DXC Technology utters words 'hiring' and 'digital' 105 times in Q3 earnings car-crash DXC Technology's trigger-happy CEO mentioned the word "hire" or "hiring" 27 times during last night's conference with financial analysts. It's almost as if Mike Lawrie was trying to make a point. As for his use of the term "digital" – he uttered it a full 78 occasions. The exec picked up the blower to explain why his business …
The most telling thing in this call was how the analysts went back to being pussycats after last Q's savaging. They had Mikey and Pauly on the back foot last time.
Now, a mere 12 weeks later they are all calm and content again... but nothing has changed.
DXC can't change a lightbulb in 12 weeks, let alone its own global enterprise.
But lets not rock that share price eh Wall Street....
"This, El Reg is sure, will bring some comfort to the workforce, who have seen 40,000 colleagues already sent down the redundancy chute since the business"
I wonder if it'll also bring some legal ammunition to some of those 40k. Surely nobody'd be so mean as to use his own words against him.
Some of those positions may well be filled... for the next 12 weeks. Then the QoQ earnings will mean YAROC (Yet Another Round Of Culling) or as DXC will say adjustments/downsizing/rightsizing or whatever.
I'd have to be pretty desparate or the package is out of this world and something like 4 times my old salary (so that I can get a year's income in one quarter) to even consider going back to DXC.
I was let go in a very, very early round of culling as HP tried to absorb Compaq.
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You are one of the ‘fortunate’ then...
So your new colleague arrived last week before the hiring freeze was announced on Friday?
Go figure, I guess that hiring freeze works just like most things and starts at one point and continues after, rather than going back through time to stop people being hired in the past
Digital is 2019's buzzword. Last year it was serverless and NoOps.
I don't want to wish another recession on anyone, but my hope is that the next one is going to slow down the hype train for a few quarters as companies just try to survive. Just like the Dotcom Crash it'll give us time to shake off the hangers-on, figure out what's useful that we got from the previous bubble, and get on with work.
As for these outsourcers...I doubt DXC is in any better shape than most are. My boss's boss just got a title with "digital" in it and he's been hit up by every single one of the Indian outsourcers trying to sell him their wrapper around AWS and Azure's management APIs as a digital transformation in a box. Even with firing every worker in the US and Europe, DXC still has too much overhead compared to Tata/Infosys and I doubt they have anything better to offer.
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DXC staff and share holders deserve a leader, not a bean counter. Somebody that inspires them to believe that DXC can do great things, that DXC is unique, and has a vision. Somebody that has studied and understands leadership. Who has read or follows Simon Sinek or his like, and gets the formula - take care of your staff, who take care of your clients, who take care of the shareholders. DXC is chasing its tail cutting costs, but depriving existing clients of the staff needed to deliver services. Staff morale is at an all time low, most having had no raise for years and being told be grateful for a job. Staff are afraid to move, for fear of being the new guy on the block and hence the next exit for the new team. And DXC cannot hire and retain staff in India. If they cannot do that well, how can they move onshore positions to India? It is all a recipe for disaster. Yet the leadership has an arrogance that they don't care to hear what anybody else thinks or has to recommend. I hope the board of directors will bring in somebody that truly gets it. Somebody who has a passion for client service - as that clearly needs to be the focus in a services company. No service = no clients! Not cutting costs to greatness - that will never succeed.
The problem with your argument is that good service and good people cost money, but DXC's customers buy on price alone. The people who have to endure DXC's service might not be happy, but Finance, Procurement, directors of the customer company don't know and/or don't care. So long as the initial bid is cheap they're content.
Then when DXC start to recover the margins they really want by reaming out the customer, the customer accepts that the changes and variations are their own fault (just a cost of doing business). And if they need to balance the books they'll cut their remaining IT team and raid the IT investment budget. Every three to five years when the reaming out gets painful they'll re-source the work done by DXC, having learned no lessons about the business model of ITO and BPO vendors, and give the work to somebody else who low-balls the tender and promises the Earth for tuppence. Rinse and repeat.
DXC's problems stem (regrettably) not from dissatisfied decision makers at the company taking their business to better providers, but from the fact that there's even crapper, more mendacious ITO outfits who under-bid DXC, before fleecing the customer just the same.
