Thread regarding American Electric Power Co. Inc. layoffs

If you own AEP stock, show up at the annual shareholders meeting and ask her about it. Be that would cause some fireworks. Actually everyone who was layed off should buy one share and show up. As a stock holder I don't think they can stop you from attending. Be great to see about 300 people show up in the meeting. Get there early to get a front row seat.

I just receieved my anniversary congratulatory book in the mail. I was part of this layoff. Is this some sort of sick joke? Julie is a unique POS. Someone give me a connection so that I can cause MAXIMUM PR damage and watch them publicly writhe.

Depending on which publication you read, Icahn is either a corporate raider or an activist shareholder that comes in to get the most value out of a company. As a raider, one says he comes in with a heavy hand against the Board and CEO. It will be interesting to see which Carl shows up at AEP. Time will tell if more layoffs are on the horizon. Personally I don't think he's in it for the long haul.

@vxrf+1qB6FXi3 Swick needed to go. He was an absentee CSO at best with no management over his org. We have architects that aren't architecting. People who don't log in. Managers that are useless at best. Then some teams that are just there to be there (architect and engineering). Swick relied on Parcel to do all the managing for him. Everyone knows Parcel only cares about one team from his org.

The entire management structure in cyber needs to go and be replaced along with TR and her mafia. AEP should be led by leaders.

The only reason why AEP has not forced all of IT back to the office is because IT leadership lives outside of Ohio and have no desire to move here. If the do replace TR with someone in the local area and that person wants everyone in the office, you'll see a mass Exodus of the retail gang as soon as they line up another remote position. I just don't see them moving to Columbus. It's easier to tell someone you're fired over Teams than to look the person in the eye and do it. Or they let HR do it. Either way, just a bunch of cowards.

Given the strong market response since the Icahn board seat announcement, it’s clear the market agrees the current leadership needs help and can benefit from changes. Honestly, I’m kind of looking forward to the scramble in the coming months. Hopefully they quickly root out the cancer and take care of it. Of course that’ll likely come with a golden parachute, but at least this is an opportunity for someone to do something about poor leadership. Hiding behind your cronies and the remote work designation probably won’t last much longer….hopefully.

Everyone knows what the problem is but are powerless to do anything about it. TR is the cancer that has infected the organization and is slowly ki-ling it. Once the host is dead, she'll move on to another company and repeat the same plan. Until there is serious repercussions for people like her, she'll continue to do it over and over again. Ie a lawsuit that calls her out personally but it'll take someone with a good case to hang her out to dry. Everyone knows Sanjay put his thumb on the scale for TCS and he didn't do that without her support. In the end, he took one for the team. Look how he was released vs Steve Swick. One man with a lot of integrity and the other supporting the Medusa of IT.

TR and/or group supporting her is allowing the same repetitive play from Target, Huntington Financial, and Penny's. Come in with a financial plan to save/return money to the investor, root TCS, Massive layoffs, huge bonuses for cost savings and then bounce (hopefully). If searched, TCS was the cause for the massive Target data breach. Huntington IT and support was destroyed and JCPenney was a quick buck while waiting for the next victim to infect. I think this could be the work of an executive employment group with a motive and maybe some connections to board members. Plenty of records and reviews to put things together from different angles. It's amazing how many employee reviews are posted from almost 10 years ago with the other companies she touched. See below for just one of many Huntington financial review on Glassdoor... This is the work of the "playbook"....From 2015!!!! Sound familiar?

Mar 13, 2015
Pros
Zero. Unless you worked with Therace Risch before being fired from Target.
Cons
Did you know Country Financial is the new Tget? Yes, the one who compromised mllions of customers personal data. "Meet Therace Risch, COUNTRY Financials new CIO..." straight from Target...and she's hiring all her cronies from the Target debacle. In a 15 minute, spur of the moment meeting, Risch announced to 76 long time employee's, without notice, that they are bing replaced with outside contractors. Oh, but they do get to stay 30 days and train the replacement trolls. Is this another financial crisis with identity theft in the near futured I mention they are planning on outsourcing all project testing positions to India? ......

AEP = rich people helping rich people Disguised as DEI and ESG.

