Thread regarding AT&T layoffs

If you have 28 years with the company, over 50, a graduate degree in engineering , can't relocate and still paying for your kids college/graduate school and the majority of your colleagues are now outsourced to IBM or Tech M with a one year guaranteed contract; then taking a Project or Product Management position is probably a safe bet although anything but challenging.

@4cgh+13kg4fsY, I mostly agree with you based on my own long-term observations and being chased around this company. I'm very technical, and with an educated background to my technical work and career. And it seems that if you are technical, and in a technical team, group and department, you'll be outsourced and replaced by cheaper foreign labor. So, you want to live and work here, stop being or appearing to be technical, and be a ‘leader’. This has been systematically going on for about 20 years now. If you want to survive, and climb the ladder, it's a three-step process: You must first be a family member to the upper elite, a close friend, or somehow made yourself a part of the inner circle. Second, become a leader in the sense of what AT&T refers to as a leader and be a practicing member of 'leadership'. And finally, the third and final part, stop being technical, wholly and completely, and rely 100% on the cheaper foreign labor to do all your technical thinking and work. This also means that you must become a leadership manager of technical contractors and third-party laborer, so manage the 3rd party management.

I don't believe this is completely true. There are many people with graduate level education that are being pushed out of technical areas. In some cases their jobs are being back-filled by cheaper foreign "technical" people. If you have the education and credentials, you should probably be more concerned about being surplussed since your pay is likely appreciable and you could easily easily be replaced by an H1B or foreign contractor. "No place is safe"

Management Position =====> If YOU"RE not technical YOU"RE in trouble.

People who don't know the difference between your and you're need to be fired.

Many technical employees with Tech degrees have jumped into other Management positions such as PO, PM, TSM or whatever the title is du jour in order to keep a job with T and not get outsourced or surplused since IT has been severely outsourced. There are Tech positions in what they refer to as the Labs these days and some in the Foundry or Flex Force but there have been downsizings there as well. Folks actually moved into Management positions in order to keep their job and are given PM type titles even with advanced technical graduate degrees.

Managers gonna git fired soon. We won’t miss ya.

at&t has developed jobs that dont exist in the technology industry. what you do here and what they ask of you elsewhere is very different. at&t has molded your skills specifically for their environment and process. you are out luck as the poster described

I've worked as a PO since spring of 2019 when my project moved to the SAFe process. If you are at all technical and someone offers you a job as a PO, run like hell. My current job is a dumbed down version of my old system engineering job, where I was responsible for solutioning highly complex projects. Now I am mainly a typist who inputs "user stories" into Jira. SAFe is okay for developers, testers, and scrum masters, but there is very little job satisfaction for anyone who used to be a system engineer or solution architect. It's just a bad deal and it won't help you get your next job.

True always went for industry standard certifications outside of att training and had paid off in spades.

I can't imagine a technical employee would ever want a PM, PO or Scrum Master position. Generally, technical employees avoid pushing paper and herding cats at all costs. If a company is looking for developer level technical folks for those positions, they aren't going to get filled.