#culture

With all the changes coming to agency, operations you better get ready for more craziness. They cut agents pay, retirement bonuses, and SF stopped contributing towards their healthcare. If they will do that to agent's, you better believe that Total Rewards in 2027 will be very different. Agents are getting to see the true nature of this sh-t hole company. They will continue the churn and burn and pump and dump business model in claims. The 2040 McBurger workforce will continue to be a disaster and they will continue the accountability scam, meaning rules for the and not for me! Execs gotta get those bonuses! The day SF shuts down is the day the world becomes a better place. The Lemmings and corporate boot lickers are in corporate he-l heaven!

The more they roll out AI and the metrics and the micro management, it’s clear State Farm think doesn’t give two sheets about employees. D1 injury has so many people out on leave or are quitting because bad management doesn’t know how to treat people with any shred of dignity. Everything is ‘trust the process’ or ‘our competitors do it’. Didn’t state farm used to be the big dog in the industry? How can a company this big just copy what it he competition does?

Worst part is that it’s a 2nd level management issue company wide. Total loss, injury, pip/mpc are all struggling. They send out those ‘anonymous surveys’ each month but they only do that to retaliate against people who’s give them 1s and 2s. You need OT but they’re so tight on the purse strings for management bonuses.

And it stinks

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/energy/articles/ford-didn-t-fail-evs-155206472.html

Some managers have less than 5 reports
AI is barely being used, if at all

Meanwhile companies that will survive are flattening the orgs and making managers have at least ten reports and AI is used everywhere

We are so far behind it's worrying

I worked as a developer in the Fusion Middleware area, first on the on-premise tools and later on Oracle Cloud.

My experience at Oracle was extremely negative. I believe a large part of that was because I am female, honest, and a highly competent developer.

Those qualities were not valued in Oracle development. Let me address each of them individually.

Female - There were no female managers or architects in the area where I worked. Management was dominated by Indian men from a culture where women are expected to be subordinate to men, and in my experience that attitude showed clearly. I worked for multiple managers who used the same kinds of tactics. They sabotaged demos I was giving by providing incorrect conference numbers, setting me up to demo on systems with bad network settings that caused slow screen updates, telling me to prepare slides for a two-hour session and then suddenly saying I only had one hour while pretending surprise that I had created slides because I had been instructed to do so. I was also once paired with another manager’s aggressive subordinate, who went first and then claimed I was demonstrating something different from what I had been told, making me appear unprepared.

I was undermined in many other ways as well. I was restricted in what I could work on, excluded from status meetings, denied information, given incorrect information, and subjected to every kind of obstruction imaginable.

Not everyone behaved this way, but enough men did that it became impossible to function normally. I was constantly forced into a defensive position. Although there were a couple of senior managers above me who supported me, my direct managers did not, and they had enough control to make it appear that I was the problem when I was not.

There were a few women I interacted with. Some, like me, were honestly trying to do their jobs. But one woman in marketing appeared to believe it was in her interest to undermine me with the men, and another woman who was very involved with one manager also helped set me up at one point. Because of that, I eventually felt I could not even trust the other women at the company.

Before Oracle, I had been a very successful developer at other companies and had received awards for my work. Oracle has serious cultural problems, and if you are a female developer, I would advise leaving the company. There is a much better life outside of it.

Honest - The managers were, in my opinion, largely incompetent. They were deeply insecure, and even the slightest sign of initiative beyond what they explicitly directed was treated as a threat. From what I observed, this was true of nearly every manager I encountered. They were paranoid, dysfunctional, and operating inside an equally dysfunctional environment. Managers would temporarily align with one another to sabotage employees or other managers they wanted to target. It genuinely seemed like they enjoyed doing this, and that much of their professional world revolved around schemes to damage someone else’s reputation or career.

By the end, I felt as though I was working inside an organized crime operation. The sabotage never stopped. One manager cultivated loyal enforcers who would do whatever he wanted to anyone he targeted. Unfortunately, I ended up under this truly toxic individual. Oracle moves developers around like interchangeable parts, and you often have no control over who you work for. This manager made s-xual comments toward me and treated me in a degrading way. He isolated me from others in the group and refused to assign meaningful work. In my opinion, he was deeply disturbed and manipulative.

Later, he worked with another manager and a woman connected to that manager to isolate me further and pressure me into writing a new application they intended to take credit for themselves.

There is no place for honesty at Oracle. If you want to be a thug and enjoy the idea of operating inside something that feels like a mafia structure, then Oracle may suit you. Honesty will not help you succeed there.

Extremely Competent Developer - If you are a strong developer who wants to build meaningful products and do real engineering work, Oracle is not the right place. I was an excellent developer. Earlier in my career, there were times when my abilities were questioned because I was female, but I was always able to prove myself and earn the trust of the men around me through competence and results.

At Oracle, competence was not appreciated. The managers I worked with valued loyalty above all else, and the people most loyal to management were often the least capable technically. They protected their jobs by flattering managers, attacking other developers, and helping management manipulate or undermine people within the company.

