alt Hacker NewsFor 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.
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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?
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?
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.