and be an objective & ruthlessly rational voice of reason to clarify the direction here. I have my doubts this will happen, but it would be the right thing to do.

@a4 best post ever. McKinsey can copy this post, put it in a PowerPoint and sell it to Comcast for a few million bucks.

I work closely with all the T&P leaders and know each of them well. On a personal level, Charlie and Rick are genuinely nice guys. Unfortunately, being nice and being effective executives are two very different things.

Charlie’s most notable innovation appears to be Storm-Ready WiFi, while Rick’s defining achievement was leading the team that developed the voice remote some 15 years ago. To his credit, Rick has also championed a CMT-based architecture that, to this day, very few people seem to understand the purpose or value of. Perhaps its brilliance is simply too sophisticated for the rest of us to appreciate.

Unfortunately, the rest of the T&P leadership team doesn’t offer much reason for optimism either.

T&P is a masterclass in organizational silos, executive politics, and the art of confusing activity with progress.

The organization operates as a collection of independent kingdoms, each with its own priorities, politics, and interpretation of reality. Leaders routinely criticize their peers, question one another’s competence, and spend an extraordinary amount of energy defending their territories.

The executive leadership team seems to have perfected the art of competing internally while somehow forgetting that they’re supposed to be competing in the market.

And Charlie, despite his good intentions, is clearly not the person who will put an end to this ongoing political theater.

Perhaps most remarkably, there is no clear, unified vision for what T&P is actually supposed to accomplish. No compelling strategic direction, no meaningful prioritization, and certainly no shared understanding of what success looks like.

Instead, each executive is pursuing their own version of greatness:

• Elad is busy driving his own agenda, while remaining convinced that virtually every other organization is overstaffed. Apparently, efficiency is primarily something other teams need to improve.
• Noam runs his own race and seems firmly convinced that everyone else is incompetent and that he alone understands how things actually work. A reassuring foundation for executive collaboration.
• Fraser flies back and forth, dreams of big transformational opportunities, and talks about the future while overseeing a product that is steadily declining. The ambition is certainly impressive. The business results, somewhat less so.
• Rick considers Elad a relatively junior leader who doesn’t understand the bigger picture. Presumably, that bigger picture includes an architecture nobody can quite explain and a remote control from 15 years ago.
• James is still trying to figure out exactly what his role is, while simultaneously working hard to acquire more teams. Apparently, organizational scope is easier to measure than business impact.
• Noopur appears increasingly interested in visibility and personal recognition while allowing her direct reports to take on much of the actual operational leadership. An interesting interpretation of executive delegation.

Put them all together, and you have a truly remarkable leadership team: several highly compensated executives, each seemingly convinced they are the smartest person in the room, all working tirelessly to ensure that nobody else gains too much influence.

The one thing they appear to agree on is that the problem lies somewhere else in the organization.

Meanwhile, business outcomes, product innovation, operational efficiency, and meaningful execution struggle to get the same level of attention as the latest organizational power struggle.

The fundamental problem is not a shortage of smart people or resources. T&P has plenty of both. What it lacks is something much more basic: a clear vision, a small number of shared goals, and the discipline to focus relentlessly on delivering them.

T&P doesn’t need more initiatives. It needs a vision. And then it needs focus. Focus. Focus. Focus.

Today, there is no single direction that the entire leadership team is committed to delivering. Instead, every executive has a collection of pet projects, personal ambitions, and strategic initiatives that conveniently justify the existence and expansion of their own organization.

Each leader has their own roadmap, their own definition of success, and their own priorities. Put them all together, and you get more than 200 initiatives competing for the same resources, attention, and engineering capacity.

This is not a strategy. It’s a collection of executive wish lists masquerading as one.

And because everything is supposedly important, nothing is truly important. Teams are stretched across too many priorities, dependencies multiply, decisions take forever, and execution becomes an endless exercise in managing complexity rather than delivering results.

The solution is not complicated. But it requires the kind of leadership discipline that T&P has been missing for years.

First, T&P needs a new executive leader who can articulate one clear, compelling vision for what the organization should become and what it must deliver for the business.

