Not all heroes wear capes: Contractor grills DXC globo veep on pay rises, offshoring, and cuts to healthcare help It is a "myth" that DXC Technology is exporting thousands of frontline customer support jobs from the US to cheaper offshore locations – the figure is in the hundreds, a company vice president has said. This was among the many topics discussed during a town hall conference call with the Delivery unit in mid-June, a recording …
Actually, it is the workforce that carries the "hopes and dreams" of shareholders, because it ain't the CEO going on-site to deal with customers, now is it ?
It might be time to reevaluate the pecking order. The CEO is the mouthpiece of the company, gives the direction in which the company should go and oversees that the engagements are being kept, and that's it. It is a job, to be sure, but so is going to client site and keeping the client happy.
And, you can replace a CEO anytime without impacting either company revenue or customer satisfaction. You can't do that with the peons that actually do the work and bring in the money.
Clearly you can replace the peons.... oh, wait...
Great to see a mention of TESM and BusinessNow, both ServiceNow specialists now lined up to go the way of Fruition Partners and be crushed by the weight of the bean counters and there business restricting policies
GFDXC
"you can replace a CEO anytime without impacting either company revenue or customer satisfaction. You can't do that with the peons that actually do the work and bring in the money"
It's that dreamland 'star CEO', the fantasy that if you just pay enough you're going to find the next Jobs, some messiah that will take your company from the middle-of-the-pack to the rising star, top of the pile. The reality is that most of the companies are same-same middle-of-the-pack, and just as the 'peons' can move from company to company with little effect, CEOs can move from company to company with little effect. Top salaries in companies used to be around 20X the bottom pay in the 60s and 70s. Now it's like 1000X. Are the companies run any better now than they were then? Like hell they are!
The problem, as with many other things, is the incentive structure. If CEO's pay is tied to short-term gain, to share price etc, then they are going to prioritise hype and short-term revenue bookings and cost cutting (ie firing / outsourcing) over long-term customer satisfaction. They don't own the company and have no emotional attachment/investment neither to the company itself nor to the employees.
Thought experiment... if any of these companies decided to cap CEO salary at 1M and other C-suites at high 6-figures, with all the other levels adjusted proportionately and the difference distributed in bonuses / benefits for all employees... would they find someone competent from within the company who is willing and able to do the job for that amount? Would that someone deliver better or equal results to the CEO paid 50X as much? Would morale among employees be better? Would customer satisfaction / retention increase?
My take is the answers to all of those would be yes, but the wall street vultures would tank the companies' stock for not having a 'star name' CEO and hostile-takeover the company / return to BAU before the positive effects had any chance to show through. After all if that business model took over they are among the ones with the most to lose
Wall Street doesn't care about WHO is running the show, as long as the company is making its numbers. It's purely a numbers game, played out every quarter. Meet or beat your forecasted numbers and you're fine, fail to do so and the investors want to know what you're going to do to sort it, which is almost always to cut jobs.
You are so very right! After all, once a company sells its stock at the IPO, what does the share price really matter as long as it doesn't tank badly? Once upon a time, companies didn't worry a great deal about their stock price. They were focused on longer-term growth and on longer-term profits. People bought stock for the long term, looking for dividends, which come from longer-term profits. Nowadays all these "Wizards of Wall Street" can't see past the end of the current quarter, and everyone seems to be a day-trader.
This attitude is DESTROYING our economy at every level. It would be wonderful if your suggestions could be adopted by corporations worldwide. Instead of paying some rock star CEO ridiculous money, hire normal people and put the money back into the company. Maybe do something crazy like give raises, even, or incentive programs for high achievers in ALL parts of the company (not just sales). But, nah, we're going to bleed white the people who actually do the work while blowing every dollar on buying more companies (to ruin) and overcompensating the c-suite.
incentive programs for high achievers in ALL parts of the company (not just sales)
The reason you see incentive programs / bonuses for sales people and not in other parts of the company is as much because sales is one of the few jobs where performance is so easily measured as it is management valuing sales above other jobs.
