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Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

reuters.com

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Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#71

Post by technion »

brogrammernot wrote: post #57
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…

The margins in particular are something I cannot understand from Cisco.

Technology in general comes down in pricing. I'm constantly amazed at the vendors that introduce newer, more powerful product lines, with a reduced price tag from anything previously seen.

Cisco here, are a huge outlier. Despite HPE and Juniper creeping much more competitive options into their enterprise space, twice or so times a year we get alerts from Cisco about "across the board" price increases.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#72

Post by drawkbox »

Let's just say the average salary is 70k which is very conservative. That is 14k * 70k annually lost from the local community, a grand total of 980M or let's just say 1 billion annually.

Looking for another job when there are massive cuts like this also degrades the salary they accept on their next job because of the competition.

I wish companies, if possible, throttled layoffs a bit more instead of large chunks like this, but that is unlikely as the board/CEOs are looking for a stock uptick when they do and don't want to drag it out to affect the market value (translation: their own pay / stock value/price).

We rarely look at the amount of money lost in communities when things like this happen but it would be nice if reporters put out the lost community dollars/salaries along with the layoff number. The Great Wage Stagnation continues in our consumer driven economy.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#73

Post by bpodgursky »

vkat wrote: post #39

I work here and this is a surprise to me, company seems to be doing well there has been considerable hiring in my organization in the past few months so I am not sure why 20% of the employees are being laid off.

It's often easier to fire under performing employees en masse for legal reasons. Fire one and they can claim discrimination etc. Be part of a layoff and there's not much argument.

If it's just 20℅ it could just be cleaning out the ranks while continuing hiring.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#76

Post by lil1729 »

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 have looked at Android code. It is awful. Now, I don't form opinions about Google engineers based just on that code.

I meant to say, generalizations don't always work well. They may have bad engineers. But they have great engineers too. Kent Dybvig and his team who wrote Chez Scheme works for Cisco. There are many others. Jonathan Rosenberg who wrote many Internet RFCs on fundamental protocols that run the Internet voice/video works for Cisco.

Let's not generalize. It hurts people!

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#77

Post by cm2187 »

drawkbox wrote: post #72

Let's just say the average salary is 70k which is very conservative. That is 14k * 70k annually lost from the local community, a grand total of 980M or let's just say 1 billion annually. Looking for another job when there are massive cuts like this also degrades the salary they accept on their next job because of the competition. I wish companies, if possible, throttled layoffs a bit more instead of large chunks like…

If the local community is the Silicon Valley, it should be able to absorb that pretty quickly. Thought there was a massive skill shortage out there.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#78

Post by tushar-r »

drawkbox wrote: post #72

Let's just say the average salary is 70k which is very conservative. That is 14k * 70k annually lost from the local community, a grand total of 980M or let's just say 1 billion annually. Looking for another job when there are massive cuts like this also degrades the salary they accept on their next job because of the competition. I wish companies, if possible, throttled layoffs a bit more instead of large chunks like…

> wish companies, if possible, throttled layoffs a bit more

The uncertainty will cause a lot of stress. As a red badge at Cisco some years back, layoff talks used to cause me serious anxiety, even though my parent company would just move me to another project.

The bigger problem with Cisco is that people speculate about layoffs and there are continual leaks. This really upsets employees, and causes considerable emotional pain for them.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#79

Post by jdale27 »

ryandrake wrote: post #34
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.

If you listen to tech CEOs, there's this huge "shortage of software engineers". Surely any former Cisco employee with software experience will be snapped up within days by all these tech companies desperately searching for tech talent.... Any day now....

If you listen to tech CEOs, there's this huge "shortage of software engineers".

There is no shortage of software engineers. What there is, in the eyes of those CEOs, is a shortage of H1-B visas -- i.e., cheap labor from abroad with low mobility. Of course, the alternative is to invest in training citizens and permanent residents, who will then go and get higher-paying jobs elsewhere. So the myth of the software engineer shortage lives on...

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#80

Post by fastball »

sengork wrote: post #70

If anything this shift to software based networking is a reflection the Intel's CPUs have reached the 'fast enough' mark. Here are some of the relevant articles for those who may not be in the datacentre loop: NFV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_function_virtualizatio... SDN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_networking Regardless there is still place for time-critical network segments where you'll…

Yup. For most use cases, SDN is now good enough that you don't need premium/bespoke hardware solutions, commodity hardware works just as well.

And for the segment of the market where SDN isn't yet good enough (HFT, for instance), there are a lot of players in the field.

See this article that was on HN recently about one of Cisco's competitors, that seems to be making more performant switches than Cisco.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602135/high-frequency-tra...

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