Our 500 person Funtion in Systems was told today, we need to cut 225. Voluntary separation packages will be offered until 3/31/18, after that the involuntary package will be 50% of the voluntary package... "The consultants" (i think Delloite this time?), you know the group Systems management hires to make the plan so management won't be blamed when it doesn't work, again, surely have the silver bullet this time with "vivify". Or maybe Fawad Ahmad, who did so well at Staples (sales there dropped 6.4% his final year there)...can rescue SF with a digital miracle? Until they abandon their 1950's Agency model, only Agents profits will increase....good luck you are the next General Motors with a 35+ year market share leak.
45 replies (most recent on top)
Wow. We can finally close that chapter. What a destructive person.
And now they begin to leave
This is an old thread, the new ones are terrible, this is the reverse of an improvement, this thread is from 2017
Yep, the site administrator has barred multiple people from posting because of their vulgar and profane language and the people using it for a political platform. Nice improvement.
Man the level of discourse here has fallen significantly. This thread looks like its full of normal people. No childish se-ual rumors, no china talk, no politics. Just talk about work and systems at work, as it should be.
Do we really need to ne--o old threads to get a real convo here?
Have we really advanced? We have done a lot of activity but not sure we have a dept that is aligned and committed. Rather a worker vs mgmt culture and lack of trust in leaders and skills.
An oldie but a goodie
We need a RE vivify!!!!
Good to look back at hpw far we have come
True but a strategic bet that our newcomers had all the answers. Has it played out that way. Seems like It is more problematic today than before
No wonder we can’t keep up to date and modernize.....when people are responding to 3 yr old posts.
I sure hope so. It could only make IT better.
Will they offshore our IT?
Time to recognize giving strategy to developers with no business skill is a recipe for disaster. Reorganize needed to get business, marketing, and finance back in leadership of how IT enables business. Alot of trust was given to inexperienced leaders like a hail mary.
What happened to accountability we were going to see in ET leadership. Lots of changes made? Have they been beneficial? Have there been changes of people leading?
The existing Exec added it their Performance Review to get rid of an existing exec and hire my own!!
It looks like we are bringing in another exec from staples and eBay!
Tough times but this is going well.
Amen to the comment about Salesforce. It's obscene how much money and time has been spent on that POS. I was actually part of a team that worked on it for a while. We tried to talk leadership out of so many things, but it didn't work because people way up top had already carved their terrible decisions in stone.
We knew we were building c-ap and we tried to warn them. They simply did not care.
One of the "lead" architects (although I'm not sure if he ever earned the actual title) was known for hopping around the office playing Pokemon Go, trying to educate everyone on his experience with queues, and generally being a giant waste of flesh.
I can’t stop laughing. Your systems are a piece of equine scat. They b–tardized salesforce into something unusable, counterintuitive, redundant, and inefficient. Come Join real tech. Better benes, nicer place to live, pride in work
The only status quo among State Farm Systems leadership is failure and wasted money.
No need to spin that at all. The evidence is plainly there for anyone to see, provided that person isn't a shill.
No need to spin anything. We are growing and making dramatic improvements. No status quo in our org.
Looks like the site owner is dredging up old threads to make it look like something is actually going on here on this forum, and posting "positive PR" for State Farm to make people annoyed enough to respond.
Nice.
For those doubters - look at how far we have come and the press our leaders are getting for improving.
I see Fawad is posting again.
Holy cow whiners! They could just axe you with nothing! And telecommuters? Please every day you have had has been a bonus! Join the real world already and find a job or as they say s--- it up buttercup!
Vivify or I mean IT Transformation is nothing more then opportunities for Ashly, Faward and Tipsord to make their golden parachutes look awesome. So long to the family culture that personified the state farm brand and made it a leader in the industry. We once had the same compassion and quality for our employees as we claim we have for our customers.. Which is also a lie if you have had to deal with SF in the past couple of years.
