Two CO techs near retirement have been reportedly approached by mgmt with a buyout in two areas of the country. One I spoke with directly and the other was from a reliable source that didn't know about the one I'd talked to. It's a much larger amount than the average severance. In that conversation, it was stated there will be approximately 700 layoffs but not when it would take place.
We've generally seen these at the end of the year or near each quarter. Since our stock is worth 67 cents if you undo the reverse 5:1 split, there's no doubt the entire company is at risk and the easiest way to get out of red ink is by cutting people no matter what the cost to the network.
Another dirty move is changing hourly to salary and cutting about $20k/year or more from people who've stuck with the company for some time and that's just overtime and not to mention about 8% less on the 40hrs minimum the new salary people see. We seem to be steering towards the iceberg. In essence, we are trying to automate everything, brainstorming how it can be done and rapidly implementing it so that we can cut out engineers across the board. It's madness. When you lose people who know how the network works and can manually fix it, you're in big, big trouble. Even they forget if they haven't done it manually in a while...
It's clear the people making these decisions don't know anything about network ops and this will be a disaster. Top talent is fleeing in droves and no one who knows how to fix the fall out from failed automations will be left to fix it when it doesn't work or breaks or doesn't fit the cookie cutter. We are going in totally the wrong direction. We need to shore up the talent we have and abandon the madness. We need competitive pay to attract top talent and not cut pay and run them off. On average we pay 20-40k less for the same positions at the top 3, Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint.
An insightful post by @WnIRbXn-tha that sums up well the flawed practices and everything that potentially awaits us soon. Thought more people should see this.