How do you measure the performance of a developer? Lines of code? I think we all know what a terrible metric that is for many reasons. How do you measure the performance of a Windows admin? For example, if you measure by downtime, he's incentivized to delay patching (even if you don't count planned downtime) due to the risk a patch might cause problems.
If management KNEW how to measure the performance of modern knowledge workers you can be damn sure they would, and they would happily reward the top performers. The problem is, they have no idea who out of a team of 30 Windows admins are the best, and even if they know "Bob is my go to guy who gets things done" they don't really know if Bob is 20% better than the average, 50% better, or 500% better.
A sales guy's entire output is one of numbers, so it is easy to fit into a formula (for better or worse) to determine how much better he is than the average sales guy - and if worse they have defendable metrics on which to base his firing. The best admin is like the Maytag repairman from the old commercials, who appears to be doing fuck all 40 hours a week, and produces no output that can be plugged into a formula to determine his performance. A manager who doesn't understand this might see Bob surfing the web on El Reg and Slashdot during work hours and think he's a slacker and fire him.
"The best admin is like the Maytag repairman from the old commercials, who appears to be doing fuck all 40 hours a week, and produces no output that can be plugged into a formula to determine his performance. A manager who doesn't understand this might see Bob surfing the web on El Reg and Slashdot during work hours and think he's a slacker and fire him"
Couldn't agree more - the best people have generally found and fixed all the issues before anyone else even knows they existed (often before anyone else is in the office) - or has worked hard to ensure that the problems never crop up in the first place (not that most managers would understand the concept of preventative maintenance).
After all, once a company sells its stock at the IPO, what does the share price really matter as long as it doesn't tank badly?
The shares are used as collateral for loans (convertible bonds and others), so the lower the price, the more collateral they have to put up and the higher the interest rate. It does actually matter, though I'd agree, it probably should matter year to year rather than quarter to quarter or day to day.
CEOs can move from company to company with little effect.
That's not actually true. Most Fortune 500 or FTSE 100 company CEO's haven't ran another company before - they're usually pole climbers from within, who grab the top job and hang on for the ride. Some are external hires but usually not from the CEO role. The "paying for talent" thing they talk about in reference to themselves is a myth - they'd dearly love to be head hunted, but there's no real market for most.
Replacing a CEO affects the share price. That's it. and it's a biggie.
Corps are slaves to the equities market. Quarterly reports are THE performance metric. Long range planning and future value is old fashioned.
The immediate greed of the shareholders is what drives a corporation. That and the stock options handed out at the C level for price performance.
The CEO's only job is to sell the corporation to investors.
Problem however is that pesky morale.
In high-skill industries with a reasonable job market, the best and brightest are going to vote with their feet. Even if the job market isn’t great, you’re going to see attrition from the people who are best at delivering value that the customers actually pay for. Indian staff may (or may not) replace them, but, if DXC is all-Indian anyway, why not buy your outsourcing cheaper from Wipro? Just because they suck at security?
Very high CEO $alarie$ at those times don’t help because they put the lie to this sweet “we’re all in this together”. (Good on the author to pull up the SEC filings)
Maybe some flogging, pour encourager les autres, would help?
P.S. an exceptional CEO can make a big difference. problem is that exceptional pay is the norm for even mediocre ones. and, furthermore, I believe that there is a ethical problem with 200-300x median salaries that is slowly poisoning capitalism and free markets.
I’ve often thought that all that talk of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) should start by replacing the CEO of a company. They come and go so often that it must be possible? Stick some AI and ML on top, save a bundle, and it works 24/7 for you! What’s not to like?
And, you can replace a CEO anytime without impacting either company revenue or customer satisfaction. You can't do that with the peons that actually do the work and bring in the money.
"The cemetery is full of irreplaceable men." One of my favourite quotes, though I forget now who said it.
The peons are just as replaceable as the CEO. A good CEO should add value or at least prevent mass value destruction to a company. That doesn't mean the rewards are in line, or that they all do a good job. There's several companies out there that changed the man at the top and then went from strength to strength - look at MSFT under SatNad.... the staff are essentially the same, but the direction, and revenues, are much improved.
