90 Day Notice for Network Engineers

Originally Posted by Womble

The 54 are not part of the 109 :-( 54 are going Business from the Telewest side, then 20 percent from all sides to go which equals 109 engineers. But, most of the Telewest boys are not Dual trained (CATV & Telco), they also have "Core Network Techs", which to ex-Nynex are Activation. so I suspect Telewest bods will take the major hit

From what i have been told today it works out as this.
approx 500 Network engineers for the whole country

-54 going to Business.
-109 redundant

= 337 Engineers to cover the whole country.

Doing the following

network upgrades
network maintenance
preventive maintenance "been told this NEVER happens now"
day to day faults.
on call cover.

So these poor sods will be worked into the ground daily.

No wonder moral is lower than a snakes belly in a wagon rut.

[Escapee]

Originally Posted by Saneboy13

The biggest pain in the a$$ for us at the moment, is the fact that they don't know how many engineers are going from each area (or so they claim).

We don't know if it's 1, 2, 3 or 4 in my area. It has taken them three months to get figures together, but they can not tell us what the local impact will be.

Moral is rock bottom right now, we have ended up with more questions than answers from the presentation and we are fearing what the knock on effect will be to the Network.

I was banging on the other week about return path issues with people using sub standard splits and cable, now it's going to get a whole lot harder to keep on top of those kind of things.

But there are some of us that are either stupid or stubborn (me) that want's to keep working for NTL, I want to try to keep making that little bit of a difference, but I will have to wait and see what the cull will be and what my area will be reduced too...

I heard that from one of the guys in Cardiff today, he said it sounded like any number between 1 and 5 but they didn't know. That sounds like they really know what they are doing!

I spoke to another guy today in a national department, he was on 90 days earlier this month and then taken off risk. He was then put on 90 days yet again last week, it makes you wonder if the left hand really knows what the right hand is doing.

Although he did say something that was good, there is now only one head of department who is ex-ntl and he's my old boss. All the rest are Telewest guys, a lot of the ntl ones are on their bike.

I know there are one or two sad losses amongst them, but generally some of them have been around for too long. I was surprised at some of the names he said were still about after all the redundancies losing good people, although it does seem like a lot of the hangers on are now hanging on for dear life.

[860]

Whats got my goat is the fact that as a network engineer I'm having to cover service faults next week as they are short staffed, leaving 2 blokes to cover an average of 25 network refferals a day, as no pm is being done things are starting to fall over, especialy in this heat we have no spares for the antiquated equipment so having to improvise unit repairs especialy 24v switching units and fuse boards for 1 ftd's in the street. any one who has any going spare drop me a line.
Also it's been hinted at no VRD for me as to qualified and experienced and as has been mentioned already in previous posts I will leave once I've found something comparable or better.
I've also been told that all you guy's in old NTL land are very happy with the state of affiairs and that we in old Telewest land are just moaning about change, which by all accounts from managment is the best thing since the wheel.(that must be the square one as thats pretty amazing!).
Any way not to be wanting to sound negative. God luck to all affected by this and hope that the muppets that run this shower have run out of horlicks, they then might know whats it's like to not sleep all night and have to work or what ever they do all day.

[Escapee]

Originally Posted by 860

Whats got my goat is the fact that as a network engineer I'm having to cover service faults next week as they are short staffed, leaving 2 blokes to cover an average of 25 network refferals a day, as no pm is being done things are starting to fall over, especialy in this heat we have no spares for the antiquated equipment so having to improvise unit repairs especialy 24v switching units and fuse boards for 1 ftd's in the street. any one who has any going spare drop me a line.
Also it's been hinted at no VRD for me as to qualified and experienced and as has been mentioned already in previous posts I will leave once I've found something comparable or better.
I've also been told that all you guy's in old NTL land are very happy with the state of affiairs and that we in old Telewest land are just moaning about change, which by all accounts from managment is the best thing since the wheel.(that must be the square one as thats pretty amazing!).
Any way not to be wanting to sound negative. God luck to all affected by this and hope that the muppets that run this shower have run out of horlicks, they then might know whats it's like to not sleep all night and have to work or what ever they do all day.

I left ntl back in 2001, after 13 years in the industry. I could see ntl getting worse but to be honest couldn't see it getting much worse. I went to work for a company that had a large contract to supply the network management system to ntl approx £10M and £1M a year maintenance, ntl verbally agreed everything to get the kit installed, made similar promises to other large vendors and promptly filed for chapter 11.

