Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#51

Post by kyrra » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 4:54 AM UTC

chucky_z wrote: post #40

Interesting. I live in the south bay right next to the Cisco campus, and the amount of new employees they are hiring is staggering. I wonder how many of the 14,000 are being rehired as a contractor or something?

This seems to be Cisco's standard operating procedure. They do big layoffs from the product groups that are underperforming. But all those affected can apply to jobs in other groups that are making money still. It seems to be Cisco's way to de-staff a product area quickly and let the employees figure out what to do.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#52

Post by BinaryIdiot » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 4:55 AM UTC

starving_coder wrote: post #31

rosstex wrote: post #9

Sweet jesus that's a lot of people! I'm having trouble wrapping my head around that many people being fired.

There is a big delta between being fired and being downsized; like core dumps. Some have backtraces, some don't.

> There is a big delta between being fired and being downsized

I think you originally meant to say "laid off" versus "downsized" as downsized isn't related to the individual employee but to the company has a whole. Still though except for some background check by a government job or unemployment benefits I see little difference between being fired and laid off. Sure there are some differences but I wouldn't call it a big delta at all.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#53

Post by BinaryIdiot » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 4:56 AM UTC

kyrra wrote: post #51

chucky_z wrote: post #40

Interesting. I live in the south bay right next to the Cisco campus, and the amount of new employees they are hiring is staggering. I wonder how many of the 14,000 are being rehired as a contractor or something?

This seems to be Cisco's standard operating procedure. They do big layoffs from the product groups that are underperforming. But all those affected can apply to jobs in other groups that are making money still. It seems to be Cisco's way to de-staff a product area quickly and let the employees figure out what to do.

Honestly when I worked at CSC it was the same way. The amount of people we'd have in our group that we'd have to interview from other parts of CSC in order for them to stay employed was staggering. Even worse was many of them were developers for over 20 years and couldn't program much of anything =/

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#54

Post by unethical_ban » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 4:57 AM UTC

pnw_hazor wrote: post #28

Wonder what this shift to SDN will mean for F5? It seems like you still need fast edge devices to get to the SDN of the cloud.

Downvoted and can't undo on mobile.

I will say that I wish F5 were less of a substitute for reliable applications where I work. If we had gold, horizontally scalable apps we wouldn't need to Bork with routing so much.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#55

Post by unethical_ban » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 4:58 AM UTC

fensterblick wrote: post #38

philip1209 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long story short: I think that, in the next year, we will see a marked shift toward subscription pricing. Amazon pushing subscriptions. Dollar shave club for X. Same for Cisco - getting recurring revenue through security/SDN/SaaS subscriptions rather than one-time hardware sales seems to be a safer long-term bet.

It's already happening. Several examples come to mind, but for now I'll use one that is relevant to Cisco: Palo Alto Networks offers several subscription based services for its security/networking hardware.

IPS and URL filtering have always been a subscription model though.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#56

Post by BinaryIdiot » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 4:58 AM UTC

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #27

It's scary seeing all of these lay-offs happening. I'd hate to be looking for a software engineering job right now.

> I'd hate to be looking for a software engineering job right now

Why? These Cisco lay-offs are hardware engineering related and the other ones are not nearly as big and are pretty typical (unfortunately). Software engineering is not only in HUGE demand but it's growing incredibly quickly. I have no idea how the hardware engineering space is behaving but software is off the charts.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#57

Post by brogrammernot » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 4:59 AM UTC

michaelvoz wrote: post #46

I live down the street from Cisco HQ. I share an apartment building with many of their engineers. Perhaps it is anecdotal, and my evidence comes purely from speaking with them (I have never seen their work), but they come across as absolutely terrible as software engineers. They seem like the kind of company destroying people that are the death knell of every software giant. They have no care for the product, good pr…

I'm sure they have some good engineers. However, I will say that friends who work there currently and those who have worked there in the past constantly raved about how little they actually have to work and how empty the office is on Fridays among other aspects that give the impression that much isn't expected from their engineers.

When you buy practically any competitor and control the margins like Cisco was able to do for so many years that turned massive profits there isn't really much expected from the employees I'd wager.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#58

Post by hujun » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 5:05 AM UTC

signa11 wrote: post #37

Trisell wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The networking field, as with the server hardware field, is seeing a movement towards commodity hardware. Custom network silicon is expensive to develop, and no longer is returning the investment that it did. This is cause companies like Juniper and Cisco to look at ways to expand their profits, while essentially making nothing on the hardware. Cisco along with others are looking by at things like licensing the IOS t…

> Cisco along with others are looking by at things like licensing the IOS to run on any device. ios is a custom-rtos for a custom machine (running on mips mostly). it runs control plane for your routers/switches etc. why would you want to run it on a non-csco/vanilla x86 boxes ? unless you can _somehow_ make control-plane h/w agnostic (easier said than done) i don't really see much value in doing this.

> ios is a custom-rtos for a custom machine (running on mips mostly).

this is true for legacy IOS, the "new" IOS-XE and IOS-XR could run on top of linux, in fact IOS-XR 6.0 could run in a linux container: http://www.cisco.com/assets/global/DK/seminarer/pdfs/XR60.pd...

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#59

Post by hueving » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 5:16 AM UTC

karma_vaccum123 wrote: post #44

mdani wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The software will run on inexpensive dumb hardware from whitelabel manufacturers such as Quanta computers. The secret sauce in hardware that gave Cisco big margins is increasingly replaced by software that is good enough (e.g. You can use SDN controller and a cheap switch hardware to replace very expensive Cisco stuff). The trend in Enterprises and telcos is to use cloud (AWS, GCE, Azure,...) and open source (aka Fac…

> all new deployments must be on Openstack you have my sympathies

Better that then yet more money funneling into the pockets of the big cloud companies.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#60

Post by was_boring » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 5:16 AM UTC

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #52

starving_coder wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a big delta between being fired and being downsized; like core dumps. Some have backtraces, some don't.

> There is a big delta between being fired and being downsized I think you originally meant to say "laid off" versus "downsized" as downsized isn't related to the individual employee but to the company has a whole. Still though except for some background check by a government job or unemployment benefits I see little difference between being fired and laid off. Sure there are some differences but I wouldn't call it a…

Furthermore, you can be fired and still collect unemployment. For an individual employee, there is little difference in actual outcome between the two.