We all know what is happening here.
It is the shareholders that are the focus of this, and pretty much any other large floated setup. This is why clients suffer, the organisations are filled with unhappy and kicked around peoeple. The language used by the politici^w board and CEO are the usual bundle of empty promises and useless BS that we all know. Like politicians in power, most of the time CEOs change after a few years to keep offering hope that 'Things are gonna change!'™ but they don't.
Because ultimatly this beast we are feeding gets hungrier and hungrier, so those that are closest to the Maw and feeding it bigger and bigger helpings in the hope they don't get swallowed.
Jeez, this is dark for a Tuesday.
TLDR; Fsck You, DXC, and those of your kind.
Most shareholders don't hold individual stocks for years and years anymore. The companies you feel you do that with (I have Berkshire Hathaway and Apple among my few individual stock holdings in my retirement account, and neither has been touched in over a decade) are few and far between.
To the extent that shareholders are taking a "buy and hold" attitude on DXC shares they might get screwed due to such short term thinking, but if they have a short term attitude about DXC they'll sell them and move on to someone else before they really tank. The people who will get shafted are those who hold DXC shares for a long time - I wonder to what extent long time employees hold DXC shares? Hopefully they can easily invest their retirement accounts elsewhere, and if they are awarded DXC stock/options they don't have to hold them too long before they're able to sell.
Most shareholders don't hold individual stocks for years and years anymore.
Citation please.
I hold stocks long term (very) because day trading is a mugs game. There's too much noise day to day to really put a correct market price on a stock, even on you've followed for many years. It's why the vast majority of day traders go bust, while some make a killing.
+1
There is zero benefit to this shit to anyone but the C-levels*. Thing is, they ultimately control the remuneration committees and can point at all the other $10M+ packages and then say “we’re just following the norms, gotta have attractive packages to attract the best”. Then 3 yrs from now it’s 12M+, then 14M+ 2 yrs after.
* Not even to the rest of the very rich as their returns aren’t as good as they would otherwise be. Which means that almost everyone would have an interest in banding together to nuke these bloodsuckers. Trouble is they also control the lobbyists paid by their firms.
Shareholders are the most important thing going at any company, and they must be kept happy at all costs.
Which is the wrong way around. Keep your staff happy and productive, and clients will be happy. And revenue will be steady.
BUT if you decide to keep your shareholders happy by outsourcing and cutting costs just so that more $$$ can go to shareholders, then staff morale goes to the dogs and clients will be unhappy with piss-poor responses from staff (they'll have an attitude to match) and also poor coding then you will start losing clients who'll go to other companies which will give them better service....
"Shareholders are the most important thing going at any company, and they must be kept happy at all costs."
One big problem - the major shareholders in these companies are usually hedge funds, mutual funds, or other types of investment vehicle*. They want high returns because that's what they're promising to the fund holders, and the fund holders will take their business somewhere else if the returns aren't up to their expectations. In the case of hedge funds, there is nothing we can do about that.
In the case of mutual funds, the fund holders are the common middle class, in many cases the same employees of these companies. If these people (ie you and me) pull their money out of funds with high-risk high-return and into funds with low-risk-low-return, it would have a knock-on effect on the shareholder *requirement* for increased returns.
It requires some more shareholder activism from the people who actually own the money invested to get the company boards to make better long-term decisions on their behalf. But unfortunately the ownership is usually filtered through many layers of ownership to the fund managers, who are both the ones most interested in a short-term quick return (because that's how they make their bonuses) and the loudest-shouting shareholders who the board listens to.
* In the case of the other major shareholders, pension funds, one would hope that they are already more heavily invested in 'safer' lower-return vehicles not so much in equities and so don't care that much.
I'll send this link to my wife - and make sure there is a barf bag in her reach when she reads it.
She's grimly hanging on. She wants those fuckers to lay her off and give her a proper severance, though they are giving it their all to make her quit. She hasn't even been in her office in months and has gone totally native, extended and extended with the client who love her. Hasn't seen a raise in years despite stellar perf reviews. Client wants to hire her, but... see beginning of paragraph.
