Cisco is a very hierarchical company. Every time there is a shake up, most people affected are not generally bad performers but those who fall under spineless Directors/VPs. Also, Cisco generally starts hiring right away.. So, in effect nothing changes drastically. You still have long hierarchies and the drab environment. The same set of names at the top level get reassigned or regrouped and nothing major changes. I feel that it's a company going down, though it will be a very slow process (perhaps a decade more) before it becomes insignificant in the tech field. (mainly because of the money they have in the banks/overseas). It's very difficult to expect the company to transform itself unless it lets other people grow and not feed suck-ups.
Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
121–130 of 294 posts
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#122I 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 heard from a colleague that John Chambers walked into one of the Cisco buildings and found that it was mostly empty due to people taking advantage of Cisco's lax policy on working from home. The buildings are now planning to get sold because they no longer need them. Either these employees that were assigned to work in those buildings are gonna get laid off with this 14K figure, or they're gonna be working from home.
I have also found that people get a lot less work done if they're working from home.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#123Cisco is losing the ground to Huawei, ZTE
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#124I 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.
The layoff is probably coming from the hardware business unit. If you're in CTG or CSG, there probably won't be many changes as Cisco is shifting gears to become a software driven company.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#125Let'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.
It mostly just confirms my belief that fully half of all white-collar workers in the developed world are adding zero value. They hustle for their first few years, then coast as old products sell themselves to old customers they already established relationships with in their younger years...
I can't fault them for not giving their all every day... I know for a fact I would instantly put in the minimal amount of work required after achieving tenure / seniority / whatever at a large organization.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#12670,000 employees is way too big. Not know much about how Cisco runs its business, half of it must be sales, business and enterprise solution consultants.
According to this 2009 document[1], they're 30% engineering, 27% sales, 43% business support functions.
[1] http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/ac227/csr2009/pdfs/CS...
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#127Let'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 really. Depends on how many years they have stayed with Cisco and how old they are. If majority of the layoffs are senior people, they might find it is not that easy to find a good position out there. Those big firms are like walled garden, they made their own wheels, and outside world has moved on since way too long ago.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#128Will be interested to see if this is followed by Cisco applying for 14,000 H1B visas.
I'm curious where these layoffs will take place: if it's evenly spread worldwide, or focused on a particular location/country.
Although a third of their workforce work out of San Jose, so it'd be surprising if that wasn't hit.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#129Earlier 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…
the annoying and stupid modularity of it ...
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Exactly - getting laid off means that the job you did no longer exists - it is unrelated to your personal skills, performance, productivity, etc etc.