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Comment by TheMagicHorsey | Hacker News Reader

I did a little work as a developer for Verizon's ecosystem back in 2007. Let me just say, from what I could see, they were a huge, bureaucratic company without a single redeeming cultural trait. The managers seemed like a bunch of frat boys who had been raised up into positions of authority through some inscrutable lottery, and none of them seemed to possess an iota of analytical capability or human management talent.

I left that position and later worked for a bunch of tech startups and larger companies that, while not perfect, at least had enough good people in them to redeem my view on the human race.

I cannot imagine why anyone would actually work as a mid-level worker in Verizon unless you had absolutely no other options in life.

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Out of curiosity, which Verizon did you work for? The former MCI/Worldcom unit ("VZ Business"), the GTE/Bell Atlantic one (Landline, FiOS, etc.), or Verizon Wireless? As far as I know, that company has remained fairly fractured, and operated as if they were three different companies.

vzw actually is a different company, which is partly owned by vz. Fba/fgte are practically separate companies too. I worked for fba (former bell Atlantic) for years and can attest, it's no place for capable doers. It's unbelievable how many layers of dysfunctional middle management are in there, supported only by the fact that vz owns so much legacy infrastructure.

Who owns the rest of it? I know Vodafone used to, but VZ bought their share out a couple years ago.

Totally agreed on BA/GTE. I used to contract on the GTE side of the house, and I saw how little it mattered whether you were good or bad at your job. All reports I hear from the new Frontier sound like it's even worse now.

Verizon Wireless.

> The managers seemed like a bunch of frat boys who had been raised up into positions of authority through some inscrutable lottery, and none of them seemed to possess an iota of analytical capability or human management talent.

Sounds like the perfect fit for yahoo :)

FWIW, I have a number of friends at Verizon Labs doing some pretty cool work with Scala and Haskell.

Just using cool functional languages has little to do with this work culture. Lets not propagate this notion please.

That's not what parent said. You read what you want to read, but parent only said they're doing "cool work" and that cool work happens to be in Scala/Haskell.

Sigh.

I didn't agree with the sentiment either but I think you're stretching here.

If I say "they're doing cool work with clay and steel" that means the coolness is intrinsically linked to those things. That's how I'd read it anyway.

You can do boring work with clay and steel, and you can do cool work with clay and steel. Saying you're doing cool work with clay and steel doesn't imply that "it's cool because it's clay and steel".

There's two ways to read it definitely, but I have a problem when someone decides to read it one way, and complains about that particular interpretation of what they're reading...

There's 10 types of people in the world. The people who assume that you are wrong and interpret your words in the least logical way, and the people who assume that you are reasonable and interpret them in the way that assumes you to be logical.

He said they were doing "cool work" in response to a post about a notoriously bad work culture. So that response was in fact on point.

Unfortunately thats the reality of many 'cool work places' where your years of experience in delivering products will not be important enough if it not in Scala or some such.

Could you elaborate on what barriers and mismanagement you experienced?

I hear similar complaints with other companies. I know at the last large company I worked for there was lots of this but also other groups who were better / different. Hard to stereotype a huge company like Verizon as one specific way of operating.

My employer feels more like 9 different companies. I feel bad for our customers who try to package multiple products, because they have to coordinate our multiple teams to work together.

I work at Verizon Labs and don't see any of what you mentioned here. Verizon as it stands today though, is an amalgamation of many different companies and cultures. I do believe your experiences could absolutely be true in some of the business units.

Verizon Labs is however, Verizon's play for Silicon Valley talent and they seem very aware that you need a certain kind of culture, perks, amount of autonomy etc. to compete in that market. I'm quite enjoying my time here.

Most people have no other options in life.

They sounds like a bunch of yahoos.

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