#organization

One of the most toxic IT leaders recently departed. This is, in my view, a direct consequence of the weak CIO hired by the previous CFO shortly before her own departure. The CIO subsequently pushed out most of the organization’s senior IT talent, leaving the team disproportionately reliant on the remaining toxic leadership. I would not be surprised if the broader IT organization were to unravel by year-end.

Big re-org in Ratnakar’s organization this week. My boss moved my 1:1 to Thursday morning at the last minute today. My spidey sense says I’m in trouble.

Anyone heard anything?

Look at anybody who has worked for Devon over the last 20 years and you will find one thing in common: Short tenure. Constant lay offs, re-organizations, a trail of management driven dysfunction all the way. Not a place where you can build a long career.

Best that one can hope for is a 7 to 10 year run and a severance at the end.

The CN org structure is crazy - random look at any org. I looked a Procurement - don't know a single person. VP head - 6 direct: 1 Sr Dir, 1 Dir, 2 Sr Mgr, 2 Mgr. Lets just look at that 1 Sr Dir - under is 1 Sr Mgr (3 under), 1 Mgr (2 under), 1 Dir (1 under), and 1 Sr Mgr (1 under - who is a Manger, who then has 1 under). The entire org has more Mgr's+ than people working under them. Think about this - who runs that org & how do they have a job? And if you think this is isolated -- it's not.

So help me understand, they got rid of bpSolutions and instead have instead made a big central organisation under Upstream HSE & Ops. One VP pre reorg to 6VPs post re-org. Surely the cottage industry has just shifted to satisfy some power hungry and egoistical characters. What is the point and what a disaster!

Every failed system in this organization has at least two architects attached to it.

Somehow, the more architects we add, the more legacy we create, the more bureaucracy we invent, and the slower engineering moves.

At this point, "Architect" feels less like a role and more like a witness to the crime.

The R2B leadership is more lost than Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles in a fun house. I have never seen this level of incompetence and desperation from a leadership team. Rumors are circulating about significant cuts to senior management and underperforming account managers, along with the possibility that whatever remains of R2B will be merged into B2B.

I can’t say I feel particularly bad for the bootlickers. A lot of people spent their time kissing the rings instead of building skills that translate outside the organization. Now some of them may be about to find out the hard way what the real world thinks their $100K corporate title is worth.

Since this is an anonymous posting. I would really to know who has been your biggest source of pain in the organization?

What does the future of the FP&A org look like at VZ? Any rumors?

My SVP confirmed with me that all remaining employees in the McElfresh organization are getting letters to move to Dallas next month. This will practically affect all remaining people under McElfresh in St Louis. The goal is to consolidate all operations in Dallas in preparation for the final move to Plano in 2028. It was fun while it lasted but I guess the machine comes for everyone at the end and all roads lead to Plano.

Where to begin? Are you looking for a masterclass in how to turn a talented team into a dysfunctional organization? Congratulations, you found it in the L3Harris talent acquisition organization!

Talent Acquisition should be strategic and proactive arm of a successful company. Instead, this feels like a live demonstration of what happens when leadership has big ideas but no strategy, opinions but no expertise, and meetings (so many meetings) but somehow still doesn't understand basic communication.

There is a remarkable disconnect between what leadership thinks is happening and what is actually happening. Decisions are made without input from the people doing the work, priorities change without explanation, and initiatives appear with little strategy, ownership, or understanding of execution. Don't even get me started on the metrics they make up on a whim with 0 insight or strategy.

The most impressive part is the confidence these "leaders" have. They repeatedly demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the problems they're responsible for solving and somehow remain completely convinced they're solving them.

Strategic planning seems to mean reacting to the latest fire or "urgent request from senior leaders" and then wondering why everyone isn't following a plan nobody actually understood.

Accountability? Apparently still in beta testing.

Communication isn't much better. Important information is unclear, inconsistent, delayed, or shared after decisions have already been made. Teams operate in silos, employees fill in the blanks, and knowledge sharing seems to depend on whether you happened to be invited to the right conversation.

For a TA organization, the lack of knowledge sharing is almost impressive and leadership is still at the helm, proudly steering a ship that has been sitting at the dock for years.

The frustrating part? There are genuinely talented people here. People who care about recruiting, candidates, the business, and doing great work.

