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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

#61
post #50
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may not. But large enterprises that pay billions a year for networking gear, who can save a billion by buying whitebox, and still get that Cisco feel that they have spent years training and acquiring expertise will and already are. It may not be IOS. But Cisco will come out with something that feels and operates like IOS that runs on x86. Juniper has already ported it's JUNOS to run on x86. Between whitebox and S…

> Juniper has already ported it's JUNOS to run on x86. huh :) i was/am under the impression that with junos, juniper started with freebsd as the core, and then added lot's of stuff to it, specifically in control-plane and a bunch of kernel extensions as well. if that is true, they were already x86 compatible... with cisco things are very different. i don't think ios ever ran on a bare-metal x86. this is not for the l…

Junos has run on x86 for years - Juniper had i686 control planes in some devices. As well as PPC and a few different kinds of MIPS (Octeon, XLR) - although those are usually data plane.

Newer products use virtualization, i.e. running the FreeBSD-based Junos control plane in a VM.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#62
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The software will run on inexpensive dumb hardware from whitelabel manufacturers such as Quanta computers. The secret sauce in hardware that gave Cisco big margins is increasingly replaced by software that is good enough (e.g. You can use SDN controller and a cheap switch hardware to replace very expensive Cisco stuff). The trend in Enterprises and telcos is to use cloud (AWS, GCE, Azure,...) and open source (aka Fac…

> all new deployments must be on Openstack you have my sympathies

What's so bad about OpenStack?

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And its going to get lot worse without company subsidized health insurance.

In fairness, Cisco has offered excellent severance in the past...but then again, they've never done layoffs on this scale

> they've never done layoffs on this scale

in 2k1, if memory serves right, they laid off approx. 10k folks. i would guess, in percentage terms (given at least 10% less employees), it might be similar though...

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#64

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…

Some people choose a career just because it's something they can do, and make good money doing it. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that. Until you have to work with their crappy code I guess

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#65

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…

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.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#66

Interesting. I live in the south bay right next to the Cisco campus, and the amount of new employees they are hiring is staggering. I wonder how many of the 14,000 are being rehired as a contractor or something?

Oh my god you are probably right, at least according to their jobs website [0]. There are plenty of jobs posted, I looked at a few job categories and there are pages over pages of openings in their database. Not 14,000 though, it seems like maybe 3,000 at most. Still a lot for a company with such a headline.

[0] https://jobs.cisco.com/

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#67
post #64

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…

Some people choose a career just because it's something they can do, and make good money doing it. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that. Until you have to work with their crappy code I guess

Or use the crappy products they build.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#68

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…

That's the impression I got talking to a friend, who worked at CISCO India, couple of years back. Their C++ code was dreadful thanks to some upkeep by 'engineers' from 'premier' colleges who made a living adding more conditions to existing if blocks.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#69
post #42
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You may not. But large enterprises that pay billions a year for networking gear, who can save a billion by buying whitebox, and still get that Cisco feel that they have spent years training and acquiring expertise will and already are. It may not be IOS. But Cisco will come out with something that feels and operates like IOS that runs on x86. Juniper has already ported it's JUNOS to run on x86. Between whitebox and S…

I've seen some older Cisco storage switches which utilised Pentium 4 CPUs and SAN-OS instead of the usual custom built Motorola processors for the non-ASIC components of the device.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#70
If anything this shift to software based networking is a reflection the Intel's CPUs have reached the 'fast enough' mark.

Here are some of the relevant articles for those who may not be in the datacentre loop:

NFV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_function_virtualizatio...

SDN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_networking

Regardless there is still place for time-critical network segments where you'll find the likes of QNX.

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