Vivek's purview to say with confidence that the most important applications at Verizon outside of network operations. POS, point-of-sale, intakes some 70+% of ALL of Verizon’s revenue. ACSS is a superset of that software. This software is utter garbage. I mean it’s just layers on layers of undocumented spaghetti code written by contractors that were seemingly plucked from the streets, paid 50,000/yr, and whose agency was billing Verizon 120,000/yr for their time here. At a company with Verizon's profits a full stack developer should reasonably expect to start here and be able to search a UI for any service or data they need to build pretty much anything you could conceive. Yet you won’t find a single shred of such documentation. GTS leadership has passively allowed layers and layers of teams to be stood up where each team only works on one segment of one leg of any end to end business process. No one engineer is empowered to build a single feature holistically end to end without pulling people from 2-3+ teams to get the job done. Often the job is just chaining some API calls and making a UI to display the results. Something a decent college CS graduate could build independently if there was proper documentation. Instead engineers are tasked with endless non-funded pet projects in some obscene race to be the team that shows the shiniest little half functional proof of concept to the nearest VP. All the while our most integral systems are held together with popsicle sticks, glue, and chewed up bubblegum. Everything is expected to be done yesterday. No one cares about code quality thus software/product quality. Most of the leaders within GTS could not solve a LeetCode medium if their families lives depended on it, assuming they even knew what LeetCode was. The sad part is the same is true for most of the Principle Engineers, Distinguished, and associate fellows and fellows as well. All these guys do is sit in calls so they can steal each others ideas. Then go implement them in some shoddy fashion so they can say they did it. Who cares if it works in production or provides any tangible return on investment for the time expenditure. The engineering culture at Verizon is utter garbage and it is perpetuated by the leadership within GTS. It is beyond simple incompetence, the leadership in GTS does not even have an idea of what competent software delivery is. It’s not incompetence because that would imply some intent to do things correctly. It’s simple ignorance. I have seen a VP of Site Reliability Engineering shoot down a Distinguished Engineers suggestion that engineers should be able to run the code that they are working in locally to validate results. The VP thought that was an absurd request. To put that in layman's terms the guy was just saying that when I paint a picture I should be able to see the canvas as I paint. That was dismissed. That’s the level of ignorance we’re dealing with. To reverse this level of cancerous spread you would need to inundate GTS with so much chemotherapy and radiation it likely would die out before any recovery was ever observed. I really do believe that the only way back is just terminating all of GTS leadership. Stop all software delivery. Bring in VP’s from actual tech companies who have actual software engineering experience within the past decade. Allow them to document ALL of the inner workings of the existing systems. Publish that documentation to OneConfluence or some adjacent documentation platform. Grant access to this documentation to ALL VZ Software Engineers. Release all of our Fellows, and Associate Fellows. Replace them with real engineers from real tech companies. THEN you can START redesigning the systems that collect all of VZ’s money. So regardless of Vivek's character do you really think he is prepared to make this level of systemic change to how Verizon delivers software? Or do you think he will just perpetuate slop delivery ad nauseam until Verizon crumbles or someone does the needful that I have laid out here?
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...which sounds like the noise a cat makes, when retching-up a hairball.
The guys name is Vivek.
@ac Because the Digital Experience and Finance teams are the worst. The Experience team does not care, and the Finance team does not want to upgrade its outdated systems to support a combined view. Believe me, I have spent over a year trying to convince them.
They are some of the worst employees to work with. They never think about the customer- only about themselves and their departments.
I do not like Vivek but it’s a problem of experience team in VCG.
OP: stop using AI to write long paragraphs that it loses its meaning
Let’s be honest. Verizon can’t even build a decent website for its own customers. Why do I still struggle to see both my wireless cell phone bill and my FIOS bill in once clean user interface after years of Verizon being a single entity! Frustrating!!!
The name says it all.
You get what you pay for.
Get people onboard who are in positions of hiring teams who are only interested in working with their own "tribe", and this is the result. Let it fester and downgrade until it all turns to chaotic cr@p, then wonder where it all went wrong?
No mystery here.
- Independently test on a regular basis, then fire incompetent workers
- Implement the employment laws/work rules where discrimination is prohibited (this includes where it's obvious that ONE certain country-of-origin type of employee/contractor almost always gets the job over any others)
- Do a Doge-like type of internal audit, and weed out who/what needs to go
- Streamline processes, and eliminate anyone who can't keep up
- Eliminate corruption
- Insist on excellence and above-board dealings
it is frightening how bad processes are. when will the work of audit and risk teams be called into question? more teams stacked with people collecting paychecks for life on easy street instead of doing good work. are they held accountable for poor performance? seems not to be the case. with teams performing badly it’s clear the leadership has to change at the highest 3-4 levels. disband those teams and outsource completely to see if that makes a difference.
PAYBACKS are no fun.........
He needs to go!!