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Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

reuters.com

91–100 of 294 posts

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#91
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How so? Most of the OpenStack stewards are as stodgy and corporate...

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#92
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 engin…

Low mobility? Immigrants on H1-B can change employers.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#93
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I agree but they have a guaranteed job if they retrain. These are relatively smart and educated people. Retraining shouldn't be the end of the world.

In my profession (banking), staff levels have been going pretty much consistently down since the financial crisis, as banks shrink or retreat from certain activities. But these are mostly bright, educated, business savvy people, who end up doing something else. For many it is a blessing in disguise, an opportunity (albeit in a brutal way) to move away from a shrinking industry to become their own boss or to work on the next big thing.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#94
Reading some of these comments has reminded me just how much I no longer have to really think about in full-stack engineering, because it's been so successfully abstracted away. It's like reading an abridged version of the history of technology growth.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#96

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…

> They seem like the kind of company destroying people that are the death knell of every software giant.

Conjecture: you have never worked for a medium or large software company.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#99
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people choose a career just because it's something they can do, and make good money doing it. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that. Until you have to work with their crappy code I guess

Or use the crappy products they build.

Welcome to the disconnect between business and life. Most businesses are operated with profit as its only real goal. Everything else is just marketing talk. Companies are run by specialists in business - i.e. people whose occupation is turning money into more money in whatever way, regardless of the money source (hopefully within the bounds of law). Product quality is only one of the many factors in making money, and is worked on only as long as it boost sales. The moment the company can sell a crappier product for the same price, they'll do so.

A lot of resentment between developers[0] and managers comes from not understanding that. Management does not care about your engineering concerns as long as they don't meaningfully impact sales[1]. Hell, even if they do, they can often paper over technical problems with marketing cheaper than it would take you to fix it. If they got a confidential memo that the whole country is going to have a sudden diarrhea epidemic, they'd happily sell the product, fire your team and buy a toilet paper factory instead.

--

[0] - those who haven't already been brainwashed into thinking in business terms first, i.e. into professionals.

[1] - sometimes it doesn't matter even if it impact sales, as long as it does so on a longer term than manager's expected involvement with this particular project.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#100
post #76

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…

> I have looked at Android code.

You just have to look at the API. From little details (wifiInfo.getSSID() returning either the quoted SSID, an unquoted string of hex characters the SSID consists of, the special string "" or "0x") to the overall architecture (needlessly convoluted lifecycle, 2D rendering architecture from 2000s, the whole intra-app Intent bullshit that causes people to find alternative ways of communicating between Activities within the same app ...)

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