Someone mentioned in one of the posts that this company no longer encourages or promotes technical excellence. Yes, that is true but I'm wondering why?
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Rule by MBA. They know business but not "the business". Everything and everyone is an interchangeable widget to a "well trained" MBA. If you can't reduce it to a spreadsheet they don't understand it. That means they don't see why buying a satellite business is an idea whose time has come and gone. Or expecting a bell head to run a place like Time Warner would work. On his first day he alienated them. Before he got out of the building a recording of his offensive speech was on the desk of a NYT reporter. That means he pi---d off someone high in TWM. Who put him there? An MBA. Any questions?
They are just trying to have an equity of work and to figure out the alphabet soup they are now part of, it’s more important than business!
AT&T culture has changed and I don’t see it ever coming back. Guys can literally walk away from jobs that they don’t want to do, claiming that they aren’t comfortable doing it. They may have done the work for 20+ years but, they now claim that they forgot how to do it so they can do something that they prefer doing. Maybe some pay reductions may jar their memories a bit.
WOW! A little anger on full display from some of you regarding my post on quarterly awards! I have seen this company go from a wonderful working environment to a very bad culture and horrible place to work in a matter of 18 years and I'm not happy about it either! I was screwed over by T, believe me, but still it's a business and not your business. It belongs to the shareholders as I am one of them and would like to see my position in T grow and not lag like it has for the last 3 years!
Not at all true, T gives out quarterly Service Excellence Awards to recognize those individual contributions that go above and beyond in order to help ATT succeed!
Yeah, they changed the expectation from pay raises to one time awards. It’s the Hunger Games every year fighting for a piece of that cake. What every one really wants is a pay raise. Sad thing is if you make it to the top tier, you’re more at risk to be on the list for layoff. So you have to use your contacts in hopes of getting a promotion/progression putting you in the lowest tier of the next level.
It’s madness and not conducive to excellence on a broad scale!
Not at all true, T gives out quarterly Service Excellence Awards to recognize those individual contributions that go above and beyond in order to help ATT succeed!
I wonder what that pays? .10% of your salary. HEY go above and beyond, try to outperform your coworkers. Try to pit yourself against you coworkers, get rewarded with more territory to cover. Get a George Forman Grill for you efforts. Hey, AT&T, go PHUCK YOURSELF.
"Not at all true, T gives out quarterly Service Excellence Awards to recognize those individual contributions that go above and beyond in order to help ATT succeed!"<< And to you, more especially GO PHUCK YOURSELF you comperate clown.
Not at all true, T gives out quarterly Service Excellence Awards to recognize those individual contributions that go above and beyond in order to help ATT succeed!
At&t no longer promotes individual excellence. Leadership wants every employee to be equalized. Yes, that's right, they would rather give trophies to all employees than a few trophies to exceptional employees. This is nothing new, millennial, Gen x, and Gen z individuals were raised this way, all participants get a trophy. Individual excellence was never recognized, an MVP and benchwarmer were seen by all as equal in every respect.
I agree with most of your post, but I wanted to point out that Gen X did not grow up with participation trophies. That started with millennials.
Y’all need to take a course in Agile project management methodology.
Minimally Viable Product = Simple To Make, Simple To Explain, Simple To Fix
Not smart enough to spell automation much less develop it. However have been involved in a few M&P writing exercises in which the final product was basically a 100 page document that explained how to change a lightbulb. Everyone had a lightbulb that was threaded differently, including the first one designed by Edison. Then we expect people to write code to automate every process included in these monstrosities without issues. Go figure..
you only need a 30 minute video course on youtube to learn how to make a powerpoint
This isn't Bell Labs anymore. The current "leadership" is coasting on decades of knowledge of the workforce. Soon that knowledge will not only retire, but will pass from this world. India is not a replacement. I have dealt with that and they have proven themselves ineffective.
John Stankey, you where a party to so many FAILED ventures (I know, it was Randy's fault) and put AT&T into so much debt. Save your wise guidance, AT&T could have built a fiber and wireless network that would be second to none.
As it is, we still support 30-40 year old legacy technologies and the customers that use them. They break, they break often and I get to fix them.
God Bless you Stankey for not having the vision to upgrade the network and trying your luck in Media. I am like the Maytag man these days. Waiting for some obsolete equipment to break. It does with some regularity. I cash checks.
It's been that way for decades.
AT&T (and its legacy subs) thought that they didn't people with technical expertise to evaluate a situation and design a solution.
They think that they can come up with Methods & Procedures (M&Ps) to provide a script or work flow to solve any issue/problem that might come up. There might be 27 different variations of the problem but they think they can come up with flow charts to provide a solution for EVERY.SINGLE.ONE.OF.THEM.
In my legacy subsidiary of AT&T (before they bought out my legacy regional Bell company) we used to get paid a small annual bonus for being a registered Professional Engineer (sit and pass the Engineer-in-Training test, then sit and pass the PE test). For those that don't know, that's like passing the Bar Exam in law school.
And no matter your area of specialty or expertise (engineering, software, finance, marketing) they d-mbed down the processes so they could claim that the script/flow chart solved the problem and they didn't need intelligent, educated employees.
Thus ..... here we are. And we are headed in the same direction still.
Automation. DOES require a lot of technical folks. Software developers, cloud engineers, pipeline people, etc...
It just requires fewer people overall to run the business day to day.
Building the automation is expensive and time consuming, because things need to be retrofitted to 40 year old bellhead processes that are purposely inefficient, with no existing technology that has any modern integration methods.
Everything needs to be recreated from the ground up using modern tech stacks with new processes; but we can't make those investments due to our crippling debt.
Leadership simply doesn't understand that you can't bolt Ferrari parts to rusty Yugo. However, they demand it anyway. Which is why our technology is so bad. We continue to light money on fire.
ATT has excellence in elevating id--ts into positions where they can gut the bottom line as much as possible and cover it all up with a PowerPoint and Buzz Words.
ATT wants automation, that doesn’t require a bunch of technical folks. The future is automate, add intelligence to the network, allow customers to change speeds through a portal and make hardware with a gui so it’s as easy to use as setting up a home router (or easier).
The company will surplus tens of thousands if employees and run a smoother operation once this is achieved…..and so will Verizon, lumen and t-mobile.
The only people who should be happy are the raisons in craft hanging around for a surplus so they can get paid to leave.
Too worried about equity and virtue signaling to promote excellence in any area of the business.
Too many dead weight employees
Someone technical is not required to issue PO's to contractor.
At at&t a high school dropout employee is equal to an employee with a doctorate in electrical engineering. Same pay, same benefits, same level of respect by co-workers. It took some time for at&t to achieve this but they finally pulled this off. I don't like the word woke, so call it what you want!
At&t no longer promotes individual excellence. Leadership wants every employee to be equalized. Yes, that's right, they would rather give trophies to all employees than a few trophies to exceptional employees. This is nothing new, millennial, Gen x, and Gen z individuals were raised this way, all participants get a trophy. Individual excellence was never recognized, an MVP and benchwarmer were seen by all as equal in every respect.