#culture

I'd like to hear if there is anyone here quit their job at Cisco to start a growing midsize company. I am thinking about it, because I find Cisco culture toxic and highly receptive. I have never worked in such a large company before and I have never felt this unmotivated in my job.

Any post-Cisco experiences? Hopefully in the lighter side

The stock is up, so I guess people are ok with the abuse. The complaining stopped.

I am so tired of scrolling past random selfies with captions pretending to be deep insights. What does your pose have to do with industry trends? Nothing. We need LinkedIn to stay useful for networking and opportunities, not become another social feed full of empty posts. This is getting ridiculous.

If Nike was doing things right then 18 months under EH should have come out with next generation of new designs and new strategy as to how to attack and new story line. Cricket~?

Instead from EH all we hear same old recycled corporate restructure narrative, at this time frankly it is getting old.

I was at UA when sh-t was going down and they played the same movie so I have seen it before. Promises and promises until the CEO cannot lie no more and next CEO comes in until he cannot BS no more on and on until the company is done.

@cx+1kr2mtsk2 said it well.

Why is it that in this company when people are called architects they're nothing more than admin assistants or when they're called engineers they're nothing more than non-technical analysts and why is it that these architects are performing administrative actions for these engineers while being denied access to provide valid implementation instructions?

Why are such efficiencies continuing to be the status quo and not replace by automation to remove these unnecessary administrative task items let alone the non-technical analysts who provide no value other than following steps on how to push buttons?

How is anyone supposed to be employed on this model for long periods of time let alone be considered a valid representative in their tradecraft?

This looks like a house of cards that's waiting to fall down due to a gust of wind or somebody walking by.

We need more thinning of the herd.

Don’t expect engagement, cooperation, creativity. You won’t get it because you don’t believe in it. You believe in hierarchy of mediocre yes-people, micromanagement and fear tactics.

It's really quiet in my org, no notifications, nothing. Is it possibly done already?

It really, really feels and looks like we work for Globodyne. IYKYK LOL

Im sorry i dont mean literally but i have to question whats happening there because not many people i work with have a damn clue how to do their job and have no freakin work ethic what so ever. And its getting worse with each new recruit brought on board. That location has always been known as an issue so very shocking when it was announced a growth location but something has got to give. There are way too many of you that are just a red flag so what gives seriously

Not even a single manager in this company seems to work on anything other than “stakeholder management” and preparing presentations for leadership.

Meanwhile, the individual contributors who actually get the work done are excluded, discarded, and overlooked, while their work is celebrated only to stroke the egos of so-called leaders. That’s the reality of Verizon today.

On Glassdoor, when you go to reviews, the entire first page of latest ones are negative. Good. People are waking up to what this place really is and warning others about it.

How is this okay? They sit around and share negative opinions about specific employees without any shame. Word gets around fast and now nobody trusts anyone and everyone is scared of being next. That's not leadership. That's bullying, plain and simple.

I'm getting really tired of seeing no benefits from good results and shouldering all consequences of the opposite. When everything was great, there was no upside for employees. Yet as soon as things started to fail, the downside was layoffs. And it keeps happening.

THe timing of the Pulse survey is straight out of the deeply flawed HR playbook cooked up by MaryYoYo Chardonnay.

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/05/28/kyndryl-takes-employees-pulse-while-cutting-off-circulation-for-some/5247246

I have watched leaders with authority lose the confidence of their teams because they lack emotional intelligence. Connect first and then lead.

On Monday, June 1st, Copilot moves to token-based billing with major adjustments to token-cost multipliers. Some models will cost 60x more per token than others. Most of what users would call the "useful" models will become exceedingly expensive in comparison to the others.

Guess I’m finally going to start using AI as much as Sandeep has begged for.

Get ready to open your wallets, you d-mb fu--ing ghouls.