The new employees are largely apprentices with roles being advertised at 14,500 pounds salary. The UK Government, I believe pays half. The plan is to train up these new entrants to take the jobs of experienced staff. They will get away with breaking UK employment law by the usual 2.8k uplift to convert from compulsory redundancy to voluntary. They know that nobody will turn down the extra money as they will need it so they force people out and make them pass knowledge transfer as part of the deal. Only thing is, you can't pass all the years of knowledge that quickly and nobody being forced out will go out of their way to document everything. So you will have the sales people doing the usual BS knowing full well there is insufficient capacity to do a proper job and the company will consist of inexperienced kids being put under terrible pressure and the remaining experienced staff having to juggle too much work and already covering for those that have gone. But oh, digital and agile is the saviour. Except it's not if you've got kids scripting up solutions not fully thought through and not properly tested due to over promising. Getting everyone pulled off other projects to bale things our in a scrum and supposedly learn each others jobs is no suitable alternative to proper planning and testing and experience. It gets worse with each round of redundancy. The apprentices will leave if they are any good after 18 months because they will see others who are three or four years down the line and still on terrible salary. You can't polish a turd.
"Unfortunately, the board has a legal requirement to put the interests of the shareholders first."
Interests. Long or short term?
"If the shareholders can prove that they haven't, they can sue."
If the shareholders aren't happy they don't need to prove anything. They can vote out the board at the next AGM. If enough of them get together they can probably call an EGM and do it sooner. Whether they're happy depends on the nature of the shareholders and the above question applies. Long or short term?
"Best interest" would be decided in the court proceedings. Short or long term would be part of that. Most shareholders these days seem to want short - part of the current problem with big business, especially financial ones.
If the shareholders just vote the execs out, the execs get to keep all their goodies. If the shareholders sue and win, they can claw some of it back and also send a message, not that it is attempted very often. (The shareholders generally being other companies whose execs are cronies of the first company's execs.)
The point is that even if a company is making vast profits, considering the employees' interests beyond the bare minimum requirements of employment legislation can only be justified if the board can show the shareholders that it benefits the bottom line - by law. This is the reality of modern capitalism which some of us with ethical tendencies - whether from religious belief or because we understand that humans are social animals - find repugnant.
When you do occassionally get management that understands that a happy, secure workforce is a more productive and profitable one in the long run, some glans of a beancounter (aka CFO) comes along and takes it all away to improve this year's figures or increase the dividend on his own shares.
Looking at the earlier comment with https://jobs.dxc.technology/ListJobs/All/Search/DXC-Location/United Kingdom
It looks like weblogic engineer, BA, PM, and architects - surely they have them inhouse and could upskill for agile and cloud?
There are exciting opportunities like "51145527 - Data Processing Clerk - Cheque" and "51135926_2 - SFTP and EDI Integration Engineer" that sounds bleeding edge AI powered crypto with mixed reality UI on a quantum computer type jobs [sarcastic].
But I did see data scientist roles for those who want to live in Newcastle so there is hope!
https://jobs.dxc.technology/ListJobs/All/Search/DXC-Location/United%20Kingdom/keyword/data%20scientist/
The new head of Cyber (the ex-BT dweeb) told an all hands meeting that his plan to retain skilled staff was to make the work exciting.
That was it, no training, no pay rises, just an exciting place to work.
I'm sure he's excited... excited by his bonus which is fully funded by the pay rises the workers should have received.
I'm sure there is a special place in hell for these people....
"DXC Technology is the world's leading independent, end-to-end IT services and solutions company,"
Nope, me neither. My attempt at understanding leads me to "management listens to cloud enabler moves everything to cloud via third party via promises of money, sunshine lollipops and rainbow"
I get the opposite feeling. I tend to rub my hands together with glee.
On one of their projects i tend to come in, have to wait for months as everything they do is behind schedule. Basically sit around, drinking coffee and getting paid. Then they run out of money or "change directions" and i'm out of there. Wait a week or two, then it's on to another "fantastic, exciting digital project".
10/10, would definitely get paid for drinking coffee again.
On Monday mornings something or other call, it was clear that the UKIIMEA leadership have read this article and taken it as a personal challenge to exceed 105 mentions, I've never heard the word digital so often.
Of course they extended the digit to all staff, when there was no mention of reward in over an hour of digital wittering, and when the inevitable questions arrived, they spectacularly failed to answer them.
Between the articles on here, the way below market rate salaries they are offering digital hires, it's no wonder they are struggling to fill the hundreds of digital vacancies and that was before details of our toxic CEO was published for all to read, which only confirmed what every DXC employee already thought.
https://www.crn.com/news/managed-services/fired-dxc-evp-stephen-hilton-fires-back-at-ceo-in-14-3-million-suit
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