She wants those bastards to pay up if she has to slice it out of some useless execs liver.
Of course I don't know your wife's story, but I think she's got the wrong end of the stick. If her client will hire her with better salary and working conditions, then she should just quit DXC and move on. Making herself miserable to try to screw a redundancy payment out of those buggers probably ain't worth the grief of continuing to work for them. They have a lot more resources than she does and can simply outlast her. Leaving now, she might possibly miss out on some dosh, but peace of mind is worth a lot, too. I think she'd be better off to just walk out, shake the dust of DXC off her feet and go work for someone who appreciates her.
I can totally understand the "hang on to get your pound of flesh" out of the previous employer. I was moving jobs and a combination of timing and sheer bloody mindedness meant that I wanted to get my bonus from the previous employer even though I'd be earning twice as much at the new place. I didn't believe they deserved to hold on to my bonus money. They wouldn't re-invest it in the business or employees, it would just go towards the director's annual Bentley upgrade.
OMG - I totally get your wife's point...
I didn't get any of my seniority when I converted because prior to that I was a contractor TO DXC... Honestly, given the choice, I would have stayed that way...it wasn't as reliable, but it paid better (OMG MUCH BETTER) and gave me the satisfaction of being able to say "no" from time to time when they asked me to do something that crossed my personal ethical lines. (My personal sense of ethics is much more stringent than HPE/DXCs)
So if they WFR me at this point, it's 2-weeks notice... I'm waiting for the "We're WFRing you, but you need to train your indian replacements" because I'll laugh my happy ass right out the door and it will be worth every penny.
I've worked hard to become a single-point-of-failure for exactly this reason. :)
Just a quick post scriptum that my wife read the responses with interest and appreciated them.
At this point, because she just has zero connection to DXC emotionally anymore and because she's happy at he gig, she thinks she might as well hang around. She's not unhappy with the client and ignores DXC entirely (she now refuses to take part in any of the annual "performance review" bullshit for instance - what's the point, after all?)
She wants to build a few more bona fides and then go out as contractor herself, so yes, it would be delicious if she ends up contracting for DXC as they're desperate to hold on to the client (a major financial institute).
It is indeed most likely that at one point she will just shrug and move on, but at this point in time, all things considered, she can finish off her projects and then get her bearings.
... it would be delicious if she ends up contracting for DXC ...
Do not, under any circumstances, become a DXC contractor.
Contractors get royally fucked every possible way. Note that, in the US at least, contractor invoices are paid 90 days after the invoice due date.
So consider this: She's finished up with DXC as an employee, and has lined up contracting work with the client on behalf of DXC. She does her first week of work, dutifully invoices DXC, and won't see that money for several months.
Avoid DXC. Just don't do anything for them. They are a toxic cesspool the fucks anyone and everyone over. Contract to the client directly if possible. And the client will be better off without DXC anyway.
She's grimly hanging on.
It's a waste of time. The best revenge is to move onwards and upwards in a better job with a better company for a better comp package.
In the City, you might get a doughnut one year (no payrise / bonus), a second back to back doughnut is known as a Bond (double-O) and is the clearest signal its time to leave the bank, your career there isn't going to blossom. Managers will try their very hardest to pretend to your face that it isn't the case, but it is, and everyone knows it.
While salaries are generally set at replacement level rather than some chronology or inflation based oddity, if the company doesn't think you've moved up the value proposition in 24 months then they'll never respect you.
I worked for a very shit bank once and tried very hard to get paid out, but they made it clear it was simply never going to happen - I had a job for life but I had that job for life, which wasn't what I wanted. Quit and move on - C suite ineptitude isn't personal - they simply don't know or care that you exist.
I've been through the mill with DXC, and several years before with CSC. In both cases I was TUPE'd over.
They are interested only in maximising their profits, to hell with the employees.
As expected, the service given to the customer is a shadow of what it was before, however DXC/CSC are happy as they're making money from the customer, the CEO's of the customer companies are happy because they don't have to pay for IT employees anymore, however it's always the people in the middle (both customer facing in DXC and the people in the client business that now have to deal with DXC) that get the rough deal.
