The Bonfire of Verrucas

I’m going to get a little bit controversial here. You have been warned.??

In what must surely be a major boost for the cardboard storage box industry, the past few weeks have seen massive layoffs in the tech industry.? According to Crunchbase, over 46,000 people have already boxed up their desk cactus and colourful pens before being escorted to the car park by Security.??

Indeed, it seems the big players are having a bit of a clear out, with Google, Amazon and Microsoft all swinging the axe at their respective workforces – apparently in response to the economic headwinds blowing in from the swelling storms of Covid and Russia. In some instances, the volume of staff reductions ranges up to 10%; reports suggest Twitter is now being moderated by three people barricaded in an office in Milan, an unverified amount of Sea Monkeys absent-mindedly left in a tank in the New York office, and a Tamagotchi that’s been wedged behind a server in Droitwich since 1996.?

There is a lot of chatter about this being an unmitigated Bad Thing, but I beg to differ (I told you this’d be controversial).??

Anyone who has worked in one of these tech Behemoths – as I have – will testify that you quite often find yourself wondering what 90% of your colleagues actually do; most of the time you’ve accepted that it’s down to you to get anything done.??

Certainly, in sales, working amongst tens of thousands of colleagues can feel like you are ploughing a very solitary furrow. That is, until you are about to win a major client deal or pull off some amazing step change development that will revolutionise the modern world like Aerosol Cheese or the like. Then (and only then) you suddenly find yourself inundated with meeting requests, lunch invites and any tentative connection being mentioned in meetings about how some total stranger who works on another continent was somehow co-responsible for your project’s significant impact.??

For many years, the Tech industry has harboured a terrible secret, and now it looks like the word is out: some of the millions of staff, are coupon clippers. They spend their time hovering around vending machines, taking meetings at the in-house coffee bar, or buzzing around Teams chats to get the scent of any solitary worker bee who has actually achieved something today. Once they have identified their prey, they swarm. Soon they have appropriated all the value of the work to themselves, and possibly their boss too, and are swanning off to the Californian hills to party with the CEO and regale them of stories of how they were the lynchpin in winning that huge deal. The original worker bee is either locked in their cubicle or stapled to a notice board, drained of any further use to the careers of the swarm. They don’t do anything useful directly but have become expert at associating themselves to people who do.?

In my experience, I’ve observed the emergence of a few notable archetypes:?

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The VP of Vagueness?

The King of Airmiles, he’s always presenting at some trade show in Vegas or Barcelona. Very often he’s a Brit but lives in Connecticut or Palo Alto, calls taps “Faucets” and speaks with an irritatingly false Mid-Atlantic drawl akin to David Frost. He swings by the office once in a blue moon to launch “Project Jellyfish” but even after his gargantuan 127-slide deck nobody has a bloody clue what he was talking about.??

The VP of Vagueness is at every Sales gathering you have ever attended, where he witters on at the bar about “strategic relationships” and wears tweed waistcoats and cravats for no apparent reason. You are pretty sure that he is something to do with Sales, but no one can ever place their finger precisely on what it is he actually does, nor can they name a notable achievement, and he doesn’t seem to have a target other than endeavouring to wear an ever-increasing number of pastel shaded Pringle jumpers at breakfast.??

Apparently, he personally witnessed 9/11 and the JFK assassination, and shared a joint with Janis Joplin at Woodstock – all of which means that, by your calculations, he is aged somewhere between 106 to 340 years old. You once saw him coming out of the Chemist down the road from the office with a box of “Just For Men”. One day, you hear he left the business when it emerged that he had fiddled his expenses to buy a villa in Portugal for his mistress on the company AMEX. It’s no great loss – for the company or his spouse.?

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The Project Un-Manager?

This guy has spent the last two years attending Sales meetings, sitting at the back loudly chewing gum, and pissing absolutely everyone off with his smug attitude which oozes from his cufflinks to the 1980s-styled turnups on his chinos.??

One day, he appears to manage a project for you. He spends the day telling you, ‘it’s all shite and will never work’. He produces a Gant Chart and spells everyone’s name wrong, disappears at 4pm, and is never heard from again until you see him in a tuxedo being awarded PM of the Year at Achievers Club – at which point you head to the bar and sob uncontrollably into your Negroni.??

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The Regional Sales Guy?

This is one of my personal favourites. You are about to land a major deal with an international big beast. The deal has been in negotiations for months; prior to that, you have worked your contacts for years to get a toehold in the account. For the last few weeks, you were trying to get your regional colleagues to support you, only to end up flying all over the place, chasing loose ends because your overseas colleague’s Out of Office is the only reply hitting your inbox.?

