#performance

Professional and Technical Tier guidelines have those positions

Associate
Expert
Senior expert
Principal
Senior principal
Chief

Do they correspond to a specific CL?
Or rather a CL band (like 27-29)?
What’s the base pay for Expert or Senior Principal ?

as an external hire, just because everyone can see other people’s “tier” online I inferred this isn’t the same as CL. Anyone can shed light on what it is and how to upgrade this ?

stock sinking why CEO's nut heads still around? As a stock holder i want them to be fired for their lousy job.

Foe this group, one thing for sure Dan will continue to do what is “wowking”. These messages is what he lives for, not you.

https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-delivers-record-2q26-results

Verizon needs to skip Hans/DEI 2.0 and announce Verizon 3.0.

Verizon 3.0 is going back Verizon 1.0 and motivate/reward performance on results and execution. Call Denny Strygal/Ivan.

It's impossible to execute with current Board and C-Suite Team.

Go back to skip levels and ask high owrformers what needs to be done.

Start with VCG groups.. learn why desoite having superior fiber in SFU/MDUs over 25 years.. broadband still under 50%.

Then attack Small Businesx and remove sales friction.

The Vz Culture and lack of empowerment and leadership talent will ensure competition continues to as$ kick Verizon in marketplace.

I’ve seen high performers get RIFed…if they’ve been on their ADs sh-t list. Does that imply AD had a say in the job loss? Serious feedback please no trolling

IBM missed every major tech revolution from PCs to AI, shrinking to a $200 billion market cap while private OpenAI is valued at $900 billion.

IBM, which has been poorly run for decades, is on the ropes. The company has had plenty of practice managing decline. When it warned about its earnings a week ago, the stock dropped over 20%. It is down 30% for the year, while the S&P is up 9%. The picture is even bleaker from another vantage point: in early June, the stock changed hands at $329, but it trades at very slightly better than $200 now.

https://247wallst.com/investing/2026/07/23/ibm-is-the-worlds-worst-big-tech-company/

This is right out of Ginni's tired playbook " One quarter does not define a company. Progress is never perfect or linear. But the future is ours to win"

Arvind, read your own headline back. “Company culture was too slow to change.” Not “I set a strategy that leaned on debt-funded acquisitions for five years.” Not “I ki-led a working deployment focus six months ago and had to rebuild it under pressure.” Not “I chased a stock price number instead of asking whether the growth underneath it was real.” Culture. As if the culture is some ambient weather system that happens to a company, instead of the direct, measurable output of what leadership rewards, funds, and tolerates.
Here’s what “culture” actually means when a CEO says it out loud: it means employees. It means the people three, four, five levels below you, absorbing blame for decisions they didn’t make and couldn’t have stopped. You don’t get to spend years building a strategy on acquisitions and mainframe timing, watch the props come due at the same time, and then, when the market notices, hand the bill to “culture.” Culture doesn’t sign off on M&A. Culture doesn’t set the incentive plan. Culture doesn’t decide which function gets ki-led in January and rebuilt in July. You do.
And the board’s own language makes this worse, not better: confident in the strategy, but will “hold leadership accountable for execution.” Read that twice. The strategy stays untouchable. Execution is the only thing on the table, and execution is exactly the layer where the people with the least power to change the strategy live. That’s not accountability. That’s a firewall, built to make sure the decisions at the top never have to answer for the results at the top.
So here’s the honest question, asked directly, not through a euphemism about culture: why is it always easier to say “we faltered” as a company than to say “I got this wrong” as the person who ran it? Why is the sentence “culture was too slow” acceptable in a headline, while the sentence “I ki-led a function I should have left alone” never makes it into one? If you were confident enough to reshuffle the entire org on a six-month clock, be confident enough to put your own name on the outcome instead of a word that conveniently has no face and no bonus attached to it.
Own it, you said. So own it. Not the culture. You

link ---> https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/economy/ibm-s-ceo-sends-a-warning-as-its-shares-take-their-worst-hit-in-decades/ss-AA28tjw7?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=6a61faf0de104c25954b7727766c091c&cvpid=9f9665ade94b4e1994ac75d6ecfc101c&ei=14#image=10

