There are layoffs every year.
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@hf - hey mo--n….that money wouldn’t ever be put back into the pool for associates to get better bonuses.
Do you not know how corporations work? That money will be kept to show a bigger bottom line while you work with less resources to deliver the same outcome.
I like the idea of cutting the fat and reward the remaining. This way, Fidelity will be reborn as an invigorated American company. Wait, "American", y'all know where I'm going : )
When I first joined Fidelity I was impressed by the resourcefulness, each squad was equipped with so many leaders that support us: chapter leader, squad leader, scrum master, architects... They're not even shared, it's the # of squads X 4 of leaders!
With multiple billions of profit each quarter, only Fidelity can afford this kind of abundance and excess. I don't mind if Abby want to squander her money this way but it's simply not a good experience to work in a kitchen with so many cooks!
Not a fan of Jeff Bezos but take a page from his leadership principles: be frugal! If a team ask for a product manager or project manager, it better be able to justify it.
The money saved in the take-home pay and these extra cooks and the productivity gain without them can be put into the annual bonus pool for the associates!
@ha, Big tech such as Google and Meta's answer to your concern is Tech Lead, an individual contributor in the team who's paid at the same level or even higher than the official team leader but don't want to do people management and cross-functional stuff.
Glad ET realized "engineering leadership" is crucial for the tech focused BU. The new team leader must be technical, period.
So each team got two technical leaders:
- Team Leader: Delivery, People management, cross-functional collaboration, product vision...
- Tech Lead: everything tech including architecting, mentoring, and the technical aspects of the cross-functional stuff...
Outside of teams as shared resources, other optional roles may be brought in depends individual team's needs:
- Product Managers. Functional requirements, experiences...
- Project Managers. Project management
If you wonder "what about architects?", no, there are no such role needed, the tech leads collectively perform the architectural decisions. If Fidelity must keep the role, limit the number of them and use them as shared resources:
- Niche architects. Security, crypto, accessibility... those niche skills not worth of a full time employee on a team can be outsourced to those niche architects.
- Cross-domain architects. A few full-timer focusing on align architectural decisions across domains and BUs.
I see possible impact to chapter leaders in our org at ET. They have lot of Squad leaders who can be made Delivery leader. Pure Chapter leaders are not doing much apart from people management and have no clue about actual work, timelines, strategy, and value. But my other worry is to get a stupid non technical squad leader as my manager who dont know to to manage and lead engineers and their careers. We have seen platform team in Wealth have done it and those engineers are frustrated.
@ee, what do you mean by "technical squad leader"? There are "non-technical squad leaders" in enterprise tech (ET)?
If I understand yourcorrectly:
Technical squad leader --> The new delivery/people manager for the bigger team
Non-technical squad leader = product --> risk being cut
chapter leader --> risk being cut
It said moving to engineering leadership where technical leaders will be both delivery leads and people managers. current chapter leaders support multiple teams and too many people so if teams are consolidated, the technical squad leaders will transition into delivery leader roles . For ET I see more risk on product than engineering maybe different for other BUs
@dw how did you deduct that? It said clearly going from small teams to large teams which means less middle mgmt including engineering mgmt
Looks like there will be impact on non technical associates according to ET memo
They will never cut if you are above 40 or worked in the firm for more than 15 years. They are the Goliath, these Goliath are the people who try their best to remove the young people.
@bx, can't agree more and happy to see the middle management being cut!
I'm curious what those folks put in their year end performance self-assessment as accomplishments: "Directed ... to do ..."?, "Supported ... to do ...", "Handled politics so associates may heads down working"??? Other than the self-induced frictions (politics, turf war...) among themselves, basically they can claim their reports accomplishment wi--y-nilly?
If that's the case I'd drill down by asking "What exactly is YOUR contribution?", "Can you point me to any artifacts (docs, git commits) that proves your contribution?" what they would say?
The thing that will always hold is the person to manager ratio. I really think that tops out at maximum 15.
Not heard of any layoffs but would expect more turnover due to increased workloads and metrics being applied by December of course with no extra compensation for the employees. Still preaching Standards of Care while the handwriting is on the wall it is all about metrics so I suspect Fidelity's compliance department will have an increased workload as well as employees will be under added pressure to achieve higher metrics to maintain employment. Welcome to the Greed machine.
Definitely happening for the leaders in enterprise tech (ET), if you read yesterday's communique closely. Other than the usual getting rid of the chapter leads / squad leads matrixed dual reporting structure, the most salient message was "(turning) smaller squads into bigger teams".
Let's do some math: in my area, one third (!) of the roles now are chapter/squad leaders (not counting scrum masters). If the right squads are turned into four teams, even with the "two in a box" language from Wealth's, there are only eight (let's plus one) = nine leadership roles needed. The eight leaders that were made redundant would either be demoted or laid off.
As an individual contributor this cut in the middle management is long over due, the only thing is I worry now can our not so smart upper managements manage the cut smartly.