I don't follow. What government pressures companies to lay people off?
There are many government pressures that cause this unpleasant business to happen; it could have been a ridiculous fine for having to many employees or a bad percentage of a certain kind of person or some other fine.
This is completely untrue and incomprehensible. Governments increase their tax base. Unemployed people mean draining tax coffers to cover unemployment insurance claims. A fine for having too many employees?
> 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.
Yep, happened at my last job. I survived several rounds or layoffs, each with my manager reassuring me that my job wasn't being targetted. Even so, each time a few of our best people would find something elsewhere, even if their position wasn't being eliminated and they ended up filling it. Then my manager left the company which was my first warning sign, some people started finding positions in different areas of the business...then I heard rumors and ambigious announcements again. Me and several of our best people left shortly before hearing that our entire department would be transitioned to a contract position with an outsourced provider, which made replacing our positions that much harder. It wasn't quite a layoff but would mean we'd no longer be full time employees with all the benefits that entails and the contractor could basically do what they wanted with us after a certain amount of time. For those that stayed, I heard its not been great.
And they keep that money in their pocket, do they? On a personal level, this sucks for those Cisco employees. But it's weird that the land of disruption advocates "wasting" money on unneeded labour. There isn't much sympathy for the taxi drivers Uber is harming.
Bad comparison. Taxi drivers losing business to Uber can easily go to work for Uber themselves (in fact, many of them have done exactly that). Someone being laid off by a company like Cisco can't just go work for the competition that easily; it wasn't a simple situation of a better competitor coming along that caused these Cisco employees to lose their jobs. If anything, it's because the work was outsourced offshore, and these employees can't easily chase their jobs to China.
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.
> Yeah, Cisco won't disappear any time soon, but their market is shrinking. do you think cisco is in danger of becoming SGI of networking ?
A much smaller company could definitely create these very high end switches and routers, with a business and support model unlike that of Cisco.
> Yeah, Cisco won't disappear any time soon, but their market is shrinking. do you think cisco is in danger of becoming SGI of networking ?
A much smaller company could definitely create these very high end switches and routers, with a business and support model unlike that of Cisco.
And they won't be trusted or used by large carriers for serious POPs for many years. New manufacturers have tried to show up on the market and sell routers that are designed to be highly redundant and offer a full suite of layer 3 feature set to handle full global v6/v6 routing tables. They've either failed or been acquired.
Major ISP backbones are very risk averse, when you're trying to run a six nines availability IP services POP. The routing software needs to be rock solid and mature when you're looking at a twin pair of core routers in a node that might be handling 200-300 Gbps of traffic and critical edge peering/transit connections.
I don't think any past or present employees are surprised by this. Cisco has always been a volatile place to work (at least since the dot com bubble) where these layoff rumors start every 4-6 months; and more often than not they do occur.
This kind of uncertainty is unsettling to any employee (good and bad performers). It's prudent for existing employees to look for employment elsewhere since this uncertainty has been going on for over a decade now. If that means gaining additional skills, networking (no pun intended) etc. so be it.
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...
OpenStack is open source. It can be forked, modified, whatever. Let me know when you manage to build your own AWS cloud with Amazon's software and then I'll entertain the thought that they are comparable.
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…
AWS, Azure or GCE....or if you insist on your own hw, just what spit and bailing wire you minimally require... at least you will own and understand it.
Those are not alternatives. They require you to run your software on someone else's computer.
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.
Absolutely. I'm still waiting for any two things in OpenStack to be consistent with each other. Related: My compilation of OpenStack rage tweets. https://twitter.com/search?q=@stefanmajewsky%20#openstack&sr...
Link just takes me to your twitter profile. I suspect if you can't correctly paste a link, you can't use openstack. :P