New 2022 Info

Information from a meeting I listened in.

Disclaimers first. This applies to Technology. I do not know how much it applies elsewhere. Certainly some of it does, and probably it will impact everyone in some way.

Voluntary Attrition has not worked out the way that senior leadership had wanted. While there has been an increase in voluntary turnover in terms of raw numbers of people leaving, the problem is that the "Dead Wood" (their words, not mine) has tended to stay.

The people who they want to leave have not been the ones who are actually leaving. "We haven't been able to get rid of the people we want to get rid of". One guy said "it's proving to be impossible to dislodge some people".

"The turnover we've gotten hasn't been the turnover that we wanted" and this is becoming "increasingly visible".

Executive leadership will be "mostly halting" hiring of US based technology people in 2022. Hiring in 2022 will be ramping up in India. There will be some exceptions, but effectively it is going to be a hiring freeze in the US. "Development will Follow the Sun" is the new catch phrase that we are going to start hearing.

There is a mismatch of skills between people in the US and similarly titled people in India. Key is "similarly titled". This is driving title changes for some US people. (I don't have any financial info on that - sorry).

Job Matching. This means that current US staff will be training Indian counterparts in the same role. This is going to be part of the "Follow the Sun" initiative.

(could this "Follow the sun" stuff lead to US people training there replacements??? They didn't say that, it's just a guess on my part where this will eventually lead to).

No mention of COVID. My feeling is that leadership has put that behind them for now and has dug in there heels on it.

No mention of raw numbers of employees. Just that we're going to miss year-end headcount goals, for reasons stated above. No mention of exactly what that headcount goal was, or by how much they missed it. Just that they "missed it".

Q1 will be informative. There will be "more decisioning" in late Q1 after those numbers are known.

Maybe others can fill in the blanks.

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OP, thanks for this insight. The decisions leadership is making and the "reasons" they give do not add up so it is nice to have confirmation that they have other agendas rather than just being clueless.

I've felt for a long time that attrition is the goal and COVID put a monkey wrench in the game plan. This is a hard push to make it happen.

If they really wanted successful agile teams then they would gradually be forming new co-located hub teams and bring them into the office together. People on those type of "RTO teams" would be happy and onboard with the arrangement from the start because they would see the benefit and ACTUALLY work together. But having people come into the office in the name of agile when they are not at the same location or only have 1 developer only serves the attrition agenda.

On a side note, if I were "deadwood" this might be enough of a push (after bonuses are paid) to get me out of here. In fact, this will get the "deadwood" to spend the holidays working on resumes and be ready to hit the door in February. Unfortunately it will also get the rest of working on our resumes too!

If they have so much alleged "deadwood", then why aren't they using their forced ranking system to let go of those supposed underperformers?

I pretty much know the answer to this before I even ask ....but is this also the reason they walked back the optional return to office for IT?

Deadwood means, knows their job and business well, and performs well, but makes 3 times offshore salaries and costs 10 times in benefits.

I'm reading scare tactic by WF to dump people by year end, to not have to pay bonuses, etc. If you match this information with the recent flip of groups returning to office RTO, I get the feeling WF execs are trying to scare people out more quickly. So stay.........I'm sure there will be more RTO flips coming.

Follow the sun. Going up in the East. Going down in the West.

By "follow the sun", do they mean, "become 24 hour", or do they mean, "go to India and stay there"?

Pretty crass talk. If they are managing "dead wood" and haven't gotten them to be productive and haven't fired them, exactly who's fault is that? Yep, managements.

I don't know if any of the above is true, but I do know that training a counterpart in India leads to only one eventual outcome.

I have been at other companies where voluntary severance was used effectively to target key groups of employees. Management decided if you qualified for the voluntary. Not sure why our stupid management won't do this other than they maybe don't want to pay severance which seems silly when profits are so high.

So you heard tech was affected

Thread regarding Wells Fargo & Co. layoffs

New 2022 Info

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