Just hit my 10-year mark and our team's down to half the people we started with. At this point, attrition feels much less like a trend and much more like a slow-motion exodus while the higher-ups keep their heads stuck in the sand and pretend everything’s fine.
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I'm disabled, but I was a small time freelance designer. The Nike up and ups laugh at me and say "you can't be a designer in Portland." Emphasis on Portland. Maybe they are going to pull up stakes...they are SO hostile, as a group refusing to pay for things. They represent their company but pretend to be denizens...
Have you seen the amount of fu--ing Indians that work here?
What happens when you prioritize being w*ke over actually making proper business decisions
@ge+1jq7882bb, the fanciful idea that a significant number of Nike employees have never lived outside of Oregon is, to put it bluntly, hogwash.
Evidence #1: Take my team for example. There are 24 of us. Of these 24 people exactly three are “native Oregonians”. And of those three people, all three of them went to college and/or worked outside Oregon before getting hired at Nike. That means 0 out of 24 of my direct colleagues meet your criteria of having never lived outside Oregon. Yet you’d have me believe that my team is some kind of dramatic outlier rather than more akin to the norm? Sorry…I’m not buying it. Neither should anyone else.
Evidence #2: Look at Nike’s approximately 300+ VP’s. If what you said was true you’d expect at least some small number of Nike’s VP base to meet your criteria. Yet of those 300+ people I can’t think of one - not even a single one - who has never lived outside of Oregon. If you disagree, please give us initials (since we can’t use names) and tell us what department that VP works in so we can know who you’re talking about. Again I don’t know of even a single one. You don’t either because such a person doesn’t exist.
Evidence #3: I helped manage and shepard the 2022 summer intern class. As is the norm we ended up offering jobs to 18 of those interns. The number of new hires from that intern class who met your criteria of having never lived outside Oregon? Zero.
Evidence #4: I’ve worked at Nike 21 years. Have I ever met people who have literally never lived outside of Oregon? I suppose I probably have. But the fact that I can’t think of or remember even a single one strongly suggests to me that your claim Nike is chock-full of such people, is bunk.
It wouldn’t shock me if, at the very lowest rungs of Nike employment where getting hired doesn’t require any real type of specialized education or employment history - like maybe security guard, admin, etc. - you might (emphasis on “might”) find a larger proportion of employees who have never lived outside of Oregon. But again, suggesting that a significant number of professional-level Nike employees have never gone to school, worked, or otherwise lived outside of Oregon is absurd.
But let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, that you’re correct! This place is absolutely crawling with “yokels” who just aren’t as gosh darn sophisticated as you! (Lolz, again.) Well, between 1980 - when Nike went public - and the end of 2024, Nike stock has provided a compounded annual growth rate of 18.2%. Compare that to the S&P500. During that same time period it has provided a CAGR of 11.95%.
If you accept that the primary goal of any publicly-traded company is to provide shareholder value to shareholders (that’s true, btw), then this place being filled to the brim with “Willamette Valley yokels” seems to have served it extremely well. This single fact, all by itself, completely shreds your entire thesis that Nike can’t operate like a global-caliber Fortune 500 company because too many of the people working here just aren’t as worldly, “cosmopolitan”, and culturally sophisticated as…people like you, I presume? Lolz, a third time.
Your entire post strikes me as stereotypical East Coast-style elitism and provincialism. Being from New England myself I’m very familiar with it. People from large East Coast cities like NYC, Boston, D.C., and even Atlanta enjoy acting as if THEY are the height of “cosmopolitanism”. As if THEY are solely capable of defining “cultural relativity” (lolz), and everyone who isn’t from those places - like those “yokels” from out west in Or-eh-gahn - just wouldn’t understand. In other words they tend to be completely full of themselves. Just like you.
@ge+1jq7882bb Believe it or not, while it may seem counterintuitive, there is more to building a great company than just hiring A players. What matters more is having a clear mission that everyone believes in, a team that works relentlessly toward that mission, and leaders who can bring people together to work toward it. Think about your own job. Nearly all daily tasks do not require a genius to complete. What really makes a difference is having people who are committed and working in the best interest of the company and its mission.
Likewise, you can assemble a team of brilliant minds from top universities and impressive accomplishments, but if they are not working toward a shared mission they all truly believe in, they will fail.
@ge this is going to trigger a bunch of people but it is true and Nike needs to address it to be competitive
When I walked in the door, it thoroughly disappointed me to see how many people work at Nike that have never lived anywhere but Oregon. I thought to myself, wow, this is weird but hey, there's clearly something special about this place. And I went with it.
Now, after a decade of being here, I can say for certain: large swaths of our workforce are not internationally savvy people who know how to do work at a Global level in a Fortune 500 company. I kept hearing messaging from leadership about 'fair hiring practices', and 'competitive application processes' and thought - OK now we will have some change to this yokely PNW workforce pretending to be top tier talent.
Nope - the flood of Willamette Valley yokels keep coming in. The 'competitive hiring practices' are continuing to yield white Karens in training.
It's an established fact in most workplaces that A-class players get assigned to play with B- and C-class players. Many other companies find creative ways to put A-class players with other A-class players to accelerate work, give a more nourishing work experience to their best workers, and push boundaries.
Nike doesn't do that. And sure enough, the A-class players have been leaving for years because they're tired of it. What's left? A workforce full of B- and C-class players who couldn't articulate the importance of cosmopolitanism, cultural relativity, or find a way to embrace other cultures instead of find them 'quirky' and 'funny'.