The last comment was dead on. The retail gang is so dead set to blame anything that goes wrong on a long time FTE so they have an excuse to fire them. But one day Karma will catch up with them. Or at least I hope so. Sick of these retail id--ts who know absolutely jack running IT into the ground.

Retaliation is alive and well at AEP.

Icahn getting on the Board spells trouble. Look for more layoffs if this guy puts pressure on the Board to up the Dividends. He's no angel for most investors and certainly not to the employees and customers.

Results for 2023 and the 1st quarter are going to have a major impact on IT, and not in a good way. I would think the company would put together another round of layoffs and that would hit IT again. Not sure how much more you can cut but as the other guy said, the gang of 8 will do everything to protect themselves and put TCS on the hook to cover for any short comings.

Looking at the out flow of employees above and beyond the layoffs is going to increase over this year. You can only ask people to be loyal and have it be a one way street for so long. I think the older employees will retire if able to do. Younger employees will look for better employers and the rest will leave the majority of the work to TCS. I'm just not sure who's worse, TCS or TR, right now it's neck and neck.

To add to all of this mess, hiring and promotions are designed to only be decided by TR and a VP. The Interview boards are a joke and waste of time when they already know who they are going to hire or promote. To me this is far from equal opportunity. My manager (part of the retail group) explained to me that when they post your job for promotion they already know and design it for a specific person they have in mind. With the financial mess we are in, holding promotions is just another way they are saving money.

@flmx+1qB6FXi3 I think security has done enough themselves. No vision. No unified architecture. Every team out for themselves. So many endpoints that our laptops run like cr-p. It won't get better with DS calling the shots.

Either you're numb from it, you don't care because the company doesn't care or you bought into the garbage that TR sold to the Board. She came in saying she was going to transform IT. Like every good leftist liberal, she has to sc--w it up so bad first before someone else will need to come in and fix it. The layoffs was her way of covering up her mistakes. Next on the list will be a breach of some sort that has a major impact on the company. She doesn't know anything about security and is about to sc--w that up just like Target

A layoff of 15% of IT could only muster 81 comments.

@8mkd+1qB6FXi3 6 sandboxes and counting.

Lessons were not learned. Cyber is already back to incinerating money. Sorry to those laid off because of them.

TR and her cronies love to keep people in the dark for as long as possible. Still no org chart released after a week. Even retail managers should know how to put together an org chart, it's not that hard. It really just shows the rest of the company, you have no clue to what is going on. TCS has a few more years on their contract, my guess TR will leave the year before it comes up for renewal. I don't think she'll want to be anywhere near when that happens. If you were following her on LinkedIn, you should stop. I think the one guy was right, a few hundred bad reviews on Glassdoor might make the next company think twice of hiring her, so don't do it. AEP needs to get rid of her sooner than later.

This is a good time for anyone that's left in IT to just do your 40 hours, or less and peace out every week. Stop putting in 80 hours to these leeches. Stop training TCS, pointless anyways.

I didn’t take the talk of the dividend seriously until I went and looked at it and saw it was greater than 4.5% yield at the current stock price. That’s significant.

It’s crazy to me they started tying employee incentives and messaging directly to the dividend. Yes the money all comes out of earnings or cash flow but it should be Customers Employees and the Shareholders. Not Customer Shareholders then Employees.

That dividend is a blood dividend now as far as I’m concerned. Because now they’re coming at the employees expense and not from the ability to make customers happy.

Therace came in and sold her vision and plan to use good employees as sacrificial flesh for the insatiable appetite of investors.

Guess what. The institutional owners and investors can deal with less of a dividend…

The second you start making moves for the shareholders in spite of the employees the management deck needs shuffled. Therace won’t last long enough to be held accountable for results of the cheap outsourced teams.

But I’m sure these three letter companies are wooing, wining and dining her and her posse feeding into their delusion that the world couldn’t exist in its normal state without them.

It’s the corporate cutting narcissism and bloodlust that AEP was actually making great strides in avoiding specifically in IT dept between 2015-2020.