For the SF’ers in the comments, this one’s for you:
https://youtu.be/GyV_UG60dD4
Leverage it, and be intentional about it. 😊
And now our learning and development department is undergoing a “study” and they refuse to say if they know if they are laying off people. AND YET they have a “tab”on the “study” sharepoint site called “impacted employees.” That is the term they use for employees who are about to lose their jobs through downsizing! LOL State Farm: Just be upfront already!!
Yes, leadership got offered severance with a set retirement date of Jan 1st. The smart ones took it to get the hell out off this sinking ship. I'm an entry-level software developer just hoping I get offered severance too, but I doubt it will happen.
12 days.... 11 VPs/AVPs gone from Systems / ISD....
There have been a steady stream of upper management in IT announcing their retirements for 1/1/18. Were they offered a severance with a qualified termination date sooner than the Rank and File in IT?
How many of us sat in those meetings where upper, upper management tried to describe Vivify with fluffy terms like optimization and synergy and co-location and benefits. After these descriptions, I'd just be sitting there scratching my head. It all sounded very dubious,.
At this point, with the benefit of hindsight, it's clear Vivify is just an attempt to reduce the number of employees. It truly does not appear to be much more than that.
Couldn't they just have said, "We're interested in gutting the number of people working here. We're trying to figure out how to dump as much work as possible on individual workers, so we're also looking at things like co-location and role consolidation. If you can't do 5 things, at least 3 of them involving hands-on technical knowledge of a tool or IDE, you're probably history. Start packing your bags, sunshine."
I mean, it would have been more honest.
AVPs and VPs bailing, eh? I can't say I'm surprised. What kind of severance did those guys get?
So the elephant in the room question... Did all these 50-something VP/AVPs voluntarily all decide to accept the severance package to retire on 1/1/18, or were they shown the door for their great performances? Oh oh, better get geico...
Tipsy, the bean counter from LeRoy, is in way over his head...
No lisp, no comb-over...he's no Ed Rust...
Who was at the H cafeteria meeting the other day at State Farm and can you tell us what you were told? How did people in attendance react to what they were told? The alternative media here in Bloomington will report it if you tell us. The people of this area need to know the truth about what is happening to State Farm. Our entire economy and thousands of support jobs are dependent on it; while our media paints a Norman Rockwell picture of the future here.
The Pantagraph simply re-prints the fax that gets sent to all local media outlets by State Farm Public Affairs department. There is no "reporting" going on. They do not seek out sources who were in the meetings last Monday and Tuesday when they had the entire H cafetaria locked all day with paper darkening the windows and Wackenhut security at each door....too funny.
As a remote worker, I do not live in BLM, but I did check out the Pantaraph and saw the article that basically said State Farm was committed to keeping the same number of employees in Bloomington.
Do not believe it.
The company is clearly -- very clearly -- interested in drastically reducing head count. If they weren't, they would have given their teleworkers a chance to relocate to a hub, provided those employees were still providing a benefit to the business. None of the affected business areas were allowed to extend such a relocation offer (with or without relo benefits) so clearly the objective was reducing head count, not increasing efficiency or benefiting from co-location, per the narrative.
And if you go out and look at the professional/technical JOPs, you will see that 95% of them require development experience (most are java development positions) or expertise in a particular set of tools. That should give you some idea of what the future is. It's fewer people doing more work and being responsible for more technical work. In and of itself, that's not a bad work model, but it does mean fewer people employed Systems wide. And it means that those who are lucky enough to keep their jobs will need to re-tool.
I'm not really familiar with your local media outlets, but I've seen enough to know I wouldn't trust anything printed in the Pantagraph.
So the lapdog media here in Bloomington is parroting the line that the numbers of workers here is not changing. Basically they are saying nothing to see here, move along. This looks like a lot a people are going out the door. And considering how State Farm is refusing to bring the company into the 21st Century, this is just the beginning. How many people are leaving and where do they work?