There's a special place in hell for outsource providers.
Entire TUPE-ed development team applied for VR, refused as "protected for 6 months".
At a guess only some of them will get VR as they'll need to leave a skeleton crew in place. If the VR isn't that good anyway the entire development team handing in their notice might have been a better ploy.
If the employee doesn't get a COLA raise every so often then they are actively being screwed by their employer.
When everything around you costs more but your employer refuses to pay you accordingly, that's when you send a notice to the local labour bureau to complain about unfair business practices.
I took a 35% pay-cut when I converted from Contractor to FTE status and all Ive ever got from DXC has been dwindeling contributions to healthcare costs, and higher medical deductibles, to the point where it was costing me in the neigborhood of $1200/month to pay for insurance where I had a $6,000 deductible. (FWIW - it cost me $1600 private party for $2,000 deductible on the marketplace)
DXC actively screws it's employees...the good news is, if they keep going the way they're going, there won't be any employees much longer.
That would be an awesome moment for which I would buy popcorn by the metric tonne!
Just every employee below mangler level (and even them if they had souls) just up & leave en mass one day, all at once, no notice, & leave the company up shite creek without so much as a golden parachute.
Let's see how well the company does if there's *nobody* left to provide the support the fatcats at the top have sold...
Aw man, now I crave popcorn!
The fat cats will be fine, DXC would be sold to some other managed services company who would take over their contracts.
What I don't get is that there are no "premium" managed services providers out there. Surely there are some companies who have been dicked around enough by the DXCs of the world and would be willing to pay a 20-30% premium for first class service provided by a company that's adequately staffed with top people. I guess not.
"Smith said on the conference call: "Managers have the opportunities to evaluate, identify our best performers and make sure they are market competitive. I tell you, I see them, I approve them every week... that is just a reality of how we operate. Most progressive companies have moved far beyond basic entitlement raises.""
Asked for one over 3 months ago - after a great performance review - been waiting ever since. fully expect the answer to be no, but might be waiting months before I get any response.
There are many in similar situations - high performers, put forward for pay rises by their managers who have been waiting years to hear something. The DXC process, by which you are only notified if you are successful. doesn't help.
Smith is (probably) telling the truth in that he approves multiple pay rises every week. It's probably literally a few, leaving hundreds of others unapproved.
Pay rises DO exist within DXC but you have to be a consistently high performing flight risk in a growth area whom they REALLY want to keep.
I've sat and watched as Technical Expert after Technical Expert got WFR'd and the work outsourced to low-cost idiots offshore who quite simply can't do the work.
It's come to the point where *I* can't propose a technical solution because the staff who has to manage the solution simply isn't capable of it. It's why half the infrastructures they're working on are stuck in the late 90's technologically. They simply don't have the capabilities to drag their asses out of the 20th century.
I find this, of all the toxic DXC behaviors, one of the more toxic behaviors.
So in order to get a pay rise, you need to find another company willing to hire you and go through the entire interview process (which could be four or five interviews) to get that signed letter of offer.
You take that letter of offer to your manager and DXC will match the toppling salary. They will never match the bottom line take-home salary.
What a titanic waste of time for the employee and the employees of the company that you just interviewed at. The level of disrespect here for everyone involved is immense.
Agreed. I discussed with my manager in January 2018 about a merit increase, and he agreed. So did his manager. In fact, all the way up to the manager of our division agreed that a merit increase was indeed merited.
By November 2018, nothing had happened.
This wasn't an isolated incident; the droves of people quitting said exactly the same things.
It should be noted, too, that whilst DXC may not believe in the outdated concept of annual raises, it sure as hell believes in sticking it to employees every possible opportunity. My take-home pay fell, rather reliably, every six months.
So glad I'm out of this rotting carcass of a company.
Oh what an absolute load of shit. I worked for DXC, since before it was DXC, back when it was HPE and even before that when it just HP.
The top talent from DXC is running like hell, or has already left, and they've replaced 100% of the talent with useless know-nothings from India who couldn't find their asses with both hands and a flashlight.
