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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

#111

Post by Rapzid »

karma_vaccum123 wrote: post #90
the_duke wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

Substitute Python for bash and I get the same sense from Kubernetes.. I'm not sure it's fair to say "before the problem is well understood... But maybe. Whatever Google had going on internally Kubernetes is very much figuring it out along the way at almost every level. If you are wanting to use on AWS then you have kops, kube-up, hyperkube, protokube; a dizzying, un-approachable and interconnected ecosystem of launch scripts/programs. Very strange interop decisions with AWS, but hard to fault because it's darn near one person trying to manage all AWS integrations.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#112

Post by jpalomaki »

shangaslammi wrote: post #101
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…

It's kind of strange that massive layoffs like these result in a stock uptick. At least for me it's a sign that the company is probably unhealthy and that its value is going to go down in the future.

Maybe the logic is that market is already aware that the company is not in good shape and this is reflected in the stock price. Massive layoffs tell the management is now also realising this and doing something about it, which is then thought to be a good thing.

Another explanation could be that massive layoffs has caused stock uptick in the past and therefore it makes sense to bet that the same thing will also happen this time. (Of course this only makes sense for those who are first to react to the news)

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#113

Post by gaius »

iofj wrote: post #82
tushar-r wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Getting fired and getting laid off are very different things!

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#114

Post by berdario »

Rapzid wrote: post #111
karma_vaccum123 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

Substitute Python for bash and I get the same sense from Kubernetes.. I'm not sure it's fair to say "before the problem is well understood... But maybe. Whatever Google had going on internally Kubernetes is very much figuring it out along the way at almost every level. If you are wanting to use on AWS then you have kops, kube-up, hyperkube, protokube; a dizzying, un-approachable and interconnected ecosystem of launch…

bash? Isn't Kubernetes predominantly Golang based?

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#115

Post by iofj »

tssva wrote: post #65
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…

If you have ever had the misfortune to use a software product from Cisco this is no surprise. At least you don't have to suffer through any single product for long because every couple of years they are guaranteed to abandon it and replace it with another system with horrible performance, more bugs than Joe's Apartment (I may be showing my age with that reference.) and no high availability or recovery solution.

They are focusing on their software products. I wonder who came up with these strategies.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#116

Post by creshal »

walrus01 wrote: post #86
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…

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.

It's a much smaller market than the old "everything with more than one network port should be Cisco" mantra, though. Yeah, Cisco won't disappear any time soon, but their market is shrinking.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#117

Post by [deleted] »

mdorazio wrote: post #87
cm2187 wrote: 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.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#118

Post by wazoox »

femto wrote: post #10

> ...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…

Edge Core builds something like 70% of all big names switches. You can buy an Edge-Core branded switch for a fraction of the price of a Cisco one, and run various OSes on it, mostly Linux-based (Pica8, Cumulus...). You can also run nmap, tcpdump, or whatever you want on it... Once you've tried it you won't look back :)

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#119

Post by fgonzag »

gaius wrote: post #113
iofj wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Getting fired and getting laid off are very different things!

Am I missing something? They are the exact same thing. The company decides to terminate your employment contract, as opposed to you making the decision.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#120

Post by function_seven »

fgonzag wrote: post #119
gaius wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting fired and getting laid off are very different things!

Am I missing something? They are the exact same thing. The company decides to terminate your employment contract, as opposed to you making the decision.

"Fired" is used to refer to termination for cause. As in, you're being let go because you screwed up.

Being laid off is termination without cause. You're just being let go as part of a workforce reduction.

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