I was promoted once while I was there, but I believe that only happened because of intervention from a senior manager above me. Even while I had support at higher levels, the manager directly above me continued sabotaging me constantly.

I would have left earlier, but I had reasons for staying, so I continued trying to demonstrate what I could do, just as I had at previous companies. None of it mattered. Management remained determined to harass me regardless of my abilities.

I also saw other highly competent developers, including men, targeted in many of the same ways. My impression was that management feared capable developers because they themselves were incompetent, insecure, and uncomfortable with real technical discussions about products or code.

One important thing to understand is that none of this was obvious at first. The managers were skilled at hiding what they were doing until you started paying very close attention. They always had plausible explanations ready, and because you want to be cooperative and professional, you initially accept those explanations and move on.

For a long time, I had an application that I mostly worked on independently, and that insulated me somewhat.

My competence also allowed me to survive there longer than many people would have. My first manager gave me increasingly difficult assignments. Initially, I believed that meant he trusted my abilities. Later, I realized he was escalating the difficulty in hopes that I would fail. I believe he wanted to point to the “incompetent woman” and say, “See, she couldn’t handle the work.” But that never happened because I successfully completed every assignment I was given.

It is a deeply unhealthy place. If you dislike women, will blindly obey your manager, including sabotaging coworkers, and especially if you enjoy attacking people and playing dirty tricks, Oracle may be the place for you.

If you actually want to do real engineering work, almost anywhere else would be better.

Our staff meetings are a joke. A lot of words, no substance and acting like everything is great. How are your “leaders” handling your teams staff meetings, given nobody knows Dan’s master plan?

What's going on here? Is this just my group or a wider pattern?

Listed SS as one of the top companies to work for. LinkedIn has SS as the best workplaces to grow. Well...there you go. We all know the truth.

If they want to continue to treat us like children what’s stopping us from acting like children?

You know RTO5 is absolutely coming soon. They will start monitoring how long you’re working somehow.

Have a long commute? You better be working while driving. If not you better work as soon as you wake up and as soon as you get home to make up for the commute you didn’t ask for.

People are really on edge lately about the ranking/layoffs.
Employees look at each other as competitors as we walk around campus.
People feel compelled to speak up in meetings to state the obvious in an effort to show their knowledge.
It is really awkward.

What other stupid observations have you seen?

When are the ranking sessions? When are all ranking sessions completed?

What you guys think?

The next round of layoffs here at NetApp highlight a growing issue: leadership increasingly feels disconnected from reality. Too many decisions seem to come from a C-level bubble rather than from understanding employees and customers. Another concern is the number of VPs/SVPs coming from companies like Microsoft, Oracle, or Pure Storage. External experience is valuable, but NetApp shouldn’t become a copy of everywhere else. The company’s strength was always its own culture and people.

Are you kidding me, you show up to the town hall wearing skinny short pants and ankle top sneakers ?

Hot Mess town hall today. Will he paint the org all rosy, as if we should be happy to be working under him? Will he conveniently skip over his big project to outsource all?

All the wellness messaging in the world doesn't mean much when people are stressed about possible layoffs. Nothing says healthy workplace culture quite like anxiety, rumors, and employees wondering if they are on the next list.

You spend more time managing personalities and approval chains here than actually doing your job. Leadership still operates like it is twenty years ago, with constant micromanaging and politics attached to every tiny decision. Why does every simple task have to turn into exercises in control?

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-I3QAckLjI

It seems that now our bonuses are also calculated with the WHAT and HOW scores. My manager created easy goals for a couple of colleagues who are her friends and asked them to copy paste them in the system. But with me, we used AI and my my goals are almost impossible to achieve. I don't think I shall get a good WHAT or HOW score even if I try too hard. And because the success of my goals is dependent on others, I am finding it hard to show that I am working harder than the colleagues with easier goals. Long story short, it feels like the new performance management makes it super easy for managers to give more bonus and salary appraisal to their friends. Is moving into another team my only choice? Are they really planning layoffs by giving bad scores? Some colleague was saying that a PiP means you don't even get severance and they can lay you off anytime. I can't ask my manager yet because she is very politik and cares more about networking than about our work. If the culture is only going to get worse I may even look for a job outside but there aren't many opportunities right now. I am based near Heidelberg in case that matters.

Former happy Cengager checking in to see what’s happening in Loserville.

Get out and let Cengage burn.

There is more money and better cultures out here.

Good luck

The leadership is hoping you will. They're hoping they'll get fewer people to do more. If you know what's good for you and all of your coworkers, you won't play into their hands.

Don’t give me all that double talk about needing a job and all.
You are grown human beings. You should be able to do something else, and clear yourself of this mess here.

Why do you keep doing the same thing every day, yet expecting a different result? At this point you are beyond being able to justify why you stay here to anyone or yourself.

Can he seriously not read the room? Telling one of the most anti-AI customer bases out there, readers, that we'd happily stock AI books was already a choice. Following it up with “unless they’re plagiarized” just made it sound like he doesn’t understand why people are concerned in the first place. It's like he's intentionally handing our foot traffic to the competition on a silver platter. Does he actually want us to drive customers away???

