3 ms·

In this case, many of the employees were civil servants who were statutorily guaranteed a job as part of the bargain they made with the government decades ago w

by ridaj 7y ago

In this case, many of the employees were civil servants who were statutorily guaranteed a job as part of the bargain they made with the government decades ago when the company was just a department of the administration. Regardless, I don't think one can blame the rules. Executives in every difficult business would otherwise have an excuse to blame the law. If the company had failed due to management's inability to downsize as needed, the state would have likely have had to recapitalize the company.

AdrianB1 7y ago
In all telecom companies at some point there was a transition to digitization, reducing the need of employees per subscriber; that is an increase of productivity, not a management failure: if you need only half of the employees to provide the same services, what is the management supposed to do with the other half? At one point manual operators at the switching boards simply become obsolete, what can management do?
- ridaj 7y ago
  I didn't mean it's a management failure. The company was really put in a precarious position when it was spun off from government without change to employees' job-for-life statutory protections. With lots of debt piled on by previous management, management was not dealt a winning hand. Although the next set of execs managed to continue the turnaround. But yes, otherwise there are many other options besides downsizing, such as retraining or entering new markets geographically or vertically, all of which (to their credit) the same set of folks pursued as well. Similarly silicon valley companies are constantly threatened by obsolescence. I think today Facebook and Google would both be dead if they hadn't retrained a significant share of their workforce on mobile development a few years ago, and machine learning more recently.

3 ms·

In this case, many of the employees were civil servants who were statutorily guaranteed a job as part of the bargain they made with the government decades ago w

by ridaj 7y ago

AdrianB1 7y ago
In all telecom companies at some point there was a transition to digitization, reducing the need of employees per subscriber; that is an increase of productivity, not a management failure: if you need only half of the employees to provide the same services, what is the management supposed to do with the other half? At one point manual operators at the switching boards simply become obsolete, what can management do?
- ridaj 7y ago
  I didn't mean it's a management failure. The company was really put in a precarious position when it was spun off from government without change to employees' job-for-life statutory protections. With lots of debt piled on by previous management, management was not dealt a winning hand. Although the next set of execs managed to continue the turnaround. But yes, otherwise there are many other options besides downsizing, such as retraining or entering new markets geographically or vertically, all of which (to their credit) the same set of folks pursued as well. Similarly silicon valley companies are constantly threatened by obsolescence. I think today Facebook and Google would both be dead if they hadn't retrained a significant share of their workforce on mobile development a few years ago, and machine learning more recently.