AT&T

• Benefits are decent in the first 5 years.
• There are good people here.
• There is the chance to work on different technologies and support different parts of the business.
• Tuition Reimbursement.

• Executives go on and on about our "culture", but the only culture is that of lying to employees.

• Required to be in the office for "collaboration".

  • Many teams are still distributed geographically, meaning you have no one to collaborate with.
  • While being in the office 5 days a week, they won't assign desks, so you have to carry everything you want/need every day.
  • In many offices, there aren't enough desks or parking.

• Constant layoffs.

  • From an executive: "we lay off teams and roles, not people". What that means is that if you end up on the "wrong" team or in the wrong "role", you can be laid off, even if you have stellar reviews and massive experience, all while the slacker that's never been put on anything important keeps their job.
  • Most being laid off are not given the opportunity to move to another position with the company.

• Benefits and vacation top out at 10 years. There is absolutely no reason to consider "retiring" from AT&T anymore. All retirement benefits have been removed, except for a minor discount on Wireless and Fiber if it's available. For Wireless, you can get a better deal at T-Mobile than as a retiree from AT&T.

• Overall, it's clear that management is trying to reduce headcount and is actually hostile to employees, hidden behind a very thin veil of "Look how much we love our employees!"

• I think when tech companies start hiring again, you'll see a massive exodus out of IT at AT&T.

Management says they want and value employee feedback. They have also denied that RTO is about reducing headcount. However, their actions speak louder than words.

Management has also lied openly to the press about pay. When discussing the CWA Strike, the press release said all employees get raises based on Cost of Living and Inflation, but in 20 years, every raise budget has been 3% for the organization.

They also lied about moving assistance being given to those in offices that were closing to move to a new city. No assistance was given, and there were even employees laid off after moving at their own expense.

Employees were told in Feb 2024 that they needed to move and had only a couple of weeks to decide. However, if you said you weren't moving, you would be laid off sometime during the year and only given two weeks' notice.

There were people actually laid off just days before reaching their retirement-eligible date, but the company would not change the date.

Management wants employees in the office five days a week but refuses to give assigned desks. This means no personalization, possibly working in a different spot each day (making you hard to find), and no sense of permanence.

Management's actions show they are hostile to employees. They say they aren't, but it's very clear.

Morale is terrible. Stankey won't let his town halls be recorded anymore. None of the town halls actually answer employee questions.

A "culture survey" was done at the beginning of 2024, but, unlike every other employee survey, management refused to release the results.

All I can say is, if management really doesn't understand what they have done to their employees, then there is no way they should be running a company.