West should be running XBS. Leadership better in the west.

Many people here are so lazy and never want to do any work but want credit for everything, they are always playing games and making things more difficult than they have to be. So many people I interact with are super rude, unpleasant, hate their job and are trying to push their agenda but don’t want to do any work themselves.

Leadership is full of su-k ups who only manage up and don’t care about their team at all. Hard work is only rewarded with more work and the incompetent who play politics stay while the rest end up leaving. Overall I have to say this is a toxic hellhole where people only stay for the money and lack of options turning many into bitter lifers. And who can even blame them when the company is rotten inside out.

This site was once a community and source of knowledge. It’s in a tailspin of conspiracy theories.

• When someone makes a reference to an exec from 3 years ago, and is no longer here. Ignore them.

• When someone makes an outrageous claim like “30% of us will be laid off” - do the math. That would be the largest layoff in USAA history times 3. That’d be nearly 11,000 employees to be laid off this year. They have no details. No sources. Just vague fear and round numbers. Ignore them.

• When someone is posting about a single person every week. Ignore them. That’s an unhinged person.

• We need to collectively stfu about RTO. There’s quite literally nothing we can do about it. The company has moved on. Society has moved on. Every other company has moved on.

I read a lot of posts on here about MW and senior management and middle management and culture and Chevron is the devil.
If you feel so strongly about it, either tell them directly or leave. If you do nothing you're honestly worse than you think they are. Have some integrity and hold yourself accountable to your moral and intellectual convictions. Maybe this is the sign you've been waiting for to say standing up for what you believe in takes guts and is risky.. so even though it's scary, you should quit.

Nobody trained me. You're simply expected to know things, then get blamed when you don't. The mood is terrible because everyone is only here out of necessity. Corporate talks a big game about safety and standards but won't fund what it actually takes to meet them. They'd rather rearrange the shelves than make the job manageable for the people stuck doing it.

If you are smart and you want to build a career, leave T. The managers don't know what they are doing, you aren't allowed to take any initiative, and the only path to success is making your boss and their boss happy regardless of whether you actually do good work. If that's your jam, so be it. But if not, just do yourself a favor and leave.

Although working for family-owned businesses run by their owners has some advantages, the biggest challenge is that no one can challenge the owners’ decisions. What AJ says goes. nobody can say no.

Our group runs on pressure, politics, and people watching what they say, but the second somebody higher up appears, suddenly everyone’s smiling and pretending this is a great place to work. I never understand the performance because it’s not like executives would even care how employees are actually being treated. What's the point of the theater?

Honestly, I never thought the current Bank President would have such a devastating impact on USAA Bank’s culture, organization, and people leadership. I knew him when he was an ED, watched him move up through the ranks, and genuinely congratulated him when he was selected. At the time, I was happy for USAA because I believed he might help restore the culture many of us remember from before 2018, etc. I never imagined it would turn out like this.

How did we get here?

I’ve worked in this industry for more than 35 years, and this is stunning. Employee exhaustion from perpetual cost-cutting cycles has become so normalized that people now seem to accept it as a fact of life.

I understand capitalism. I understand the need to make a profit. But at what point did we remove the human element from the workplace, all while increasing our use of slogans like "people first" and "we’re a family"?

We've became a sick society.

all of the “It’s okay to not be okay, you’ve got a team who cares” emails…Pick a lane, either Own being a sweatshop or actually treat associates with respect and kindness.
At this point, it would not surprise me if they are creating a list of people who reach out to wellness for layoffs.

Nike only lays people off when changing the organization structure, not when someone is doing a really cr-p job or royally sc--ws up a business.

Why doesn’t Nike fire people more often for poor performance?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-need-younger-people-inside-growing-fear-age-att-jayson-gnall-7dzuc/

While not totally indicative, Glassdoor rankings of CEOs are used by Elliott and others in assessing how real employees feel about CEOs and their performance. Looking at Glassdoor, here is how Phillips 66 stacks up in the industry regarding approval rating, senior management rating, and the other number is would employees recommend to a friend:

CEO approval rating / Senior Management Rating (out of 5) / Would Recommend Company to a Friend (%)

Phillips: 56% / 2.8 / 63%
Valero: 71% / 3.6 / 80%
Marathon: 77% / 3.5 / 76%
PBF: 50% / 3.0 / 60%
HollyFrontier: 77% / 2.8 / 61%
Enterprise Products: 83% / 3.6 / 75%
Williams: 85% / 3.2 / 66%
Targa: 87% / 3.8 / 75%
LyondellBasell: 60% / 3.2 / 66%
Dow: 67% / 3.4 / 73%

Notice anything? PSX is PBF and HollyFrontier. Let’s stop pretending.

These id--ts remove remote work and expect software developers to work a lot for 75% of the average pay. They also expect you to do POCs and come up with all the solutions and lead new efforts like a software architect at a director level pay lol.
The expectations are delusional and ridiculous.

https://youtu.be/TZmR2BuCY0Y