In IT, we've been through the cycle of "get rid of contractors, we need to own our systems", so "have contractors take care of systems so our employees can focus on what's important" has happened more times than I can count. They even go over "why is this time different", and then state the exact same reasons as the last time.
Don't ever expect anything to change at AT&T. If you look in the past, you can easily predict what's coming.
Perfectly stated, @1ugf+1uhJougu.
1uqPcwIQ Nailed it.
This person is clearly not in IT, or a least one the sharp ones.
"1uqPcwIQ Nailed it."
ignoring the fact that southwestern bell, which is really what this co is,
do not kid yourselves... has never been a leader in anything. Certainly not as long I've been around at least.
1uqPcwIQ Nailed it.
They only do this to pay long term employees off the pension. Replace Stankey with an Indian and the company will do a lot better. Ever since Nokia failed it's been clear that Europeans and their descendents aren't good at tech.
“I can't count the number of phases and projects and emergent technology that the stealership has chased. Lately, Un -Verse, Dish~washers, etc. etc. But, this time it's gonna be handled right!
If we can just shed some more headcount, if we can just regain those lost customers, if they would just let those smart and intuitive true believers have some room to work their magic! This time it will be different!! We will become an industry leader again.”
The ones you mentioned, in ~2020/2021 they had us chasing AR and purchased a bunch of Oculus headsets and were pushing devs to learn altered reality frameworks.
In 2021/2022 it was blockchain, we had a bunch of side projects get spun up looking for use-cases that involved blockchain since it was the next big thing.
We’ve had security teams try to make products for that when they saw other security products/companies like Crowdstrike (hehehehe great company too) and Palo Alto Networks were blowing up (if you know anything about the recent security debacles and layoffs you’ll know that was a financial disaster)
Now it’s Ai - they’re pushing tons of projects trying to leverage ai and create use-cases to fit a new solution instead of the use-case coming first and finding the solution in Ai.
Also been a total waste of time, management doesn’t understand what the capabilities of ai are and believe the marketing hype (just feed your code into the ai and it’ll make unit tests!) - doesn’t work btw since the ai has no know ledge of the business logic outside of its context…
So many d-mb projects that are just wrappers around existing models (Ask AT&T) more money wasted, etc.
This company won’t fund research or innovation and management hasn’t has an original thought since the 80’s therefore they’re just in a perpetual state of chasing trends and tech hype to try and su-k investment dollars off the coattails of other companies that are actually producing good innovative products.
As you said, the problem is there’s no technical people in upper management, it’s all social butterflies who got some business degree from who gives a fu-k and don’t have a creative bone in their entire body. They got there by kissing a-s and knowing the right people, not making cool new interesting things.
I can't count the number of phases and projects and emergent technology that the stealership has chased. Lately, Un -Verse, Dish~washers, etc. etc.
But, this time it's gonna be handled right!
If we can just shed some more headcount, if we can just regain those lost customers, if they would just let those smart and intuitive true believers have some room to work their magic! This time it will be different!! We will become a industry leader again.
It won’t change until they change the leadership from L4 and up. The “leadership” is why things don’t get anything done. And I quote leadership because we don’t have leaders, we have social butterflies with zero leadership knowledge, just good at speaking and being liked by those above them.
Why even exist? Just hand over the business to the contractors and let them share the profits.
When your only idea is to cut your way to success you eventually run out of things to cut.
That’s when executives convince themselves outsourcing is the solution and won’t cause any problems.
The issue is, as you stated, throughout history outsourcing complex technical work has often resulted in disaster and technical debt that ends up costing the company more.
But this time they have github co-pilot and chatGPT and big daddy Microsoft said that those will basically replace IT and actual skilled developers and you know, Stankey ain’t too smart, so he buys into Microsoft’s line (like he did with Azure) - therefore this time will be different.
:)