Thread regarding DXC Technology layoffs

The leadership team seems to have forgotten that they, including managers, set the culture of the business. Not the employees. Gaslighting employees for not growing the business is straight up pathological and manipulative.

@gf+1m4x52eb9

CSC/Dxc might have started this nonsense but tbh the IT services industry is like this all over

I do think there is change on the horizon and not all of it good. Some public sector orgs are taking some services back in house after realising what a feckin mess things have become, but the caveat is they still waste money with companies like BT and Vodafone etc doing their infra contracts while companies like DXC, ATOS, Capita, Capgemini etc do hosting + SIAM type models

M1 built everything you see here. He built it to fail while trousering the profits personally.

M2 didn't get the memo and imagined it was fixable and he could do it. Then rage quit when he found it was unfixable.

Anyone still here who saw all of that is weary of the endless reorg that never works.

They are even more weary of the lack of rises and the hollow promises of the management continously dangling them and changing their minds at the last minute.

Oh and now it's the workers fault that the company hadn't grown.

CSC/Dxc might have started this nonsense but tbh the IT services industry is like this all over.

It's not going to get better either.

@cv+1m4x52eb9

Yep, I was getting paid barely £20k a year while new people were hired into my team at £50k a pop. I didn't resent the new guys (though I bet upper management wanted that to happen) they were good at the job, but man was it infuriating knowing the american whales couldnt pay me when I was doing the same as them + training them to boot!

@ep DXC survives on market inertia like a dead fish floating downstream. It requires no brains to keep moving, no leadership to steer direction and no vision beyond floating with the current. Eventually, the smell became impossible to ignore for the market. But by then, DXC's own organisation had convinced itself it was just the way things were supposed to smell.

I don't know if this is how it was meant to be from the start but, in hindsight, it appears that DXC was built to strip assets, and was just successful enough that it didn't die quickly.

Of course the real culprits, like Meg, Mike, Mike, and so on, get their golden parachutes while we get sp-t.

DXC is run by people who are better at playing the game than actually doing the job.

At the senior level, it’s all politics, ego and putting on a show. Lots of talk, empty presentations, self promotion on LinkedIn and pretending to have everything under control, but not much true competence or genuine care for the business.

The people who put extra ordinary effort to sell themselves get ahead, while the ones who actually know what they’re doing and get work done consistently & quietly get pushed aside.

DXC can only keep up the act for so long before its business starts paying the price. That is what is going on.

Too many useless dufusses.

It's clear why colleagues joined our team. They got 25% more than I do!!. What they didn't bargain on was joining a demoralised and demoralising team. Unwilling to help and bitter at the pay inequality. They soon got into how it works with 3 months sitting about before they even got the access they needed. They don't get a pay rise either and realise they probably never will as are already well above the average pay for the team. So they've also joined in the do what you're asked but don't bother being helpful - it doesn't get you anywhere around here.

I believe many new joiners over the past couple of years are only here because of a challenging job market. This isn’t a terrible organisation to be at in the short term, but if you’re still early to mid-career I would expect new joiners to leave once the market begins to turn about. No raises is a deal breaker for an organisation of this size. Talent will leave when given the opportunity, as they should.

did you not research DXC before joining?

Another muppet joins DXC, I reckon you go far if management.

Well it's rather funny you ask but I will give my perspective as someone who worked there for almost a decade between the mid 10s and early 20s starting as basically a kid out of school

I started as an apprentice working for CSC/DXC at a local office, thought it would be a stepping stone into the industry. I went into an office that was a mix of veteran and OG staff that were bitter from years of WFR / redundancy and were only hanging around because they were waiting for voluntary redundancy or retirement so their original T&Cs were preserved - see the legacy guys from accounts like Royal Mail, URENCO etc

The others were either juniors, graduates or apprentices, who were quickly used to backfill gaps wherever. Which meant that rapidly you had grads and apprentices who filled the shoes of senior SMEs, account managers etc while getting a fraction of the pay. The WFR was a stat cheat anyway as they would regularly make people perm, make them redundant, then rehire with new job titles (So Solution Architect or Wintel Engineer become Solution Integrator or Wintel Analyst) to get around employment laws. People would get regularly berated for not travelling to customer sites in their annual reviews while travel bans meant that funding this wouldnt happen.

Once I had to travel by train, complained when my ticket wasnt reimbursed, and got shouted down by some bitter old woman about "so many people I know cant travel to do customer work!" as if that was supposed to make me feel better

The US management had and probably still have contempt for staff. It was clear that the UK leadership for instance didnt like it and is a reason why we had a musical chair of account execs and leadership who would get into DXC, see the trainwreck it was, and dip out. And don't forgot, no promised pay rises or promotion process even when we took on new roles, but there was always money to feed the execs their bonuses.

