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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

#141

Post by gaius »

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.

The market welcomes ANY sign that the CEO isn't asleep at the wheel, that's all it means.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#142

Post by 72deluxe »

cisco_throwaway wrote: post #122
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…

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 hom…

Is that due to not making a dedicated working space at home? I find that I am less productive depending on where I sit at home.

And other people's ideas of working from home vary. My friend's wife thought that her husband could do all the jobs around the house on his "day off".

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#143

Post by 72deluxe »

_pmf_ wrote: post #96
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…

> 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.

Is that because medium or large software companies are NOT like this or because of something else?

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#144

Post by Gustomaximus »

tushar-r wrote: post #78
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…

> 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…

To add to this point often stronger employees will exit when this ongoing pain is happening. No-one likes the uncertainty but your best guys can move the fastest. And general morale.

Redundancies are absolutely best done as one-and-done.

Also, would this be a record number of staff laid off in one go 'by choice'? 14,000 is huge. Poor guys.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#145

Post by bogomipz »

hueving wrote: post #59
karma_vaccum123 wrote: post #44

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.

Its not about money funneling into the pockets of the big cloud providers, its about engineering hours being better spent. Openstack is bit of a mess.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#146

Post by 72deluxe »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #53
kyrra wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be Cisco's standard operating procedure. They do big layoffs from the product groups that are underperforming. But all those affected can apply to jobs in other groups that are making money still. It seems to be Cisco's way to de-staff a product area quickly and let the employees figure out what to do.

Honestly when I worked at CSC it was the same way. The amount of people we'd have in our group that we'd have to interview from other parts of CSC in order for them to stay employed was staggering. Even worse was many of them were developers for over 20 years and couldn't program much of anything =/

What languages did they work in?

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#147

Post by hvidgaard »

72deluxe wrote: post #134
lazaroclapp wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deve…

There is a difference between not knowing the latest and greatest, and not keeping yourself updated with the evolution of your tool of choice. Most people will do the former after a while. It's too much time spend with too little gain. The latter however is not acceptable. I want my developers to know about the latest version of .net, and if they're not using linq they're doing it wrong.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#148

Post by 72deluxe »

ryandrake wrote: post #34
Hydraulix989 wrote: post #27

It's scary seeing all of these lay-offs happening. I'd hate to be looking for a software engineering job right now.

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....

Shortage in specific languages or areas or just a vague "software engineer"?

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#149

Post by gaius »

kkhire wrote: post #22
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…

hardware way cheaper to do in china

So is software. What does Cisco actually expect its business to be in 5 years or 10 years? It's the next Yahoo.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#150

Post by bogomipz »

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…

I think its completely off base to conflate "they" the handful of people that live in your building that you have spoken to with "they" an entire company that consists of tens of thousands of people.
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