Comment by mikeweiss
3 hours ago
For those who weren't aware: Verizon got a new CEO late last year and laid off 15% of the workforce (15,000 people). This included people working in network, IT and cyber security.
3 hours ago
For those who weren't aware: Verizon got a new CEO late last year and laid off 15% of the workforce (15,000 people). This included people working in network, IT and cyber security.
15% seems like the magic number. It seems like many corporations layoff approximately that fraction of their workforce; it's hard to believe it's coincidence.
Everyone is always so negative about these outages, but if we look at the details we see it was a win as long as they maintain 85% up time.
Is there a substantive connection?
Like all the doom and gloom after the Twitter layoffs predicting the site would implode and go permanently offline "within a month" which...never happened.
It's also ironic in the sense it implies the indignant people were so bad at their jobs they designed and built a system so fragile it would collapse without constant intervention from thousands of individuals.
You do realize it's possible for an organization to be overstaffed?
This is unrealistic and seems to be biased by some kind of broad un-focused hostility. Yes, maybe they were overstaffed. But it's reasonable to suspect that leadership overcut, given the current climate and the number being 15,000. Your characterization of Twitter predictions relies on cherry-picking and ignores the actual impacts, and there's no evidence that the system goes down without "constant" intervention from "thousands". Your tone also implies that large, complex systems, even if designed well, don't normally require a lot of maintenance from many people.
>Your tone also implies that large, complex systems, even if designed well, don't normally require a lot of maintenance from many people.
That's correct.
In the case of Twitter, it was disclosed that many of their systems were running out of date EOL software, to the point of being a security liability, which raises the question: if the systems weren't being maintained, wtf were all those people doing? Taste-testing the free food and cappuccinos?
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Verizon is a traditional for-profit telco. Not some VC funded startup trying to hit a burn rate. Very unlikely they were overstaffed by 15k, sounds more like overzealous cost-cutting to hit a quarterly target.
Slight sarcasm ahead—fair warning.
When Twitter did, its CEO may have slept at the office for weeks to make sure problems were resolved.
On the other hand, the Verizon CEO may be shopping for a new boat
> the doom and gloom after the Twitter layoffs predicting the site would implode and go permanently offline "within a month" which...never happened.
Many think Twitter has imploded, though it's online.
> You do realize it's possible for an organization to be overstaffed?
It's possible to be understaffed or appropriately staffed. Anything is possible!
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If you’ve got 100k people to run something that should run essentially on autopilot, you’ve got much deeper problems where merely laying off selected chunks of people will no longer help. The whole company is rotten and the only way is to start from scratch and not make the mistakes that led you to accumulate 100k people.
I can't even begin to imagine what those 100k people actually do. For starters, none of the telcos actually develop their own equipment - they buy pre-made from vendors like Ericsson. Often that includes ongoing maintenance too. The only "engineering" is building the back-office and customer-facing UIs, and even that is often outsourced (as a rule of thumb, if something can be outsourced, telcos will do it: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/).
Customer service might be part of that number (assuming that too isn't outsourced), but even then 100k feels extreme.
10k is ok although leaning on the more bloated side. But 100k?
Telco infra runs on autopilot?
This is really taking the whole "I could build Dropbox in a weekend" style comments to a new level.
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It does if you have no idea how it works.
Erlang fault-tolerance FTW! ;-)
Almost; you need maintenance and monitoring but that doesn't take anywhere near 100k people - assuming they even use their own headcount for this instead of just outsourcing maintenance to their equipment vendor.
Big Tech companies operate much more complex systems (for starters, they actually build greenfield stuff instead of buying ready-made equipment from a vendor and plugging it in) and have way less headcount.
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Obviously, you know exactly how to run a major telecomm operation ten times as efficiently as the dominant operator in the most prosperous nation on earth — you are wasting your skills and should absolutely be given funding to disrupt them and make Billions!! What is holding you back from joining the Oligarchs?
Have you considered that the inefficiency is a feature and provides cushy jobs for a lot of people and subcontractors? But yes, a modern telco can absolutely be run more efficiently if you operate it like a tech company and don't have to deal with decades of legacy sludge (whether bloated headcounts or heterogenous legacy infrastructure you have to support).
The problem is that this is a culture problem and once a company is ossified it is really hard to enact such change from the inside even if you wanted to because everyone enjoys the status quo (and who doesn't wouldn't be there to begin with).
Another example: have you seen the UK & EU banking scene and the boom of fintech and "neobanks" around 2017 like Revolut, Monzo, Starling, N26, etc? They managed to build from scratch on relatively shoestring budgets their own implementation of a consumer bank, something that their legacy competitors still can't replicate despite having way more budget and resources.
Unfortunately, the telco world is an oligopoly and they don't like new entrants (banking in the UK was actually a much more level playing field in comparison), so we can never actually see an experiment that proves or disproves my theory.
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The problem with being a nationwide ISP - and Verizon runs mobile phones, fiber and all kinds of other stuff - is that you need lots of hands across the country. A lot of stuff can be done remotely and with automation, but often enough you still need actual physical hands on site, and you can't just say "eh, we'll come around tomorrow, we can't make it there faster".
Also 'Verizon' is not really one company. It is 2. Telco and wireless. Each of those is a mashup of dozens of other phone companies VZ gobbled up over the years. With tech stacks going back decades. At one point while I worked there about 10 years ago they were running the 56k dialup for AOL. They also run a decent amount of stores. They are not going to automate a retail store in the same way you would amazon. You have to have people standing there. Then there is the "i need to talk to someone about why my phone keeps doing weird things" helpdesks/servicedesks. Then the line workers like you point out. Plus the backend people who might be able to work from home. But only if they are not in a secure area working (they have lots of that). That 15k of people was probably the result of several big projects that were scaling up but didnt work out. They have all sorts of projects to try to 'monetize the last mile they own'. Almost all fail.
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