Everyone will be a VP soon. The org chart is bloated with VP's and the VP's themselves are bloated. Talent gets you nowhere in Telecom management especially in Uniti/Windstream culture. About 75% of all VP's are crony appointments and the others are Telecom lifers with talent but waiting for their severance package.
VP's! It's VP's ALL THE WAY DOWN! The job title bloat is unreal but what do you do in a shrinking industry full of telecom lifers.
some managers are reading this and have their feelings hurt apparently
@OP Senior Principal Executive Vice President is the new level being created for next year and all current directors will become VP's. Now everyone is one promotion away from becoming a vice president and this will help motivate us to work harder in 2027.
When AI fails it will look a lot like when the REIT failed. Anyone who tried to be reasonable and talk sense will already be gone. Yet anyone that got a big promotion or raise for over-committing will not see any of it reversed.
@OP a VP now is what a director was a decade ago. A director now is what a staff manager was a decade ago. Our paychecks now don't buy what they bought a decade ago.
It will get much worse before it gets better.
@5rs WIN might have been 20 years late to the "agile" party but I'll never forget that inspiring TT book report on the subject and near religious fervor about branding the company as a SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT POWERHOUSE!!!!
@5r4 I don't know, I mean we all might have fallen behind inflation and found ourselves reporting to scrubs but that blog post from TT about all the lessons he learned driving through the swiss alps with french drivers was awfully inspiring to me. I never worked harder or faster after reading that blog post. I still fell behind on my families medical bills because of the insurance etc but I can hold my head high that I fought just like he wanted us to.
@5qw the lawsuit era was a disaster for org development and unfortunately it's hard to dislodge all the cronies and glut at once
If you weren't hired by someone who was hired by the President your days are numbered. It's that simple. It's that d-mb. That's the culture.
@59w machine learning and self healing agility is how we synthesize stay-ba-bility into the software defined network at wholesale scale
the incoherent big data buzzword salad bamboozle will continue until the promotion to VP arrives in kinetic. if you can recognize the slop you are at the wrong company and in the wrong role
@55g $4.20 HERE WE COME. "It's not a matter of if the stock rockets back to success, it's only a matter of WHEN the stock rockets back to success" - Earnings Call VP
I am guessing the earnings call is going to be a blowout. Seems, someone knows something, considering the stock has fallen massively over the past few months.
@4y4 Looks like finance indeed driving the truck again today...
@4xy FINANCE DRIVES THE TRUCK!!!!!!
(until it runs off the road then let's not talk about the truck and blame the economy, repair, cable, obama, biden, china, etc)
I'm linking to this post on my resume to explain why I left or finally got RIF'd it's the GOAT. Maybe in my glassdoor review too
@4wm pay bands don't work here because of funny business with job codes/departments and inconsistency with job title definitions and criteria. industry level view is better but good luck
@4w6 Don't ask about pay-bands without an exit strategy. You and your manager seeing the data will not result in any rectification of any problem. If you are even asking about it....it's a good sign the ship has sailed and it's better to move on. You'll find out when you resign that money is on the table but you'll be on the RIF list if you take it.
Laid off from Uniti/Windstream as an IC is a sign of strength or at worst neutral to other employers with healthy HR and organizational development practices.
Laid off from Uniti Group as director or above is red flag. Good luck stepping into a role at that level anywhere else. Senior Directors from this company routinely revert back to individual contributors and/or entry level business analysts at other companies especially if changing industry.
The things you learn at Uniti are completely backwards to the real world in terms of people management and general best practices.
This company is loaded with management all the way up and down just like telecom was in the nineties. They have reduced their network tech side but from here it looks necessary if you’re not doing business installs and upgrades. Not to mention you all need to be able to pay that ever growing collection of executives. Maybe area managers and their supervisors should be nervous??
director level is watered down also ever since the REIT failure era. org is like a mushroom but without the magic
@OP A CEO/CFO with no history at either WIN or UNITI is about the only hope but that might not be good for Arkansas employee base unless they strike some deal with governor to keep at least the copper business HQ in AR
@462 If you ever get that creeping feeling you are being used as training wheels for a director or VP so they can fake it until they can make it on their own....it might be time to start looking because they don't want anyone around who remembers how they got there....
@460 Had a "staff manager" that was hired with no degree as a consultant. They went back to school and earned some kind of MIS degree while working. Then immediately promoted to "staff manager". Meanwhile we had two MBA's on our team and one had a CS degree. I think the linchpin was going to church with the director, something they didn't even try to hide (cube walls have ears).
@42y Many (over half) of the Manager, Staff Managers and Directors have no more than a GED diploma. And you think they should have a MBA?