You have to understand that leadership rolls at Verizon are often essentially glorified IC positions. It’s a remnant of all the mergers and acquisitions that formed Verizon. There is not enough pay growth in actual IC positions here. There are not enough band 5 level IC positions. So IC’s take manager rolls simply because there are more of them. Then they get those rolls because of their performance or relationship’s established while being a decent IC. So the lack of quality people leaders is to be expected. The reality is you could collapse Senior Manager, Associate Director into one roll across the company and not miss a beat. I suspect you could even collapse Director into that single roll with little impact depending on the business unit.

Bumped from @aq+1kr3jr1wf.

Another round of Allstate Asks where Zulfi tells us that they want to know what we think, but then they complain (and target you) if we don't give them the answers that they want.

No wonder they are at Lenovo, Intel didn’t want them! All Hands was a sh-t show!

Nike's turnaround effort has not been a quick pivot, to borrow a basketball term. It has been more like a wobbly slide on a dusty gym floor. The stock price peaked at over $170 in late 2021. It was down to $79 in October 2024, when company lifer Elliott Hill returned from retirement to take over and set things right. Now it is $46, a price investors could have paid nearly a dozen years ago.

There are two more problems. First, although shares are cheaper than they were, they are not trading at a deep and obvious discount, at 24 times projected earnings for the company's fiscal year ending May 2027. A bounceback in earnings would help, but estimates for the years ahead have been slipping.

Second, Hill is already doing the things investors are demanding: refocusing the company on performance shoes after years of shuffling along on casual designs, and repairing relationships with stores after an arrogant move online. There are pockets of success, like a modest rebound in North American sales in the latest quarter. But it has not been enough.

It is a tempting buy when one of history's great growth stocks has fallen so much. A 3.6% dividend is a sweetener. But investors should first consider the possibility that Nike's problems run deeper than they appear.

A plunge in demand from China is clearly a key concern, but there are also questions over whether Nike has lost its marketing edge, amid what might be a shift in the phenomenon that brought it to dominance to begin with: basketball stardom. It may be wise to wait for more progress before buying shares.

## Shoe Drop

An investor who held Nike from the start would have no regrets. Shares sold for 18 cents apiece, split-adjusted, at the initial public offering in 1980. But the price had dropped to 12 cents by Oct. 26, 1984. That was the day Nike gambled a then-unheard-of $2.5 million on a five-year shoe deal with a college basketball star who had not yet played a day in the pros: Michael Jordan. The pact was so transformative that Ben Affleck made a 2023 movie about the executive who landed it, called Air, starring Matt Damon.

It was not just that Jordan won six championships with the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s, or thrilled fans with soaring dunks. The 1990s were the twilight of monoculture, when consumers watched the same television shows and read the same magazines, before the internet splintered audiences.

The 1992 Olympic "Dream Team" showed Jordan off to an adoring world. In marketing, there is a proprietary measure of celebrity reach and popularity called the Q Score. Anything over 20 is excellent, and 40 is a rare pop miracle. In the 1990s, Pope John Paul II, a celebrity pontiff if ever there was one, is said to have scored in the low-to-mid 40s. Jordan hit 56. Everyone knew him, and everyone liked him. He made Nike the place to be for top athletes.

In Nike's fiscal year ended May 2025, its Jordan brand did $7.3 billion in sales, or 15% of the company's total. But that dollar figure was down a painful 16% from the year before.

For years, the brand generated hype through limited releases and instant sellouts of retro shoes, which "sneakerheads" traded on secondary markets. During the pandemic, Nike flooded the market, creating an easy boost for sales and profits, but also suffocating its hard-won hype.

Two disastrous things happened around the same time. Nike's Consumer Direct Acceleration strategy under previous CEO John Donahoe involved cutting ties with middling shoe retailers and reducing allocations to longtime partner Foot Locker, while pitching more shoes online for a higher cut of profits. Meanwhile, consumer preference abruptly shifted away from bulky basketball silhouettes toward running aesthetics, especially dad shoes and tech wear. New Balance, Hoka, and On surged, and stores that had been spurned by Nike were happy to give them shelf space.