The working conditions have slowy but surely got worse in the company, due to the number of years and sort of people I was involved with, I still have fairly regular contact with ntl employees. (even if they are just asking me if I know of any jobs available) Certainly amongst the network techs in original
ntl they are not happy, anyone who says that is spouting pure lies.

There seems to be different views, but there are techs who are keeping thier head down because they are not capable of finding anything else, techs who are too lazy or set in their ways, and techs who are just waiting for the redundancy. Sure there are some good techs still in ntl, but the many good ones who have left have meant promotion of lower grades due to a block on employing people. This has in many cases meant some of the newer techs in networks wouldn't of been seen as suitable a few years ago, but are now acceptable to fill the gap.

This all means a company that is becoming less and less efficient at fixing customers faults, preventative maintenance was always the first thing to be dropped in the old days. Funny though, it was always re-instated when the faults started to escalate because of it. It appears these days that they just fire fight and ignore the fact that some preventative maintenance actually reduces the number of service and network calls.

I guess the reduction in managers with any technical skill, for ones who used to work in the call centre has a lot to do with these decisions. The 'yes men' managers under them are also to blame, the majority of managers in networks keep their heads down and mouths shut not to kill the golden goose who lays a big egg in their bank account every month.

ntl is a pile of sh*te, the company is getting deeper and deeper into trouble. I have predicted that the company will go from one crisis to the next, and I dont even believe we have seen the last of the redundancies or the bottom of the spiral yet.

Right now if they had to pay the quarterly interest payments they were paying before chapter 11, they would again have to seek a safety net from the creditors. Chapter 11 and all the redundancies and the merger has still left them with a large disfunctional company full of very pi**ed under motivated employees.

The employee morale speaks volumes for the companies chance of making the business viable.

[Shaved Wookie]

There are some NTL franchise areas that are already desperatley short of network techs (ie Leicester), I don't know how they can expect to cut back even further? It is so reminiscent of whats happened with parts of FMS, no one replaced upon leaving and instead expected to take on more and more work. Its probably been said before, but there are clearly too many levels of management which is causing failures within network operations as a whole.

Originally Posted by Escapee

I left ntl back in 2001, after 13 years in the industry. I could see ntl getting worse but to be honest couldn't see it getting much worse. I went to work for a company that had a large contract to supply the network management system to ntl approx £10M and £1M a year maintenance, ntl verbally agreed everything to get the kit installed, made similar promises to other large vendors and promptly filed for chapter 11.

The working conditions have slowy but surely got worse in the company, due to the number of years and sort of people I was involved with, I still have fairly regular contact with ntl employees. (even if they are just asking me if I know of any jobs available) Certainly amongst the network techs in original
ntl they are not happy, anyone who says that is spouting pure lies.

There seems to be different views, but there are techs who are keeping thier head down because they are not capable of finding anything else, techs who are too lazy or set in their ways, and techs who are just waiting for the redundancy. Sure there are some good techs still in ntl, but the many good ones who have left have meant promotion of lower grades due to a block on employing people. This has in many cases meant some of the newer techs in networks wouldn't of been seen as suitable a few years ago, but are now acceptable to fill the gap.

This all means a company that is becoming less and less efficient at fixing customers faults, preventative maintenance was always the first thing to be dropped in the old days. Funny though, it was always re-instated when the faults started to escalate because of it. It appears these days that they just fire fight and ignore the fact that some preventative maintenance actually reduces the number of service and network calls.

I guess the reduction in managers with any technical skill, for ones who used to work in the call centre has a lot to do with these decisions. The 'yes men' managers under them are also to blame, the majority of managers in networks keep their heads down and mouths shut not to kill the golden goose who lays a big egg in their bank account every month.

ntl is a pile of sh*te, the company is getting deeper and deeper into trouble. I have predicted that the company will go from one crisis to the next, and I dont even believe we have seen the last of the redundancies or the bottom of the spiral yet.

Right now if they had to pay the quarterly interest payments they were paying before chapter 11, they would again have to seek a safety net from the creditors. Chapter 11 and all the redundancies and the merger has still left them with a large disfunctional company full of very pi**ed under motivated employees.

The employee morale speaks volumes for the companies chance of making the business viable.

Originally Posted by only me

Seconded