Then, you stupidly mention that the deal is imminent on an international Sales call and Lo! You get the email from a sales exec called Chip, Lance, or Verruca. According to Chip, Lance or Verruca your clients’ Purchasing Department is based in Nowhereville, North Dakota and as this is in their specified sales territory, they will be assuming the role of Sales Lead on the opportunity and retiring all the revenue against their quota from here on in. You will also need to submit a request for an ex-gratia payment of 5% for providing the sales lead.??

Another interesting fact about the Regional Sales Guy: they almost always play golf with the Global VP of Sales who also wades in at some point saying that you need to be more of a team player (!!!)?

I love those guys (you know who you are...)?

In these instances, I have learnt that possession is, as they say, nine-tenths of the law and actually having the sales order in your inbox – or preferably a steel-lined briefcase – tends to prove the point. Alternatively, an email from your buyer saying they have never heard of “Verruca” before usually sways the argument in your favour.?

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The Parachute Executive?

Picture the scene: You’ve booked a meeting room for you and your trusty pre-sales guy, who has steadfastly believed in your plan and now sits alongside you, the Tonto to your Lone Ranger. You’re finalising the finer details of a deployment plan for the solution you sold to that new client that got your CEO so excited when you landed it, when the glass door suddenly swings open and in walks the Parachute Executive.?

Her voluminous hair cascades down the sides of her designer suit, and the clatter of her unfeasibly stylish high heels is only challenged by the trundling wheels of her Louis Vuitton Luggage. She sits down at the head of the table, checks her phone, removes her Air Pods and flashes her perfect teeth at you and your pre-sales guy, who has just spilt his steak slice all down his tank top. She blithely informs you that she has been sent over from ‘The East Coast’ to personally oversee the project. “Great,” you respond. “We were just about to find a PM as the last one left at 4pm three months ago”. She holds up her hand so quickly that the air swooshes. She isn’t a PM – she is a Senior Executive and she’s here to ‘get things done’.??

“OK,” you say, heading to the whiteboard to draw up a to-do list. By the time you have underlined the words, TO DO in red, however, she has already vanished off to a breakfast meeting with Tiffany from Marketing. She spends the next 3 days getting in the way, asking if you have an international charger for her hair straighteners, going jogging at lunchtimes, and looking confused at your pre-sales guy’s choice of British idioms. At some stage, she suddenly jumps up from the conference table, announces that she has to get her Uber to the airport, and just like that… she’s gone. The next time you see the elusive Parachute Executive is on the corporate website, where she’s just been appointed as General Manager of the Italian office, coinciding with an appearance in Hello! magazine having recently attended a Berlusconi party in Lake Como.??

All of these people always appear from nowhere, seemingly rise through the ranks with alarming speed and collectively achieve absolutely nothing. The sooner they are retraining as Baristas or “Life Coaches” the better as far as I am concerned; the rest of us can then crack on without them.?

That being said…what about the other victims of Silicon Valley’s merciless cull? Not everybody is a Project Un-Manager or swoops in to make a claim on your hard work only to jet off into the unknown when the credit’s been given. In fact, many of those facing lay-offs have likely been targeted because their roles are deemed ‘too small’ or ‘unnecessary’ – an assumption that has already come back to bite Elon. ?

I want to be clear. Whilst mocking the "waste of trousers" that I have previously cited above, I fully understand that they are obviously a minority and I have nothing but respect for the majority of those who today are having to again look for work and if I can be of any help, I certainy will.

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For the many organisations who look up to Silicon Valley’s mightiest, and who might be tempted to drift towards the same drastic measures to make it through the oncoming storm, there’s a better option. Without a doubt, it pays to look at saving elsewhere before cutting people. The latter will be the driving force of your business’ success during the crisis – and they’ll be the ones with you once the storm passes.??

Taking that into account, you need to be smart about it; you won’t be helping anybody by cutting budgets left and right. Instead, apply the same principle as the tech giants cutting loose the water-cooler-buzzards, remembering that sometimes a good clear out is what’s needed. We suggest that you look to the cloud as a starting point. There are probably lots of licences, solutions, resources, and features going unused – and a Surveil health check will find the waste quicker than Verruca can muscle in on your commission cheque. With the Health Check findings in your hand, you can cut the waste, trim the business, save some cash, and keep your people. Well…the useful ones, at least.??

Get in touch and we can actually achieve something, together.?