Thread regarding Fidelity Investments layoffs

"Head of this" and "Tail of that" are business titles, which should not be a concern. Too many level 8 and 9s (VPs and SVPs)is directly tied to the cost of the workforce. Not to mention they don't create the commeasurable values. They're not only too expensive to keep but they produce negative impacts with all the politicking, red-taping, demoralizing credit taking, lost opportunities...

Nah, instead they just skipped doing the pulse survey this time

@bp
agreed. Also rename the tile of "VP" to "Senior Director" which is what it is as the rest of the business world. Lay off at least half of them while you at it.

Agreed

Remove all these "head of titles" half of these dinosaurs will leave . GCL and architet role should be abolished in tech

My recommendation is 2 parts:

1. Listen to the people that work for this company, no matter the rank and job description. If people are not happy, quality work is not going to come out. Why is leadership constantly blatantly ignoring valuable feedback? There is a point to where a power play has to be met with compromise. I understand we are past the stock market highs of the late 2010’s and past the employees market of Covid but man leadership needs to start addressing employee unhappiness.

2. Senior leadership needs to have strategies that actually make sense and have an implementation strategy that isn’t a “let’s figure it out as we go”. The past 4 years have been nothing but strange directions in strategy that call for fire drills every few months and the people cannot keep following this. It is very apparent that senior leadership is shooting from the hip and not down the sights. Be smart, use data, do research, listen to what your people have to say (which is the beauty of what agile should’ve been) or copy what has worked in the past.

The large scale, distributed workforce performance management challenge can and probably can only be solved by science, like what Amazon's People Experience & Technology (PXT) central science team is doing (hire a bunch of economists and management professors form elite universities and throw the problem at them):

https://www.amazon.science/working-at-amazon/visiting-academic-jessie-handbury-uses-economic-data-to-inform-amazon-employee-experience

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/amazon-executive-justine-hastings-shares-team-building-advice

One great discussion[1] earlier here is on the bloated middle management, from what I observe an interesting pattern among front-line, middle and upper management at Fidelity:

• The level is positively related to tenure. The higher up the more years they are with Fidelity.
• The competency is negatively related to the level. The higher up the less they know. This is related to previous point in that when folks join Fidelity ages ago, technology was so outdated and while folks rise in ranks they don't update their skills.
• Strategy, operations, details hierarchy is inverted. Higher and middle management are not strategizing, rather they focus on operational and implementation details.
• Middle managers = Middlemen with red tape. They ping-pong stuff to front-line managers and exercise their power by putting put red tapes.
• Upper managers = Economic buyer with Fidelity credit card. "Buy, Buy, Buy" is all they know and do.

My recommendation: do cut the middle layer! They're harmful in both ways by not adding value and be the demoralizers to those who actually add values.

[1] [ Earlier discussion on cutting middle mgmt](https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1uo0NGDz)