Wow, the entire forum section devoted to chatter about work and job cuts in AEP, and I almost missed it.
I landed here through a shared link a few days ago. I've been checking it ever since, only to realize today that this isn't the only thread here.
How on earth did I miss that the big blue link in the headline above saying “Thread regarding American Electric Power Co. Inc. layoffs” actually leads to the forum is beyond me.
Not many threads there yet, but I have a feeling that’s about to change soon.

https://techworkerscoalition.org/

Gee, I’m hearing that there’s a lot of flu, colds, etc going around. It would be really terrible if everyone had to be off at the same time.

@5fzp+1qB6FXi3 Don't blame IT for antique software. If it was up to us, we would have replaced the software years ago. The BUs have to pony up the money to replace those systems, not IT. We're stuck supporting 8 but software that some BU says they can't live without. All we can do is shake out head and say ok. It's like time reporting systems, there over 15 different time reporting systems at one time, there should be one but some BUs will tell you that the main one doesn't work for them or for contractors so IT is left holding the bag supporting multiple time systems. So don't blame IT, look at the BUs to leave the 20th century and please enter the 21st before we hit the 22nd.

IT??? I’m sorry guys but the writing has been on the wall for awhile. IT has been horrible for the past 10yrs. Arcos doesn’t work and never will lol. Spectrum has been around for ever and barely works anymore. You want use to go work storm with sh-t that doesn’t work!
We were actually surprised that we still even had IT people available.

"AEP is an electric power company, not an IT company, so IT is viewed as an expense. Same for every other industry except for the software/computing industry itself. Filipkowski was interim head of IT for about 2 years until Nick Aikens and the board found the right person who would cut IT costs. Risch must have promised that in her interview.
The board doesn't care that IT jobs are going to India or Brazil (and they may not even know), they just want to see IT spending go down. "

Response: Yeah that makes perfect sense till we're breached, have our name in the media, and get fined more than we spend on IT / Security for years by NERC in a single incident, not to mention the actual harm that could happen to our nation's power grid. We are NOT an expense. We're the cost of paying for a dam to prevent a flood.

Pre Therace we had a really good culture at AEP. The problem was the costs weren't reigned in and there were philosophical differences amongst the mid and senior level managers that prevented the emergence of a better way of working from evolving and succeeding. Not all companies can meet the challenges of today. Therace was a bad hire that will infringe AEP's growth for years. The problem is now harder to solve when you have all of these consulting companies with their heads buried into your skin running your company with a clench on your nads. Good luck AEP. You were great during the teens.

IT and cyber security are losing so much talent because of these layoffs. I'm not just talking about the people with 10 or 20 years or more at the company who were let go. I'm talking about the secondary effects these layoffs are having. The general atmosphere in IT and cyber security now is that AEP is a sinking ship. Anyone with marketable skills is getting out while they can.

Over the past 2 months we've had a significant number of people in key positions quit for new opportunities elsewhere. And thanks to the hiring freeze and budget cuts we're unable to fill those positions. The end result is that the people who remain are overworked and undervalued which is driving them to also leave. It's a vicious cycle.

The damage that AEP is doing to its IT and cyber security organizations will far outlast Therace's tenure at AEP. But as long as that arrow is green next quarter that's all that matters, right?

I wonder if the costs they cut by letting people go are greater than the costs of all the fancy new promotions to SVP and VP they announced on the same day.

@4oid+1qB6FXi3 But costs are going up because they are incoimpetant.

AEP is an electric power company, not an IT company, so IT is viewed as an expense. Same for every other industry except for the software/computing industry itself. Filipkowski was interim head of IT for about 2 years until Nick Aikens and the board found the right person who would cut IT costs. Risch must have promised that in her interview.
The board doesn't care that IT jobs are going to India or Brazil (and they may not even know), they just want to see IT spending go down.

What came first: CEO wanting to outsource IT or Therace selling AEP on the idea for her and her posse to come clean house? Upvote if you mostly blame this on Therace. Downvote if you mostly blame with on Nick.

You assume that the management of any corporation that purchases AEP would be as incompetent as that of AEP itself. There's no way that's possible. The purchaser would already have its ducks in a row before the regulators even hear about the sale.

