Thread regarding Comcast layoffs

@gm I was involved in a reorg in Care once in which every leader was brought in one by one and told their fate. It was like a reality show. They were given the number of supervisors and managers that would be let go in advance. So, they all knew how many were to be eliminated. As the day progressed, one after another would leave the conference room after being told their status. People were breaking down in tears in the call center. Either they lost their job or their friend had lost their job. The last leader scheduled to meet refused to attend. Of course, they were all texting as this played out and they told him that the last leader who left the conference room was safe so that meant he was the final one to go. His boss finally convinced him to attend and it turned out they decided to take one fewer person than originally stated and he was safe.

Somewhere around 8-10 years ago, there was a manager at the region level that was told his dept was reorganizing. This was on a Friday afternoon and the company told him they will let him know Monday if he still has a job. Well, he didn’t make it until Monday. He got so worked up he had a heart attack over the weekend and died. That is when I decided I would never get that worked up over this place again.

@dk was the heart attack incident reason?

I think I remember someone having a heart attack, it was in CB. So sad, yet not surprising. While there are still some good leaders at Comcast, they are outnumbered completely by the toxic incompetent ones. HR in general is there to protect the company, however the irony is that by protecting these awful “people leaders” they’re contributing to the destruction of the very place it’s their job to look out for. Watching talented people get laid off and the sparse good leaders leave (or get pushed out) while vapid bullies get promoted due to their personal connections is so deflating. eNPS, YourVoice and Comcast Listens are an absolute joke as well. If you’re reading this and are an employee, I strongly advise you never share complaints about a leader through these channels unless you have another job opportunity lined up. You’ll simply be placing a target on your back and first to go next time there’s yet another round of layoffs (aka - excuses to get rid of people who do anything to challenge the status quo).

@bm This experience is true. It is rapid through departments and across regions. Bootlickers and best friends get promoted or kept no matter how low their incompetence while the people doing the work and keeping the machine going get sidelined or pushed out often by the incompetent bootlicking leaders who feel their competence is making them look bad.

Comcast rewards bad behavior so long as there’s loyalty to the individual holding the power. Some caught on to that early and that’s how they move politically. By kissing up while punching down. The result is this. You have incompetent people now running the machine, no surprise it’s sinking. HR? Whew. There are departments who speak of how they had tears and balloon releasing ceremonies after a toxic leader quit after HR did nothing. There’s another dept that speaks of how they believe a manager had a heart attack in his 30s because of how a manager exclusively treated him and he had no HR support. That recent pie in the face complaint likely gets a lot worse as far as stories go across this company and likely mirror informing a manager (of physical abuse!) who did nothing.

And this is what happens when you guard your cronies over talent. Profits sink and a company soon becomes a shell to be sold and a documentary to be had.

It hasn’t been a good company since Ralph Roberts died.

I've been here a long time too, and honestly, this tracks with what I've watched happen. It's got a lot more visible in the several years. More so around Covid, everything shifted so fast that a lot of normal checks got dropped, and some people never brought them back once things settled. It just took a while for the effects to show up in the open. Now it feels obvious. It seems like people who couldn't tell you their own KPIs if you asked them point blank keep moving up. People who've never built a real relationship with anyone on their team get handed bigger ones. Meanwhile the leaders who actually knew the work, who pushed for something better than the bare minimum, get labeled disruptive and slowly pushed out.

That part is frustrating on its own. But the thing that's harder to say is how accountability feels like it's changed. From what I've seen and heard, concerns raised through the right channels don't seem to go anywhere. Whether that's the outcome of a fair process or something else, I can't say for certain, but the perception among a lot of people is that it stops looking like coincidence after a while. And once people believe that, they stop reporting, and leadership can end up reading the silence as proof everything's fine.

It feels like HR used to function as more of a check on this stuff than it does now. A lot of hiring seems to come down to relationships and loyalty, not just ability. You see VPs with a full team underneath them, admin support, everything they could ask for, and it still doesn't translate to results, while the people actually keeping things running are stretched thin without any of that support. I don't think we've fully sat with how far this has slipped.

What gets me is that there are good leaders here. I've seen younger managers who genuinely care, who coach people, who want to build something. And it feels like they keep getting overtaken by people who show little interest in any of that and treat leadership as their next promotion. Leading people shouldn't be a reward for playing the game well upward. It should come with responsibility to the people below you and to the place you work. It feels like we stopped expecting either a while ago, and it shows. If this company wants to be what it used to be, that's the thing that actually has to change.