## The Skeptic

If there is a measure beyond Nike's stock price that captures its slump, it might be operating margin, which averaged around 13% over the decade through May 2024, and is projected to dip below 6% for the year through May 2026.

Part of the decline is necessary medicine. CEO Hill has pulled back on Jordan retro models, along with an oversaturated basketball low-top turned lifestyle shoe called Dunks. He is also making amends with retailers, which has involved accepting humbler economics. The bull case on Nike - less than half of Wall Street analysts say to buy the stock today, versus more than three-quarters at its 2021 peak - is that margins will revert to normal once Nike regains its footing.

Jay Sole at UBS is not so sure. For one thing, double-digit margins for sneaker giants are unusual. Adidas (ADS) had an 8% margin last year, and it led Puma (PUM) and Under Armour (UA). Also, it is unclear how much Nike needs to shrink to grow. Sportswear, including apparel, has recently been half of sales, Sole reckons, even though the company once said it should never be more than 30%. This risks spending down brand equity that was built with performance shoes, and cultivating a customer base of trend chasers, not brand loyalists.

Stepping back, Sole wonders whether Nike has lost what he calls its superpower: the ability to be all things to all people. "Most brands have some sort of limitation," he says. "They are footwear only or they are apparel only, or they are one country only, or they are one sport only, because that is sort of what they are known as. And it is hard to be more than that."

Lululemon Athletica (LULU, +2.90%), for example, attracts primarily women, and Under Armour attracts primarily men. In past UBS surveys that asked respondents which brands are for them, most topped out at 60%, but Nike hit 95%. It sells to men, women, young, old, suburban, urban, and participants in just about every sport, or no sports.

There are so many rumors about layoffs on this forum. But none of them are based on facts.

Please focus on facts. For example, let‘s talk about the enshittification of the company culture and the effects on staff turnover. That is something that can be grounded on facts and board actions.

Thanks.

Weeks ago, they sent out an email stating the results would be provided, but of course, nada to date.

This is the hallmark of a very dishonest, disorganized, non-transparent company.

This survey was originally distributed last fall? (it was so long ago I forget when it was), and now we’re almost into June and they still can’t get their act together.

Total disgrace!

Wonder why all the SVP-VP-Directors all love to use the phrase PUSH THE BOUNDARIES. What do you keep telling the lower employees to push for??

From Intel employees who believe that it’s helpful for just be purposely unclear, purposely unresponsive to their peers. Management should fire these fu----s

I’ve been thinking about searching elsewhere, but I wonder if this is just a sign of the times, or is Optum especially bad about having layoffs all the time? Will it really be better if I leave?

BNY’s “transformation” machine keeps producing the same outcome: people doing real work get tossed aside, then retroactively labeled as “not a fit” to justify decisions already made in a conference room weeks earlier. The script never changes — strong reviews, solid delivery, then suddenly you’re recast or discarded as the inflexible obstacle to whatever new operating model changes leadership is worshipping this quarter.

And the part about “other opportunities”? Classic BNY fiction. They don’t offer options; they don’t offer severance… only a storyline to protect the org chart. Meanwhile, the people who kept the place running are left trying to rebuild careers while BNY congratulates itself for “modernization.”

Your experience isn’t an outlier — it’s the business model. Employees give decades; leadership gives euphemisms. And the saddest part is how many careers are derailed or forced to end earlier than planned… not with recognition, but with a carefully crafted narrative that erases the truth and replaces it with some delusion of BNY's visionary leadership and innovation.

I've been at several companies over the last 20 years, and I've been at 3M for the last ten.

I used to be able to enthusiastically say that 3M was the best place I've ever worked.

I guess that's still true, but not the 3M of today.

This place has gotten bad, and it continues to get worse.

Anyone going through that recently?

I got this fu--ing annoying member from another team, who is good for nothing.

Yet, I can see behavior which always cause chaos, trying to step on everyone’s toes.