There is a theme in most of these comments, TR runs the CITO org into the ground with what she sold as co-sourcing when everyone knew it was out sourcing because you were told to train TCS to do your job. The fact they could sit in meetings and lie with a straight face is beyond me. TCS techs are some of the worse people I've worked with from a technical level. I'm sure it beats working in a scam call center but not much.

re: "All this was is getting rid of people who refuse to show up for work." How are they refusing to show up for work when they are already classified as remote? Most (or all?) of the IT groups were moved out of the tower and Gahanna and made remote a couple of years ago to make room for hybrid/full-time BU departments moved from locations in Gahanna, Arena Building downtown, New Albany, etc. to the tower to save money. Very few hybrid employees have been let go and they are the ones fighting/resisting coming to the office - especially because of an abrupt increase last year in the number of days they were required to be there. Things like groups approved for 1-2 days/wk or 1-2 days/month and were following that (and hired people in the past few years with that understanding), but then were told with one month's notice that it was changing to 3 days/wk for the sake of "collaboration" and with no exceptions or delays. It was a B.S. reason, and the timing was right before kids summer break and a number of parents were stuck rushing to make last minute daycare changes or sign ups for summer camps - and that can be hard to find. Pretty much everyone believes the change was due to tax issues with Columbus - and hey, you can argue AEP has to make those kinds of decisions for the sake of the business - but come on - they talk about a culture of transparency ALL the time, so walk the walk and quit feeding us stupid lies. Everyone knows that the vast majority of people were more efficient and happy about doing their jobs at home for the majority of the week - unless you think having people constantly chatting, taking long breaks at the cafe, and being in generally bad moods regarding their company for 3 of their 5 workdays is a positive development. One day per week was good for our group output - people were happy to see their co-workers and get certain things done that were better face to face. When there were new employees to be on-boarded people showed up in person for additional days to help out and tutor/train - it was flexible and made sense. It's been about 9 months now and none of the time wasting, constant interruptions, and general unhappiness has improved. Some of us actually used to try and make up for the lost time by logging on in the evening to work, but we've gotten to the "sc--w that" stage. Also - I think there was a person that commented on how the people left here never want to call the Helpline anymore - and our groups talk about this CONSTANTLY. You run into the language barrier and clear lack of IT knowledge - I'm BU but I freaking know more than them - and we also are in shock that when we call, we can hardly HEAR them - because I kid you not - there are dogs barking, babies crying, and cars honking in the background constantly. I've NEVER, not once, had my ticket routed to the correct group on the first time so you waste time dealing with that. Those of you in IT that have been let go over the past few years, please know that all of the BU's are with you and miss you, and we complain all the time to our management to send that information up the chain. But I will say this - some of us have had to temper the way we express our disappointment with the situation. I actually had a note in my last performance review about it - that I needed to be careful with what I say, because our negativity about the situation could affect the younger people/newer employees perceptions of the company, etc. We have had many younger employees leave or transfer - we spend the time training them, etc. and then as soon as they have some marketable experience and can do things on their own - BAM, they leave - and we have to start all over again. Uh, no - that's not because of my comments - it's because they want fewer in-office days or fully remote like they were promised when hired - and they also don't see any evidence that they'd have a chance of a long career here, or the fact that in many groups promotions have been pretty much non-existent for years. AEP banks on the fact that the longer term people with the most experience (at least the ones they don't inexplicably dump) won't leave because it's too much of a disruption/risk to their families and careers - and for the most part AEP wins on that front. They also bank on the fact that we still give way more effort than we should, due to our loyalty and care for our direct co-workers. I know IT guys laid off over a year ago that STILL help their old friends at the company when disasters occur (some of which were caused by TCS and their lack of competency). The people that have been around the longest know it didn't always feel this way - we felt valued and a lot of loyalty to the company - even for a long time after it began to degrade. However, we all recognize now that we are easily disposable and it's just really depressing.

Everyone blaming Therace but let’s not forget who hired her. CEO with guidance from the board. Wonder if this would have happened sooner if not for COVID. It was the plan all along. Did the expense of charge push the executives over the edge??

AEP is making more than enough money. All this was is getting rid of people who refuse to show up for work. Good luck.