![]() Then when they were in serious trouble they tried to fix things and found their logistics system was ages behind, their data was useless, their software broken and ineffective, their experts grew frustrated and left years ago, while substandard employees who knew they'd be fired anywhere else were now in senior positions because they stayed. More than a decade went by and they frittered away that billion dollars while their revenue gradually fell thanks to Amazon despite the mantra being during my time there "We don't consider Amazon a competitor" (which a current employee in finance told me they were still saying as late as 2019). A culture where "no one ever gets fired here" (HR's comment to me) didn't matter, no matter how many good people left and bad people stayed. Data that was simply wrong didn't matter (my boss covered up a data problem I found and this was a major contribution to my quitting). They had a billion in cash and no debt so to them nothing mattered except stock buybacks to raise the price so they could cash in their options. It was probably so buggy already that "better than ever" doesn't mean much.Īlso, another long essay for another time, but this is how I knew in 2005 the company was doomed. So color me skeptical that they're improving anything or fixing bugs. ![]() Yes, they were literally copying and pasting! Billion dollar company. They then hit the copy button to get everything on the same sheet of paper. They laid out these strips alongside the new report on the photocopy machine and taped everything in place. They then used scissors to cut out certain columns from the old report. Then when the current month ended that report was run. The boss kept a copy of last month's report in a binder. I observed how they were handling the problem. No one had been able to get it to print summaries for the past and current month side by side in the three years my boss had been there (I ultimately did, but that's another story). They also had reporting software that had been discontinued at version 8 although our department only had version 5. I told her that if I hadn't just quit I'd have gone down and quit now after learning that. So the pages got put on a cart (there were that many!) and wheeled down to the floor below us where there were people who spent the day manually typing everything she'd printed out from system 1 into system 2!!! She told me that we had two computer systems that had never been successfully integrated with each other IT had promised to do it but never did. I turned to this woman and told her I had to know - what happens to all those pages she prints out every day? Right after I told HR I quit with a generous one day notice while my boss was on the other side of the country on a business trip, I came back to my desk. When I worked at BBB corporate a woman who had a cubicle next to mine came in an hour early every day to print out hundreds and hundreds of sheets of paper.
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