First I'll say that I genuinely enjoyed my small team at AT&T with whom I worked the last 20 years of my career there. I have no resentment to the time I spent there, so this isn't a complaining post, just some perspective after some time away. I was in management, doing technical work and app development for sales support.
Most of my team, about 80%, was laid off for not moving to Dallas (most of the rest were already there; one or two moved there). We were in various focus cities supporting our local sales teams, but the senior leadership didn't understand that and did not make exceptions. I found another position doing similar work for another company and started 3 weeks after my final day at T. The new company has fewer than 1000 people, for comparison.
So here are some of my takeaways, in case someone with a long career at AT&T might be thinking about making the jump, or who might have it forced on them.
Surprising that this is the first one, but honestly it's such a difference that I wanted to call it out: I have not opened Powerpoint once since I left T. At T, powerpoint was basically the language of business. We wasted so many cycles "making a deck" to try to communicate to the ever-changing field of senior leadership that I probably spent the plurality of my time in Powerpoint vs. any other program. I got a new laptop at my new job, and realized as I deleted the pre-placed icon from the desktop that I've never once used Powerpoint. We use Teams, sometimes demos, sometimes a mockup or diagram...but I've never had to "make a deck."
It really hit me just how many people at AT&T did literally nothing of value. This is not a dig against most colleagues, but rather just that significant subset who didn't have discernible skills, so got placed into positions to just spin their bureaucratic wheels but otherwise stay out of the way. I recall two dozen names off the top of my head that were just there to make people jump through hoops, document workflow (for no followup reason), design a new process that was jettisoned as soon as they moved somewhere else, or just attend meetings and throw in their two cents without really contributing. Outside of T, there are people of various skill and contribution levels, but nobody whose job is simply to fly under the radar. When I read stories about T employees logging in and leaving their laptops in lockers, or sitting in the cafeteria watching TV, it makes me glad to know that where I'm at now, everybody is giving a fair day's work without making work for others.
Leadership at AT&T is toxic. I'm not just talking the Stankey/Stephenson types, who, yes, have ruined the company through unfathomable incompetence. I'm talking the people in the mid-level, director-like positions and above. Almost all (not all) of them at T seemed like they got there based on the Peter Principle or otherwise nodded their head enough. Only in the beginning of my career in the late 1990s did I feel any executive director or above at T (SBC at the time) was there due to being a practitioner of their craft, for being respected, or for being a good manager. And that class began to dwindle as time went on, replaced by hollow, empty suits who could spew buzzwords and claim empty victories by cherry picking their numbers. It's like an ever-shifting field of grifters.
The hiring process at ATT is irreparably broken. I was a hiring manager, and trying to get someone competent in the door was inexplicably difficult. HR gatekept candidates and had no concept of the hard and soft skills we needed. We got sent batches of candidates who faked their resumes, faked their interviews (even before AI was big), faked their legal ability to work in the U.S., and so on. There were times that it took 9 months to find an entry level programmer because HR kept whiffing. HR gets a lot of flack everywhere, but at T, I believed they were truly a cesspool of rejects.
Maybe I'll think of more but these hit me just this week. There are things I miss about T, mostly dealing with colleagues, but these are definitely things I do not miss! The day-to-day stress and friction they cause isn't always evident when you're in the middle of it. Only after the ATT shackles are thrown off do you realize how bad of an environment it can be!