Thread regarding Fidelity Investments layoffs

What the middle management does anyway? Being the “economic buyer” (just learned this term) and spend Abby’s money indiscriminately? Why do we have all the tools in house under the sun? Allation/Collibra, Splunk/DataDog, Zoom/Teams… “Hire, hire, hire”, “Buy, buy, buy…” I’m humming NSYNC’s tune right now : )

For the middle management Fidelity can use some of the gut of Elon Musk! Cut 75% and notice no change or improved productivities. The old timers need to make room for the young and newer generations.

Been at Fidelity for over 25 years. If you want to climb the Corp ladder you need to move to groups that are willing to offer the titles people deserve. There are several groups known for NOT doing so.
You also need to network like crazy as hiring managers will give higher level positions to team members first and then friends.
Also, if you are white then look for white hiring managers and if you are Indian look for Indian managers as both are biased in hiring practices (you can check org charts for this).
Get a higher level mentor (lvl 7 or above) and ride their coattails as they move up.

Didn’t look into the job descriptions but I’m sure Fidelity’s standard is as high as other firms on paper. What matters are what’s in the hiring/promotion practices. Some hiring managers are “smart” enough to hand out higher titles as favors to their friends or as carrots to poach people. We lost one principal developer to neighboring team because he’s not up to the standard of a L7 director in our opinion but the other team happily gave him the director title. BTW, the neighboring team, twelve developers, all have director or above titles!

To Fidelity HR if you’re reading: you have data scientists or analysts, right? Ask them to develop a metric to single out teams with title inflation like my neighboring team. Hold the leader who practice title inflation accountable. And learn from Google how they do promotion: an independent promotion committee determines promotions based on submitted promo packets, managers have no influence other than to vouch for or against their report’s promo packets.

Title inflation is definitely rampant here at Fidelity. I for one was recently lured to Fidelity by the “Director” title : ) I was a “Staff” level individual contributor (IC) which is one level above “principal”, and there is one more level above me the “Distinguished” which is hold by less than handful out of five thousands.

At where I was, “Staff” level ICs are curiosity driven creators that deliver departmental impacts and “Distinguished” level ICs are mission driven visionaries that deliver companywide impacts. As a previously “Staff” level IC you can imagine how disappointed I am with Fidelity’s VPs. If I invoke the Gossip Protocol in a distributed system design, they look at me like an alien. When I look into their LinkedIn profiles, many are not formally educated and climbed up to the VP level by seniority or cronyism from the way they thrive here. To their credits, they’re super nice to me and dropping hints here and there that I’ll be one of them soon.

Seriously, according to my old company’s standard and current Fidelity’s maturity of practice, certain area of tech should not have a single VP. Take data architecture for example, other than the mundane use-case schema design, has any of the VPs innovated in any way in the field of distributed data management system that solved Fidelity’s unique challenge?

Moving on from ICs, it seems the Squad Leader role automatically makes one a VP here at Fidelity, which should not be the case. As another poster commented, an ops squad doesn’t need a squad leader at all, certainly not a VP level squad leader!

Then there are what I call the “Business VPs”, mostly business facing squad leaders. If you look into their education and experiences, MBAs, data analysts… If they’re paid the same with the “Technical VPs” which requires hardcore engineering Ph.D.s, it’s unfair to me.

may be there is those few architect who is freaked out that their job is not adding value. They are coming here to vote down clearing their browswr cache. If we scroll down, its funny that all positive votes are equally balanced by negative votes. May be that one creep is freaked out their role is in danger and want to reduce noise.

DEI inflation is why.

They have to stuff them somewhere and hope that they are in a position that doesn't break anything.

Dear Fidelity architects, ask you friends who works at big techs such as Meta and Google, there are no such roles as "architects". IC engineers write the design doc which includes architectural considerations, Tech Lead engineer of the team provides review and guidance, engineering manager of the team ensures cross-functional architectural alignments. You see, it's part of the engineering team's responsibility.

If you haven't authored any design docs for years, haven't used the product you're responsible other than reverse engineering a C4 diagram by meeting after meeting wasting engineering team's time, consider your self a dinosaur.

Instead of downvoting posts here, I'd join the engineering team's refinement meetings, provide actual guidance or simply transition into the engineering team. The sentiment towards your role here should not offend you if you're contributing architects, they should alarm you otherwise.

What’s with all the posts being set level? Is this a Linked in thing or does Fidelity HR have a group doing this or ?

