Winter is coming.
Yes, in about 4 months. Winters in San Jose tend to be pretty mild though.
Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
81–90 of 294 posts
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#82Let'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 emoti…
As someone who made the mistake in working for an international office, and caught the train out almost 10 years ago now, I agree. I escaped one set of layoffs and then kept thinking I'm next.
I was next.
Got fired at end of financial year, along with a couple thousand others. Had a new job before the day was out (another result of said anxiety).
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#83I 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…
> 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.
Cisco is a huge place and this varies by person/team/BU. Fridays a lot of people work from home.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#84Earlier 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.
>. why would you want to run it on a non-csco/vanilla x86 boxes ?
AWS, for instance, with the CRS1000V. Though, I think that is IOS-XE and Linux based. IIRC, they are moving to IOS-XE/XR which is more Linux based and can be run on COTS boxes.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> all new deployments must be on Openstack you have my sympathies
What's so bad about OpenStack?
What's good about it? It's a bunch of different dumpster fires created by a bunch of committees across a bunch of companies which mostly compete with each other, and as such have no real incentive or motivation to have it all work well together even if they had the ability to, and the ability alone is seriously in question.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#86> ...as the company transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric organization. With all these companies exiting the hardware space, who is going to be doing the hardware? Will hardware remain a niche department within these software based companies? Are off-the-shelf systems-on-a-chip now powerful enough that there is now no need for hardware, beyond a generic universal SoC based device? Is it going to…
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…
White box switches are all great in the data center if we are talking about a shitload of layer 2 and TRILL, but somebody still has to manufacture the core routers capable of advanced IP layer 3 features at line rate 400-1000Gbps bus backplane per slot. You're not going to whitebox replace an ASR9010 with 3rd generation line cards.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#87Let'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.
I know I'm cynical, but from what I've seen, the massive skill shortage is specifically for young, early career software developers willing to work for somewhat subpar wages. A 45 year old embedded systems manager would have a much harder time finding a new job.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may not. But large enterprises that pay billions a year for networking gear, who can save a billion by buying whitebox, and still get that Cisco feel that they have spent years training and acquiring expertise will and already are. It may not be IOS. But Cisco will come out with something that feels and operates like IOS that runs on x86. Juniper has already ported it's JUNOS to run on x86. Between whitebox and S…
> Juniper has already ported it's JUNOS to run on x86. huh :) i was/am under the impression that with junos, juniper started with freebsd as the core, and then added lot's of stuff to it, specifically in control-plane and a bunch of kernel extensions as well. if that is true, they were already x86 compatible... with cisco things are very different. i don't think ios ever ran on a bare-metal x86. this is not for the l…
The very first juniper ever was basically a freebsd box glued to a bunch of custom ASIC and line cards. The m40. It has always been x86 and now x86-64.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#89Let'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.
Not quite so clear. This is a layoff of 14,000 hardware or low-level networking systems engineers [1], not 14,000 front-end developers, it is not so obvious to me that the current Silicon Valley market is ready to absorb them so easily.
Interesting to think those were the kind of jobs, and CISCO the kind of company, that once gave Silicon Valley its name. Makes you wonder how the market for software engineers, even adaptable always-learning hack-through-the-night-for-fun engineers, might look in 20 or 30 years.
[1] Read "(low-level networking systems) engineers", not "low-level (networking systems engineers )"
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> all new deployments must be on Openstack you have my sympathies
What's so bad about OpenStack?
The Vision: a community-managed set of integrated tools that let you create a featureful cloud on hardware you control.
The Reality: a bunch of python scripts everyone forks.. committee politics...frustration
OpenStack is a great example of going "community" before the problem is well understood or there is a solution people trust.
It's basically a tire fire at this point and most of the community participants are market losers.