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T-Mobile US profits just keep rolling in. So only thing to do is axe 5k workers (theregister.com)
23 points by rntn on Aug 25, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments


Since I don't post on Reddit anymore, I feel as if I have nowhere else to post this.

I used to be a near-lifelong T-Mobile US customer. My family started on T-Mobile via Omnipoint in NYC.

When we moved to Houston two and a half years ago, the coverage here was absolutely garbage. Trying to find signal anywhere was a pain, and cellular often didn't work in our house.

So we switched to AT&T, and I deleted my account with TMUS thinking that I wouldn't look back.

I was wrong.

After yet another string of bad service and slow 5G, I decided to give T-Mobile another try. It is leaps and bounds better. It's almost as if I'm using another carrier. 5G especially.

I never had working 5G before and largely thought it to be a gimmick, until I started using T-Mobile 5G Ultra Capacity. At one place, I had bandwidth over cell that was as fast as my gigabit Wi-Fi mesh at home. Insane speeds.

And it wasn't limited that one spot. I got a T-Mobile prepaid SIM while we were on a road trip to compare coverage. TMUS trounced over AT&T in just about every market. It was a night and day difference.

Between this, T-Mobile Tuesdays, Netflix and Apple TV+ on them (including Premium), an extremely seamless onboarding process (which surprised me, given that TMUS's IT has gotten a fair share of criticism), why anyone would bother with AT&T in most cases.


> According to the letter, the layoffs will primarily hit workers in corporate, back-office, and technology roles. Retail and customer service workers won't be impacted by the cuts, it's said.

As a corporate and technology worker for my whole career, this seems perfectly reasonable?


> T-Mobile US says workers will be offered "competitive severance payments based on tenure," in addition to at least 60 days of transition leave.

could certainly do worse on the package.


It costs them $450M. For 5K employees, that comes down to 90K/employee. Of course, that doesn’t mean every one of the 5K employees is going to get that much as severance, but it seems they are spending a decent chunk on severance.


Gotta bump those stock prices. Short term shareholder value at any cost to the company.


Short term shareholder value at any cost to the people doing the work...


Maybe they’ll spend the extra cash on security? They’ve had an almost unbelievable number of breaches.


For perspective, Amazon pushes out more than 7% of its workforce every year for "performance reasons". For a far more stable company like T-mobile, this feels like cruft-culling.


> For a far more stable company like T-mobile, this feels like cruft-culling.

What possible basis do you have for saying that the five thousand workers are cruft?




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