If you see reactions. Some usless forlks may be those useless architects are so creepy that they made sure to cancel and vote down all positive reaction to make it appear zero. Such creepy crawlers

All I get from my Group squad leader is asking for status update multiple times a week so he can put on ppt and present . This is totally non value layer that should be eliminated .

Great post and discussions. Sad that concerned Fid associates can only speak freely here. Repeating my comment on the now deleted rumored L8 reduction post:

L8, L9, L10 middle managements corroborate with each other to maintain an illusion of their existential necessity. Other than the Deja Vu "Strategy", "Planning" internal facing non-work, externally:

You hear "align". "Oh, gosh, it took me a ton of energy just to ALIGN with blah blah!"

Then you hear "noise". "Phew! there are so much noises around topic A, I had to sit with L9_B and L8_C for hours to stifle the noises. You don't want to hear what and how I did it... Do you really not to want to hear it?", " Hey buddy, I need to meet with L10_D and L9_E, can you fill me in what's going on in area F so I can make sure they don't make noises about us?

They want to come across as the brave generals fending off the enemies so the team can be productive. In reality, on the ground level, the engineers of the "rival" teams work together just fine. It's the very middle management from the two teams that create these "misalignments" and "noises". They act as each other's noise maker so they can be each other's noise muffler. From this sense, they're corroborating.

These corroborating middle managements create a layer of man-made politics that's expensive in both the unfair salaries they take home and more so the impediments to productivities.

In summary:

• In engineering team Fidleity should trust. Treat engineering team as adults. We don't need middle managements or architects' top down strategy and technical hand-holdings. We want to do and be rewarded for bottom-up innovations. Minimize middle-management to handle the actual noises and provide architecture as a service not a king. Talk to big tech such as Meta and Google and learn how their engineer driven culture delivers.
• You fired all testers and forced us to do the tastings and we're doing just fine, now fire most of the middle managements and architects we'll be even better.

This post is spot on. If HR is monitoring then ACT on it.
No use of Group Squad leader and too many architects with no value add. L8 Product area leaders / GSL with 2 or 3 squads is a joke.
Chapter Leader should be technical people manager not someone with English/Psychology major who never wrote a single line of code.
SM without basic technical knowledge is as good as hiring an admin and their CLs absolutely own nothing.

so true what @pfr+1uo0NGDz said:

"Architects are in their own ivory tower and have absolutely no recent technical hands on experience and never written a line of code in 20 years. In my 10 years here, I have not seen Architects adding value or speeding things up. "

I was told face/face that I would "never make architect".
I circled back with the boss who told me this with examples of my "architect" reaching out to me (a lowly Principal SWE) for solutions to solve for customer reported issues that they had no idea how to deal with.

I was "dunski" after that face/face and then the VBO was offered.... what perfect timing.

How about making architecture an "service" rather than a mandate? If no teams request your service you don't need to exists.

Same goes for the overly paid data scientists who download models from Huggingface, install them following Huggingface instructions and claim their own.

Lol so much whining about architecture, you all should try life with out them for a few years and see the dumpster fire you would create. Fido is burning green tonight!

I dont think HR is monitoring lol but posts that are "too specific" - are typically removed

Regarding squads, many points are spot on. I'd add that there are too many people that put up red flags, or are just awful people who trash others to justify their existence. Few Scrum masters have the managerial experience to properly run a team - they came up through project management type methodology managing tasks and not people - huge difference. Many squad leaders were selected for their technical prowess, not people management skills. Seen some disasters here, that are still lingering around

Some teams are great though and are awesome to work with, but others.... can be dreadful, every meeting is like walking through a minefield.

With layoff rumors looming about, there seems to be a lot of "make work" happening so people appear busy and engaged, lots of pointless tasks being added.

Some good stuff written.Yup, Architecture org. has lot of fat and can be trimmed by 25% without affecting deliverables. Everywhere in the industry apart from Fid architecture jobs are declining. I witness it everyday under the name of data architect bunch of junk guys are put who are incompetent are L8,L8. They survive all layoffs. CXOs are scared of architecture.

agreed ! Fidelity has too many architects. Lot of them are not adding any value. Hold chapter leaders more accountable and reduce architecture footprint. Architects are in their own ivory tower and have absolutely no recent technical hands on experience and never written a line of code in 20 years. In my 10 years here, I have not seen Architects adding value or speeding things up. They create more and more red tapes by scaring Sr. leaders about compliance and security and just slow down overall delivery process.

I agree 100% on too many architects, we need SWE to do the modernization work.

Yes we know this.