Q2 is out. Revenue basically flat. Free cash flow flat for the half. And yet the letter reads like a highlight reel: double-digit growth here, “strong performance” there, three bold priorities for the back half. Look closer, and the growth is concentrated in exactly the places you’d expect if the story were built on acquisitions rather than the underlying business.
Automation up 3%. Sounds modest until you remember that’s the segment carrying HashiCorp and Apptio (both bought, both being folded into the base, both getting a full year of “integration growth” before the comparison gets tough). Data up 18%, presented like IBM is winning the AI battle. Except Data is also where Confluent landed. Strip out an acquisition that closed months ago and ask what the legacy products in that category actually did on their own (that’s the number nobody puts in bold).
This is the oldest trick in inorganic growth: buy a company, fold its revenue into your segment, get a full year of easy comps while contracts get renewed and “blue-washed” under the new parent, and call the blended number your own performance. It works, for about a year. Then the acquisition anniversaries into the base, the easy comp disappears, and the segment needs the next acquisition to keep the story going. That’s not a growth engine. That’s a treadmill with a one-year lap time.
Meanwhile the parts of the business that were never propped up by an acquisition tell a rougher story. Infrastructure down 7%. Transaction Processing down 9% (they’re the same story told twice). Transaction Processing is the software that rides on Z. No mainframe refresh, no new Z capacity, no large deals closing (no new MLC licensing booked either). Hardware and software here aren’t two separate lines on a slide, they’re one engine: when Z doesn’t sell, the software tied to it doesn’t sell either, and both numbers fall together because they were never actually independent.
Which raises the uncomfortable question: how much of this business is actually layered on top of itself? Acquired revenue propping up Automation and Data while the base underneath goes quiet. Mainframe hardware and mainframe software rising and falling as one, dressed up as two separate growth stories. Each piece needs the piece below it to keep moving, or the whole structure stalls at once. Call it what you want (a treadmill, a house of cards, a pyramid where each new acquisition is there to cover for the last one’s fading comp): the pattern is the same, nothing underneath is generating growth on its own, it’s all leaning on something else that has to keep being fed.
Revenue flat overall at $17.2 billion. Free cash flow flat at $4.8 billion for the half. If the “real” IBM (the part that isn’t riding a recent purchase or a hardware refresh cycle) is shrinking while acquisitions and mainframe timing carry the average, the honest question isn’t “is IBM a software company.” It’s “whose growth is this, actually, and what happens the quarter the props stop arriving on schedule?”
And right on schedule, the answer on offer is another reshuffle (new titles, new coverage models, a new operating structure for the back half). But renaming jobs doesn’t change what’s underneath them. If the growth was never really organic to begin with, no amount of reorganizing who sells it or what they’re called is going to make it real.
And this isn’t a new discovery. The pattern has been visible on the ground for years (it just took a bad quarter for the market to finally notice what employees already knew). That’s the part worth sitting with: this wasn’t leadership missing a hidden signal. It was leadership seeing it, for years, and being too arrogant to admit the story needed correcting. Too invested in a stock price number (chasing $300 a share) to step back and ask whether the growth underneath it was real.
And even if the July reorg were the right diagnosis, it isn’t the right timeline. Deployment takes months to show up as revenue under the best conditions, longer when the team doing it just got reshuffled and has to relearn who owns what. A reorg launched mid-year, needing to prove itself by year-end, is asking for a “wow” effect on a clock that deployment has never once run on. Nobody deploys enterprise software in one or two quarters just because leadership needs a good Q4 slide. So the real question isn’t whether the numbers improve by December; it’s whether anyone at the top is honest enough to say, out loud, that they won’t, and that expecting otherwise is expecting a miracle from a plan that was never built with that timeline in mind.
Numbers tell the truth when you sit with them long enough. Put makeup on them (bold a growth rate, bury the segment it came from, skip the base it’s being compared against) and they’ll tell you whatever story needs telling that quarter. This quarter’s story needed rescuing. The last-minute reorg landing on top of it isn’t the fix. It’s one more coat of makeup on a number that’s going to need a lot more than that to hold up next quarter, when the acquisitions currently doing the heavy lifting start looking like ordinary IBM again.

I'm hanging on for a severance package. That's it. Considering the frequency of layoffs, I don't want to jump ship ahead of time and leave good money behind. I'm determined to leave, I'm just in a waiting pattern right now. I don't care if it's reflected in my performance. I've already given BNY much more than it ever deserved.