Good luck

Etsy is implementing layoffs affecting approximately 12% of its workforce, totaling around 220 employees. This strategic move aims to simplify the company's structure and accelerate innovation in a competitive e-commerce landscape. The job cuts are intended to position Etsy for future growth and greater focus, rather than being a cost-saving measure. Most affected employees are from the product and engineering departments. The company's CEO stated these changes are necessary to build the organization for Etsy's next phase of development.

New York, New York

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/05/etsy-layoffs-q2-earnings.html

Is there any date or month when the rebadging is expected to happen? Which organization(s) will be moved?

I don't understand how our org chart makes any sense. Why do so many people/groups report up to people that aren't really in their same area of work, or region for that matter? I can see cross-region reporting when it makes sense, but it doesn't always. Person/group A reports up to person/group B who does something else entirely. Meanwhile, there is a 100% related person/group C who does what A does and seems to be a logical fit. Why is this? I see it a lot.

How can moving to limited pools of employees around centres of excellence, improve a company? I call BS. They are winding OT down.

PepsiCo is following suit with the US Administration and eliminating minorities and women from the organization! Intelligence and loyalty mean nothing to this company any longer. Looking at the org charts is like looking at a vanilla ice cream cone with a very light dusting of dark chocolate sprinkles.

Based on my experience, I would encourage candidates to do thorough research before accepting a position. During my interactions with the company, I came away with concerns about leadership, the hiring process, and the organization’s direction. The interview process felt disorganized and left me with little confidence in how the company was being managed. Given the recent layoffs, I would carefully consider the stability of the role before making a decision.

It's nearly 3 months late at this point

Why are there so many H1Bs still working in the CSO organization? Why can't they be replaced with experiences US Citizens?? This is what this company betrays the great USA on its 250th birthday???

PM gone. LSS is the largest part of PA. Hard to figure out why.

Why the F do we have a Chief Growth and success officer?

We're so top heavy its laughable now

What an embarassing situation for them.

Ok, throw out your best guesses…. -_-

Why is no one talking about all the org changes today effective July 1 impacting Medicare? Anyone think this will lead to yet more layoffs?

Why have we not changed organization structure to help Paramount+ technology?

So many groups and layers - I don’t think we need product and technology enablement team in VBG. Let’s be honest …

There's a certain art to building a data and technology organization that looks busy, costs a fortune, and produces almost nothing of lasting value. It doesn't happen by accident. It takes years of careful hiring, deliberate avoidance of accountability, and an unshakeable commitment to calling everything a win. Having observed this craft up close, I feel obligated to document it — if only so future generations know what not to do.

Welcome to the Bank data organization. Pull up a chair. Try not to trip over the unused pipelines.

The Architects of Mediocrity: JK and TD

Every great dysfunction starts at the top, and ours is no exception.

JK — EMG — is, by all accounts, a pleasant man. Genuinely. He smiles, he travels to the office locations, he checks in, he goes back home. Remote, of course. He was hired by a senior EMG a few years back, not because of any particular expertise in data or analytics, but because of the time-honored tradition of hiring people you already know and like. He came in with a VP title inflated from a Director-level role at his previous company — a clever move to give him parity with the business-side VP he'd be working alongside.

In over three years, he has produced exactly zero vision or roadmaps. Not a draft. Not a napkin sketch. Nothing. His leadership philosophy, as best as anyone can tell, is: trust your people, avoid politics, and don't make waves. Noble in a yoga studio. Catastrophic in a technology organization.

TD is the other half of this leadership duo — the one who actually knows technology, or at least knows how to talk about it. Specifically, he knows how to talk about Capital One. If you've ever wondered what it was like to work at Capital One circa whenever he was there, just ask him. Any meeting, any problem, any question — "At Capital One, we did it this way." He is smart. That's not the issue. The issue is that being smart and leading well are two very different skills, and he has fully committed to only one of them.

Together, these two have built a leadership culture where looking busy is rewarded, spending budget is celebrated, and asking "but what value does this actually deliver?" is considered rude.

TD's Cabinet of People Leaders

Under TD, you'll find a collection of leaders who share one common trait: they care deeply about their people in the most technically useless way possible.

LA has been with the organization for forty years. Forty. Years. In that time, she has apparently absorbed very little about data, technology, or how to lead an engineering team. What she brings to the table is unclear to most observers, including, one suspects, she herself.

