IT Managers were pulled into a meeting in the H cafeteria today with guards outside. Rumor has it they spent one hour discussing the fate of managers that did not take severance and another hour spent talking about transition work. Has anyone heard any specifics?
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Retiring in a few days. Had a wonderful 30 year software dev career, the last 10 at the Farm. I struggled mightily my first 10 years after graduation because I was in love with college town I graduated from despite few jobs there. Oversupply of talent assured there were not many good paying IT jobs there.
So after I married we bit the bullet and moved family from the south to an anonymous city at altitude 5250 feet with plenty of well paying IT jobs. Besides gaining many new skills the move enabled me to better late than never start a 401K account, at age 46. My wife took up IT as a career and soon we were both making 6 figures.
Bottom line, don't let errant behavior of your employer get you down. in my 30 year career I know the turmoil at the Farm is common, I've seen the crisis many times, some companies survive, some don't. I like the Sears analogy. If you are willing to relocate I can assure you there are many wonderful employment opportunities in this country. Make the money there and return often to visit family in Bloomington, a wonderful town. Quite a difference from"please will you hire me?" to "please will you work for us?".
Outsourcing all of IT is an impossibility. State Farm would never place their fate in the hands of separate publicly traded company. What this is all going to come down to is numbers -- numbers only seen by the highest ranking execs. Good people will be let go, poor performers will be kept, it's a fact of life with a company this large. In a few months we'll all know a lot more. It's not personal (yes it affects you personally, but the decisions are not against us personally). Don't let this dictate your happiness. There are 20,000+ firms in this country with 500+ employees. And lotsa great small Biz out there. Roll with the punches.
I left in 2013 and at the time had heard they were trying to work a deal to outsource IT to IBM.
So the plan was to outsource IT to the most inept, shadiest consulting firm ever to grace the halls of Corporate South?
Oh man, if the executives do this, they deserve EVERYTHING they are going to get.
The Jiggle Boof can...
Anyone have numbers of people affected? I left in 2013 and at the time had heard they were trying to work a deal to outsource IT to IBM. The plan was to 'transfer' almost everyone to be an IBM employee, then IBM would release those that were not needed. Seems the monopoly man is more of a bottom line guy than Mr R.
Sad. Glad I bailed when I did.
These numbers give me hope. I know that's a lot of people but not as many as it could have been. I'm sorry despite SF being a dum$@$$, I still would like to stay long enough to get further into my retirement. The prospect of staying over is stressful. For Analyst hopefully it won't be as bad as some of these posts.
Gossip numbers. 200 managers took buy out. 50 to 60 i t managers were not going to be offered a new spot. True numbers are to be released end of next week. Good luck to all
The way the executives are handling this is creating a powder-keg. All it takes is one unbalanced individual...
The distribution of the "effected analyst" info in Systems is a good example. They release that weeks in advance so everyone could stew in the knowledge that they might be out of a job, but they didn't provide hard numbers, making it impossible project odds. Weeks and weeks of angst, waiting for the hammer to drop, while everyone continues to mill about the hallways pretending to be focused on their jobs...
I hope everyone stays sane.
These people we told weeks ago to get there projects in stand up order to be ready for the transition ie. For your replacement. No one can keep all that emotion bottled up. No wonder. There is more security
she said people stormed out of the building after there personal meetings
If this is how the managers reacted, how do they think the analysts are going to react?
I mean, the managers have spent their entire careers learning to prim and proper and state-farm-polite in all situations. They have perfected touchy-feely-passive-aggressive culture....
Analysts, on the other hand, don't give a crap. One could argue they're a lot less pent up, I suppose.
"Thank you for working at State Farm. It has been our pleasure to terminate you."
--Fawad, after working at Chic-Fila.
It would be an excellent way to learn some customer service skills.
I think they should have offered the executes a job on the front line of Chic-Fila....
They are re-hashing the ACE program.
my sister said that meeting was a nightmare, had her personal meeting was told to say nothing for ten days she said people stormed out of the building after there personal meetings long and short was a nightmare for everyone. take what is offered and hope to survive for another day
OK, that last comment earned you your first genuine LOL. Keep up the good work.
On making videos... they should remix some Wilson-Phillips videos, like Hold On. That would touch many heavy hearts and really buoy spirits up with a message of hope.
And we all know who gets to play Carnie...,
Did the 3 Amigos run the meeting (Sandy, Ashley and f-wad)? Or were they too busy making videos to hide behind, claiming their great transparency...lol
They hire guards whenever they're talking about layoffs now (and ruining people's lives) so no one goes postal
I haven't heard anything important other than what's been speculated elsewhere on this forum: that the managers who were given an offer have 7 days (or something like that) to accept or reject. If they reject, they get involuntary severance.
I also heard there was some sort of security incident where laptops were airborne, or some such nonsense. There's no telling if that part's true.