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Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
131–140 of 294 posts
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#132Sweet jesus that's a lot of people! I'm having trouble wrapping my head around that many people being fired.
I'm surprised that they have 14,000 working at Cisco. I know it's a big company, but still.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#133Let'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…
Can money really "get lost"? I would think a dollar that otherwise would have been paid via salary to one of these 14k now goes some other way. Somebody else gets it. Somebody else can spend it.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#134Earlier 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 always wonder what happens to those software engineers, the "hack through the night" sort of guys. They must eventually burn out, or get replaced by the younger developers who are onto the next "hack through the night" project.
There must reach a stage in development where you're considered "too old" (sadly) or haven't kept up with the latest and greatest in trends.
What do you do then?? Project manage? Do all developers move into project management?
I see this mildly where I work where older developers are greatly valued (they're good!) but haven't kept up to date, eg. a lot of C++ is here, but nobody here (and I mean nobody) has any understanding of C++11, C++14 changes and are stuck in the C++98 ways. They even call C++11 "C++0x" still. This is different to the "learn the next fad" approach, as C++98/2003 deserve to go away.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#135Earlier 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.
Is that because they're too expensive or because potential employers undervalue their skills??
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#136Earlier 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…
What alternatives are there?
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#137Let'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…
Can money really "get lost"? I would think a dollar that otherwise would have been paid via salary to one of these 14k now goes some other way. Somebody else gets it. Somebody else can spend it.
It goes to the stock owners pockets, not lost.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 commu…
Out of interest, what's wrong with Intents??
As alternatives, do people just end up dumping to an sqlite database and polling it in each Activity? Haha that'd be madness
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#139Earlier 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…
"Substitute Python for bash and I get the same sense from Kubernetes"
Huh? Kubernetes is written in Golang.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#140I 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.
I remember working on their Call Manager system. A Windows application that used embedded Crystal Reports to load a single XML file with a query in it, where the rest of the work was done in large and lengthy Informix stored procedures. So you could add your own by writing your own SP and modifying the XML on the client side.
Mixed feelings.
Also, if you asked Informix for the time, it gave you the system time but somehow the Cisco DB tables always logged call times with daylight saving, so you got time mismatches by an hour. Call Manager must not have used the same "ask Informix what the time is" function that I used...
Fond memories, sort of. Trying to debug on an Informix instance the other side of the world with giant nested SPs failing with unhelpful error messages, what fun!