BK runs the platform team, which does legitimately solid work — Snowflake optimization, platform oversight, the kind of stuff that actually matters. The catch? It only matters for the Bank. The same work that could be driving cost savings across every line of business in the association stays neatly siloed because TD likes having a showcase team. Why share the glory? Why scale the savings? That would be efficient, and efficiency doesn't make you look as important.

SK is officially a strategy leader. In practice, she is an executioner who has confused the two. She runs what she believes is a strategy team, propped up by strong engineers who do the actual heavy lifting. She is also the department's most reliable source of complaints — about her team, about leadership, about the general state of things — all delivered faithfully in meetings where decisions are supposed to be made. The irony of a "strategy leader" who reacts rather than plans appears to be lost on her. She has mastered a different kind of influence: the victim narrative.

JK's Bench: Where Careers Go to Coast

If TD's side is a people-leadership museum, JK's side of the org is where engineering standards go to retire early.

MJ came in as a project manager. Through a combination of timing, access to the right interim leader, and sheer persistence, she ascended to Director. She does not know how to run a project. She does not know how to manage a team. She does know how to be present when a vacancy appears, which, it turns out, is enough.

MW is perhaps the most complete embodiment of the organization's dysfunction. His job security, many believe, owes something to the fact that his wife is an AVP on the Bank application side. His team's job security owes something to the fact that businesses keep asking for things and he keeps building them — no questions asked. One file. One expensive data pipeline. One expensive Tableau dashboard. One "big win." Repeat indefinitely. Nobody asks whether the business actually needed it. Nobody asks if the data supports a decision or just decorates a meeting. The business asked. he built it. Done.

GB is a long-tenured director who is — genuinely — a great project/department finance manager. This note is not sarcastic. he is kind, approachable, and his engineers feel heard....again to only those reporting to him. Unfortunately, feeling heard is not the same as getting better at your job, and he offers nothing in the way of technical guidance.

The MVP - DM deserves his own paragraph, possibly his own chapter. He is a director who has reduced technology leadership to a single question: how do I spend this budget before someone takes it away? He leads many teams and many of them does not add meaningful value to the Bank. His genius, if you can call it that, is his unwavering belief that having a budget and spending a budget are the same thing as delivering value.

The Engineer Problem Nobody Wants to Solve

Here is the uncomfortable truth underneath all of this: approximately 75% of the engineers in this organization do not have deep technical skills in the data they support. The workflow is simple — an analyst writes code, the engineer wraps it in a pipeline, and everyone celebrates. That's it. That's the whole thing.

This is partly a legacy issue. The previous executive, AD, forced higher employee contractor ratio, which leaders took a short cut through heavy H1B visa hiring. The result is a large workforce where many engineers are underutilized, underdeveloped, and scrambling for meaningful work. The right response to this would be right-sizing the team, investing in skills development, and building a leaner, higher-output organization.

The actual response has been for JK and TD to go back to the business every year, ask for more budget, get it, spend it on more of the same, and call it growth.

The Members Nobody Is Thinking About

Let's not forget who this organization ultimately exists to serve: the members of the association. Real people. People whose financial lives depend on this institution making good decisions with their money — including decisions about how to invest in technology.

Every reckless pipeline, every budget-hoarding director, every people manager who can't coach an engineer, every roadmap that was never written — it all trickles down. Not to JK. Not to TD. To the members.

Nobody in a leadership meeting appears to be asking: does this help our members? It is, perhaps, the most damning thing of all.

This isn't just a rant. Here's the contrast that makes all of this so frustrating:
A roadmap. Any roadmap. One with a direction.
Technology leaders who can actually mentor engineers.
A shared services model that scales good work across lines of business.
Budget tied to outcomes, not to the fear of losing it.
Engineers who are challenged, developed, and given real problems to solve.
A leadership question asked in every meeting: how does this help our members?

None of this is radical. None of this is expensive. It just requires leadership that came to lead — not to coast, not to protect territory, not to spend budget for the sake of it.

Until then, the pipelines will keep getting built. The dashboards will keep getting launched. And somewhere, a business analyst will hand an engineer a script, and someone will call it a win.

Word through the grapevine is that this is a newly formed committee that makes the decision on whether or not to approve any positions and increases in compensation.