This moron Smith can spin it anyway he wants to, but I still speak regularly with people who are forced by contract to stay DXC customers and they want OUT. And I don't blame them. Their service has suffered greatly, and at this point, all it is going to take is a couple of key departures and the whole house of cards is going to fall apart, and to a one, every one of them is looking.
DXC is absolute proof positive that you can't offshore your way to profitability... ever.
The first time I worked with them I was consulting for the company that had hired HP, so I worked alongside them. They had some top people, really smart, I learned a lot from them. Made some contacts that led to me being contracted by HP in 2000 on a big project, again working with top people (all consultants like me, being supported by employees) We were getting paid insanely well, but our little team of 8 accomplished more over that 6-7 month project than I've seen teams of 50 do over three years in subsequent projects.
After the dot com bust HP started getting cheap. First just around the edges, but by the time of my last engagement with them about a decade ago they were really going downhill. I was helping them bring on some full time people for the project I was working (i.e. to replace me and the other consultants at a fraction of the cost) but all the good people I recommended didn't get hired. I assume because the salary wasn't high enough (I didn't see that part of it) and they ended up hiring people I hadn't even interviewed because I thought they were worthless based on their resume.
And it turned out they were worthless. They were just unable to comprehend what I'd set up for them to automate rote tasks like storage setup on blades or the daily massive storage allocations the client required, so they did everything manually at 10x the effort.
After that I quit answering when people I still knew from HP were trying to get me back for another gig. It was too depressing seeing how far they had fallen. Clearly they have continued to fall since then.
"The top talent from DXC is running like hell, or has already left, and they've replaced 100% of the talent with useless know-nothings from India who couldn't find their asses with both hands and a flashlight."
Yes - our internal helldesk (based in India) is every bit as bad as anything we force our customers to endure - I called them because a group policy has suddenly restricted the ability to run PowerShell scripts on my laptop - the person I spoke to did not know what PowerShell was, and then (after a long wait) said that they didn't support PowerShell.
It's things like that, that make me question my own sanity.
It would have been fun to be part of the call so I could shout "BINGO! I GOT BINGO!" somewhere at about the 30 second mark after that bastard opened his mouth.
When asked WTF I was blathering on about I'd reply happily "I filled my Buzzword Bullshit Bingo card! What do I win?"
Interesting that the knee-jerk response to any question about raises is "We don't grant automatic raises." Yet the question is never about automatic ones; nobody in this industry expects those. We know it's pay-for-performance. The problem is when the performance is there (and very positively rated) but the pay doesn't follow.
I'd say quite a lot of people, even in this industry, expects (or hopes) of annual raises at least in line with inflation and rising cost of living, and if performance is there the raise should be noticeably above the inflation. If you get no raise at all, you're getting a paycut every year as living costs keep rising.
Who would have thought DXC were using NMA lyrics as a 'plan' -assuming there is a plan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MOCOmgJ9-g
"On, on, on, cried the leaders at the back
We went galloping down the blackened hills
And into the gaping trap
The bridges are burnt behind us and there's waiting guns ahead
Into the valley of death rode the brave hundreds
We called for some assistance from the friends that we had known
But this is the 1980s and we were on our own
We never felt like heroes or martyrs to a cause
Just battle-weary soldiers in a bloody civil war
The massacre now is over and the order new enshrined
While a quarter of the nation are abandoned far behind
Their leaders offer the cliché words, so righteous in defeat
But no one needs morality when there isn't enough to eat
The unity bond is broken and the loyalty songs are fake"
It's funny, they've been pitching that merit for performance BS for years, yet big Mike's rating on the prospective employer sites (Glassdoor, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, etc.) is HORRIBLE. His CEO rating pales in comparison to his peers in the industry. This company sucks and is a shell of the companies they absorb and ruin. Make no mistake, everyone on the inside knows no one is buying their crap. They buy contracts through these acquisitions. There are no rebid wins or new sales.
It's kinda difficult to get your team a merit rise when you're not allowed to rate anyone higher than a 3. I asked if it was any coincidence if they were all highly experienced, older than average and based on-shore. I don't work there any more - draw your own conclusions.
