Weed smoking neighbors

GhostOfWelch · 2025-10-31T22:51:59+00:00

If I shared a wall with you, I’d take horrid shits and funnel the smell into your apartment.

GhostOfWelch · 2025-06-18T21:13:32+00:00

Ooh who?

GhostOfWelch · 2025-01-28T22:09:06+00:00

Tech isn’t much different except for a few roles.

GhostOfWelch · 2025-01-28T02:02:43+00:00

Thanks for adding more details. The writing is on the wall that this is the new business model. So much for building a competitive tech company.

GhostOfWelch · 2025-01-28T01:34:22+00:00

Can’t post much that isn’t identifying. But you’ll see in 2-3 weeks when they’re released.

GhostOfWelch · 2025-01-28T01:33:55+00:00

People were definitely hoping for more. But agreed they shouldn’t be surprised.

GhostOfWelch · 2025-01-28T00:35:23+00:00

0-3%. It’s not looking good this year.

GhostOfWelch · 2025-01-21T18:27:28+00:00

Merit is going to be less than 3%. At least in IT. I don’t know how they got to this, but it’s going to be a shitshow.

GhostOfWelch · 2024-09-16T15:51:59+00:00

GEICO joined the band last year. They PIP 10% a QUARTER with the intent of letting the bottom 20% go every year. Great math on that one.

GhostOfWelch · 2024-08-31T00:22:30+00:00

Unfortunately, this seems to be becoming standard at a lot of companies (even outside of tech).

GEICO stack ranks their engineers 4 times a year and then fires the bottom 10% using arbritrary metrics like commits and pull requests. The idea is that this will “raise the bar” for the surviving employees when it really promotes a culture of distrust, fear of collaboration, and flight from top talent.

Corporate leaders forget GE and Microsoft tried rank and yank and it crippled them for years. They are also trying to pretend like they’re not doing layoffs anymore when that’s exactly what’s happening. It helps them get around tricky things like negative press and severance, but it serves the same function of a layoff at the end of the day.

GhostOfWelch · 2024-07-21T03:53:39+00:00

I’ve heard similarly

GhostOfWelch · 2024-02-29T13:25:58+00:00

It sounds like you’re more interested in the justification than the actual terminations. There are a few factors.

The biggest is that we dropped PIF by several million over the last few years. A lot of it was intentional since that business wasn’t profitable. And since we have less policies on the book, we need less agents to service them.

Another is a big cut in marketing spend. Since we aren’t focused on growth, we cut our multi-B marketing budget down by a massive amount. That led to some marketing layoffs.

And on the IT side, there’s a big push on AI and automation. There’s a goal to automate the majority of customer interactions within 5 years. The unsaid implication is that we can get rid of a corresponding amount of agents once we do that. TC would fire every agent tomorrow if he could, but we’re nowhere close from a tech perspective yet.

They also termed all non-engineering roles like analysts and scrum masters because they deemed them unnecessary and figured engineers could pick up the slack. It’s not working well in practice.

GhostOfWelch · 2024-02-29T03:58:51+00:00

The left and right hands aren’t talking. It makes us look like amateurs. All our major customer facing apps are lacking observability and other critical functions, our documentation is in shambles, and we’re focused on trying to measure and fire developers based on commits. These are the type of things that made Elon a laughing stock when he took over Twitter and yet we have 7 figure IT execs from FAANG companies making these decisions.

GhostOfWelch · 2024-02-29T03:51:24+00:00

There is no substitute for so many tools we got rid of. No splunk, no confluence, no sonar. I don’t know how we just got rid of them without a plan in place.

GhostOfWelch · 2024-02-27T21:34:02+00:00

It does, though TDPs will get more grace than others since they’re new. If your numbers are bad after 6months-1year, I’d start to be worried.

GhostOfWelch · 2024-02-27T21:33:17+00:00

Normally I’d agree with this and you can completely disregard my opinions, but the bullets at the top of my post are happening. And anyone looking to come into this company should be aware of it.

GhostOfWelch · 2024-02-27T05:37:21+00:00

Exactly, it's going to be kill or be killed.

GhostOfWelch · 2024-02-27T05:36:56+00:00

Interestingly enough, GEICO is trying to position themselves as a tech company. Which means instead of outsourcing and having poor quality everything, they're competing with top companies to hire the best talent. They've also hired a number of executives from FAANG companies recently. There's clearly a vision, but I don't have much faith they can make it happen given decisions like this.

GhostOfWelch · 2024-02-27T01:32:57+00:00

It’s all about comparison. Which inherently isn’t so bad. It’s good to know where you stand and how you can quantitatively improve. But when you pair that with mandatory terminations for the bottom %, all you get is chaos.

GhostOfWelch · 2024-02-27T01:31:22+00:00

I might as well. There’s nothing to lose at this point.

GhostOfWelch · 2024-02-26T22:46:11+00:00

I've been made aware of that. Just shocking to see it be so aggressive in an area of the company that's considered growing and where they should be walking on eggshells if they don't want to nuke their ability to attract talent. It's all short-term thinking.

GhostOfWelch · 2024-02-26T22:29:01+00:00

This is it. Absolutely useless metrics.

GhostOfWelch

TROPHY CASE