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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

#34

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....

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#36

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....

Hardware focused Engineers like EEs are probably who are being let go.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#37
post #19
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…

The networking field, as with the server hardware field, is seeing a movement towards commodity hardware. Custom network silicon is expensive to develop, and no longer is returning the investment that it did. This is cause companies like Juniper and Cisco to look at ways to expand their profits, while essentially making nothing on the hardware. Cisco along with others are looking by at things like licensing the IOS t…

> Cisco along with others are looking by at things like licensing the IOS to run on any device.

ios is a custom-rtos for a custom machine (running on mips mostly). it runs control plane for your routers/switches etc. why would you want to run it on a non-csco/vanilla x86 boxes ? unless you can _somehow_ make control-plane h/w agnostic (easier said than done) i don't really see much value in doing this.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#38
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would hardware development not be important to security?

Long story short: I think that, in the next year, we will see a marked shift toward subscription pricing. Amazon pushing subscriptions. Dollar shave club for X. Same for Cisco - getting recurring revenue through security/SDN/SaaS subscriptions rather than one-time hardware sales seems to be a safer long-term bet.

It's already happening. Several examples come to mind, but for now I'll use one that is relevant to Cisco: Palo Alto Networks offers several subscription based services for its security/networking hardware.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#39
I 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.
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