It truly is how well you can 'brown nose' to get ahead at this company, nothing more, nothing less
@42y I reported to a "director" for 3 years and it involved sitting in her office once a week for 15 minutes rattling off what I was doing and the entire time she did her best to pretend she was in high demand and important by responding to Teams messages and replying to emails WHILE I TALKED.
A few times I just stopped talking mid sentence and she would look up and say "anything else?" or "sounds good see you next week".
In hindsight it was great because no accountability rolls downhill and I learned to play the game well. They just want their headcount bump on their paycheck and prestige on the org-chart. No Accountability is a learned trait and infects/poisons everything.
I left that team eventually and have found the only way to stay motivated is to keep changing teams for new experiences even though being versatile doesn't pay.
Waiting for a VSP offer now and have volunteered to be laid off 3 times. I think when they know you want out they just decide to lay other people off and wait you out thinking you'll quit but I'm lucky to have a side gig that pays the bills and plenty of support. I understand the stress for most people is unbearable at times like these though. SAD!
@3by Supervisor/Staff Manager are outdated job titles that don't play well on the market. They were really nothing more than high level individual contributors but the role allowed them to claim "people management" on a resume even though it was mostly fiction. Most companies understand high level individual contributors provide direction without formal authority. To actually manage human resources requires managerial sense, and generally leadership training or an MBA etc which is how it works most places. At WIN most directors now are individual contributors that have people under them in an org chart but really shouldn't be involved in HR. It makes no sense to have Directors reporting to Directors and very few individual contributors.
@OP There are greener pastures in Telecom but weeds are abundant and chiggers everywhere in copper. Good Luck
@3ye The crony explosion started just BEFORE the lawsuit in residential when JS was installed to replace SD. The timing of which was speculated that they knew it was coming and TT wanted his friends taken care of. A corporate bankruptcy is GREAT for people in senior leadership as they get "locked in" for indefinite period of time, the opposite of how it should work. Being too qualified in middle management is a liability when your goal is protecting turf.
Getting promoted to Director level or VP level used to be something to be proud of now it's like mark of the beast or sign of servitude and corruption. Been that way since the REIT lawsuit started.
@3cj "Finance drives the truck" ...and finance swaps seats with X group once they get pulled over for DUI and reckless driving!
@3cj I thought banks had a lot of VP's then I worked at Windstream and Uniti
@3by It's The Peter Principle in full effect. Signs of a dying / dead / corrupted culture. Job title inflation creates more job title inflation and then they get stuck above a job title they can't get anywhere else....and there's nowhere to go but add another word to the already inflated job title.
Remember the posters "Finance drives the truck" with the green truck? Yeah they took those down when REIT failure became too obvious to ignore. Finance drove the truck right off a cliff and will do so again and be paid well for it.
I remember when it was analyst -> supervisor -> staff manager -> director -> VP -> Cxx at Windstream.
You had a very small number of senior analysts or consultants/senior consultants. Incredibly small.
Now I almost never see anyone below a consultant. Their managers are always director or assistant director. Staff Manager don't seemingly exist anymore. And then the VP reports to a SVP that reports to an EVP that reports to a President that reports to the Cxx.
Everything got shifted up two tiers because the company can't be bothered to give out raises worth a dang so the only way to give your employee a raise is to promote them.
Unless you are DS over in finance. Then you regularly give your favorites 20+% raises while finance tells the rest of the company "NOTHING OVER 3%".
Org chart is so top heavy it is ridiculous.
It's a big club and you ain't in it
@OP When the layoffs happen it will be a 10/1 ratio of 10 laid off per 1 new VP announced along with new role of Super VP to make the current VP's not feel like they got demoted through job title inflation.
@dp They had one in Kinetic but she was set up to fail so CEO's BFF could get the job just in time for existential lawsuit/bankruptcy which CEO and BFF caused (Original Uniti spinoff failure). That era was all about protecting turf and purging anyone that said the spin-off was d-mb and doomed from the start. Don't give good advice in Telecom just nod your head and cheerlead the worst ideas ever. The woman typically gets a cleanup job is set up to fail for her first senior leadership role and that was the case then.
I’m still waiting for a female CEO or at least the President of Kinetic be female. Otherwise that was all a horse and pony show with men at the top just dangling carrots to get the desperate to follow them like the old times. Be my servant or be laid off type stuff.
@cn Who will prop up the VP's to teach them how to run the AI bots if it's all VP's ? VP's reporting to VP's reporting to VP's probably and maybe a few others so special parking privileges remain special. If there's no hard office or special parking spots the VP's will all be too depressed because otherwise what's the point of getting themselves called VP?
In an ideal AI world, you only need VP’s… no need for a middle manager or director to run an AI bot.
The VP Slop will continue until morale improves.