In John’s Q2 results email he said, “We’ll need to embrace a market-based culture and continue executing against our 2026 priorities.”

That got me thinking… what exactly does “market-based” mean?

A market-based system generally means rewards and consequences are tied to performance. High performers create more value and are rewarded accordingly. Poor decisions and poor performance have consequences. Resources flow to what works, and what doesn’t work gets changed or terminated… That’s not how this place feels.

For employees, compensation isn’t meaningfully tied to individual performance. Top performers and average performers often receive very similar outcomes, while broad policies apply to everyone regardless of results.

And if we’re truly going to talk about a market-based culture, shouldn’t that standard apply at every level of the organization, including leadership?

A market-based culture shouldn’t just measure employees. It should measure strategies, capital allocation, recruiting, retention, culture, innovation, and long-term shareholder value.

The phrase “market-based” only has meaning if accountability flows both ways. Otherwise, it’s just another slogan.

Sr. leaders: why are you still here? Cash comp at the 66th percentile, equity that hasn't moved since 2020. You're being paid below market and told the difference is in the stock — the same stock that just spent six years proving it isn't. Anyone with an equal offer should already be gone. And if you're lucky enough to catch a severance package? Take it. It's the best-performing asset this company has issued in a decade.

The sales manager cowards have all awoken from their coffins and have been unearthed - they cannot handle the pressure from the CRO and are funneling down the pressure. New VP nice guy but dud and already rolling out day 0 day 1 day 30 day 90 forecasting methods starting August and he thinks this is going to fix the horrid decline of this abomination of a company. SRD Kb lost her marbles and never make her number once as rep or dir or SRd she fire so many reps and replace with all duds already selling nothing what a joke

they all are cowards now writing big AI gen threaten emails to engineers support staff sales everyone

these are all big joke ppl

cro is biggest joke the tech industry has ever seen nobody gives a rats a-s about him or his life story or troubles no one like you! Leave cro!

annual performance evaluations are out

What is the point in feedback sessions if it is always the same nonsense talking points then why take the time for a meeting.

Are you seeing any AI wins around you? It has been three and a half years since AI started appearing in every presentation deck at CDW. So, what have we actually accomplished? Where did all the energy, effort, focus, and money go? Oh, well.

How come the majority of EMG in Member Protection (aka Fraud/Disputes in the Bank) were promoted in the first half of the year (EDs to AVPs, and AVPs to VPs) but non-EMG employees can’t get basic promotions in place approved? Like seriously, you can’t get an employee promoted from a level 3 to a 2 or a 2 to a 1. They get denied or you hear nothing for months on end. Not even trying to get people into Lead position, just into positions that they should be in based on performance and experience and yet so many EMG have been promoted like nothing. Just because you don’t send out promotion emails doesn’t mean we don’t know or see it. Absolutely ridiculous!

Deals pushed. Numbers missed again.

Will the yearly bonus be better than last year or higher ?
Considering competitors are giving six figures bonus, it's time Seagate management and C suite steps up and gives a fair share to employees

Don't be greedy ba----ds like ASML who are offering 20k bonus vested over 4 years

Seagate management for years has not taken care of employees so this is your one time to show that you really care and actual "HEALING" can begin.

What was your RSU refresh after your Year End Conversations?

Please include your level and performance rating.

I've not looked into the annual reports but do we know how this debt is doing given the company has never done so well on paper?

they were gathering attendance statistics, how much we use Copilot, p4v activity. Do you know about some other statistics being gathered?

Senior management protects their turf, you do something to better the company like win a technology challenge and are told that you should have saved it for your own group and not shared it company wide. For that specific reason I have been canceled. No longer an e performer even though no one knows nearly how to do their job and comes running to me. I was told that I should be honored that many take my slides for their own presentations and not giving me credit.

I went to a competitor who now loves my work and also understands their competitive edge over fidelity

Whether a role can be performed effectively from home ultimately depends on the nature of the work itself.
In many cases, remote employees go above and beyond compared to their in-office counterparts. For example, when meetings are scheduled at 6:30 a.m., remote employees are generally expected to be online and fully engaged. This is particularly common for employees based on the West Coast who report to leadership teams on the East Coast. Remote employees also put more hours in work on an average.

Ironically, employees working from the office often benefit from greater visibility and more opportunities for informal interactions with leadership. Remote employees, on the other hand, frequently contend with the classic "out of sight, out of mind" challenge, which can impact recognition and career progression despite strong performance.

