For 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.
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?
That's correct.
In the case of Twitter, it was disclosed that many of their systems were running out of date EOL software, to the point of being a security liability, which raises the question: if the systems weren't being maintained, wtf were all those people doing? Taste-testing the free food and cappuccinos?
This is more likely a management problem rather than a staffing problem. Lower level management knows about these kind of things but often they are not incentivized to make them a priority due to a culture focused on growth and “winning”.
You do need too many people to work with that. Cutting them is asking for pain.
Also things break. Vulnerabilities come along that need to be carefully patched and deployed. Tools and packages get depreciated. Updates can be done to save compute, and money. Things don't just hum along with zero intervention by no one for years and years.
I realize your point, but its fair to say maintaining a nationwide physical wireless infrastructure may not be the same as hosting tweets, particularly when outages strike.
When Twitter did, its CEO may have slept at the office for weeks to make sure problems were resolved.
On the other hand, the Verizon CEO may be shopping for a new boat
Many think Twitter has imploded, though it's online.
> You do realize it's possible for an organization to be overstaffed?
It's possible to be understaffed or appropriately staffed. Anything is possible!
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?
To who? What evidence is there either way?
Is it an often-repeated story online? That sort of information is both well known and unreliable - it's well-known misinformation.
Big Tech companies operate much more complex systems (for starters, they actually build greenfield stuff instead of buying ready-made equipment from a vendor and plugging it in) and have way less headcount.
You're building new cell towers, managing countless failed backhual links (thanks to fiber's natural enemy, the backhoe), working with whatever obscure bugs your MVNOs have managed to uncover, certifying new cell phone designs, and still working on upgrading everything to 5G while simultaneously planning for 6G (keeping in mind that the 5G network architecture looks radically different than the LTE architecture). Much of that work is necessarily physically distributed across the entire country.
Not to mention dealing with end-user sales and support, which unfortunately often needs physical stores.
I'm not going to say whether 100k is too many, but there's a lot more involved here than just maintenance and monitoring - especially if you want your network capacity to keep up with growing demand.
The problem is that this is a culture problem and once a company is ossified it is really hard to enact such change from the inside even if you wanted to because everyone enjoys the status quo (and who doesn't wouldn't be there to begin with).
Another example: have you seen the UK & EU banking scene and the boom of fintech and "neobanks" around 2017 like Revolut, Monzo, Starling, N26, etc? They managed to build from scratch on relatively shoestring budgets their own implementation of a consumer bank, something that their legacy competitors still can't replicate despite having way more budget and resources.
Unfortunately, the telco world is an oligopoly and they don't like new entrants (banking in the UK was actually a much more level playing field in comparison), so we can never actually see an experiment that proves or disproves my theory.
I also note you kind of glossed over the 'legacy sludge' technologies that telcos must support — that likely takes a lot of manpower, making it very difficult for them to get to the 0.1x staffing level
Yes, this explains most of our jobs.