"It's kinda difficult to get your team a merit rise when you're not allowed to rate anyone higher than a 3"
I managed to get a 2 on my last review - but I did really push the point to my manager after only getting a 3 last time (I made the point about what expectations I had NOT met.)
1 - Exceeds all expectations
2 - Meets All and Exceeds Some Expectations
3 - Meets Most Expectations
Was talking about setting your "goals" and was thinking what I'd want
Decent Pay Rise
Applicable Training
Meaningful job / role growth
But then realised I wasn't thinking corporate think so be
NO Pay Rise
NO Applicable Training
NO Meaningful job / role growth
So If I get any - result, else I get a 1 for exceeding on all my targets
Performance only pay raises are the biggest con ever. It sounds good, do a better job and get more money, problem is that the metrics are always opaque, and anyway there is no realistic metric that can cover all the different contributions to the company success. The only metric that matters is the company overall performance.
It is basically a con to hide pay and keep pay raises as low as possible. It also quells dissent since potential troublemakers can be silenced by indicating that not toeing the company line will result in low performance ratings.
Every time I read one of these DXC articles I think "phew, dodged a bullet". I had two really good interviews in CSC (DK) shortly before the birth of DXFrankenC. Looking back I am so happy they got back to me saying that all hiring had been put hold, instead of saying "welcome aboard, now leave your soul at the entrance and come with us".
Thanks El Reg for making me feel good now and then.
"engaging vibrant morale is not only a great thing for our clients, for DXC and our shareholders, but it is a great thing for us as people."
=> engaging vibrant morale is a great thing for 1) shareholders, 2) DXC , 3) clients, we're also told it would be a great thing for us as people. Ahah, just kidding.
"being brave and courageous and for asking the questions you asked".
I'll dance over your dead body.
"I think we are going to constantly be repositioning, retraining our workforce for the foreseeable future"
We are going to continue to exploit wage slaves and extract anything valuable from them before throwing them in the bin.
"In order for us to be competitive, we are going to have to take advantage of a global workforce."
Our motto: exploit misery worldwide.
the "transformation going on inside DXC can feel chaotic" and "feel built and steeped in pressure".
You're not paid to think. A mindless worker is a happy worker! Shut up and do your job!
"being brave and courageous and for asking the questions you asked".
You will be leaving the company involuntarily real soon...
"In order for us to be competitive, we are going to have to take advantage of a global workforce."
In order to be competitive we need to be cheap, which means more offshoring to, and work being delivered from, Low Cost Countries.
Just for grins - let's say we reduce Mikey's annual comp from $68.12m to $4.12m. Still a huge salary but that frees up $64m per year.
Assume a fully loaded FTE is $150K, that's roughly 427 FTE's DXC could afford to pay and serve it's clients. And that's just ML's salary - not sure about Saleh etc.but equivalent cuts across the executive suite pushes that FTE number up significantly.
This will never happen of course but it does provide some context on the greed, hypocrisy and lack of ethics exhibited by this leadership team. Come on DXC BoD - fix this!
Compensation cuts to the execs WOULD make a difference but the difference doesn't scale. There are relatively few senior executives making big money, and none make anything like Lawrie's compensation.
Where there are big savings to be made is in 'middle management' - the L3/L4/L5 layers. There are hundreds/thousands of people in these positions earning large salaries but it isn't clear exactly what they do. Filleting those layers would make significant savings.
Thing is, if you zero'ed all of the board's salary and stock options, its still a drop in the ocean for a (soon to be) 100,000 employee company.
It wouldn't make any difference in hiring more folk to make any meaningful difference - which actually is how these illogical cuts make some sort of sense to the spreadsheet kids.
Equally, if you took their money and split it up for raises, everyone would be lucky to see US$1000 each - which unless you are working in PR, doesn't really even begin to offset inflation.
It is a massive figure that shows excess greed, but giving that money back to "the workers" doesn't add up to much.
You can see it in the CEO pay ratio - Mikey is about 400 times the median ($77k), which roughly equates to 400 employees in the first world...its obscene but in a broader picture?
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