If your team needs a position, it has to go all the way up the approval chain and then be presented by the Chief of your organization to Drew Asher and whatever other finance people are in the committee...

Allegedly, it's now an "act of God" to get promotions and raises outside of moving internal positions. They want us to take on more work with even less people.

I see a lot of us leaving on our own accord if we make it through this mass layoff... I know for a fact I will be looking. I'm not about to ki-l myself over a job...

Some organizations may benefit from exploring manager rotations before layoffs, ensuring decisions are based on business needs rather than politics.

If every 10 employees lose 3 positions while management remains unchanged, the organization should also evaluate manager-level roles. Workforce reductions should be based on efficiency and business needs at every level—not only on frontline employees. A balanced approach creates fairness, accountability, and a leaner organization.

Back to the subject of this site, what is the current landscape of RAs and pips everyone is currently seeing out there? Including business unit and organization would be helpful in response.

First principles are the foundational, irreducible truths of a system that cannot be deduced any further. SNPS is a software company that depends on selling software for profits. So the first principles of the company are those who write codes and those who sell the software. Anything else should serve these two principles: reduce distraction, provide a comfortable working environment, and give them good compensation.

However, at SNPS, these 2 groups are the ones who are mostly ignored and suppressed. When management flips the organizational hierarchy, bureaucracy cannibalizes the engineers who build the product and the sales professionals who generate revenue. Every supporting department—from middle management to HR—should exist solely to optimize this pipeline, not obstruct it. Losing sight of this foundational truth triggers immediate organizational decay. This is the root cause of extreme low productivity compared with our competitors.

This structural inversion creates dangerous consequences for the company's market position. High-performing talent does not stay where it is marginalized. When top-tier developers and elite sales executives face hostility, they leave for competitors who respect first principles. The company is then left with a culture of compliance rather than innovation, where survival depends on pleasing managers rather than creating superior products or winning market share.

To see this reality clearly, it is worthwhile to pause and count the people around you. Ask yourself: how many actually write code? How many engage in real sales? And how many do nothing but to make their managers happy? When the talkers outnumber and outrank the doers, a company has abandoned its first principles.

At SNPS, It's not uncommon that an IC sits in the 8th or 9th layer in the reporting structure. We, the front line engineers, don't need so many nannies and care givers.

This is such a scandal driven organization. Not too long ago, we had Wolfe and his peeps running around Engage. Now we have new SVP who did nothing but politics to get to this level. We observed how he set up Wolfe leading to his demise. At the same time is constantly busy running his own LLC and staffing company. I was just around him in Alpharetta when he was running his own business on his personal phone. Kinda gave 3 of us a look when we overheard a bit. He does not know It’s widely known too. Sharan Consultancy LLC. Look it up who owns it. What kind of global organizations SVP runs his private business and devotes time during work hours while gives us the speech that CEO has told him to make this the no 1 company.

Some also know a lot about this business including direct competitor to LNW. It’s gotten so bad that he has created a working group of people running his own LLC making competing product with LNW. Nothing diff than what Wolfe did and we have to constantly get the “you su-k” from customers. And using LNW resources. Suddenly a bunch of people don’t have to travel due to it.

And how about Sharan and HCL relationships. HCL is the vendor for LNW. And nobody gets hired until SVP gets his cut.

This is going to be another scandal, soon.

Wolfe had his last laugh and Palanisamy follows.

How do MMM’s contributions to the Marketing org stack up? Are we driving progress in the right areas within GMS, TC, VM and ISM?

So the legal lady comes in to clean up the mess after CG doesn't "do the right thing." But the whole function is worse than ever. What gives? Where is the talent brains and skill in the org spending all this $$$? Are we really going to win this way?

I was very optimistic when Dan joined and started cleaning up the organization by weeding out ineffective leaders and dead weight.

However, the needle still isn’t moving. They haven’t even restructured the teams into the right size or organizational model. Everything feels chaotic. I feel like time is running out for him—it’s already been eight months.

Meg just announced the structure of the new Organisation

“From )1 July, we will move to an Upstream and Downstream operating model, replacing our current structure of Production & Operations (P&O), Gas & Low Carbon Energy (G&LCE), and Customer & Products (C&P).”

Now - here is where the jokers lay:

GB is now “EVP, Upstream”
RH is “interim” EVP, Downstream

These are the only two gents listed so far…