We certainly have skill issues, but attributing those issues to remote work misses the mark. The root causes lie elsewhere, and remote work is not the driving factor behind them.
If we're being objective, some of the weakest performers are sitting in Franklin Lakes, which makes it difficult to argue that location is the root cause of the problem.

Bumped from @fv+1kvtn2txr.

Lousy raises and no recognition for anyone, even the top performers. There's literally no reason to put in extra effort anymore.

We have people carrying the team while others do almost nothing. Why don't the layoffs ever target the right people?

I'd be fine with layoffs if they actually targeted the right people. But it's never been about performance. The best workers keep getting let go.

I'm so stressed about layoffs that I can't focus. As a result, I'm worried I'll end up getting cut because my performance is slipping. It's kind of funny in a terrible way.

Heard some senior folks talk about our high performing teams in terms of sports teams. It made me think about genuinely high performing sports teams - the ones who are given time to develop and train, given the best equipment, given support, given trust and empowered to perform and then I thought about XOM, the team on the field is despised by their managers, trying to perform with worse equipment each year, no support and a performance system that pits teammates against each other. I realised the sports team analogy is a pile of bullsh-t.

https://qz.com/google-workers-rally-layoff-protections-headquarters-071726

Among the petition's core demands: a severance guarantee for any worker who is laid off, the option of voluntary departures ahead of any mandatory cuts, the elimination of forced-distribution performance ratings, and the ability for employees to take their severance in the form of extended paid leave.

Too much to do and never enough time now. Once all these changes happen I can’t even imagine this scenario.

And the quarterly bonus… I’m not getting one… So much work done… So disappointing!!!
I’m sure I’m not the only one not getting one..
So disappointing when you’re looking forward to it and it’s not there!!!

GB - took over Nov 2017. Over her tenure, shareholder value has increased by an anemic 2.8%/year, membership by just 1.4%/year, and operating margins have cratered by 52%. Meanwhile, her annual compensation has steadily increased by 7%/year. Sounds like a “2” rating performance but a 4 or 5 compensation. Shareholders should ba----g on the BoD doors demanding her ouster. Wil never happen, since BoD is stacked with her pals.

The most amusing part of the article is the premise itself that IBM can re-achieve any sort of relevance after this decimation.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/ibm-stock-price-fall-sell-87657335

The blue chip’s biggest wipeout on record will force the company to reinvent itself—again.

By Mackenzie Tatananni |
Updated July 17, 2026, 4:27 pm EDT / Original July 17, 2026, 1:00 am EDT

IBM has been forced to reinvent itself many times in the past. After its biggest wipeout on record this past week, it will have to do so again.

Big Blue had been riding high. Yes, there were problems in consulting, as signaled by Accenture’s woes, and in software, tipped off by weakness in ServiceNow and its sector peers. But the stock was trading at an all-time high as recently as June 2 as investors looked at the company’s near-monopoly in mainframe computing, its quantum computing effort, and its prospects as an artificial-intelligence winner.

They were wrong. IBM stock tumbled 25% this past Tuesday, its worst single-day drop on record, following a rare pre-announcement of its quarterly results. Such a move is highly unusual for the company, which is traditionally disciplined when it comes to financial reporting. The last time IBM pre-announced earnings was in October 2008, in an effort to reassure investors it was on track to meet targets during the global financial crisis.

Investors faced a different reality this time around, as IBM posted second-quarter earnings and revenue that missed Wall Street forecasts. While there were plenty of problems—slowing software and consulting sales, a massive reallocation of technology spending by its customers to chips, servers, and other AI needs—the biggest drag on the company’s performance was its infrastructure business. That includes its legacy mainframes—the massive computers enterprises like banks and credit-card networks rely on to process billions of calculations and transactions in real time.

Big Blue is undoubtedly the dominant force in this space. A 2022 study by Celent, commissioned by IBM, found its Z Mainframe Servers line processed more than half of the world’s transactions by value. But that didn’t help the division’s performance during the second quarter. Infrastructure revenue fell, as expected, but the 7% decline was significantly faster and harder than IBM had anticipated. Not only did fewer companies buy the actual mainframe hardware, they also bought less of the high-margin software required for tasks like banking and credit-card payments.