Not seven different visions stitched together into a PowerPoint deck. Not a vague collection of aspirational statements that everyone can interpret however they please. One vision that makes it crystal clear where the organization is going, why it matters, and what success looks like.

Second, that vision must translate into a handful of shared, measurable goals. Not 30 strategic priorities. Not 200 initiatives. A handful.

The entire executive leadership team should be aligned around the same goals, with collective accountability for delivering them.

Those goals should be straightforward:

1. Build new products and generate new revenue. Select two or three meaningful opportunities that can create real customer value and measurable business growth. Focus the best talent and resources on making those opportunities successful, rather than spreading them across dozens of disconnected innovation experiments.
2. Drive meaningful efficiencies for the company. Establish two or three concrete goals to simplify operations, improve productivity, reduce costs, and eliminate unnecessary complexity. Not efficiency programs designed to make someone else’s organization smaller, but shared initiatives that actually improve the economics of the business.
3. Fix the foundations. Prioritize one or two critical initiatives to reduce technical debt, simplify architecture, and remove organizational obstacles that slow execution. And resist the temptation to turn every technology improvement into another multiyear architectural science project.

That’s it. A clear vision and perhaps five to seven meaningful goals for the entire organization.

Every executive should be measured against those same outcomes. Every investment, roadmap, and organizational priority should directly support them.

If an initiative doesn’t clearly contribute to one of those goals, it should not be a priority. No matter how passionate an executive is about it. No matter how many PowerPoint slides have been created to justify it. And no matter whose empire it happens to support.

The hardest and most important leadership decision will be what to stop doing.

T&P needs someone who is willing to look at those 200-plus initiatives and say: We are not doing all of this. We are going to pick the few things that truly matter, put our best people behind them, and deliver.

That means shutting down pet projects, eliminating redundant efforts, challenging sacred cows, and reallocating resources based on business impact rather than executive influence.

It also means ending the culture where each executive gets to pursue their own agenda as long as they can wrap it in sufficiently impressive strategic language.

Focus is not about doing the same 200 things with better coordination. Focus means having the courage to do dramatically fewer things, exceptionally well.

And alignment does not mean seven executives politely agreeing in a meeting before returning to their respective kingdoms. It means seven executives genuinely sharing the same priorities, making trade-offs together, and being accountable for the success of the whole organization rather than their individual territories.

This requires a different leadership model. One where the executive team operates as an actual team, not as a federation of competing business units.

One where success is measured by products shipped, revenue generated, efficiencies realized, and business outcomes achieved. Not by headcount, organizational scope, number of initiatives, or the ability to declare one’s own projects strategically important.

Today, T&P is working on more than 200 different things and delivering far too little meaningful impact.

Everyone is busy. Every executive has an ambitious agenda. Every team has a full roadmap. Every quarter brings another set of initiatives that are apparently critical to the future of the company.

And yet, somehow, the organization struggles to point to a small number of truly consequential accomplishments.

The problem isn’t that people aren’t working hard. The problem is that they are working hard on too many different things, often pulling in different directions.

We have created an organization where starting something is rewarded, owning something is politically valuable, and finishing something that actually matters to the business seems almost secondary.

T&P doesn’t suffer from a lack of ideas, ambition, talent, or investment.

It suffers from a lack of vision, a lack of shared priorities, and an almost complete absence of focus.

The next executive leader needs to do three things exceptionally well: set the vision, align the leadership team behind a handful of common goals, and relentlessly eliminate everything that distracts from delivering them.

Not another reorganization. Not another management layer. Not another strategy offsite that generates 50 new action items.

A clear direction. A few big bets. One leadership team. Shared accountability. And relentless execution.

Until that happens, T&P will continue doing what it has become remarkably good at: launching initiatives, expanding organizations, debating priorities, protecting executive pet projects, and producing an extraordinary amount of activity with surprisingly little to show for it.

The ultimate irony is that T&P probably doesn’t need more resources to achieve dramatically better results. It just needs to stop wasting the resources it already has on 200 different versions of what each executive thinks is important.

And perhaps the greatest innovation a new T&P leader could introduce would be something genuinely radical: deciding what matters, getting everyone to work on it, and actually finishing it.

@a1 agreed, he needs to go

Hopefully FS is next