T-Mobile to cut about 7% of workforce, mostly corporate roles

I'm a T-Mobile customer via Sprint acquisition. My experience post merger is that they simple view customers as monthly payments that T-Mobile is entitled to, service delivered, or not. They do not back the equipment they sell, they make it nearly impossible to bring your own phone (if you are on a former Sprint contract), and their people have zero discretion to do the right thing. It's a dystopian hellscape.

We had tons of issues with AT&T. Incorrect billing, getting random charges that weren't ours, and a huge pile of "you have full bars, but absolutely no data and calls can't go through" issues. (during the early iPhone days I worked at the Apple Store, we had a standing policy in several local stores of sending one of our sales reps to the AT&T store across the mall with a customer to get issues resolved because AT&T lied to customers so often to try and upsell them to something else, or out of sheer incompetence.)

After switching to T-Mobile we've had great service, no billing issues, no problems with international roaming or surprise charges, and a couple of cold-calls with offers to update to a new plan which was actually cheaper. The only issues we've ever had have turned out to be hardware related.

I think the truth may be that mobile carriers, much like ISP's, are a complete crapshoot, and reliability/service may entirely depend on which market you're in.

They didn't send me a label for my phone for a couple weeks, so I reached out to them and a rep sent me a UPS label, which I used. (Apparently their ecommerce website had simply eaten the part of my order where I declared a trade-in.)

The bill credits never showed up, so I started reaching out to social media customer service on Twitter or Facebook Messenger. This is the only competent arm of their whole CS org. And they're actually empowered to follow up independently so you don't have to keep calling them.

Anyway as far as I can piece together my phone was sent to their returns center instead of their trade-ins place, and after being signed for, it was never seen again. (I assume somebody recognized it didn't belong there and made sure it fell off a truck).

Eventually the reps got a supervisor to okay a solution, which happened to be in my favor -- they just credited the full amount they owed me against my installment plan immediately, so I only owed like another $150 on the new phone at that point, paid it off, and had it unlocked.

I think I stayed about a year. I got lucky with my issue, but they are definitely not great overall at their one job of providing wireless service.

AT&T's prepaid service runs on an account/billing platform and website that is straight out of 2003, but the plans themselves are great and the service works well in my part of the country (T-Mobile sucks in most of the West by comparison).

Been a T-Mobile user for over a decade, and never had technical issues.

The store staff are beyond useless. I always get help from their phone support personnel - but I almost never need to. It just works.

Their online portals are beyond crap. Example: I used to have one prepaid plan and would log in to make payments. Then I switched to another plan and I could no longer log in to manage it - my email address was tied to the prepaid plan I no longer had, and everyone I spoke to said "Our IT folks say they can't do anything and that I should just create a new account with another email address".

In order to avoid manually making the monthly (prepaid) payments, I set up automation with them - it would automatically charge my card each month. Except they could never align the date properly - so for about a day every month I could not make calls. They could never fix it - the problem just went away when I switched plans.

Another thing that I really liked was when I was traveling in Europe, I had free basic internet and texts. This was NOT the case with when I had Verizon. They just send you a text when they detect you there, tell you what is free and what costs extra, and you can use your phone like normal.

I even got a local esim with them when I was in Europe more long term (it was surprisingly cheap to get a dedicated European line). I originally got a phone that could handle a physical sim and additional esims for this reason.

Don't know much about the company other than that.

AT&T has an absolutely terrible network - janky glued together hell - but I've never once had an issue in over 20 years.

Aside from a janky customer app on iPhone, I'm quite pleased. That said, I've never been to a physical location.

AT&T has added 2M postpaid phone subscribers over the past year, an average of 500k per quarter.

Over the past year, Verizon has been basically flat adding 106k postpaid phone customers, an average of 27k per quarter. Verizon is flat, but the other two are getting 5M new postpaid phone customers a year.

Except my phone was on my parent's plan (since single people get scammed by the carriers) and my home internet was my own fios subscription. It kept trying to merge my personal home plan, located 300 miles from my parents home into my parents cellular plan account.

I was on Straight Talk, which was great because you could pick any carrier by simply buying the SIM for that carrier. I picked the T-Mobile SIM.

When Verizon bought them, you no longer had that option and you were suddenly just shunted to Verizon. When that happened, my 5G speeds in the city dropped significantly. Meanwhile, the coverage outside major population centers is not better. My wife still has T-Mobile so we have an easy way to compare, and T-Mobile's network is beating the pants off Verizon these days.

There are only 3 mobile networks in the US. But using MVNO, they can sell the same wireless broadband infrastructure to different people at different prices.

There is also QCI. You pay more, you (ideally) get higher priority.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/tn4733/qci_leve...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QoS_Class_Identifier

Same reason car sales people focus on the monthly payments instead of the total cost.

The few times we've needed support, they're helpful and easy to talk to.

Dealing with Fi support was an absolute revelation after countless hours spent waiting in AT&T stores even for a simple phone upgrade.

Their app is solid, billing is very easy to understand and the prices are competitive.

Coverage used to be lacking in rural areas compared to Verizon and AT&T, but it's improved dramatically over the past few years in our area.

Highly recommend Fi.

It sounds like a meme that a big company might want to have internally, if they were trying to both reduce regretted/uncontrolled attrition, while also lighting a fire under people who the company thinks are complacent.

But the company would not say that publicly (nor want employees to say that too loudly), because that would be a big liability, defaming tens of thousands of people while they are job-hunting. Also, a jerk move.

Regardless, I'd normally expect any big company layoffs to likely include people that the company or some layer of management has wanted to get rid of (for various reasons, not all the fault of the employee). But layoffs will also hit people based on what project they're on, what department, what role, and simply because their manager was given a target number to reduce.

I also know of multiple high-performers who knew/assumed layoffs were coming, and already wanted to leave, so quietly put in a word with a trusted manager/exec, that they would like a severance package when the time comes. (And then the manager could keep another person or two they would've had to reduce otherwise.)

Where, exactly? If everybody is 2-5x overstaffed and is cutting people, where are all those people going to go? Form startups to sell things to people forming startups because they were laid off?

People like Nat and Musk want people burning themselves out with overwork and blame organizational and management issues on people not working hard enough. The truth is at most tech companies the real organizational waste is bad leadership and poor direction, people not having clear goals and work, and burning too many cycles trying to compensate for organizational dysfunction.

Hurray Elon