The last transition group is in May, so there will be some minor updates based on this which was communicated. It is not all of STS.
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Hey to poster of “Tech La Brea Tar Pits”. You me! Funniest thing I read, and sadly, so true in STS.
Completely agree. Unfortunately sts is the opposite of a well oiled machine. Delivery is slow or non engaged existent while those responsible blame other sts teams ie: cloud and arch, blame internal policies, lean on perfection vs delivery all as an excuse to why 2 weeks of work takes 6 months.
As a result of that, the first business though is to integrate a vendor to speed time to market and pass all the risk ( vendors can do things that internal employees run into governance roadblocks)
Lastly, internal ways of working leave us 4x overstaffed due to that. Twiddle thumbs waiting for team x y z to let you do your job.
I really don't think internal Schwab can be solved anytime soon making outsourcing to vendors the only way
We don’t have Tech Debt, we have Tech La Brea Tar Pits. Debt insinuates that we COULD pay it down or off. Tar Pit is the reality, with “dinosaur” leadership stuck and floundering, to their eventual demise.
Failing to address the root cause is like having a faulty appliance in your house, and the solution is to ship it to India, plug it in, and it’s still faulty there; but at least the electricity is cheaper.
Spending less on outsourcing doesn’t mean reduce outsourcing. It means cheaper outsourcing. And, of course, more outsourcing if it can be done cheaper than in house.
Doubt April is a magical month. But they are headed there. And I don’t trust a word they say. They lied before. They will lie again.
In the fall, Dennis answered a question on how Schwab’s IT spend compares to our peers. His answer was it’s generally in line with our peers, but we spend more than them on outsourcing and leadership would look to address that.
Based on that, I assumed there would not be any additional spend on outsourcing - perhaps renegotiate some contracts, move some stuff to FTE resources ( without hiring more though) or just cut or eliminate some efforts.
Yes. All of STS will be laid off in April. Entire org is being outsourced.
Layoffs and outsourcing.
There’s frustration from the business regarding slow delivery and frequent outages. The tone deaf response from those responsible has been modernization, cloud, cloud, cloud, Kubernetes, automation, and AI. All failures that were spun into redefined successes. All while we spent billions.
Somehow miraculously having another company do it will fix it.
The problems are easy to understand and require top level change. Instead the top gets rid of anyone observing this or ignores them thinking their 20-year-old technical knowledge is applicable or addressed by a vendor slide deck.
For years we couldn’t say the words tech debt. Think about that.
Rick is a cost cutter. He will make that happen and the EC is already doing it.
Remember Robot Rick is from McKinsey; all they know is to look at metrics and apply them to the business without having an understanding of the business. Quick answer from them is to layoff X staff.
Something is going on behind the scenes with whispers and closed door meetings.
Outsourcing is an OKR. Nothing more needs to be said.
I agree. In my org it seems like the objectives for the year are wrapped around simplifying process. I immediately thought that this looks like a prep for possible outsourcing.
I would bet so. All of the bosses have been in meetings all the time and there's an odd request out there to figure out what can be outsourced. So yeah, probably another big reduction on the way.