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| Topic | Stock Market General #37 |
| CableZL 06/29/21 10:50:21 AM #103: | Thaumaturge posted... That... doesn't sound good. Yeah, the company was really really bad. I'm kinda interested to see how their stock does now, though. tl;dr: GTT bought out the company I worked for and they were an extremely shitty company to work for. The CEO at the time was a snake and they had no idea how to manage our network or support our customers. My history there: November 2012: I got hired at a company called Outernet as an entry level NOC tech. December 2012: One Source Networks bought Outernet October 2015: GTT bought One Source Networks GTT's CEO at the time, Rick Calder, came to speak to us. He was selling us on how great GTT was. The only thing I remember from his speech: "We'll be great to our large customers, but not so great to our small customers." They were the 4th largest global internet backbone provider at the time and were trying to compete with Level3, which was the largest at the time. GTT would essentially buy a new company every quarter, do massive layoffs from that company as well as internally, and then repeat the cycle. One Source Networks had about 133 employees and they cut us down to about 70. They cut some critical people who were responsible for the maintenance and administration of important platforms like Solarwinds. Solarwinds started breaking and they never really fixed it while I was there (I was there about 7 months as a part of GTT). As a part of the merger, they demoted me from network engineer to the NOC and told me to work trouble tickets. I was pissed. At first, they said I would only have to do it for 60 days and then I could pick where I wanted to go. 60 days turned into 90. 90 turned into 120. And then by the time they came to me with the offer of moving out of the NOC, I was already knee deep in the job search process to get the hell out of there. I didn't care any more. Rick Calder was a snake in human form. OSN had a genius level network engineer that I was very fortunate to learn a ton from over the years. There was never a problem I went to him with that he didn't have a solution for in like 5 minutes. We had an all hands meeting one day where he told the whole company that they had completely integrated the OSN network with GTT's network. A few of us from OSN looked at the genius level network engineer and he shook his head. He had no idea what Rick Calder was talking about, LOL. The networks were definitely not integrated. They put that genius level network engineer in the NOC, too. One day, he grabbed some network equipment to configure it for a customer and they got mad at him for configuring it because the NOC isn't supposed to do that, LOL. He put in his 30 days notice soon afterward and I knew I had to GTFO. At that time, the network engineer expertise rankings in the company:
And I knew that once the genius level guy was gone, the 2nd guy was gonna be out, and then pretty much everything GTT couldn't figure out, which was most semi-advanced things about OSN's network and their customers, would fall to me. Even though I was in the NOC. GTT had some policy where customers would need to put major support requests in at least 72 hours in advance or they would get ignored. A customer tried to follow this process. They put in a request for support on a Monday because they were moving to a new office that Friday. They needed a network engineer to reconfigure their routers and set their dynamic site to site VPN tunnels up again with new IP addresses. Typically, they would just copy us all in on emails and we would handle it even if they made the request a couple days beforehand. If it was last minute, we would just do our best. I saw the request come in that Monday. I was very familiar with their network, so I offered to do the support. I was told not to because I was in the NOC and I needed to do trouble tickets. I insisted that I help them because of my rapport with that customer and my familiarity with their network. They refused and said they would take care of it. Tuesday morning came and no one had responded to him. The customer sent another email to check the status of the request. I again offered to help, but they snapped at me and told me not to. Wednesday morning came and still, no one had responded to him. The customer was getting a little panicky. He sent a bunch of emails that day trying to get a response. Thursday rolled around and they still hadn't responded. At this point, he's panicking. I'm pissed because I'm watching all this go down and they essentially handcuffed me. Thursday afternoon (they're moving offices the next morning), the customer is freaking out. Then at like 3:30pm, someone comes over to me and says "Hey CableZL, can you help them with this?" I was fucking livid. I could have been prepping to do the work all week, but because they ignored it until the last fucking minute, I had to stay up all night to plan and prepare. I got it done, but I was very upset. This is what they meant by "not so great to their small customers." I got my CCNP and was out of there within 30 days. The guy who got promoted to voice engineer at the same time I made network engineer left a few months after I did. He had a LOT of money in their stock. He ended up trying to hold on and lost about $40k when the stock crashed. They had a class action lawsuit against them because they had been lying to their investors. They eventually fired Rick Calder. They've also sold off all of their network backbone and they're purely a managed services provider now. --- ... Copied to Clipboard! |
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