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Verizon offers a good place to work, but with constant layoffs and outsourcing, it is losing its competitive edge

Software Engineer
Current Employee
Has worked at Verizon for less than 1 year
January 26, 2011
Ashburn, Virginia
4.0
Doesn't Approve of CEO
Pros

There are great employee benefits, like fairly low-cost health, dental, and vision plans. They also have a generous 401k match. A lot of IT people telecommute some or all of the time (Northern Virginia).

They offer many vacation days, personal days, holidays, and sick days. There is a good performance bonus offered each year, but it is hard to reach the maximum bonus.

There is a robust employee intranet for access to everything you could want dealing with employee resources, such as benefits, policies, and work groups. They have a generous severance package.

Cons

There are contestant layoffs, which creates extremely low employee morale. The pension for most of the remaining management employees has been dissolved. There are no or few promotions for current employees. The company has been outsourcing to India or other low-cost areas of the world for years, which means fewer employees in the USA to do the remaining work and therefore less work is directed towards those resources. Diversity has gone too far because Verizon hired too many Indian employees, and they can't speak English very clearly, which makes it impossible to communicate effectively. There is no viable career path or future. Verizon suffers from trying to merge so many telecoms under one umbrella organization. There are so many different systems that have to communicate with one another that it can be rather complex, infective, and inefficient.

Advice to Management

Stop outsourcing all of the IT jobs to India and other low-cost areas of the world.

Upper management should take an across-the-board pay cut in order to save US jobs instead of getting huge bonuses.

Stop laying employees off in a continuous cycle, because it is horrible for employee morale.

Grow the company the old-fashioned way, by smart investments and savvy business strategy.

Stop trying to increase profits for shareholders by only cutting costs (layoffs of employees).

Grow the business similar to the way Apple has grown its business, by being innovative and offering fantastic products and services.

Stop treating employees as an expense to cut during the next RIF (layoff), but instead, treat them as a resource to grow the business.

Try to develop a "cool" brand image similar to Apple.

Realize that human capital investments in US employees take time to foster growth and may add to the expense side for several quarters, but ultimately will be cheaper in the long run.

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