Mike Lawrie, the old CEO who came from CSC into the DXC merger, was notorious for his bland speeches where he arced and wobbled around like a Thunderbirds puppet and had his PA cut his steak for him at a dinner, and was annually gaming share prices + getting away with insider trading. Actually got told off once for joking about this in the company but it was true

Mike Salvino aka Mike 2, who was Mike 1's successor, was supposed to be a "change" and apparently seemed interested in fixing problems but clearly was just no better.

I don't know much about HPE but it sounds like they had a lot of the same problems. We got a bunch of their staff including some terrible middle managers like the GSS lead KV

Customers got a raw deal too, the company deliberately ignored paying for commercial vendor support because service credits were less costly than the support arrangement. Uncleared staff were put on gov, defence contracts that required levels of security clearance including one big customer's secret network.

I myself got "promoted" in workload moving roles a few times but never actually got a promotion or pay rise, my job title was never formally changed by HR and my pay packet was my terrible apprentice salary despite promises. And literally a week or two after I left a mass email went out about no pay rises so that nonsense I'd been promised clearly wouldn't go anywhere

So the people sticking around in DXC are either:

• Vets or OGs waiting for retirement or VR to get their money's worth out of their T&Cs
• Graduates / apprentices / juniors who don't know better or need a foot in the door
• Consultants employed on a generous contract that offsets the state of things
• People who feel they can't get out or move on. The company does that to people a lot, not just me but other people were often told we weren't suited for certain work to make us feel terrible like we weren't good enough, I swear management deliberately did this. The GSS lead KV moaned about how she had to do a formal training course on how to tell people they were being made redundant... thats the sort of apathy and attitude you're dealing with

So in short, if you have OK T&Cs and salary that you're happy with, you can hang about, but don't hold your breath. Otherwise, try and jump ship when you can.

@OP+1m4x52eb9

Funny you ask, I will give my perspective as someone who worked there for almost a decade between the mid 10s and early 20s

I started as an apprentice working for CSC/DXC at a local office, thought it would be a stepping stone into the industry. I went into an office that was a mix of veteran and OG staff that were bitter from years of WFR / redundancy and were only hanging around because they were waiting for voluntary redundancy or retirement so their original T&Cs were preserved - see the legacy guys from accounts like Royal Mail, URENCO etc

The others were either juniors, graduates or apprentices, who were quickly used to backfill gaps wherever. Which meant that rapidly you had grads and apprentices who filled the shoes of senior SMEs, account managers etc while getting a fraction of the pay. The WFR was a stat cheat anyway as they would regularly make people perm, make them redundant, then rehire with new job titles (So Solution Architect or Wintel Engineer become Solution Integrator or Wintel Analyst) to get around employment laws. People would get regularly berated for not travelling to customer sites in their annual reviews while travel bans meant that funding this wouldnt happen.

Once I had to travel by train, complained when my ticket wasnt reimbursed, and got shouted down by some bitter old woman about "so many people I know cant travel to do customer work!" as if that was supposed to make me feel better

The US management had and probably still have contempt for staff. It was clear that the UK leadership for instance didnt like it and is a reason why we had a musical chair of account execs and leadership who would get into DXC, see the trainwreck it was, and dip out. And don't forgot, no promised pay rises or promotion process even when we took on new roles, but there was always money to feed the execs their bonuses.

Mike Lawrie, the old CEO who came from CSC into the DXC merger, was notorious for his bland speeches where he arced and wobbled around like a Thunderbirds puppet and had his PA cut his steak for him at a dinner, and was annually gaming share prices + getting away with insider trading. Actually got told off once for joking about this in the company but it was true

Mike Salvino aka Mike 2, who was Mike 1's successor, was supposed to be a "change" and apparently seemed interested in fixing problems but clearly was just no better.

I don't know much about HPE but it sounds like they had a lot of the same problems. We got a bunch of their staff including some terrible middle managers like the GSS lead KV

Customers got a raw deal too, the company deliberately ignored paying for commercial vendor support because service credits were less costly than the support arrangement. Uncleared staff were put on gov, defence contracts that required levels of security clearance including one big customer's secret network.

I myself got "promoted" in workload moving roles a few times but never actually got a promotion or pay rise, my job title was never formally changed by HR and my pay packet was my terrible apprentice salary despite promises. And literally a week or two after I left a mass email went out about no pay rises so that nonsense I'd been promised clearly wouldn't go anywhere

So the people sticking around in DXC are either:

• Vets or OGs waiting for retirement or VR to get their money's worth out of their T&Cs
• Graduates / apprentices / juniors who don't know better or need a foot in the door
• Consultants employed on a generous contract that offsets the state of things
• People who feel they can't get out or move on. The company does that to people a lot, not just me but other people were often told we weren't suited for certain work to make us feel terrible like we weren't good enough, I swear management deliberately did this. The GSS lead KV moaned about how she had to do a formal training course on how to tell people they were being made redundant... thats the sort of apathy and attitude you're dealing with

So in short, if you have OK T&Cs and salary that you're happy with, you can hang about, but don't hold your breath. Otherwise, try and jump ship when you can.

It is by far the worst place I have ever worked. Roll on retirement.