now basic income looks like a Good idea for them
Sure. It's really great those engineers in China where the jobs are going are contributing taxes to our basic income system here in the US.
Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
281–290 of 294 posts
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Gah, Twitter. Correct link: https://twitter.com/search?q=@stefanmajewsky%20%23openstack&...
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
What languages did they work in?
The vast majority were Java developers. I always felt bad about it as I never passed a single one of them during my time working there and interviewing them. They were in such a shitty position but at the same time I only ever had one of them actually able to talk through how to code something (and even that person said they only "know how to do a for loop in theory" which I don't understand but I digress). I'm fine…
I am really confused - how can you be a Java developer and never use a "for" loop or know how to write one????
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
You appear to have very little respect for your neighbours inspite of not having any real insight or experience with their work. It would be impossible to come across as 'absolutely terrible software engineers' just from a conversation without prexisting prejudice. Its not just Cisco but for a large majority of folks a job is a part of their life not their entire life and it doesn't automatically follow that they are…
It absolutely is. We were talking about C++ pointers. 15 minutes of casual discussion at a hot tub a few months back comes to mind - and I could tell they had no idea of: What a factory was. What a unique_ptr did. The dangers of unclear object ownership in a manually memory managed program. Difference between when to pass by reference and when to pass by pointer.
Or more possibly that they simply had no interest in discussing "shop" on a weekend or outside of work hours. Or perhaps they were preoccupied with other things being that they weren't at work. Seems quite a stretch and kind of unfair to proclaim how horrible they and Cisco as a company are based on this.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#285I 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…
Look at it this way: why would a lot of the best engineers want to work at Cisco? Maybe when they were the company they were 20 years ago, but today?
Do actual engineers go to work for Cisco? It looks like they just buy up R&D and then monetize the hell out of it.
Which isn't to say it is a bad strategy. Seems to have worked for a while now.
It would be interesting to see the lifespans of people that went to work for Cisco vs those there by an acquisition.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> They've either failed or been acquired. That is certainly not the end of such endeavours. Cisco can't buy ALL of them forever.
Many would argue that M&A is Cisco's primary market.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
The vast majority were Java developers. I always felt bad about it as I never passed a single one of them during my time working there and interviewing them. They were in such a shitty position but at the same time I only ever had one of them actually able to talk through how to code something (and even that person said they only "know how to do a for loop in theory" which I don't understand but I digress). I'm fine…
I am curious. If I may ask. Did the company actually decided to keep/lay the employees individually based on your feedback from the interview? Or were the destiny already decided beforehand and the interviews were just some acting?
> Did the company actually decided to keep/lay the employees individually based on your feedback from the interview? Or were the destiny already decided beforehand and the interviews were just some acting?
A bit of a mix of the two. Essentially you were "soft laid off" if your project ended and your group didn't immediately have another project to put you on so you could apply to work at another group within CSC. If your interviews went well (and they all did interviews differently to the point where some groups did zero interviews and some, likes ours, treated them as a new hire (we were an acquisition so we didn't think they'd have the same quality as us)) then you would stay employed and just work at another group. If the interview(s) didn't go well then you were eventually laid off.
I never went through this process beyond the interview side of things but it was explained to us multiple times. The crazy thing is CSC, at the time, was so large (over 97k employees) that it wouldn't surprise me if each of the larger groups did this even differently. This was just my experience.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
The vast majority were Java developers. I always felt bad about it as I never passed a single one of them during my time working there and interviewing them. They were in such a shitty position but at the same time I only ever had one of them actually able to talk through how to code something (and even that person said they only "know how to do a for loop in theory" which I don't understand but I digress). I'm fine…
I am really confused - how can you be a Java developer and never use a "for" loop or know how to write one????
Not really sure I can give you an acceptable answer here (I know I felt the same). Essentially we were told "interview X, he or she is a CSC employee working with Y title in Z group". I suspect many of them have become non-developing architects or technical managers or something. Some of my colleagues had a tiny bit better luck but for the most part the developers we interviewed didn't really know much about programming.
To add some context we were part of a larger group at CSC that handles government contracts and you essentially only make money when you fully staff a contract so many folks in the industry referred to them as "butts-in-seats" contracting so it's not entirely surprising.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bathwater doesn't have morale. I worked at a semiconductor company while in school and for a bit after graduating. It's a volatile industry and layoffs are frequent. Every time anything happened, people were just concerned about layoffs. On every project, people's concern was usually protecting themselves so they wouldn't get laid off. None of them were really happy in their jobs, but they all had golden handcuffs (I…
There's two ways you can throttle. As you describe, and being smarter about it.
Why not detail this smarter way? I don't see how you get around choosing between 1.) all at once, do it almost never or 2.) Semi-regularly, but in smaller batches.
It's the act of introducing the periodicity that damages morale so much.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#290This link seems relevant
https://klmlinks.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/fucked-by-the-clou...