Matter of time when someone asks them to “calm TF down”

It’s amazing to me how dismissive the ELT has been with our RTO mandate. We know from other companies that this initiative is often a huge failure and unfair burden on employees. Women are almost always impacted more than their male counterparts. My experience in HR has been one of the worst I’ve seen in my career. The communications are incredibly poor and borderline disrespectful. Since the initial announcement, I have not seen Suzan answer a question directly, but rather punt the heat and responsibility to her leadership team. She’s also stopped doing Q&A altogether in meetings she’s led. We are less than a week away with almost no questions answered, and our human capital division meeting today was so poor that it actually raised more questions than answers. Rather than discussing direct concerns with Monday looming, we spent time celebrating an arrogant partner’s records from 25 years ago and discussing employee discounts. We still have no word on assigned floors or desks. We still have no solutions for parking. Unbelievable.

i’m in finance. My SD lives well over two hours away from BR. He has multiple Asso. Directors on the team who also live over two hours away. he calls into meetings from his kids atheltic events.We’re required to go into these office but these fools are cheating Verizon by leaving early on in-office days (and showing up late. maybe work from 10-2 with a long lunch?), not working, shoving work down on lower employees, and other selfish acts that hurt the company. why would someone be hired who lives in a city over 2 hours away?

I get it for EVPs. but for a lowly SD? our SVP also lives 3 hours away from her home office. this is why Verizon’s performance has been suffering for YEARS and maybe DECADES

I have been with this company since 2009. I started when it was HES and watched it transition into HSE (because someone's favorite thought it sounded better). I have worked across multiple parts of the function, including remediation and operations. At the lower levels, the work was solid and the mission was clear. As I moved up over the last 15 plus years, the reality became impossible to ignore.

For years, I dismissed the posts on this site as noise from disgruntled employees or people upset after layoffs. I genuinely believed the dysfunction being described could not reflect the Chevron I knew. I was wrong, and I am disappointed in myself for not listening sooner.

What I have seen at the senior levels is staggering. A function led by people who have never worked in the field. Leaders who talk endlessly to sound informed but contribute nothing of substance. Leaders who take credit for the work of others and present it as their own. A culture where competence is optional but connections are everything.

And yes, the nepotism is real. If you are tied to the right executive by blood or marriage, you are untouchable. I have personally seen performance ratings overridden because someone was someone’s daughter. That is not leadership. That is not integrity. That is not the Chevron many of us committed our careers to.

Everything I once dismissed as exaggeration has turned out to be true.

After more than 15 years of service, I am planning my exit. I will stay until I secure my next role, but it is clear this is no longer the organization it once was and no longer the place for me.

It is time to go.

Up to double the previous number from the last round.

Hopefully all the illegal aliens will be shipped back so we can get on with stabilizing a western company.

Two weeks ago I laid off more than 20% of my workforce. I didn’t do it because Cloudflare is struggling. We posted record revenue growth, have strong free cash flow and are adding an unprecedented number of customers around the world. I did it because business is changing, and to win the future, Cloudflare needs to change with it.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince

Two weeks ago I laid off more than 20% of my workforce. I didn’t do it because Cloudflare is struggling. We posted record revenue growth, have strong free cash flow and are adding an unprecedented number of customers around the world. I did it because business is changing, and to win the future, Cloudflare needs to change with it.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince

or does it feel like policies and procedures change on a daily basis?

I used to honest to God believe that if I worked hard, stayed late, and gave everything to my job, I'd be valued and protected. I've learned the hard way that this isn't true. Ford will happily extract every ounce of energy you've got, praise you for your dedication, and then fire you with no notice the moment it helps their bottom line. And they won't feel bad about it. They won't even think about you again. Hustle culture's a sickness.

"Because when explaining massive layoffs to your employees, there's nothing like a performance by legendary hip-hop artist Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC to make it all go down easier."

https://mashable.com/article/wework-adam-neumann-run-dmc-layoffs

At least somebody’s saying it like it is.

There was a time when I genuinely believed this company valued its people. That feeling is long gone. Now we are just waiting for the next layoff announcement and bracing ourselves to train the people who will eventually replace us. I won't even mind all that much when my time comes.