CEO Arvind Krishna attributed the results to poor execution. “We did not adapt and move quickly enough, and numerous large deals failed to close on the timelines we expected, driving the majority of our shortfall,” he wrote in a letter to shareholders.

The 25% drop was massive—and partly justified, even as it erased nearly $70 billion in market capitalization. “The stock had become a crowded AI infrastructure winner and was trading near all-time highs, so any sign of execution issues was going to get punished,” says Dan O’Regan, managing director of equity trading at Mizuho Securities. “That said, a move of this magnitude suggests the market is now pricing in a much more prolonged slowdown than what management has implied.”

It didn’t help that analysts had set high expectations heading into the print. Morgan Stanley, for one, had predicted upside in infrastructure and software that was already priced into the stock. Oppenheimer, which downgraded the stock on Wednesday, had anticipated “no surprises in business trajectory,” making the sudden pre-announcement a true blindside.

Analysts were quick to move to the sidelines following IBM’s earnings miss, asserting that Big Blue would have to lean on major acquisitions or close deals that slipped past the quarter’s deadline to recover lost ground. Now Oppenheimer is questioning the company’s ability to achieve double-digit software revenue growth through 2027. The 5% growth in the latest quarter was sharply below the firm’s 12% estimate.

The bigger issue might be whether IBM’s infrastructure business itself is being disrupted. Even before Tuesday’s plunge, IBM stock had been lagging behind the broader market after stumbling earlier in the year as fears of AI disruption began to take hold. One of the most significant drops occurred in February, when AI start-up Anthropic unveiled a COBOL modernization playbook for its Claude Code tool, claiming it could dramatically streamline updates to the outdated programming language that runs on IBM mainframes. Historically, the immense complexity and cost of migrating off these systems protected IBM’s highly profitable mainframe business—a protective moat AI now threatens to dissolve.

IBM stock closed on Wednesday at 16.54 times 12-month forward earnings, its lowest price/earnings ratio since June 2024. But that says less about where IBM is now than where it was before. As recently as June 2, the stock was trading for more than 25 times, above the S&P 500’s 21.52—a premium valuation that might not have been deserved.

“Lower prices make an asset more attractive,” BNP Paribas analyst Stefan Slowinski says. “I just caution investors that, out of all the companies I cover, IBM probably has the lowest organic growth currently and the lowest organic growth outlook. That needs to be reflected in the valuation.”

Shares plunged 26% by Friday’s close, capping off their worst week in history. As tempting as it may be to scoop them up after such a tumble, IBM still has a lot of work to do.

In the worst-case scenario, investors fear that IBM’s enterprise clients—massive businesses with sprawling IT setups—are redirecting their budgets toward AI instead of Big Blue’s traditional offerings. At best, the company was simply caught off guard by a sudden capital expenditure shift, as Krishna asserted, and can reclaim that lost ground in coming quarters.

Slowinski is one of the most bearish voices on the Street, rating the stock at Underperform. “IBM’s strategy is to use its cash flow to acquire higher-growth software assets in order to improve its growth profile,” he says. “But it has a business in consulting, in software, in mainframe, where all of them are low-single-digit organic growers. And the prospects of that improving organically is very slim.”

As Mizuho’s O’Regan sees it, the setup from here depends less on the AI narrative and more on management proving it can consistently execute.

“The market wants proof that this is an execution stumble, not the beginning of a structural slowdown in demand,” O’Regan explains. “As a stock, the days of getting the benefit of the doubt are probably over for now.”

At least until the next metamorphosis begins to take shape.

Remember, the 52 week high and low are $37.42 and $82.62. Those are shocking results.

Any idea?

I don’t want Dan and Alfonso to get on stage next time and complain about the terrible customer experience on the app or mobile site.

They chose to retain the underperforming team while laying off smart people. How did they decide to keep Adam C over other Senior Directors? And Chris P’s underperforming team remains completely intact.

The buck stops with them going forward. They can’t blame the former leadership team anymore.

I find it highly oxymoronic (with the emphasis on mo--nic) that we have these departments that take their work so seriously, use unbelievable amounts of academic rigor to try and solve problems and come from the highest caliber business schools and academic institutions while we see stock prices in free fall and continuous service area exits and RIFs. Maybe things need to be simplified, not iterated with more rigor and wonderfully polished vocabulary in presentations. This place is full of contradictions.