@e4+1jq7882bb What’s worse is watching more and more roles get moved over to india. Our contractors over there must be working two jobs, because they’re not doing any work for Nike.
L1 support exists solely to fake metrics and forward incidents. The engineers cost more than a college graduate but somehow have less experience.
CIS. If you’re monitoring this site you should audit whatever 3rd party integrations are managed primarily by Indian teams. I know of two separate systems critical to Nike’s function that have no backups or periodic permissions review (half the current users no longer work for the company).
Sorry for not being more specific but my manager would absolutely fire me given the chance, they’re in the middle of consolidating power in their timezone. I’m desperately applying to other teams & companies at the moment.
What hurts the most is watching roles that got RIF- they are brought back as ETW. Nike wants to pay less and give them more work. Seeing it in product management/GT,exec admins - who knows how many other roles. They don’t change the scope- in fact scope is added. Why would anyone come back?! Because of lack of jobs and people have to put food on table.
There is no growth at Nike- per policy of no promotions. Every job must be a competitive hire. A leader will not go to bat for your advancement because they can rely on those policies (there are back doors to promotion but your management has to want to fight for it)
Nike is where careers go to die. Some want to leave but our skills have dried up and we have dependents. It’s really hard to realize we have nothing on the outside.
I left Nike a few years ago and since then haven’t spent even a single minute regretting it.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed most of my time there. But the last few years I saw things increasingly going downhill. To the point where the Nike I left no longer resembled the Nike I had joined several years prior.
Even seemingly small things like where you sit everyday can have a major impact on how people feel about their jobs. For most of my time at Nike I had nice cubes that offered at least a little privacy and quiet, and a place I could comfortably call “mine”. I had family pictures, a bunch of knick-knacks reminding me of fun work events and outings, and a place in which I could decompress towards the end of a long work day.
Then Nike thought it would be a grand idea to strip that away and give me part of a large table in a gigantic room. And a locker of course. With that, all of a sudden going to work felt like clocking in at the factory. Not to mention I had difficulty being productive in a workspace that couldn’t possibly be more horribly designed for the type of work I was expected to produce. It was as if Nike hired a designer and said, “See this space? Think of the worst work area your evil minds can imagine. Then make it twice as bad as that!”
The people making those decisions didn’t care. Why would they? It didn’t personally impact them and I had long abandoned any quaint notion that they gave a flying fudge how it impacted the rank and file workers. I always thought it was hilarious when Nike leaders talked up how great it would be to abandon individual work spaces…while exactly none of those same people were giving up their own offices for a seat at the literal table. It was enough to make a person both cynical and resentful.
When I started waking up everyday feeling like I really, really didn’t want to go to work I knew it was time to exit stage left. So I did.
It wasn’t just the physical work arrangements. It was a bunch of stuff with which all of you are familiar. Especially those of you who, like me, had been there awhile. “Old Nike” was clearly gone and “New Nike” just wasn’t the same place. It was depressing and I increasingly felt like I didn’t belong there.
If I was still there today I’d genuinely be worried as to whether or not I’d still have a job 12+ months from now. As someone pointed out in another post Nike is at least two years away from stabilizing. Even that assumes everything goes Nike’s way. I’m also in my late 40’s now and frankly can’t afford to be worrying about my longer term financial stability. It’s one thing to lose a job in your 20’s or 30’s. After you hit 40 things get more murky with a job loss. I’ve known at least four people who got laid off later in their careers who never fully recovered. Some people might say “That’s a risk you’ll face anywhere.” Sure. But some places are more risky than others. Right now I’d place Nike in that higher risk category.
Best of luck to those of you staying. Nike used to be a cool place to work and I’m thankful I got to experience that. These days however “New Nike” wouldn’t be and isn’t my cup of tea.
The d-mb thing about people saying “Go woke, go broke” is that if that was true, Nike would have “gone broke” several decades ago.
The company has been what some people call “woke” since at least the 1980’s when it became the first large company to use an openly g-y athlete in advertising; something that was considered almost scandalous at the time. And since then Nike has pushed the social envelope many times, again in ways that some people would today call “woke”. Yet somehow Nike grew from being a <$10B company to an almost $50B company while being the epitome of “woke”. Go figure.
The people saying “go woke go broke” are doing what people like that always do: conveniently assigning their social & political narrative as an explanation for things that (i) are far more rationally explained by several other factors, while (ii) ignoring decades worth of evidence that if being “woke” was bad for business, they’d have a lot of trouble explaining Nike’s success from 1980-2020 when it was one of the most “woke” companies in America.
In addition, if so-called “wokeness” caused companies to go broke then Costco - another very “woke” company - should pretty much be out of business by now. Instead Costco has been on a massive growth spurt in recent years. ALMOST as if there are a bunch of other, more important factors that determine business success & failure. The same can be said of Apple, Adobe, Salesforce, and a bunch of other companies you could accurately call “woke” that definitely aren’t going “broke”. Here too the imbecilic “go woke go broke” crowd has to ignore inconvenient facts (their specialty!) to proudly chant their bumper sticker “argument”.
I’ve personally spoken with several people of this persuasion. And honestly, in “real life” they are as clueless and vacuous as they sound behind anonymous keyboards.
Good! At ten years people should leave. We don’t need stagnancy.